Sitting at Mickey’s Diner in Enfield, New Hampshire, across the lunch table from my almost 90-year-old father, I tell him about the heater on the Cheyenne. The heater had stopped working on a flight from Tampa to New England. It got very cold up there at 25,000 feet, so we landed at Westfield-Barnes Airport in Massachusetts, near Hartford, to warm up and get great service and cheap gas at Five Star Aviation. Naturally, the heater worked on the next short leg to New Hampshire, so I called Jim Celentano at Columbia Air Service (well-known Cheyenne specialists) in Groton, Connecticut, the next day for advice. It is Jim’s message I’m telling my dad.
Since he is mechanically intelligent and I am not, my father is a good one to whom to tell the tale. He listens intently; macular degeneration has stolen his vision. He tracks every nuance of the discussion, from the effects of high altitude and cold on the likelihood that jet-A will atomize in the heater to the need for accurate fuel pressures and for preheated air if the damn thing is ever going to work. If anybody understands how difficult it is to diagnose an ailment, whether mechanical or medical, that is intermittent in its appearance, it is my surgeon-mechanic dad. As we eat our ritual BLT sandwiches, my mind goes back to the early days of my flying and my father’s role in making it happen. I got really hooked on flying while in college, and as sort of a graduation present, my parents agreed to spring for flight training. It wasn’t until after the first year of medical school that I got the chance to take them up on the offer. I’m thinking about back then.
