Flying a jet for a living isn’t always beer and Skittles, and if you doubt me, just turn a few pages and Les Abend and Dick Karl will set you straight. Between maintenance snafus, nasty weather, ATC delays, long days and short nights, sometimes it’s real honest-to-goodness work. This, however, was not one of those days.
It was an early wake-up, sure, but we had only one short leg from Atlanta to Orlando, where we’d be landing shortly after 8 a.m. for a 24-hour layover. It’s my leg, and it was an utterly beautiful, joyously sunny morning to fly. We were only at cruise altitude for a few minutes before ATC cleared us to begin our descent, and as the big Boeing 757’s engines rolled back to idle, I felt an old familiar itch. Clicking the autopilot off a few minutes early for an easy visual landing was not going to quite scratch this particular itch. A day this nice called for low and slow … stick and rudder … tube and fabric.
As soon as the jet was parked at the gate, I called up Jack Brown’s Seaplane Base in nearby Winter Haven. Truth told, this is a call I’ve been meaning to make for years, and I just never got around to it. I live in Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, so a floatplane rating should be a must. But the reality is that soaring insurance rates make it prohibitively expensive to rent a floatplane or even own one unless you’re willing to self-insure. Thus, I’ve considered a Single-Engine Sea add-on to be something of a frivolity best pursued when I have extra cash, a free weekend and a hankering to try something new. Funny how seldom those three circumstances line up. But whenever they finally did, I figured Jack Brown’s would be the natural place to go. Brown’s instructors are well-known seaplane training specialists, and the company’s 100 hp J-3s on straight floats would be a natural fit for a current Cub driver.
I doubt that Jack Brown gets too many spur-of-the-moment airline pilots wanting to drop by on a lark, but in a stroke of serendipity they just happened to have both a Cub and an instructor free from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. I ducked into an airport restroom to change into shorts and a T-shirt, and then snagged a cheap rental car. Forty-five minutes later, an inconspicuous turnoff onto a gravel road just past the Winter Haven airport led to a quiet lakeside oasis — the world-famous Jack Brown’s Seaplane Base.
The friendly receptionist gave me a tour around the place and introduced me to my instructor, Ben Schipps. He was surprised to learn I had just popped in for a couple of hours of instruction, completely unprepared. Nevertheless, he did an excellent job of briefing the plan and imparting some Floatplane 101 gouge as we inspected our mount for the day, a newly rebuilt 1945 J-3C. I took the back seat, the usual PIC spot in a J-3. Ben climbed onto the right float, threw the prop over, and the Continental four-banger clattered to life as we floated out onto Lake Jessie. Hey — just where are the brakes in this thing?
The whole key to flying a floatplane, Ben tells me, is pitch control — not that different from a Cub on wheels, actually. As we plow-taxi around the lake warming up the engine, he tells me to look at where the horizon bisects the cowling. This is the absolute minimum pitch for any operation on or near the water. If the floats contact the water at any lower pitch than this minimum, they will at best porpoise and at worse catch a bow, potentially flipping the airplane. And so the whole key to floatplane operations is incrementally varying one’s pitch above this minimum by visual reference, depending on what you’re doing and which part of the float you want to have contact with the water. In a Cub, with elevator trim at neutral, this desired pitch is only achieved with positive stick pressures; you never use forward stick until well clear of the water.
With the engine warmed and fundamentals covered, Ben briefs the normal takeoff procedure and tells me to go ahead. With a deep breath, I pull the stick full aft and rapidly advance the throttle. The prop wash allows the nose to pitch way up, keeping the propeller clear of tip-destroying spray as the Cub plows ahead through the water. As the airplane gains speed and climbs “onto the step,” the nose naturally comes down, and then it’s just a matter of varying stick pressure to keep the nose in the takeoff attitude — only a degree or two above minimum. The marked acceleration as the float breaks the water’s surface tension is unexpected and truly delightful; and with that, we were in the air, and it is just another Cub. Actually, this behaves a bit better than a wheeled Cub because the floats add directional stability and cut down on adverse yaw.
Winter Haven calls itself the Chain of Lakes City, and indeed there are a great number of lakes clustered into a small area, making this a great place for training. A large part of becoming a floatplane pilot is learning to read the water, choosing the best landing area, and setting yourself up to land there. Frequently switching lakes gives you a lot more practice at this, and in fact, we switched lakes every few landings. My first one wasn’t very pretty. Theoretically, it’s just like a full-stall landing in a wheelplane, except you have to flare higher to account for the taller gear. Knowing that, and adding my natural airline-pilot tendency to flare at 30 feet, I plopped it in pretty good. But I kept the pitch well above minimum, and the airplane handled it just fine. The next landing was better, and the third one downright silky. What a great feeling.
We took a break from landing practice to do some step-taxiing. You start this just like a normal takeoff in order to accelerate rapidly while keeping the prop clear of the spray. Once on the step, you retard the throttle to maintain your speed — 2,100 rpm worked well for us, with somewhat more in the turns. Then you’re just cruising around the lake like an outboard runabout. I was again surprised by the amount of directional stability on the water. There’s little tendency for the nose to wander, you’re far less active on the rudder than in a taildragger, and the outboard wing shows no inclination to dip toward the water, even in the middle of a rather robust skidding turn. The exception, Ben warns me, is when turning from downwind to upwind in a good breeze; in this case, the pilot is advised to slow and make an idle turn back upwind.
Step-taxiing provides the foundation for our next maneuver: the confined-area takeoff. The idea here is that you are departing a small mountain lake with rising terrain on all sides. You start the takeoff run 90 degrees to the wind, get on the step, and then begin an accelerating turn into the wind. If you time it just right, one float and then the other breaks the water right as you turn through the wind. You continue the turn as you accelerate and climb, increasing the initially shallow bank as you gain altitude and turn downwind. At about 200 feet or so, you should cross right over the wake from the start of your takeoff run. What outrageous fun; what pure stick-and-rudder flying. If you did this in a landplane, sober-eyed folks would accuse you of cowboying around, and Martha Lunken’s old party-pooper colleagues may show up to yank your ticket. But in a seaplane, it’s simply a fundamental skill.
We practiced other variations, like rough-water takeoffs and landings, glassy-water takeoffs and confined-area landings. Crosswind landings are particularly interesting because the moving waves provide the exact opposite visual effect of a fixed centerline; applying appropriate crosswind correction gives the illusion of sideways movement. Our final maneuver of the day was glassy-water landings, which I enjoyed almost as much as confined-area takeoffs. Glassy water affords no depth perception, making an accurate judgment of flare height impossible. The solution is to make your approach and an initial high flare over something that does give you depth perception — an obstruction-free bit of shoreline is ideal. From there you set up a shallow power-on descent in a slightly nose-high attitude and hold your pitch steady while waiting for landing. Ground effect cushions the final portion enough that the touchdown is usually quite smooth. If you haven’t established this power-on descent by the time you pass over the last visual reference, you go around.
Two hours and 18 takeoffs and landings went way too quickly, and we finished up with a short-field landing back on Lake Jessie and a downwind sailing approach to Jack Brown’s ramp. As soon as I shut the engine down, I realized just what a hot and humid Florida summer day it was; it was perfectly comfortable splashing around the lakes with an open door. One more thing to love about flying floats. I was still buzzing as Ben signed my logbook and I headed back toward Orlando. This is honestly the most fun I’ve had flying in a long time, and I say that as someone who makes it a point to have fun flying. Dawn and I are pretty busy purchasing and moving onto a sailboat in preparation for extended cruising, but I’m going to take the time to get back down to Jack Brown’s to finish up my float rating. It may be a frivolity, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable one, and perhaps even justifiable. Float training hones stick-and-rudder skills that are valuable to any pilot, whether one flies a Piper Cub or a Boeing 757 — or both.
