Through the magic of the Internet, I learned an important lesson recently about a flight that I piloted 40 years ago this month.
I was a lucky kid who grew up around small airplanes. My father, a physician, had a 90 hp Cub on floats that he kept on the St. Lawrence River in front of our house in Montreal. I don’t remember the first time I flew with him, but family lore has it that I tapped my dad on the shoulder after takeoff to let him know the propeller had fallen off, because I could no longer see it. I wasn’t worried at all, though, because I had complete trust in my father as the pilot of this amazing machine, and I was too young to understand how important his skill and judgment really were to the outcome of every flight.
