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Flying through fear
In the winter of 1949–1950 I was just learning to fly airplanes. I remember one day in particular when I was making my first 100-mile flight “out and return”—a long solo cross-country flight in a Cessna 120—with just a total of 28 hours flying time logged. The weather was clear where I was departing from, but before I left I checked the weather at my destination airport. The numbers indicated a new cold front would be arriving there shortly after the time when I would begin my return trip, but I decided to go ahead. The outbound flight went well, and I felt prepared to return to my home airport.
Before I left, however, I could see the storm from the cold front looming up in the distance. I wasn’t a very experienced pilot, and thought I could out-fly it, so I didn’t wait at the airport for better conditions and refueled my plane. The tower controller finally said, “At pilot’s discretion, cleared for takeoff.” I started down the runway and lifted off in a heavy rain, but the rain quickly changed to snow, and the last thing I saw was the control tower going by. After that, I felt I was too high and too far down the runway to try to land. I had no alternative but to fly up into the wholly enveloping white atmosphere.
As I settled down to try to fly the airplane, I looked hard to see any sign of space where the snow was thinning. Suddenly I realized that the instruments on my plane were not behaving as they should, and then I heard the engine begin to labor. The dashboard showed a significantly high rate of climb and the airspeed was dropping fast. At this time in my training I was having trouble as I practiced recovery from power-on stalls, which was exactly what this seemed to be turning into. If the plane went into a complete stall, it would promptly enter a tailspin downward—something I wasn’t prepared to recover from without outside help.
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