Now that Kevin has some (mostly unfounded) confidence in my ability to take off and land his airplane, he’s decided to shake things up a bit. He thinks that treating the Caldwell runway as an actual runway (how silly is that?), we should pretend it’s a 300-foot field of grass. With giant trees on either side of it.
Why? Good question. Maybe I’ve driven him completely crazy and he’s beginning to fall into a fantasy alternate reality. Or maybe I’ve scarred him into thinking we’re going to crash often enough that he has decided I should go ahead and learn how to land in random fields, yards or golf courses.
That’s my two cents. Of course he as a different explanation. He says it’s part of learning how to maneuver (take off and land, specifically) on shorter than normal runways and/or runways with buildings or trees at either side, and managing the airplane on unpaved (soft) runways.
What makes these different than normal landings or take offs? They’re harder. And not just a little bit. Imagine the difference between simple math, say 2 plus 2, and advanced quantum physics – then times that by 200.
Short Field Take Offs
Let’s say you’re taking off from a shorter than usual strip of land, such as your neighbor’s driveway. And to top it off a significant obstacle is sitting at the end of it, such as his 100-foot maple tree that always drops leaves onto your lawn. You’ll need to execute a short field take off.
Short Field Landing
You’ve been flying around Wal-Mart looking for the best spot, now how are you going to squeeze your plane into it? With a short field landing. It’s perfect for situations when you haven’t cheated death enough times with normal landings and need the extra thrill of only using a few hundred feet.
Soft Field Take Offs
If you’ve got a bumper sticker that says, “Paved runways are for sissies,” you’re prime for soft fields. These suckers are like grass fields or dirt strips that no one has taken any initiative to actually pave. The trick is to keep pressure off the front landing gear so it doesn’t sink into the ground. Sounds easy enough, then again, so does passing through a black hole.
Soft Field Landings
If you’re crazy enough to land onto a soft field, you’re probably not reading this. Your reading materials probably consist of the instruction label on your psychiatric medicine bottle and the lyric sheet to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”
The idea is to land without stopping OR putting any pressure on the front landing gear. Kevin describes it as “doing a wheelie down the runway.” I couldn’t ever maintain a long wheelie on a bicycle, and the bike didn’t have 30 million controls and instruments, nor did it cost $40,000.
Financial Rock Bottom
Sadly, I’ve exhausted what few dollars I had set aside for flight training. It doesn’t mean I’ll stop, it just means I’ll have to start getting creative in terms of financing. I’m pretty determined to eventually earn my private pilot license, so it’s just a matter of making it happen.
Besides, my flight lessons are great for the economy. Everybody benefits. I pay money to Kevin, who in turn pays money to Target for new underwear, who in turn pay their employees, who in turn spend their hard-earned dollars on Internet connections to read junky blogs like this.
It’s the circle of life! And I for one am not prepared to break it on account of something silly like low finances.
