Strangechord

Woohoo! We went flying Saturday night in a little four-seater Cessna 72! My friend, Jeff, has his pilot’s license and rented the plane out of the Hillsboro airport (right outside Portland). The three of us took off about 8:30 PM; the evening was pleasantly warm and almost completely clear. Jeremy rode up front with Jeff on the way to Astoria (about 30 minutes flight away) while I sat in the back taking pictures out the window in the twilight.

Then Jeremy and I switched seats. Jeff let me try taxi-ing on the empty Astoria runway from the co-pilot’s seat. I didn’t realize this before, but steering while the plane is on the ground is done with the foot pedals - back and forth, balancing the two feet to go forward in a straight line. Then he let me take off twice! We would take off, do a left pattern back and land (Jeff handled the landing, which seemed tricky), then take off again. Apparently, both times I pulled back too quickly and we nosed up into the dark sky a little sharply. The experience of being in a pitch-black sky heading up was new and frightening to me in a strange, mysterious way. It felt very alien.

I had a chance to push in the throttle during take-off and steer once we were aloft. On the return trip, while in the co-pilot seat wearing headphones and mic, Jeff showed me around the instrument panel. The controls were terribly interesting, especially the newish GPS mapping readout where you could punch in an airport code and get a display showing you where your plane was in relation to getting to that airport. This is an extremely useful tool at night when it becomes difficult to locate the airport below. We had a paper map too and could identify the clusters of lights below as towns along the way back to Hillsboro. We radioed into Hillsboro and wound up having to circle and wait for another plane making its way in.

Very cool and also a little scary. Being in the front seat next to Jeff was a completely different experience from being in the back just looking out at the scenery. In the back, I got used to the smallness of the plane very quickly and it felt like I was kicking back in a commercial plane. In the front, I had butterflies in my stomach most of the flight. This could’ve been too because it was dark on the return. It’s in the front seat where I got the sensation of “it all depends on me/us.”

Photos out the window and of the plane coming soon!