I tell him it's hard to imagine flying anywhere, much less the length of Florida, without a radio. "Fairly simple to get to Miami," he says. "Fly east over Georgia, then take a right when you hit the beach."
As I was growing up, I knew the 50-lawn-mower drone of the planes' engines and their crazy ability to get up in the air and the slap of the grass on their tires. College and work took me to the North and then to Europe and Asia, where it was a lot harder to fly. But I didn't hang around Pryor Field to get my license when I could have. I became a passenger, not a flier.
I began to regret it every time I stepped onto any plane. Irritating bits of knowledge would boil up out of me from nowhere: Hey, this dude needs to trim it out, or, Give it a little more right rudder, you dick, and finally, of course, Why am I not flying this plane?
Although I had more chances than anybody I knew, I'd never really learned to fly. Given my level of squandered opportunity, it was total idiocy. Seven years ago, I took my father back to Pryor Field and rediscovered his home among the collectors and fliers there.
Under the ebullient tutelage of Randy Burns a few weeks ago, I flew his Piper Super Cub, a two-seater taildragger made relatively late, in the 1970s. Burns is a national-award-winning restorer and collector. Also in his fleet are a massive 1943 Navy AT-6, a 1965 Cherokee 180, a six-seat Piper Aztec of the same vintage, a Curtis Pitts special stunt plane, and, by no means least, two prizewinning Stearmans. I became addicted to taildraggers seven years ago after flying Burns's two Stearmans with him. On the ground, Burns is a renowned cardiologist. In the air, he has a way of putting your heart in your throat.
On its way south out of the Tennessee hills, Interstate 65 slices through a 75-foot-deep gash in the earth before it runs into the flat cotton country of Alabama. Five hundred feet up, I slip the bright-yellow Piper along the west brow of this gorge, which looks like a giant whale and breathes like one, its blowhole shooting a column of air up at us, beating the plane like a Japanese drum. The Cub bounces this way and that as I look for the ground. The engine roars, the fabric covering the wings vibrates until it sings. Who knew the earth could do such crazy stuff? We crab in sideways through the crosswind, which, with every second, seems like something that's going to kick my ass.
The ground in this instance is the Ardmore, Alabama, airstrip—no control tower, just grass and some corrugated tin sheds with planes like ours in them. We don't want to land, we want to fly down the strip at about 25 feet and then climb. I'm fairly sure I'm about to die, but technically, I'm practicing an approach maneuver.
"Hold whatcha got, hold whatcha got, hold whatcha got," Randy Burns says calmly over the intercom. Burns, a jedi aviator as a result of his own famous Alabama flier dad, thinks everything is cool.
