My greatest flying experience

[dhermann1]

This is an offshoot of the "Afraid to fly?" thread. I tought it would be fun to share our best and most memorable flying experiences. I'm going to paste my post and Dixon Cannon's post right here, and we can just continue.

Mine:
Ooohhhh! Oooohhh! Let's start a "My best Flying experience" thread!
I've mentioned my flight over the crater, but my best was in a friend's Cessna 150, from Linden airport in New Jersey, to Caldwell (as I recall). Just a tiny 2 seater, with the motor sputtering away RIGHT IN YOUR LAP. I really felt like part of the airplane. He let me do a couple of turns. Woohoo!
And as we landed, he slipped the plane sideways a little as we settled onto the little grass strip. Oh, man. I still remember it VIVIDLY after almost 30 years.
Ooops! I just remembered my flight in an ultralight 7 or 8 years ago. Now THAT was an experience! Right up there with the birds. Super fun.

Dixon Cannon's:
Ok Dhermann1, That's a great idea!

When I was about 16 years old, having a student license and flying solo, I took the Cessna 150 up to the top of it's service ceiling (about 12,000').
It took quite a while to climb up there. Once at altitude, I pulled the carb heat and the power, lowered full flaps, opened the windows and just
glided back down doing slow turns.

The experience was like parachuting, I imagine - cold, fresh air - slowing turning high above the clouds. The entire experience took about an hour
and a half from chocks to chocks. I even shot photos with my little instamatic.

To this day I can still feel it like it was yesterday - the poem 'High Flight' has a very special meaning for me.

-Dixon Cannon


Roger Wilco, over and out . . .

 

[dhermann1]

And I just remembered another memorable flight. My family went on a 6 countries in 17 days trip to Europe during Christmas vacation 1962 - 63. On the way home, flying Alitalia, we were to take off from Milan, but there were weather problems. So they decided (don't ask me why) to fly us to Rome to get a different flight. So they packed us all onto a Vickers Viscount. My brother and I, having played with Dinky toy replicas of the great early British turbo prop, were thrilled. They flew us to Rome, changed their minds about the weather, and turned around and flew us back to Milan, where we boarded our original DC-8 and flew home to New York (Idlewild. remember Idlewild?) It was neat.

 

[Dixon Cannon]

'High Flight'

Ok Dhermann1, That's a great idea!

When I was about 16 years old, having a student license and flying solo, I took the Cessna 150 up to the top of it's service ceiling (about 12,000').
It took quite a while to climb up there. Once at altitude, I pulled the carb heat and the power, lowered full flaps, opened the windows and just
glided back down doing slow turns.

The experience was like parachuting, I imagine - cold, fresh air - slowing turning high above the clouds. The entire experience took about an hour
and a half from chocks to chocks. I even shot photos with my little instamatic.

To this day I can still feel it like it was yesterday - the poem 'High Flight' has a very special meaning for me. http://bcoy1cpb.pacdat.net/Goranson_...igh_Flight.jpg

-Dixon Cannon

 

[JimWagner]

My favorite flying experiences were while on aircrew sitting in the nose of a P2-V7 Neptune taking pictures of Russian submarines at 300 ft. altitude. This very one.

Two turning and two burning. Engines, that is.

Ex Batman from VP24 here.

 

[Talbot]

My favorite flying experiences were while on aircrew sitting in the nose of a P2-V7 Neptune taking pictures of Russian submarines at 300 ft. altitude. This very one.

Two turning and two burning. Engines, that is.

Ex Batman from VP24 here.

You must have some interesting stories...

 

[dhermann1]

Oh, gee. That reminds me of another one. Coming back from Hawaii to be discharged from the service on a KC-130. Flying across 2,500 miles of open ocean in one of my all time favorite aircraft. I love being inside cargo planes in the first place, because you get to see that naked insides, cables and wires, etc. But the pilot let us come up and sit in the front for long periods, so it was really like being out in the open sky, with glass on all sides, zooming along, with that low turbo prop whine carrying the plane along.
And there was one more experience, but on the ground. I have pics somewhere. When I was in the EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) our local NYC chapter went out to Floyd Bennett Field to look at a beat up old P2V. We had the hilarious idea that we could take it on as a restoration project. The plane now proudly sits on the deck of the Intrepid, on the Hudson River. But then, around 1982, it was an old derelict aircraft with no imaginable future.
So about 6 of us spent much of a beautiful summer day scrambling and climbing all over and inside this old bird, with empty holes in the control panels where instruments had been removed, and random wires dangling all over the place. It was totally cool, if totally feckless. Somewhere I have those faded snapshots.

 

[shortbow]

Is that I actually survived my last near-death experience in a bush plane!lol

 

[JimWagner]

You must have some interesting stories...

Some of them involving Australian Shackleton crewmen I drank with in Iceland and the Azores. Those guys were nuts. lol

 

[Edward]

For me it was..... flying Air China Business Class to Beijing and back on one of my semi-regular work jaunts out there, last year. Something I'll never be able to afford to do for myself (even steerage can be pushing it sometimes - haven't yet been able to take up a standing offer to visit a friend in Toronto because of the cost of flights). The ideal, of course, would be to fly First Class in a plane internally designed with a very forties-era theme..... I think for long haul flights, though, I'd rather it was a modern plane!

 

[Atticus Finch]

Flew in the back seat of a "Breezy" at Oshkosh, once. I'll never forget coming down the final and looking between my feet at a herd of Wisconsin dairy cows grazing just beyond the end of the runway.

My father and I were flying an Aeronca Champ down the Outer Banks one day when the engine swallowed an exhaust valve...which seized the engine and froze the prop in front of our eyes. Fortunately, the Champ stalls at about forty mph...so we just landed on the sand. Still, there is no quiet like the quiet one hears when his aircraft's only engine abruptly stops in midair.

Another summer day, we were flying the same airplane south across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge against a very stiff southwest wind. I glanced down and saw the cars on the bridge passing us like we were walking...or maybe even crawling. I remember thinking how odd it would be to run out of fuel trying to cross a body of water that you could see across.

AF

 

[Foofoogal]

I went to Puerto Rico and was more than happy to leave.
I had always heard people talk about pretty sunsets on planes but never could understand what they meant as to me flying meant boring clouds.
Well, it was about 5 or 6 I recall and the sunset took my breath away. I couldn't tell where the top and where the bottom was.
Golden colors everywhere with rays. I really thought to myself that if heaven looked like this I wanted to go right then and there.
I was giddy with the sunset and the fact that Puerto Rico was behind me.

 

[Smithy]

The best flight I have ever, ever, ever had was a full aerobatic flight with an ex-RNZAF fast jet pilot in an Alpha 160. I'd been on quite a few aerobatic flights before but flying with this ex-military fighter pilot was simply unbelievable. I was buzzing for days afterwards.

 

[Burton]

The geatest flying experience (not the best one) I ever had was a flight I was never on. In the 1980s I was in the Amazon basin and due to an unusual situation and my bad Spanish didnt board an aircraft that took off and killed everyone aboard. I still have the Colombian newspaper with my name listed with the dead. It was only great because I was not on board. I cant say I enjoy flying.

 

[Tomasso]

My cousin, retired U.S.Navy (USNA'65), has this* docked at his home in the Keys. We've traveled from Canada to Mexico and all through the Caribbean and lived to talk about it. What do you do with a drunken sailor.......

*Photo taken off the net but pretty damn close