Head above the clouds

National Review, March 24, 1997 by Tappen Soper

IF you want to fly from coast to coast in one day in a small airplane, you need an early start. It was five in the morning when I drove to the airport near Southport, a small town on the North Carolina coast. My destination was San Diego, some 2,300 miles to the west. The small airport was deserted and dark, and so I left the car running with the headlights shining on my airplane for the preflight inspection. If anything was amiss, I wanted to find it out there on the ground rather than a little later in the air.

The object of my inspection was something of an endangered species: a new American-made single-engine airplane. The explosion of product-liability cases and horrendous jury awards in the 1980s just about wrecked the U.S. light-plane industry. It has been said with some accuracy that 25 lawyers put 25,000 aircraft workers out of their jobs. Cessna threw up its hands and stopped making piston-engine aircraft, and Piper was forced into bankruptcy. One of the manufacturers that managed to survive was Mooney Aircraft of Kerrville, Texas. I bought one of their planes in 1994. A not insignificant part of the price went to cover their liability insurance, in effect a cash tribute to the trial lawyers. My plane, a bright red and white Mooney MSE, is capable of speeds up to 200 miles per hour on only 200 horsepower, making it one of the most efficient light airplanes in the world. It was made for cross-country travel, and this day I would give it a good test of that capability.

Once the plane was ready I used the pay phone on the field to call Flight Service to get my clearance for the first leg of the flight. Since there was a solid layer of cloud at five hundred feet, an instrument clearance would be required; in any case, I planned to fly under positive control and radar observation all the way. At that hour obtaining a clearance was no problem; I was given the routing and altitude I had requested.

Small airports don't leave their runway lights on all night, but rather set them to turn on in response to a radio transmission. After starting up I clicked the transmitter and saw my path to the runway outlined by blue lights. With the wind out of the north I followed the lights to the south end of the field. After completing my pre-takeoff checks I turned the airplane to line up with the runway, noted the time (5:41), took a deep breath, and advanced the throttle to full power. Light airplanes accelerate quickly, and only a few seconds passed before I reached 70 miles an hour, raised the nose, and easily left the ground. Soon I was in the clouds.

Flying in the clouds in daytime feels like being inside a milk bottle. At night it's like an ink bottle. By the dim lights of the instrument panel, I could see nothing except the interior of the plane. The human brain is incapable of guiding a plane in controlled flight without reference to the horizon or to instruments that replicate it. I concentrated on those instruments while I climbed straight ahead to two thousand feet and turned west toward Florence, South Carolina, my first waypoint.

At five thousand feet I broke out of the clouds into a world known only to pilots. A bright moon ahead illuminated a flat sea of stratus underneath me, while over my shoulder the first light of the sun was now visible behind a palisade of cumulus over the coast. At six thousand, my assigned altitude, I leveled off, switched on the autopilot, and watched the air speed build to a cruising level of 190 miles per hour.

An hour later, as I crossed the Georgia border, the sun appeared behind me shining directly on the instrument panel. The stratus layer had broken up below, and I could see the Great Smoky Mountains ahead in the distance. I continued across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to arrive in Memphis at 8:30 A.M. Central Time. Memphis is a major airport serving airlines, Federal Express, and corporate jets. I approached it cautiously, knowing that the disturbed air behind a large jet can throw a small airplane out of control, with fatal results. I was able to land during a break in traffic and happily discovered a deli next to the refueling base: I would be spared the typical pilot's lunch of vending-machine crackers.

My departure was not well timed: I found myself in the middle of a line of Northwest jets headed for the runway. After some delay I was cleared to take off directly behind a DC-9. I would have been within my rights asking for a delay; but, not wanting to hold up the parade, I put on the power and turned away from the runway toward Little Rock as soon as the wheels left the ground in order to avoid the jet wake.

My next stop was Amarillo. The land rises as you reach the middle of the country, and I climbed to eight thousand feet on this leg to get above a haze layer and maintain a comfortable height above the terrain. The sun caught up with me in a clear sky over the high plains of western Oklahoma and warmed the cockpit. I was able to refuel and leave Amarillo in forty minutes for the next leg to Phoenix.