Category: Flying

I’ve been dreaming about flying float planes for most of my life. Especially after sore knees and hips made it increasingly hard to reach the silent lakes of my youth via canoe and hiking boot. I always remember that time on a remote lake in Algonquin Park where a park ranger dropped into our lake in a deHavilland Beaver and paddled the plane ashore. He was there to set up some toilets at a new campsite that wasn’t on our map, but he stopped over to check our permit and make sure we weren’t cutting down live trees.

Since then, I’ve often thought how cool that would be, to fly a Beaver into a lake that was only known to a few paddlers, and after the engine stopped making pinging noise as it cooled down, just listening to the loons and the breeze in the trees. I got to experience some of that on the Alaska cruise as we stood on the float of our Beaver for a few minutes.

Vicki and I were talking about it the other day, and she suggested that when I retire (or it becomes impossible to find my sort of work anywhere outside of Asia), I could fly floats as a second career. A little research shows that there are a couple of hitches to that:

• Nobody will hire a float plane pilot without hundreds if not thousands of hours of float time.
• Nobody (with the possible exception of Twitchells Seaplane Base in Maine, but that’s a long way to go before starting your flight) will rent you a seaplane except with one of their instructors sitting beside you.
• Probably most importantly: float plane flying is strenous work, since the customers will expect you to do all the loading and unloading and dock work.

But before I throw out the dream entirely, I did some more research, and some more dreaming. On the dreaming side, there is Georgian Bay Airways, which as well as initial and advanced float plane training, also has a Career Bush Pilot Program where you get 50 hours of training, including 1 in their Beaver. I wish I’d known about this when I was 20 years old – they hire one or two of the students from this program to be dock hands for the summer, and you’ll get some more time flying both their Cessna 180s and Beavers. They tell me that last year’s two dock hands got an additional 50 and 80 hours flying time.

But on the more pragmatic side, I’m probably not going to be able to do that. But I could at least get prepared – I need two things: a commercial rating and a float plane that I can put a lot of hours into. So I’m looking around to see if there are any other local pilots interested in a small partnership on some sort of float plane. I can’t afford one of my own, but I might be able to swing 1/2 or 1/4 of a sufficiently old Cessna 180 or similar. These new Light Sport Aircraft are tempting, but the only LSA ambhibian is a boat-hull flying boat rather than a float plane, and none of the commerical operators seem to use flying boats so I doubt the flying time would count for much. I’m not sure if I’d even fit in a CubCrafters Super Cub on floats.

Before I get the commercial, though, I’ve got to fly a lot more. I’ve got the minumum hours for the requirements, but frankly, I consider myself a safe pilot, but not a great pilot. I have always flown “good enough” instead of “as good as I possibly could get”. I just don’t fly enough, and because of that I don’t nail my airspeeds and altitudes, I don’t use the rudder enough, and I’m not totally smooth. But I know I can do that stuff with practice. So that’s my goal this year – to get 50 or more hours of flying, and some of that time going out to do real airwork to get more than just proficient at the normal Private Pilot maneuvers before I start thinking about learning the commercial maneuvers.

My Garmin 296 is here. It’s very beautiful. There was a little bit of struggle to get the unlock code for the detail maps. I put it into auto mode and used it to get us to the restaurant for dinner. It was just like Kim and JK’s Street Pilot, which they demonstrated when we drove from New Jersey to Philadelphia for Maddy’s Memorial back in January 2004. The aviation mode looks pretty good too – I can’t wait to try it in the plane.

So far, nobody local has spoken up for my 195. So I guess it depends on whether I see Mark or Tina Marie first. (Unless Mark has changed his mind and doesn’t want it.)

Our flying club requires you to do an “annual ride” every year with an instructor. Every other year, I combine that with a BFR, but on the odd years (like this one) nobody is really sure what we should do on these rides other than fly around and somehow assure the instructor that you still know what you’re doing.

I switch around to different instructors every time, so I get a chance to learn some different things. This year Jon offered to do it, because I’d offered to set up a mailing list for him and his fellow commercial pilots – he’s flying as a FO on a regional jet now. It’s nice to our relationship back friendly again, since I’d had a major blow-up at him a while back when he’d written to me disagreeing with an opinion I’d expressed in the newspaper, and he’d CC’ed every controller at our local airport. Just what I needed was hate mail from ATC. Plus he’d asked the club officers to forbid members and officers from identifying themselves as being members of the club without officer approval. But I got over it – he’d actually been right in some ways, although I still say the world isn’t going to end if they close the tower at Rochester in the wee hours of the night.

For some weird reason, I get a bit of performance anxiety on these things, even with instructors I’ve flown before. But I soon settled down as we did some steep turns, slow flight, stalls, reconfiguring between slow and fast, etc. Jon talks a lot, and it was a bit distracting at times, but that’s probably good practice as well.

But then I got a radio call I’ve never heard before.

Rochester Approach: 977 are you ready to copy a message?
Jon: Approach, 977. Go ahead.
RA: Your company 290 called to say that they're stranded in Batavia, and would like to be picked up.
Jon: Approach, we'll finish up our airwork then head on over. Thanks for passing that along.


And so that’s what we did – we did a bit more airwork, then went over to Batavia and picked them up. Evidently they couldn’t get 290 to start – the bendix wouldn’t engage. But what this means is the club is temporarily hosed – all of our fleet except the Lance is not flying.

• 290 won’t start.
• 05X just went in for its annual.
• 39Z has a dead mag.
• 23Y is getting a new engine, prop and GPS.

Boy I’m glad I’m a Lance pilot.

I won an eBay auction for a Garmin GPSMAP 296 and car kit. (New, that would have cost about $1850, and I got it for $1400 “lightly used”.) It’s a little scary sending that amount of money to a stranger via PayPal, but at least the seller is listed as a private pilot in the FAA Airman Registry. That should make it a little safer than most of the fraudsters out there that use a different email address than the one listed with eBay and who request money through Western Union.

Fingers crossed for a successful transaction!