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Learning to ‘Bush Fly’ (#1)

Aviation is a universe full of very diverse planets. Commercial aviation, for instance, is a highly regulated bureaucratic world where every minute counts, where computers are everywhere and where, despite the beauty and complexity of the machines used, ultimately what counts is to meet the purpose of transporting people and goods from A to B in the most efficient way.

But for some pilots the pleasure of flying comes from the ability to interact with nature, to fly free from ATC orders and, sometimes, to tame a difficult animal. I love all type of planes and all segments of aviation, but there is a particular one that caught my attention and fantasies lately and that’s ‘Bush Flying’.

We generally talk about Bush Flying referring to flights conducted in zones of wild nature, like Alaska or in Africa, and no paved runways to land. I link this to the highest degree of freedom a pilot can experience: fly where you want and land where you want. Because of the difficult terrains, bush planes need to meet strict requirements: they need to have a high take off and landing performance, they need to be robust and their gears need to be sufficiently elastic to absorb the shocks coming from the manoeuvres on the ground.

Private bush flying in Europe is mostly done with ultralight aircrafts, because, according to EASA regulations, General Aviation aircrafts are generally prevented from landing outside certified airports. Differently, Ultralights are not regulated by European regulations and fall under national jurisdiction.

 

 

 

So, I had to decide where to move my first step towards bush flying and the perfect choice sounded like Brescia, in Italy. Indeed, there is a bush flying school there featuring one of the finest pilots (Fabio Guerra, former military pilot, B777 captain and famous bush test pilot and instructor) and one of the nicest bush planes one can find around here, i.e. the Savage Cub from Zlin Aviation.
A nice story about Zlin is that about their appearance at Valdez last summer. Indeed, the ‘Shock Cub’ (an incredibly performing cubber with slats and slotted flaps) of Zlin Aviation made a great debut arriving third in Valdez last summer, but what a lot of people don’t know, is that Zlin’s official test pilot was not available to fly it in that occasion. So, it was flown by a pilot that had practised only a handful of hours before the competition, instead.
The other reasons to choose Italy were that ultralights can land wherever the pilot deems appropriate as long as the land owner agrees and that the beauty and variety of the Italian landscape is unmatched in Europe.

Renato, the President of Scuola Volo Brescia, guided me through the main differences between General Aviation and ultralights and then showed me the Hangar of the school were a nice selection of ‘Cubbers’ were lined up in different set-ups. Proper Bush Flying will start only after I feel perfectly comfortable on the Cub and after the instructor feels comfortable with me being alone on the Cub.

So, finally came the moment to hop on the yellow Savage Cub for our first mission. The set of instrument looked rather minimal to me, but given the weight restrictions and that most flights are local and conducted in good weather it makes sense.

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We started training with some taxiing on ground. This is, indeed, the real difficult part of handling taildraggers. The reason is that the center of gravity of the plane is located behind the main gear and this feature makes tailspins easy to happen.

After a few back-and-forths on the runway, increasing the speed to train the control on ground we went for a flight. The Savage Cub is a lovely machine. You feel in contact with every part of the plane: you can feel the RPMs with your fingertips and the drag of the airflow when pulling down the flaps. Fabio showed me the slow-flying capability of the machine which are simply astonishing. With full flaps and maximum power the plane can remain in the air with the airspeed indicator close to 0. When stalling, the Savage Cub drops a wing, but the control on the rudder remains very good.

I performed a few steep turns, which in that plane means being able to circle over a tennis court and then we headed back to the patter for some touch and goes.

Landing on the Savage Cub proved to be the training I was looking for. While most tricycle will forgive you a slightly sloppy alignment with the center line and, once on the ground, the pilot can generally relax the muscles, the Cub demands perfect alignment and until the plane is halted on ground, attention must be kept to its maximum.

45 minutes passed in the blink of an eye. We had a quick lunch in a local ‘Trattoria’ and then headed back to the airfield for another session.

I felt more confident and excited, but the task was made tougher by a quick shower that passed by. The rain covering the windshield and the low contrast of the grass runway made almost impossible for me to estimate the distance from ground. We went around, and at the following round I managed to use some more peripheral vision to calculate the distance and made a rather good landing for the standard of the day.

We trained traffic patterns until the rain became too intense and we had to stop. I was mentally depleted, but I had one of the most satisfying flight training sessions in my life.

I was happy, at intervals I managed to ‘tame’ the Cub.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Re-reading ‘The Little Prince’ 20 years later

As father of a 4-year old, while looking for some new books for her, I stumbled across “The Little Prince”, the most famous book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

I remember reading it when I was 7 or 8. At the time, I found it pleasant, but very cryptic in some way. So, I thought that it would be very interesting to go through it again, now that I am a grownup and a pilot, using the sweet excuse of reading it to my little one.

In facts, reading it now, around 20 years after my first time, that little book transmits a completely different feeling. I could possibly say that it conveys some of the most private feeling of the pilot “Saint-Ex”, but clearing the story from every technical details that would possibly bore the young audience.

One thing of the book that I struggled to understand was why and how the Little Prince was travelling from a little planet to the other. It is difficult to understand what the different small planets that the Little Prince visits are if one doesn’t know that when Antoine de Saint-Exupery started to fly, one of his tasks was to open new air routes for the Aéropostale connecting towns and countries. At the time, a remote town close to the Andes could easily be seen as a different planet. And people could more easily close themselves, thinking to be kings, but without knowing of what insignificant realm.

However, a theme – if not the theme –  that is central to the book is that of death. It is somehow never explicitly mentioned. When the Little Prince agrees to be bitten by the snake, he simply wants to go back to his planet. When I was small and read this lines, part of me was convinced he did actually make it back. I still think it now somehow.
If you have the chance to read some of the articles Saint-Exupery wrote during the years of the Aéropostale and especially about what happened when a pilot assigned to a long and dangerous did not arrive, you will immediately understand why death is something that remains unspoken. In facts, when that happened, there was only the silence left by their absence but often no confirmation of what had happened. A part of each of the friends and colleagues waiting on ground hoped for some different epilogue.

The book has certainly many other meanings, but you can read about them in any anthology. Here I just sit with my imagination in the room were Saint-Ex wrote his masterpiece and listened to the pilot.

I am happy to hear what does the book represent for you. Feel free to use the contact form you find under the respective page!

I wish you all a nice reading.
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A morning at Airliner Classics

Airliner Classics is a fixed appointment for aviation lovers in Germany and around Europe. The event brings to the small town of Speyer, in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, a number of old airliners kept in perfect shape and often even carrying crews dressed in the original uniforms of the time. I won’t be telling too many technical details, because these you can find on all the specialised magazines that every year follow the event and on the website of the organiser (http://airliner-classics.de/).

What I would like to transmit is the special atmosphere that you can enjoy at these event, because it says a lot about the value that aviation has for the Germans.

Let’s start from the location. The airport of Speyer-Ludwigshafen (ICAO code: EDRY) is located around 90 km south of Frankfurt am Main and is one of the most beautiful airports I can think of thanks to its proximity to the Rhine river and the incredible view that pilots enjoy landing on runway 16 or taking of on runway 34. In facts, next door to the airport, the Technik Museum Speyer has its seat and one of its most prominent features, a decommissioned 747 by Lufthansa, stands at 30m of height greeting all air traffic.

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Despite a thunderstorm in the early morning, hundreds of aviation fans were already on the apron when I arrived and, with their cameras, they were already violating all secret details of Antonov, a Yak and a MH1521 Broussard.

The crowd was mostly German, but with a few Americans here and there, due to the vicinity of a couple of US Army basis. There were people of any age. Then, a sudden buzz preceded the DC3 of Swissair, which made her appearance escorted by two Beechcraft 18.  It is glorious view to see the DC3 gently touching down on the wet runway. The shiny body of the plane and the water on the asphalt fill the eye with light. Right after her, the two Beech 18 also touched down.

In matter of minutes the sky opened up completely, and war birds and passenger planes intensified the pace of arrivals. The variety of planes and the numerous crowd tells a lot about how much Germans love aviation and how well they manage to preserve its most historical treasures.

But the beauty of this event, is not only linked to the historical value of the aircrafts present. I love the familiar atmosphere, the way everybody smiles and welcome warmly the pilots descending the ladders from their machines. I exchanged a few words with a young man of around 30 and I promised to send him the pictures of him standing close to the DC3, but he doesn’t have a facebook account. He said he works as flight instructor during the week ends and at the regional aviation authorities during the week. I concluded that he is probably one of the most connected persons I know anyway. Indeed, he seemed to know most of the pilots in the area. He showed me pictures of him crossing Frankfurt International on board of a L39 commanded by a famous aerobatic pilot and then pictures of him piloting a PC-6 while carrying skydivers. There was always someone passing by who greeted him while we were talking. While we exchange the email details, I think that coming from a very different place and also a different culture, something took me off-guard. I was indeed somehow, stupidly, surprised by how the aviation crowd here seems more like an open and welcoming family.