Sunday, December 05, 2004
Capt. Wade
Flying commercial airlines makes me nervous. I tend to think of the worst possible scenario and run with it. For whatever reason, as uncomfortable as I am on big jets, I love small planes and I've been able to snag quite a few flights in my brief journalism career. Yesterday, I covered a training exercise conducted by the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol and got to go up in little single prop Cessna 172 with Capt. Wade.
The point of the flight was to pull close to a Civil Air Patrol plane so a photographer could get a snap of it for the paper. As we were looking in vain for the CAP plane, which was supposedly headed right for us, the pilot had this unsettling habit of saying, "Boy, it's hard to see airplanes in the air. It's really amazing there aren't more collisions." We did eventually find the plane without crashing and headed back to the airport.
On our approach, the tower kept telling Capt. Wade that there was a plane making its approach a couple miles ahead of us - but Wade couldn't see it, so he started talking again about how difficult it is to see planes in the air. After a few minutes of not finding the plane he decided the air controller had our plane confused with another one - and landed anyway.
The above picture was taken in happier times.
The point of the flight was to pull close to a Civil Air Patrol plane so a photographer could get a snap of it for the paper. As we were looking in vain for the CAP plane, which was supposedly headed right for us, the pilot had this unsettling habit of saying, "Boy, it's hard to see airplanes in the air. It's really amazing there aren't more collisions." We did eventually find the plane without crashing and headed back to the airport.
On our approach, the tower kept telling Capt. Wade that there was a plane making its approach a couple miles ahead of us - but Wade couldn't see it, so he started talking again about how difficult it is to see planes in the air. After a few minutes of not finding the plane he decided the air controller had our plane confused with another one - and landed anyway.
The above picture was taken in happier times.
