My one reservation was that our 78-year-old Franklin 150 engine had been freshly overhauled before purchase, and, between Pacific Northwest weather and building our hangar/living quarters, we’d only put 100 hours on it. By comparison, we owned our previous Piper Pacer for over 18 months and flew it some 220 hours.

The difference was that we made a number of ambitious cross-countries with the Pacer, while the Stinson has remained largely local. Infant mortality is a thing with newly overhauled engines—even those of more recent manufacture than the Franklin—and I was leery of venturing into the northern wilderness without a decent proving run. 

My own cross-country-making skills were also in need of a brush-up, having not been really exercised since we sold the Pacer in 2016. Yes, my day job involves regularly flogging Boeing 737s across the continent. But ensconced in the flight levels and enjoying performance and equipment that afford something approaching all-weather capability, those skills are practically irrelevant to the experience of being down in the rocks and the clay, trying to make serious miles in a VFR-only, single-engine aircraft of limited performance.

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The information-gathering and decision-making processes are entirely different, and the required degree of self-reliance much greater. These skills atrophy with disuse. The reality is that on marginal days in the Pacific Northwest, I mostly just don’t fly the Stinson, and so I haven’t had a lot of recent practice in making the fine calls. My brain, like my airplane, needed a proving run to get up to speed before tackling the north country. 

Longtime readers may recall past columns about our friends Sylvia and Hugh Grandstaff, previously of Texas and Alabama and the various forts and bases associated with Sylvia’s 13-year Army career as a CH-47 pilot. Since Sylvia left the Army a few years ago, the Grandstaffs moved to California, where Hugh now flies for Cal Fire. Most recently they bought a 70-acre parcel several hours north of San Francisco, and Dawn and I have really been looking forward to seeing it. Fortunately, there’s a small airport nearby in Boonville, California (D83). With a five-day stretch of time off work around my birthday in mid-April, it made the perfect destination for a leg-stretching, cross-country flight.

Weather delayed our departure on Monday, April 15, until after noon. Our airstrip sits just in the lee of 1,800-foot Green Mountain, and we frequently have low ceilings even after nearby Bremerton National (KPWT) is reporting good VFR. Eventually we were able to duck out under a 1200-foot ceiling for the first 5 miles and had great weather for the rest of the day with mostly clear skies, unlimited visibility, and a slight tailwind.

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Our first leg was a short one to Chehalis-Centralia (KCLS) for cheap gas, followed by a lovely 250-mile cruise down to Roseburg (KRBG) in west central Oregon. There was still over two hours of daylight remaining when we departed Roseburg, and I considered continuing to Crescent City, California (KCEC), but the marine layer along the coast had been persistent for several days and, despite a favorable forecast, the temperature/dew point spread was uncomfortably close.

Heading across the formidable Klamath Mountains to arrive at a potentially deteriorating destination with fading daylight and marginal gas to get back is the sort of thing that makes my antennae tingle. Instead, we made a scenic, half-hour hop to the mountain town of Grants Pass, Oregon (3S8) for the night. 

The friendly folks at Pacific Aviation Northwest loaned us a trusty airport car and directed us to the best dog-friendly hotel in town. We enjoyed a warm, beautiful evening, and I planned the following day’s flight to Crescent City via U.S. Highway 199 and then down the coast to Ukiah and Boonville following U.S. 101. This route, which I preferred for being shorter and more scenic than California’s Central Valley, was completely dependent on the coastal weather. Indeed, the marine layer did in fact move back over Crescent City around sundown. The new TAF reflected that but still claimed early clearing by midmorning. 

It was not to be. Despite a relaxed breakfast and a fashionably late appearance at the Grants Pass airport, the coastal METARs depicted a once-again tenacious marine layer. And furthermore, there was a completely unforecast broken layer a couple thousand feet over Grants Pass, which, problematically, was visibly obscuring our intended departure corridor to the southwest.

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Time for Plan B. We instead departed southeast toward Medford, Oregon, soon left the aberrant ceiling behind, and enjoyed a gorgeous flight up the Rogue River Valley over the Siskiyou Pass and past Mount Shasta. By the time we landed in Red Bluff, California (KRBL) for gas, the coast had cleared up nicely, making for a stress-free, one-hour flight across the Coastal Range to quaint little Boonville (D83), with its 2,800-by-50-foot paved runway tucked into a scenic valley.

Hugh met us and helped push the faithful Stinson into his rented hangar. Total flight time southbound was just over seven hours. 

We had a fantastic couple days with the Grandstaffs and fell in love with their impossibly scenic off-grid homestead high up a golden, oak-peppered ridge overlooking the Rancheria Creek watershed. Our dog Piper had a great time running around the ranch with the Grandstaff’s deaf, three-legged rescue pup, Dove. We went hiking, drove out to the coast, went flying in the Stinson (incredibly, the first time Sylvia and I have flown together in our long friendship), and shared an unexpectedly fine meal at an unpretentious gem of a restaurant in Boonville. It was a special birthday spent with treasured friends. 

Several years of my early career were spent living in and flying all around California, and every time I come back I’m absolutely gobsmacked at how fantastic it is—especially the northern half of the state. There’s a tendency for outsiders to decry the congestion, high cost of living, supposedly suffocating regulatory structure—“Californication”—and I won’t deny that the most crowded areas hold little appeal to me. But California is an enormous and tremendously varied state, more akin to a medium-sized country, one that would take a lifetime to fully explore.

There’s a lot to love in California, particularly for pilots and those who enjoy outdoor adventure, and a surprising portion of it is lightly populated and not so terribly expensive. The Grandstaffs are not wealthy, but simply by putting down roots outside of commuting distance from San Francisco (and putting a lot of sweat equity into their land), they could afford a fairly large and beautiful spread of property. Well done, you two. 

An approaching low-pressure system forecast to make landfall on Friday prompted me to move up our northbound departure by a day, and we were rewarded with fine weather and a light tailwind in southerly flow. This time we were able to take the coastal route to Grants Pass, stopping in Little River, California (KLLR) to top up on fuel, then cruising up the rugged shoreline to Crescent City, and climbing up and over the redwood forests of the Klamath Range.

From Grants Pass we retraced our route to Chehalis-Centralia and finally back to our home grass strip, where a gusty north wind set up a potentially sketchy landing on seldom-used, downhill-sloped Runway 30. I decided to make a low inspection pass and beat a retreat to Bremerton National if things got too sporty. As it turned out, the challenging approach through a small notch in the tall pines lining the threshold went perfectly, and once below the tree line in smooth air, I found myself in perfect position to land in the touchdown zone—so I did. Total time northbound was six hours. 

The plane worked great, and the engine ran smoothly throughout the trip, with fuel burns of 9 to 9.5 gph (typical of the Franklin, which is thirstier than an equivalent Lycoming O-320 or Continental O-300) and true airspeed averaging 105 mph. I gained some useful, real-world performance data for max gross weight operations, the weather provided a few decision-making opportunities, and I got practice in filing, activating and closing VFR flight plans again.

In short, our jaunt to California and back was exactly the sort of cross-country proving run I had in mind. I returned with renewed confidence in the plane and my own skills,and looked forward to our Alaska flying adventure with eager anticipation.

This column first appeared in the September Issue 950 of the FLYING print edition.

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Airline captain Sam Weigel shares his experience of owning a 1953 Piper Pacer while he was building hours early on and how he navigated an unexpected turn of events.

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“Thinking back to the years when I was training and time building, I did not have $20,000 to lose,” Weigel said. “Such a financial setback might have killed my career before it even got started.”

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The post The Risks of Owning an Aircraft While Training appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was a sad end to an adventure-filled 18 months of ownership, but in reality that chapter was closing anyway. Dawn and I were selling everything to buy a sailboat and run away to sea. This too turned out to be a grand adventure, one that lasted nearly five years. We had but one regret during that time: our near-absence from general aviation, and especially the lack of an airplane of our own. Dawn particularly felt the void; I at least had work flying to halfway scratch that itch. We determined to build our post-boat life around a return to general aviation, and accordingly, bought a lot on a grass airstrip west of Seattle and planned the build that is now underway. The only question that remained was what kind of airplane we would purchase, and when.

Last summer, we moved off the boat and, on our meandering way to Seattle, attended Oshkosh for the first time in six years. As with all previous Oshkoshes going back to my first in 1998, I found myself drawn to the few particular rows of vintage aircraft camping that host dozens of fine examples of my ultimate dream airplane: the Cessna195. I find the type an irresistible combination of timeless art-deco charm, round-engine-and-tailwheel machismo, and haul-everything-to-cool-places utility. This time, we spoke to a number of 195 owners and, on their suggestion, joined the International Cessna 195 Club.

Fast-forward a year to the Friday before Oshkosh in nearby Wausau, Wisconsin. Like last year, Dawn and I volunteered for the AirVenture Cup Cross-Country AirRace but didn’t race because of our between-airplanes status. This year, I spent most of my time shooting video footage and interviewing participants for the Race History Team. I was distracted from my duties, however, by the arrival of a beautiful, polished example of a 195, the low rumble of its Jacobs radial sending my heart throbbing. When I introduced myself to the pilot and complimented his fine bird, I mentioned that Dawn and I are members of the type club, to which he immediately responded, “Oh, have you read the book?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, so he turned around and grabbed a copy from the 195’s rear seat and autographed the title page for me. “Oh, you’re that Mike Larson!” I exclaimed. I’m pretty terrible with names.

I had, in fact, read Mike’s book, Tales of the Cessna 195 ,shortly after our return from Oshkosh last year. It’s an amusing and quick read of some 279 pages. Mike is not a writer by trade—he’s a retired airline pilot with an entertainingly checkered past—so don’t come looking for high literature here. Instead, the book is a whimsical collection of hilarious and heartwarming stories as Mike might tell them to a group of pals gathered around a campfire, whiskies in hand, on a starlit backcountry airstrip. The first half concerns Mike’s early life and career: enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, skydiving in the wild and wooly early days of the sport, various misadventures as a starving drop-zone operator, and a succession of jobs as crop duster, freight dog, and Douglas DC-8 flight engineer before landing at New York Air and then Continental Airlines. Mike’s meandering path makes my post-9/11 career trajectory look positively mediocre. Industry newcomers will find it an enlightening look at the “bad old days,” back before airlines were throwing bucketfuls of cash at anyone with a pulse and an ATP.

Mike’s first encounter with the Cessna 195 was as a skydiving platform at the drop zone he operated in the early ’70s in Casa Grande, Arizona. Many years later, as a considerably more solvent major airline captain, Mike and his wife, Charmian, bought N8266R, a newly restored 1949 195A. The second section of Tales concerns their adventures with this airplane and with various members of the International Cessna 195 Club. By the end of the book, I was pretty well convinced to run out and buy myself a 195 (not that I needed much convincing). But a quick check of barnstormers.com confirmed that the 195 had followed the rest of the used aircraft market into the stratosphere, and a check of my bank account confirmed that I was not ready to follow it there.

Talking to Mike at Wausau a year later, I discovered that he and Charmian are airpark neighbors and friends with two AirVenture Cup friends of ours, Laura Noel and Allen Floyd (and had in fact flown from Colorado in loose formation with Laura’s Cessna 185). I promised to look for N8266R at Oshkosh, and a few days later, when Dawn and I made our inevitable appearance on Cessna 195 row, Mike introduced us to a number of fellow club members (including some notable characters from the book), and invited us to the club barbecue that night. As we met and chatted with various friendly members of the 195 community—including a surprising number our age or younger—the dream of a 195 seemed a lot more in reach. 

Up until this point, we assumed that our next airplane would be another four-seat classic taildragger along the lines of our last: another Pacer, Cessna 170, Stinson 108, Aeronca Sedan, or Maule M4. Dawn has expressed some renewed interest in getting her certificate, which effectively ruled out the Pacer and the Maule. Our revised plan to build a hangar with an attached apartment assumed we’d buy an airplane shortly after the hangar was finished, build the main house in a few years, and perhaps consider the dream Cessna 195 sometime after that. But as we drove westward from Oshkosh this year, we started crunching the numbers. Once our hangar is complete, we realized, and if we’re in no great hurry to build the house, a 195 will be within financial reach—not someday, but now. It helps that the used aircraft market has calmed down a bit and asking prices are returning to reasonable levels.

We have a pretty good knack for blowing our plans to smithereens as circumstances change. We didn’t know it yet, but our plans for aircraft ownership would change again, and soon after getting home from Oshkosh. That, however, is a tale for next month.

The post An Airplane of Our Own appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In the early stages of COVID-19, it was almost certain that I would lose my Boeing 737 captain seat and be downgraded to first officer with an attendant decrease of income. A furlough or my airline going bankrupt were possible too. As the situation evolved and my position appeared safe, the geographic and mental separation of being a continent away from our land combined with the restrictions of quarantine to ensure that our focus drifted and deadlines slipped. And then the Pacific Northwest real estate market went nuts, supply chains went FUBAR, the cost of lumber quadrupled, and available construction workers became rare as hen’s teeth. 

Initially we persisted, knowing we wouldn’t build until 2023 but otherwise hewing close to our original plan of building a three-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot timber-framed house and 50-foot-by-60-foot hangar in quick succession. We hired an old-school architect who expanded on my longtime vision to produce a beautiful, understated Northwoods design that we fell in love with. But as we pored over plans, financial reality set in. The cost of building the home would likely exceed $400 per square foot, putting the price of our humble forest cottage near $1 million. That rankled every fiber of my naturally cheap being, but if I could accept this as the cost of having a roof over our heads in Seattle, we could afford it. 

What we could not afford—and what probably wasn’t possible given all the supply-chain and labor shortages and construction delays—was to build the hangar simultaneously with or shortly after the house. When I ran the numbers, it would take several more years of saving to put us in a comfortable position to build a hangar and buy an airplane. So we had to decide: What did we want more, a house or an airplane? 

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Captains at my airline make a decent income and most have rather nice houses. There’s a certain cultural expectation, but I had long broken the airline pilot mold by selling everything and running off to sea. Post-boat, our lifestyle has remained mobile, minimalistic, and adventure-oriented. We lived in 200 square feet for nearly five years and had the time of our lives. We never really missed having a big house. We did, however, miss having our own airplane—Dawn even more so than me. Our choice was clear. The hangar came first. 

When we moved west in August last year, we had the idea that we would get a tiny home, and we even looked at a few. They aren’t quite legal in our county, though, and we had difficulty getting a septic system approved for a “seasonal cabin.” We considered building the hangar in 2022 and just wildcatting an apartment in the loft for a year, but the wily county planners were once again ahead of us: Given our zoning, it turned out that a hangar could not be permitted without an existing legal single-family residence. This revelation sent Dawn and I into a late night, wine-fueled brainstorming session, sketching out eight solutions and listing the pros and cons of each. 

By night’s end, our course was clear, and the next morning, I started drafting plans. Our new aim was to build the 50-by-60-foot pole-barn hangar with an attached 15-foot-by-60-foot side shed, finished out as a two-bedroom living area—a “barndominium,” if you will—all permitted as a single-family residence. We found a pole barn company able to engineer my plans and supply the kit, and engaged contractors to erect the shell, pour the slab, and install the septic system. 

Dawn and I will finish out the living quarters ourselves, with the assistance of my retired contractor father. We ordered a 44-foot-by-15-foot Higher Power hydraulic door and will incorporate PEX tubing for radiant heat into the slab, but the hangar portion will remain otherwise unfinished for the moment. We’ll add insulation, a boiler, a standby generator, and solar power as time and finances allow. We plan to live in the hangar for three to eight years and build the house when the time is right, at which point the annex will make for extra storage or a nice mother-in-law suite. 

We ordered the pole barn kit in March 2022, and I refined the annex plans and put together a building permit application package that we submitted on May 7. We’d already been doing a lot of site prep since last December, thinning trees and brush and expanding the clearing. In January, we cut in a driveway and bought a storage shed, and material deliveries started in June. We trenched in power and water just prior to heading east for Oshkosh, and after a few small changes, our building permits were issued on July 22. As it stands in late September, we have broken ground and erected the poles; the trusses go up soon and we hope to have a roof and a slab before autumn rains begin. We’ll start the living quarters in late October, planning to move in early in the new year. 

Throughout this process, two things have become very clear. Whether putting in a long hard day of work on our land or listening to bullfrogs by the campfire on a still summer evening, we absolutely love spending time at the airstrip. It’s a little slice of heaven, and we can’t wait to call it home. And secondly, our yearning for an airplane of our own has only intensified, even as we rent a local Piper Cherokee and fly my neighbor Ken’s generously lent Super Cub. It’s been more than six years since we sold our Piper Pacer, and we need to find another vintage adventure machine to explore far horizons. 

The draw of the airstrip and the promise of our own airplane have been hugely motivational as we’ve put in a ton of hard work and navigated all the twists and turns of the process these last six months, and I expect they will power us through all the really hard work ahead (and various additional wrinkles). In a way, this is a very analogous repeat of how we built our life together cruising aboard Windbird: hard work, persistence, flexibility, and living each day intentionally. If the result is anything like our last adventure, the reward will be supremely worthy of the struggle. 

The post Building the Dream While Rolling With Twists and Turns appeared first on FLYING Magazine.