Sylvia's Journal

Five and a half months after we crashed I retraced my flight to Gardner and Turner’s Falls. With Arne by my side as a safety blanket, I was ready. We took off from Beverly airport to the West on Sunday afternoon.

I requested Flight Following, a service that is provided to pilots. It means that I am an identifiable (by tail number) blip on a traffic controller’s screen, amidst other blips. This way I am cleared through airspaces and warned when another plane gets too near. It also means, if there is much air traffic in the area that I am traversing, that there is a constant stream of radio messages back and forth between Boston Approach Control and pilots of all planes in the area, not just little ones like ours.

Amidst all this radio chatter I have to remain aware just in case my tail number is called. I also have to keep track of where I am going, fiddle with the new Garmin system that Arne and I only barely understand, hold my altitude and course direction, and check ground references, so I know where I am on the map. I remembered my first cross-county flights with my instructor Greg, in May 2006, when I wondered how I could ever master this overload of mental stimulation. Not having flown much over the past 5 months, it was a challenge again.

The voice of the controller on the radio was not very clear. I could not always understand him. I would look at Arne in the hope he would bail me out. Sometimes he did, sometimes he did not. I should be able to handle this on my own, but it was nice to have an interpreter sitting next to me.

We got to Gardner Airport in about 45 minutes and landed on the same runway (36) that I last touched down on, at about the same time in the afternoon on that fateful Saturday in July. The landing was easy, and a good one. I had plenty of runway left. Arne suggested, as he always does, that I do a few more landings. I taxied back to the beginning of the runway. It was then, on take-off that I had this reaction in my gut that is hard to translate into words (another one of these biochemical reactions). We lifted off in a straight line where on July 14^th the plane veered off to the right into the trees and where my memory stopped. We saw the pond, now covered with ice and snow. I had to swallow deep realizing that the center of the pond was not that far from the boggy edge where we ended up. For a brief moment I had one of those would-have-should-have-could-have thoughts and a few words started to slip out before I caught myself. I did not finish the sentence and was able to let it go.

We landed two more times, once more using runway 36 and then with a slight tailwind on 18. Since I had wanted to retrace the entire flight, not just the landing and take off from Gardner, I continued to Turner’s Falls, some 20 miles further West. For awhile we couldn’t find it and I was glad that we had two pairs of eyes on the look out. Our GPS told us we had just flown over it and still we couldn’t see it. Arne suggested I do a 360 and then we spotted the airfield off our left wing. This place, where we had had our picnic on that sunny Saturday in July did not look as attractive in winter; a desolate and forgotten little airfield on the Eastern shore of the Connecticut River.

Since there was hardly any wind we could land from either side. I picked runway 34 and noticed that if I were to come in too high and too fast we’d land in the Connecticut River. The thought made me tense up a bit as I was a little too high on final approach. But I am getting better at losing altitude quickly and made another good landing. We turned around at the end of the runway and took off Eastwards, back to Beverly; mission accomplished.

The flight back was beautiful. Flying into dusk in winter is spectacular. This is the attraction of flying and this is what is drawing me back into the pilot seat. As the lights turned on in buildings on the ground a Christmas landscape emerged, with Boston sparkling in the far distance. By the time we landed at Beverly it was nearly dark. This was another challenge as I had not landed at night since early December 2006.

All in all I had flown for nearly two and a half hours. Arne was quite pleased with my performance. And so was I. It was another milestone on my journey of recovery. Over the past month I have flown 6.2 hours, made 35 landings, a few of them on some very short runways and one at night; I have gone up solo in the traffic pattern at Beverly and now I completed my first long cross county trip. On New Year’s Day Mike will take me up for more instruction on the Garmin over the practice area. I will be flying over my sleeping friends in Ipswich, Essex, Newbury and Newburyport a little after 8 AM on the first day of the New Year. It seems like a good start of this first New Year’s Day in my second life.