Saturday, June 14, 2014
wing walking - June 14, 2014
Posted: June 14, 2014 | Last Revised: June 14, 2014
Its been years since Mark and I last were together, but the times we spent together were always entertaining, late nights out at the farm south of Frontier on a coffee high till the wee hours. One special escapade we had was our own private air show, and I am able to tell this story today because Mark was a very cool and skillful pilot. We decided to try wing walking.
Taking all precautions, I put on a motorcycle helmet, tied a rope around my waist and to the wing strut, and we did some passes down the runway at speed. "Feels alright!", Mark said, so we decided to go for it. We had a back-up plan, I was standing on the wing about 4 feet from the fuselage, and if it was handling poorly Mark would signal and I would go against the body and hang on the the spray fill port. We taxied to the end of the runway and were off.
There was a power-line about 1/2 mile from the end or the strip, and when we cleared it by 20 feet I looked in at Mark. He looked a bit concerned, and signaled for me to get to the center. The wind behind a 250 horse power fan is quite a thing to experience,and as I looked back to see if Mark was relaxing any, my sinuses were immediately cleared. He put the plane in a slight right bank and we did about a 5 mile circuit, never more than 300 feet off the ground, and he landed it with the throttle still to the firewall just to keep things organized. We rolled to a stop , Mark just sat there for a while then climbed out, hardly able to talk. We laughed and shook for a while, realizing we had just dodged a bullet. The plane was shuddering on the verge of a stall the entire time we were air born, which shouldn't have been a surprise as a 200 pound Norwegian is not very aerodynamic. If Mark had taken a left turn rather than a right I am sure it would have spun in.
Mark told me later that he had tensed his stomach so tight during the flight it hurt to laugh for 2 weeks after.
Mark, thanks for your skill all those years ago, and the good memories, as you "slip the surly bonds of earth to dance the sky on laughter silvered wings" .
(That from a poem by John Gillespie McGee.)
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