Flight Club
Need a new perspective on the city—and want to leave your recession-era problems on the ground for a few hours at a time? Go to pilot school.
By Jim Gullo
THE FREAKIEST THING happened when I was flying past the Space Needle on a slightly cloudy (“high overcast,” in aviation-speak) afternoon last summer. Twenty minutes earlier, my copilot for this flight, Jeremy Wilson, and I had climbed into the cockpit of our twin-engine airplane at Boeing Field. We ran our preflight checklist, and when I flipped on the electrical master switch the plane began to hum and I nearly passed out from excitement. (Note to self: This is something that I need to work on if I’m going to continue on the path to becoming a licensed pilot.) The navigation screens lit up, the pedals pushed against my feet, and we yelled, “Clear!”
We taxied out onto a long ribbon of asphalt. As we raced down the runway, Wilson called out our airspeed: “Forty knots…50 knots…” At 60, he said, “Rotate,” and I pulled back on the joystick, feeling the plane lift from the ground while at the same time wondering if it had been such a good idea to eat the big barbecue sandwich from Pecos Pit for lunch.
I forced myself to concentrate. We ascended at 950 feet per minute over Elliott Bay, with the Space Needle just off to our right side, and had nearly reached our maximum airspace altitude of 3,000 feet when Wilson said, “Watch what we can do with this.” He pushed a button on the control panel, and we froze in midair. Dead stop. No sound, no movement. “In this, I can pause the flight,” he said. “I can show you what I want, or I can change the conditions. Let’s add pouring rain. Let’s add lightning.”
Hey, let’s not. Wilson wasn’t God; in fact, he wasn’t even an instructor. He was the sales and marketing guy for Galvin Flying, which has been teaching people how to fly at Boeing Field for 75 years now. Thanks in large part to the Diamond DA42 TwinStar Flight Training Device in which we were sitting—on the ground in Galvin’s training school—it continues to be one of the best places in the country to learn to fly. Which, let’s face it, is a distinctly Seattle thing to know how to do.
Published: June 2009
“I don’t need to tell you about the principles of flight”? Yeah, remind me to never do any flying with Galvin. I can’t believe you found a CFI with the gall to say all that. I’ve never heard of a school that doesn’t plan on instructing its students on how the plane works… that’s insane.