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As some of you may know, I’ve been in an intimate relationship with two airplanes over the past 9 or 10 years. While they’ve given me some trials and tribulations (like women, they’re generally high maintenance), over the years I’ve had many fun times with them. That has included various aerobatic competitions, competing at the US National Aerobatic championships (I didn’t win), flying down to Texas and back in an unheated, cramped, 2 seat airplane with barely enough luggage space for an anorexic flea, flying up to Canada, formation flying over most of New England, and various other insane aerial adventures.

Sadly, however, over the past few years I’ve pretty much lost interest in the airplane – not in flying as such, but more in the specific airplane type. While the Pitts is a wonderful aerobatic airplane, if your interest in aerobatics starts to wane you find yourself saddled with an airplane that isn’t particularly good for anything else. Ok, that’s not entirely true – it is one of the best crosswind landing capable GA airplanes in existence – I never found a crosswind that I couldn’t handle in either the S-2A or the S-2B. It also does just what you tell it to do. Immediately. Without delay. Which, of course, could be a problem if your control inputs are not exacting and precise. And that is exactly why it is so good – the Pitts is unforgiving, intolerant and an insanely hard taskmaster: if you do something wrong, it lets you know immediately. Most of the time you survive the experience, but unfortunately some people have not. In other words, it is a perfect schoolmaster. When you can land a Pitts competently, pretty much any other airplane (and here I’ll confine myself to piston-engined general aviation aircraft because I have zero experience with turbines) is insanely easy to land, and in my opinion landing is the single most complex operation you’ll ever perform in an aircraft.

So why then, if the airplane is so capable and such a good schoolmaster, did I lose interest in it? It’s really pretty much exactly as I said: if you find yourself losing interest in turning upside-down and doing strange things in airplanes, then the Pitts becomes that much less fun. Having competed in aerobatics and flown an aerobatic-capable airplane almost exclusively for close to 10 years, I guess I just got tired of doing something that was pretty much repetitive:

1. go to the airport
2. take the airplane out of the hangar, preflight, add fuel
3. strap on the parachute, climb into the cockpit, start the engine
4. taxi out, take off, fly to the same 1/8 mile square spot
5. point the airplane at the sky, hurl yourself straight down at the ground at 200mph
6. make the airplane tumble around the sky in various strange attitudes
7. laugh hysterically all the time you’re doing so
8. notice that almost an hour has passed and that you need to land before you get too low on fuel
9. fly back to the airport
10. land, taxi back to the hangar, shut down the engine, climb out the cockpit, and put your toy back to bed

Lather, rinse, and repeat about 1000 times over the years with a couple of fun adventures thrown in every several months – trips to other wonderful little grass strip runways, flights out to NY to go to bike races, flights down to Virginia to go motorcycle racing, flights to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard for beachcombing and so on – and after a while even something that is seemingly the most fun thing to do with your clothes on becomes humdrum and boring. Especially if, like me, you have a relatively short attention span.

And all of that led me to sell my airplane, which brings me to the last flight I had in my Pitts last weekend – after selling it to some wonderful Japanese gentlemen, I needed to deliver the airplane to their agents up in Vermont. That, of course, meant that I had to fly it up there and somehow find myself a ride back home. Fortunately I have a number of friends who have access to airplanes and who think that flying around the countryside is a bucketload of fun (as do I – I still love flying), so armed with a Beech Baron and a Pitts we set off on our merry way.

And about 20 minutes into the flight I realized that I was actually doing the right thing – while it was fun flying it, I basically had had enough of the cold, cramped cockpit and was wishing I could more easily stretch my legs, sit back, relax and actually have something approaching warmth in the cockpit. Flying at 4500 feet in sub-freezing temperatures gets old really, really quickly even when you’re wearing 4 layers of clothes, especially when your tachometer drive decides that it’s time to crap out on you and you suddenly see your engine RPMs at zero, but even that momentary foray into abject terror wasn’t enough to keep me warm. Naturally I figured out the problem pretty darned rapidly and elected to continue the short distance to the destination airport because bailing out of an otherwise perfectly normally functioning airplane into the arctic permafrost didn’t seem like a fun alternative.

Anyways, once the airplane was delivered, I climbed into the left seat of the Baron and had probably the most fun flying that I’ve had in about 4 years – the airplane was just a blast to fly, much more comfortable than the Pitts, much warmer, much quieter, had working tachometers, and was a shitload easier to land.

So all that this means is that I’ll have to find other ways to re-engage myself in my love affair with flying.