I left just after noon yesterday for my dental appointment; I wanted to run a couple errands before my rendezvous with dentistry. Fortunately, that part of it went very well: scale, polish, a quick poke with the dental pick, and I was out within a half hour. No muss, no fuss. My favorite kind of dental visit.
Anyhow, the mail had run by the time I left, so I took the mail with me. There was a surprise in the mailbox: a sample copy of Trade-a-Plane. Boy, does that take me back. I hadn't read through a copy of it in over a decade, when I stumbled across copies in one of the bookstores I frequented in grad school. Seeing that yellow newsprint in the mailbox was like meeting up with an old friend.
For the uninitiated, Trade-a-Plane is sort of a big national classified paper for just about anything aviation: parts, airplanes, equipment, even real estate. You can find ads for everything from charts and maps to a pair of restorable F-104 Starfighters, and anything in between. It's a legendary publication in aviation circles, and it's stuck around so long for good reason. It's printed on canary yellow newspaper stock, so it really stands out. (If memory serves, the idea of shifting to normal "white" paper -- well, as white as newsprint can get, anyway -- has been hooted down many times. Trade-a-Plane on yellow paper is as American as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and the Chevy Mailbu.)
Inevitably, leafing through pages and pages of airplanes for sale gets you window-shopping. What if you could afford it? Not just the airplane, but the maintenance and fuel and everything else. And the avionics (have you ever seen what two KX-155s and a KT-76 -- same as in the 152 I trained in -- sell for? How much of that little airplane's value was in the instrument panel alone) and the engine. And required periodic inspections. Oh, and let's not forget ramp/hangar space. And insurance. And all the other bells and whistles. All this for what? Well, with luck I'd get to fly on weekends, perhaps some weekdays over the summer. Unless I became independently wealthy, which I would have to be to afford all this airplane business. Sure ain't gonna be able to afford it by doing what I do now, no sir.
Still, though. Dream big. What would I get? In my heart, I'd get a De Havilland Beaver, the legendary mount of choice for bush pilots. But not much call around here for what those do. An airplane like that needs to be able to haul stuff around and work for a living. If I lived in Alaska, I could find a way to make that work for me. But not around here. Not much call for bush pilots in the deep South. And it's a big airplane. It takes a lot of money to buy, and a lot of money to keep going.
Nope, more realistically, it'd be a Piper Super Cub. It's also a favorite among Alaskan aviators, but it's smaller, more accessible, the whole nine yards. I could almost justify owning a Super Cub in these parts; it's a small, unobtrusive, fairly simple little airplane. (My opinion is also influenced by a beautiful Sunday ten Julys ago spent in the front seat of a yellow J-3 Cub, my uncle in the back, flying along with the window and the door open, puttering along, being outpaced by the cars on the highway down below us, and having a ball. Without question, it's the most fun I've ever had in an airplane.)
But even the little Super Cub's a trifle dear, and I won't be owning one any time soon. (I'm not ruling out that one day we may become rich -- remember, the possibilities in life are endless, and you never know what fortune tomorrow may bring.) For now, I'll make do with the daydreams. And at least Revell-Germany has come out with a Super Cub in 1:32 scale, and the newest issue even has a set of floats. Even in that small scale, to me that airplane's a little cutie. (Then again, I can say that because I don't have to pay for the care and feeding of the real thing. If I ever get to own a real one someday, I'll get back to ya.)
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