Flying, Part 2

The second phase of my adventures with aviation began in 1963, when Bucher had a tug-and-barge business and the contract to deliver Texaco fuel down the coast to a new Hercules plant, set up to extract resin from pine stumps. The Hercules manager and his wife, Don and Muriel Stauffer, were close friends. Bucher came home one day to tell me excitedly that Don and he had decided they needed a plane to facilitate travel between Belize City, Mango Creek where the plant was located, and Guatemala from which we shipped the fuel. The idea was that all four of us would learn to fly in the happy future.

In what any beginning psychiatrist would recognize instantly as denial, I let Bucher’s explanation of why we absolutely had to have a plane drift in and out of my wandering mind. Reality hit me like a thunderbolt the noon he came home for lunch to announce that “our” Cessna 172 had arrived and that the Stauffers had invited us for a celebratory dinner that night.

Our plane’s registration number was N2704U, spoken as November-Two-Seven-Zero-Four-Uniform, or Zero-Four-Uniform for short.

I pride myself on being a lady in the face of disaster, so I chose a suitably festive dress and went off to dinner with what I hoped was a pleasant smile glued to my terrified face. The other three were so volubly excited that my unusual lack of responsiveness was not noticed. Another guest at the dinner table was our good friend Tom Tattersfield. As we left the dining room together, Tom softly said to me, “So you intend to leave home and children and take to the skies, abandoning care…” It was my first laugh of the evening.

The next day I was at our lawyer’s office demanding (to his enormous amusement) that he write my will.

 

Muriel and I immediately co-opted a highly trained flight instructor who worked for a local airline. With the dedication of True Love and no confidence at all, I began taking flight lessons. Somewhere along the line I fell in love with The Wild Blue Yonder.

Bucher soon regained his proficiency. Muriel and Don both got their licenses the next time they went back to the States on a visit. I continued with my training in Belize.

Alex’s high school, St. John’s College, was located at one end of the municipal airstrip where we kept our plane. Air traffic was minimal in those days. We knew the schedules of both the international flights and the local ones. Rarely did another small plane invade our space. Alex told me that the noise of planes attracted the attention of students in their classrooms with all doors open to the tropical breeze. He enjoyed remarking offhandedly, “That’s just Mom practicing takeoffs and landings.”

 

Another routine training exercise was making successive “S” turns over a road. The problem was that Belize had three main roads, north, west, and south. None had a straight stretch. I practiced my S turns over the Burdon Canal, which cuts arrow-straight from the Belize River to the Sibun. Since these turns were done at fairly low altitude, I managed to terrify a number of people peacefully taking cargoes of fruit to market in their dory or small launch.

As for steep turns, I found a tiny, round mangrove caye just off the coast above the city. I spun round and round it day after day, one wing pointing directly to what I named Kate’s Caye.

I don’t remember my excitement at soloing because by then I was so enamored of flying.

 

Time came for my solo cross-country. I decided to fly north. I made my first landing at Corozal, then headed toward the western border for the little dirt strip at Gallon Jug.

I saw the strip and a windsock about a minute earlier than my calculations predicted. However, I trusted my eyes more than my math. In proper procedure, I “dragged” the unfamiliar strip, flying over it at an altitude of 50 feet to assure all was safe. As I did so a Mennonite horse and buggy drove by the adjacent road and I saw that my landing strip was now a field of waving corn stalks, complete with windsock.

I was so shattered at not finding Gallon Jug that I headed back for the safety of my little municipal airstrip home. That afternoon I flew safely south to fulfill my cross-country requirement.

 

I took and passed my written exam. It had to be sent to England for grading. The weeks passed and I continued flying. The aviation department was undone at having their first student pilot in many years, and a woman at that. They could not agree for my instructor to do my final flight check. Eventually they gave me permission to go to Guatemala and have it there.

In December 1963, the Stauffers and I accompanied Bucher on a business trip to Guatemala. During the trip, Bucher arranged for a flight instructor there, an old friend of ours, to check me out. Bucher did me the dubious honor of asking him not to treat me like a friend but to really make darned sure that I knew what I was doing.

Flying at high altitude in the mountains was very different from flying at sea level. I had to learn to compensate in a hurry.

Most flight checks take a maximum of an hour; mine lasted an hour and forty minutes. It was rugged. My examiner gave me three emergencies before I reached the end of the (admittedly long) runway. Then we climbed and did timed turns. We did six or eight stalls of various kinds, which impressed him; he didn’t know that I had a very demanding instructor and that I enjoyed stalls. We did steep turns at 60-degrees, which qualifies as aerobatics and which I’d never done before because we concentrated on 45-degree bank turns.

In his last dirty trick, my examiner turned the engine off in a simulated emergency and asked where I would land. I pointed to a large open expanse. He said I couldn’t land there because it was a military post. I told him I didn’t know that and intended to land there and talk my way out of trouble later.

We did some advanced maneuvers that I’d never done before and that aren’t required for a private pilot’s license—chandelles and Lazy Eights. Partly he just wanted a chance to do them himself, showing me how, and partly he wanted to see what sort of coordination I had trying them cold. After that we went back to landings, did two with power and three dead-stick spot landings, which I’d never tried before but managed to do to his satisfaction. It was one long but exciting hour and forty minutes.

We went back to the terminal restaurant for coffee and I was given an hour lecture on my abilities and shortcomings as a pilot.

Despite good grades on both the written and flight check, it took officials six months to bring themselves to give me a license. On June 10th, 1964, I received the first private pilot’s license ever issued by the British Honduras government.

 

The plane added another dimension to our pleasure. While we all used it regularly for business, we also had it available for pleasure. Long weekends in neighboring countries…Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras…became easy. Sometimes we went together; sometimes either couple took other friends; sometimes we took the children. We “girls” used to take two friends and fly over the border to Chetumal, Mexico, for shopping, an obligatory stop at the bread shop, and lunch, much to the amazement of the airport authorities who kept searching the plane for a pilot, not believing at first that we were “it.”

 

Our flying days came to an end in May of 1966 when a waterspout destroyed most of the airplanes in the airport hangar, including ours.