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This Saturday moring is nothing special. As always, I get up early for my morning workout. First thing out of bed, I look up and out the window. It's early October, the temparature's warm and the air is calm. The sky is covered 'wall to wall' with thick dark clouds. Looks like another chores day at home. By about ten thirty the sky's still dark and the forecast does not seem to be promising anthing better later on. I decide against the chores anyway and start towards Randall airport where I have been spending the past few Saturdays searching for memories of days long past.
Randall is a small private airport in the middle of farm country some seventy miles northwest of New York City. The field is nothing more than a few old buildings in desparate need of repair, and a paved runway. The sign announcing the establishment is so old that the writing is faded almost beyond legability. Housing the local FBO as well as the kind of makeshift hangar/storage is a long, low and narrow structure on its last leg. Yet, besides its resembalance to Kitty-Hawk, Randall does have something special about it. I found it on the Internet, and back in August I took a ride up there to check out the local soaring club. There was a barrage of air machines scattered everywhere. Old and new, experimental and vintage planes were commingled side by side with colorful hot-air baloons, hang gliders and slick sailplanes. And the place was humming with activity. "A playground for grownup kids" I noted not without amusement.
I had taken my first flight, later followed by my first solo, when I was just about fourteen or fifteen years old. It was in a glider. As every pilot will tell you, the sensation of that first flight and emtions evoked on one's first solo is forever captured and carved deep in your memory. I would best describe it as the ultimate feeling of freedom, an excitement filled with wholesomeness, elation and delight. A seat of passion never to be likened. Ever since then I have flown many military and general aviation airplanes, never to recapture that first-flight/first-solo buzz. At the airport I find some of the boys hanging around, trying to make up their minds whether it's worth taking off into this dismal sky. There are Scott, Hank, Bill, Jason, Alasdair and Bob at the site. "It's a good day for practice," says Hank in his deep assertive voice. Alasdair shakes his head and mumbles "I should really be trying out my new canopy." Meanwhile, it clears just a bit and those clouds are scattered about the greyish-blue sky. "What do you think?" O pose to Bob. Bob, some call him 'the ripper,' whom I liken to everyone's favorite uncle and who would always favor the sunny side of an encounter, replies: "It sure doesn't look like much, but if you like, I'd ride out with you." "Let's go" I proose.
We take the orange 2-33. "What would you like me to do?" asks Bob as we're being towed out. "Nothing" I answer "enjoy the ride." We release at 2500 indicated. As soon as we are released over the northeast side of the airport the vario starts shreiking like mad and it will not cease for almost the entire duration of this 55 minutes flight. We hit a pretty strong thermal that keeps taking us up.
Alasdair, who's meanwhile also airborne, dedtected action by us and has now joined us in working the thermal. He's flying just below us at about 4500. Hank too, who was riding with Jason, rushed to join the party and is now circling some five hundred feet below. The scene is breath taking and emotions are flying high inside the cockpit. I see Alasdair almost eye to eye circling below in his streamline silver and blue 1-34, the yellow bulky 2-33 way down with Hank and Jason spiraling upward, and in between, soaring in a tight circle, almost motionless, are a couple of hawks wings spread out. "Soaring with the eagles" I whisper in wonder.
This is my closest recital with nature. Caressed by its gentle forces, harmonious with its elemetns, free as a bird. This was my reintroduction to my first flight, first solo, some forty years ago.