EAA Sport Aviation - November 2011

I gave him a quizzical look, and he gestured that I should bank the airplane to the right. I did, looked down the right wing—and saw a large Goodyear blimp hovering outside an enormous airship hangar, 3,000 feet below us.

“Oh! Right! Like that one!” I stammered, laughing. A blimp, after all, is a hard item to miss. Connor laughed, too, although I think it was as much at my reaction as at the blimp. But the universe rarely sees fit to prove me right about something so quickly, and in so large and dramatic a fashion. I wasn’t even sure the hangar hadn’t burned or been torn down somewhere along the way. But I doubt Connor will forget the encounter anytime soon. Not too many people get to look down on a Goodyear blimp.

I’d planned the leg so that we would arrive in Youngstown shortly before sunset in the hopes of getting Connor a little flying time in some smooth, calm air. He’d been doing bits of flying all across the country, but every time he took the controls, the turbulence seemed to get worse.

“I don’t think your plane likes me
flying it,” he finally concluded with a sigh.
“It knows who the real boss is.”
“Not always,” I assured him. But the
Ohio skies proved as finicky as those
everywhere else, and it was still bumpy as
we closed in on Youngstown, with surface
winds from 350 degrees at 12 knots,
gusting to 18. The tower cleared me to
land on Runway 5, which was the closest
to our position.

“Oh, goody,” I said to Connor. “Another crosswind landing.” We’d come more than 2,000 miles in the past nine days, and every single landing so far had entailed a crosswind. Surely that defied the odds. But, wait. I looked at the airport diagram again and saw that Youngstown also had a runway much more closely aligned with the wind. I called the controller back and asked if we could have Runway 32 instead. There was a pause.