First Flying Lesson
by Captain Wayne (Rusty) Baker
“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
My first flying lesson was with Ed Smith. Ed was recently graduated from college. Growing up as he did as the son of an air taxi and fixed base operator / airport manager, Ed naturally began flying at an early age. He had soloed on his sixteenth birthday, gotten his private pilot license on his 17th, and his commercial license on his 18th birthday. To say I was impressed and envious would be an understatement.
Before we got into the airplane, a Piper Cherokee 140, Ed taught me the four fundamental forces – thrust, drag, lift, and weight – that are constantly affecting an airplane in flight. He showed me the controls –ailerons, stabilator, and rudder – and explained how their use caused the airplane to roll, pitch, and yaw. He covered all the items that a pilot must check on a preflight inspection – check the fuel and oil, looking for any signs of damage or bird nests in the engine cowling, inflation of tires, etc., etc., etc. Then, it was time to go fly.
The four fundamentals maneuvers of flight are climbs, turns, straight and level flight, and descents. These are covered in every flight lesson, and quickly become second nature to a pilot, just as maneuvering a car requires little conscious thought on the part of an experienced driver. In the beginning, though, everything is new, awkward. I felt that I must be the worst student pilot in the history of aviation. I have since learned in the course of my 17,000 hours plus career that:
A: Such a feeling is not uncommon among new students, and
B: I am not the worst pilot. The worst pilot was a captain at a commuter airline that I would later fly for.
I don’t remember much else about the content of my first lesson, other than the fact that while returning to the airport we got caught in a thunderstorm. I was of course new to the whole thing and quite ignorant of our predicament. I knew that Ed had something called an instrument rating, which I thought meant that he could fly safely and skillfully through any kind of weather – maybe even a hurricane, for all I knew. I soon learned that there are limitations to everything.
Ed did manage to find the airport and make a safe landing, but I now know that it might have been wiser to have taken advantage of our fuel reserves and landed elsewhere to wait for the weather to pass through the area. No matter – I now was an official student pilot, and I had a logbook with an instructor’s endorsement documenting all the maneuvers that we had performed during my first lesson to prove it.
By the way, just to keep things in perspective, when I started flying in 1973, a gallon of 100 Octane was 57 cents per gallon, and 80 Octane was 53 cents per gallon. The wet rental rate for a brand new PA28-140 Cherokee was $13/hour. With an instructor, $18/hour.