It is a lovely, peaceful spot set on a knoll, but most of the remains—people who went down the Ohio River and settled on the flat ground below in the late 1700s—were reinterred up here above the floodplain. That large, flat area, called the Turkey Bottoms, would become “Sunken Lunken” Airport in the early 1920s.

I’ve heard comments about how many approach and takeoff paths take you right over graveyards, but I never realized how many cemeteries are located on airport properties.

• READ MORE: Perusing Some Old Logbooks

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. The ground between or alongside runways and taxiways is flat and well cared for, and what could be a more appropriate resting place for pilots and aviation aficionados? The thought of resting in a place with airplanes soaring into the sky nearby…hey, that makes sense to me.

But since Lunken (KLUK) hasn’t yet seen things my way, I have a plot in a little and very old cemetery at the base of the Mount Washington neighborhood water tower, sitting on a hill about 4 miles from the airfield.

The airport beacon is mounted on top of the tower, and many a night I’ve navigated home fi nding my way toward that bright light.

Out of curiosity, I “uncovered” information about the incredible number of airports—large and small—where an old cemetery is found on the property. And it’s fascinating how the problem is solved.

A Chicago field, originally called Orchard Airport and the site of the Douglas Aircraft Company, was renamed O’Hare (KORD) in 1949, and in 1952, graves in Wilmer’s Old Settler Cemetery—0.384 acres on O’Hare Airport property—were removed by court order because they were in the path of a proposed new runway. Reportedly, 37 whites and an unknown number of Native Americans interned there were reburied in three nearby cemeteries.

Just how long a grave can be “reserved” for sole use by the original inhabitant seems to depend on state and local practices. It’s common for cemeteries to rent plots, allowing people to lease a space for up to 100 years before the grave is allowed to be recycled and reused.

In Ohio, it’s 75 years, but I could find no universal law here. It seems that much depends on the preference of surviving—if any—family members. Sometimes a court order is required.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (KATL) consistently wins the title of the world’s busiest airport and it continues to grow, engulfing more and more small communities. When a fifth runway was added in 2006, it vastly increased the number of possible operations, but it also enveloped two century-old cemeteries.

• READ MORE: Sometimes the Flying Weather’s Fit Only for Turkeys

Authorities decided that these two small family and church burial grounds, Hart and Flat Rock cemeteries, would simply be incorporated into the airport’s master plan. Despite being located between runways with takeoffs about every 30 seconds, they are still publicly accessible via a dedicated access road with signs showing the locations.

Probably the most famous—and curious—on-airport remains can be found at Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (KSAV).

Members of the Dodson family, Daniel Hueston and John Dotson, are buried alongside Runway 10, while Richard and Catherine Dodson’s graves are actually embedded beneath that runway. If you look really hard out of an airplane window, you can see the markers.

On quiet Saturday mornings, local pilots have been known to ask ground controllers for the “Graveyard Tour.” If cleared, this allows one to taxi out to the Dotson grave markers on Runway 10/28 so passengers can snap a picture before taking off.

Everything is haunted in Savannah and ghost tours are big business, but thus far, no one has figured out how to monetize the graveyard tour at the airport. Perhaps the two flight schools on the field could start incorporating a ghost tour into their sightseeing flights.

When Smith Reynolds Airport (KINT) in Winston- Salem, North Carolina, acquired property in 1944 to extend a runway, about 700 graves in the private African American Evergreen Cemetery were relocated to a new location. But it seems some marked graves remain in a wooded area within the airport complex.

• READ MORE: The Man Who Saved the Iconic Hartzell Propeller Company

If you watch carefully while driving on Springhill Road south of Tallahassee International Airport (KTLH) in Florida, you’ll see a break in the security fence. Pull in there and drive between the fences with signs proclaiming it is a restricted area, and you’ll come upon gravestones of a cemetery around which the airport runways were built. It’s known as Airport Cemetery and was originally a pauper’s graveyard. About 15 graves are designated with stones, but it appears there are about 20 other sunken depressions marking graves.

I’m betting you know many others, but I found one at Burlington International Airport (KBTV) in Vermont, where the graveyard is surrounded on three sides by the facility. And there’s Florida’s Flagler Executive Airport (KFIN), North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International

Airport (KRDU), New York’s Albany International Airport (KALB), and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport (KSHD), where Revolutionary War veteran Mathias Kersh and his wife, Anna Margaret, rest—all sites of small family plots. The behemoth Amazon recently added 210 acres as part of its air cargo hub at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (KCVG) and is seeking permission to move 20 graves from the land it owns there.

No discussion of final resting places and cemeteries would be complete without a mention of a glorious shrine to aviation built a quarter mile off the end of Runway 15 at California’s Hollywood Burbank Airport (KBUR), formerly known as Bob Hope Airport. It’s called the “Portal of the Folded Wings.” The 78-foot-tall structure was designed by a San Francisco architect and built in 1924, intending it to be the entrance to a cemetery called Valhalla Memorial Park.

With its location so close to Burbank Airport—then called Union Airport—and the site of the Lockheed Company, aviation enthusiast James Gillette wanted to dedicate it as a shrine or memorial to early aviators. It took Gillette nearly 20 years, but it was finally dedicated as the final resting place of pilots, mechanics, and aviation pioneers in 1953. In addition to the ashes of those actually interred inside the portal, a number of brass plaques honor famous aviators resting elsewhere, such as General Billy Mitchell and Amelia Earhart.

Familiar aviation pioneers whose ashes are found inside include Bert Acosta (Admiral Richard Byrd’s copilot); Jimmie Angel, whose remains were removed and scattered over Angel Falls in Venezuela, where he crashed flying a Cincinnati-built Flamingo; W.B. Kinner, builder of the first certified aircraft engine as well as Earhart’s first airplane; and Charlie Taylor, who built the engine for the Wright Flyer and operated the first airport on Huffman Prairie in Dayton, Ohio. You can visit the site in Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, California.

But I can’t write a story about aviators who legally rest on airport properties without mentioning who knows how many ashes that have been surreptitiously scattered from airplanes flying over the deceased’s beloved home airport.

This column first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: The Connection Between Airports and God’s Acres appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I’ve subscribed to this venerable periodical since my early teens and read it in the local library for a few years before that. I’d peruse the news and gawp at the air-to-air photos and soak up every word of the articles, but first I’d head straight to the columns, for it was there that my love of aviation and appreciation of good writing were most equally rewarded. My two favorites were Len Morgan’s “Vectors” and Gordon Baxter’s “Bax Seat.” Morgan was everything I wanted to be, with the fortune of having been born in a more interesting age. There was such grace and poignancy to his writing, infused with the wisdom of a long life well lived, and a little sadness as well, for his more interesting age was one in which an aviator regularly lost compatriots he called friends.

But my favorite personality in the old FLYING was Gordon Baxter. “Bax” wasn’t so much a pilot as he was a character, and he was very upfront about that. His columns were full of his foibles and inadequacies as an aviator, as well as various hijinks that made me wonder how he ever evaded the steely gaze of the FAA and various designated examiners. (Martha Lunken is his spiritual—and literal—successor. Somewhere Bax is looking down—or up—and thanking the controlling deity that he predated webcams.)

By the time I started reading him, Bax had grounded himself because of recurring seizures and only occasionally took flight with other pilots. But, in his own exaggeratedly down-home Texas fashion, Bax was able to convey, in a way few others could, everything that people like you and I find wonderful, magical, and captivating about flight, airplanes, and aviators.

• READ MORE: Allure of International Flying Lies Across the Glittering Sea

I think the other reason I liked Bax was that he so clearly had the gift of gab, something I decidedly lacked at that self-conscious age. Long before he wrote for FLYING (and Car and Driver), and even before he started writing for local newspapers, Bax was a well-known radio personality in Southeast Texas, famous since 1945 for his madcap style and on-air antics. He frequently moved stations, being fired each time “for the same reason they hired me. I’m Gordon Baxter, and there’s no cure for that.” Later he spent a fair amount of time on the speaking circuit, and he wrote about that too. He drove around the South to spin a couple hours of folksy humor to perfect strangers eating rubber chicken—they loving him, and he loving them right back. As a bookish, introverted teenager with a slight speech impediment, that sort of easy volubility awed me, and I was a bit jealous of it. Still am.

I’ve loved words from an early age, but for me they were things to be considered and weighed, massaged and delivered to the world in my own good time. By my teens I knew my strengths and weaknesses fairly well, and I counted writing among the former and speaking as one of the latter. Like most people, I’ve always tried to lead publicly with my strengths while privately working on my shortcomings. These included my lack of ability in practical matters (so I worked on my own vehicles, cruised aboard and maintained Windbird, and built our hangar-apartment) and my natural aversion to pain, discomfort, and risk (so I ski, motorcycle, dirt-bike, and

skydive). In my late teens, I made a conscious effort to come out of my shell and talk to people even when it was uncomfortable, and as I’ve aged, I’ve become increasingly extroverted and comfortable in my own skin. Dawn scoffs when I describe myself as an introvert, noting with some exasperation that “you’ll talk till the cows come home!” She’s not wrong. It helps that I’ve accumulated a pretty good cache of funny and/or interesting stories (some of them even true!) as I’ve traveled the world and embarked on various adventures. I love hearing a good story, and I enjoy telling one.

That said, I haven’t gone out of my way to seek out public speaking opportunities. The only one I’ve accepted until now, at the abortive ModAero aviation/music festival, ended up being somewhat disastrous, insomuch as I poured myself into preparation for a presentation that ended up being attended by all of four people (Taking Wing, June 2016). More recently, my videos for FLYING’s V1 Rotate web series have forced me, for the first time, to really hone my delivery. Seeing yourself in high-definition video is the most brutally honest form of feedback you’ll ever get. Making the videos has improved my pacing and rhythm of my intonations, cleaned up my enunciation, made me more conscious of my posture and facial expressions, and prompted me to become more liberal with gestures. It has actually changed my speaking to more closely mirror my writing. Fortunately, I’m usually filming myself and have the luxury of virtually unlimited takes—because a lot of takes have sometimes been required to get it right!

• READ MORE: Just Another Day in Airplane Heaven

So when Larry Buerk from EAA Chapter 818 emailed me with an invitation to speak at its meeting, I decided the time was right to take the leap. As a longtime EAA member (and a product of the Young Eagles program), these are folks I’m comfortable around. It’s about as low stress of an environment as I could wish for my debut. Indeed, once we land at Skagit, head inside the terminal, and start meeting folks, the nerves mostly subside. After an hour of chapter business and another guest, it’s my turn to speak. I cue up the accompanying photo presentation and begin my lecture on “Creating an Aviation Homestead in the Pacific Northwest.”

Buerk films the entire thing for the chapter’s YouTube channel, where you can find it if you’re so inclined. I’m pretty stiff at the beginning, hands drawn toward the lectern and eyes toward my laptop screen. As the presentation proceeds, though, my body language opens up considerably. I do a better job of maintaining eye contact and using gestures. The audience of 25 or 30 is agreeably engaged, laughing at my jokes and periodically interjecting pertinent remarks and questions. The interruptions to rehearsed flow actually help me loosen up. I speak extemporaneously at some length in response to questions. The members give me a nice round of applause afterward and stick around to chat and give Piper a scratch behind the ears. It’s a really nice experience.

Does my humble little presentation for a local EAA chapter mark the launch of a second (ahem, third or fourth) career touring the rubber-chicken speaking circuit, like our ole pal Bax? Probably not! That said, having faced a lifelong bugaboo and coming away without embarrassing myself and even enjoying the experience, I do think I’d like to stretch myself with a few more speaking gigs and see if I can’t get better with a bit more practice. If you’re desperate and need a freebie speaker to fill time at your EAA chapter, flying club, or airport association meeting, well, I’m a sucker for all those types of events and can probably be talked into all sorts of foolishness. Drop me a line and lure me in. I’m particularly susceptible to hints about rides in cool, old airplanes.

This column first appeared in the December 2023/Issue 944 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I don’t mind because I like remembering so many interesting hours (and days) in that terminal build- ing doing Part 135 flight checks and type rating rides in Rhoades Aviation Douglas DC-3 freighters. What a bunch of characters—not to mention, what a collection of hard-used DC-3s. This gig began (for me) in the 1980s when I was an inspector in the Indianapolis FSDO, and a guardian angel nudged somebody in the FAA to send me to DC-3 flight training with Hector Villamar at Opa-Locka Airport (KOPF) in Miami. But you’ve read my stories about that. As a memento, I have a nearly destroyed piston head from a Pratt & Whitney R-1830 and a box of rose petals from a bouquet those beloved ruffians sent me one Valentine’s Day.

It’s no secret that I’ve written some less-than-flattering things about the FAA (and continue to question the “sanity” of possibly appointing an administrator who knows nothing about aviation). But there are good memories of the Indianapolis FSDO where I worked with some really fine people for five years. And, yeah, there are a few less-than-fond memories about some dreadful accidents and a few scalawags I inherited as an inspector.

Del Shanks, a long-time mechanic with Ohio Aviation in Dayton, had been hired by the FAA and was now the maintenance supervisor in our office. And Del really knew his business.

It was a miserable cold winter day, and I was sched- uled to give a 135 six-month’s check in a Beech 18 to a pilot from Sky Castle Aviation. But one of the Marlatts who owned the operation called and said the pilot was returning to Sky Castle because he couldn’t get the gear down in the Beech. Del heard the conversation and, being an old Beech guy, said to relay a message to the pilot: “Tell him to lift off the red cover between the pilots’ seats and smack the clutch pedal with something substantial (like a shoe). That can release the gear motor from all the mechanical paraphernalia and allow it to free-fall into position. Then tell him to hand crank the gear/flap handle to assure it’s fully extended.”

I think it was John Marlatt who relayed the message, and…it worked! What actually happened was a piece of felt “cushioning” glued on the cover had worked loose and jammed itself around and under the clutch pedal. With some difficulty and monkey motions, the pilot was able to remove it and get the gear down.

I guess my point is that these days, damn few FAA inspectors—if you could even reach one—would stick their neck out to help a pilot with a mechanical problem in flight. But the Indy office was full of good people still in love with airplanes—and airplane people.

My assigned operators—Air Marion, Anderson Aviation, Brown’s Flying Service, Muncie Aviation, Sky Castle, Van S, Washington Aero, Indiana Airmotive, and Morgan Aviation—were also good people (despite the guy who brought out his skunk whenever I walked in the office or the operator who’d greet me with a large pistol prominently displayed on his desk). The skunk had been denatured, and the armament was purely for show. Oh, there were a few relatively minor offenders like the kid, a student who flew below the top floors of the municipal building in Connersville, pissed off and buzzing his girlfriend in a truck with her new husband. Or not-unusual situations where operators would charge passengers for flights in airplanes not on their Air Taxi (Part 135) certificates—commonly known as “Part 134 1⁄2-inch” operations.

By far the sleaziest—someone everybody relished investigating—was a guy with a Part 135 certificate using a Navajo largely in air ambulance operations. Either an inspector checked on the planned flight or, more likely, another operator (familiar with this guy’s questionable practices) alerted our office. He was flying to Houston to bring a very sick, elderly cancer patient back home to Muncie, Indiana’s Ball Hospital. Besides the woman on a stretcher, medical equipment, a nurse, at least three family members, and baggage, a legal fuel load would put the airplane well over gross on the return flight. So our office alerted the Houston FSDO, and an inspector met the flight on landing. When he questioned him, the pilot told the inspector his trip had been canceled. In reality, he called his passengers and told them to have the ambulance bring everybody to an outlying airport where they departed…well over gross.

The pilot was suspicious and worried about the FAA. So he landed somewhere en route and arranged to have an ambulance meet them at New Castle, Indiana Airport. They would deplane there and be driven nearly 30 miles on a state road to Ball Hospital in Muncie.

We received a complaint from the family, and I was sent out in a G-car to interview the pilot (who, of course, I couldn’t find), the nurse, and family (two women and a close friend). The elderly and terminally ill patient had died somewhere in this odyssey.

The family and friend were outraged. They had no idea why they had to change plans and meet the airplane at a smaller airport in Houston. And the friend, who was rid- ing in the right seat, described a frightening near mid- air collision at the nontowered Sky Castle Airport (home of my old friends, the Marlatts). I tried to reconstruct a weight and balance from passenger weights and baggage estimates, but that was iffy at best.

The nurse I located “taking care” of an elderly man confined to a wheelchair and living alone in an apartment. It was dreadful, and she—who seemed to work with this operator—was surly and uncooperative.

I don’t remember the outcome, except the operator did get a violation for operations during an airshow at Mt. Comfort Airport.

In my travels, I did stumble onto another memory: a house between Mooreland and Millville, Indiana, with a sign indicating it as the birthplace of Wilbur Wright before the bishop and his family moved to Dayton, Ohio. Turns out the bishop didn’t move his family to Dayton until after the legendary inventor’s birth.

This column first appeared in the June 2023/Issue 944 print edition of FLYING.

The post Finding Wilbur Wright on the Wabash appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

That morning I became a “real” private pilot…nine months since the revocation of all my certificates and ratings. Though I could pursue getting all of them back, at this time in life I won’t go for anything else except an instrument rating. I don’t need anything more.

Sure, it’s nice to remember flying that single-pilot Lockheed Lodestar alone, instructing and testing pilot applicants for thousands of hours, and logging nearly 1,000 hours in a bunch of Douglas DC-3s. And I had loads of fun playing with an Aeronca Chief, a de Havilland Beaver, Piper Super Cubs, and a Republic Twin Bee on the water (even under a few bridges)—and pretending I actually knew enough to be a commercial hot air balloon pilot.

This time, I took my private ride in a 1967 Cessna 150 off a grass strip north of Cincinnati—a place I initially chose because the only tailwheel-rated designated pilot examiner (DPE) in the area is there. Why a Cessna 150? Well, as the time got closer, it occurred to me that DPEs these days advise their FAA “keepers” of any scheduled check rides. And keepers are tasked with conducting “observed rides” at least once a year. When I was a Fed, we would explain to the applicant that we weren’t assessing his or her performance—just the examiner’s adherence to FAA standards and giving a complete check ride. But naturally, the DPE would be in “high” gear and give the damnedest, lengthiest, and most comprehensive oral and flight test ever.

When I worked in the Indianapolis Flight Standards District Office (FSDO), Herman, one of my busiest (and most beloved) DPEs in Terre Haute, famously flunked one applicant each year—when I showed up to ride along. And, yeah, I always felt sorry for the applicant that day who didn’t have much of a chance.

So, what to do? I mean I’m pretty competent flying my Cessna 180, having owned it for 30-some years without seriously denting anything, but anybody can flub a maneuver, especially with two pairs of eyes watching (one pair rather critically from the back seat). Wrestling with this dilemma, somebody who shall remain nameless said, “Well, that’s easy; fly one of our 150s.”

A long time ago, I logged close to 6,000 hours of instruction and testing, much of it in my flying school’s 1966 Cessna 150. But I still had to study the 1967 150 manual—which is more like a pamphlet—and dig into the maintenance logs for required inspections, total time, and weight and balance information. The “numbers”—VNE, VNO, VX—were pretty simple and the landing speeds were all around 60 knots. And I still remember how to lay out a cross-country flight on a sectional chart, wielding a plotter and an old-fashioned E6B (I’ve never figured out the electronic models).

The examiner, Bob Miller—who I remembered from my own days as a DPE—was serious about this, FAA observer or not. Of course, an FAA inspector could have shown up for the oral portion, but I figured Christmas Eve morning was pretty safe. Anyway, Bob isn’t the kind of guy to cut corners.

He’s about twice my weight, but we were still OK on weight and balance with full tanks, and I appreciated the body heat in that lovely little airplane on that cold December morning. The cross-country looked to be a no-brainer; the 150 had a rather medieval VOR receiver that instructor Emerson Stewart had reviewed with me during our three hours of dual preparation for the test.

I also had an iPad with ForeFlight strapped to my leg, which was cumbersome since Bob insisted on my having the nav log sheet and sectional at hand. But, as we started out on the trip to Portsmouth, Ohio (KPMH), I was in familiar territory with a great first checkpoint—the big, beautiful Jeremiah Morrow Bridge across the nearby Little Miami River. Also, I had the VOR tuned for cross bearings on other checkpoints along the way, over the featureless, barren winter farmlands of Warren, Clinton, and Highland counties.

As I was gloating over my prowess as a navigator, Bob told me to abandon the navigation and turn about 90 degrees northeast over a large lake where we performed every maneuver in the books. It was fun—an old 150 is truly a joy to fly.

Eventually, when we finished the whifferdills, he said to resume the cross-country—but we weren’t starting from where my line started on the chart. I headed (approximately) for another checkpoint in the distance and tuned the VOR to center when we crossed over it. It took quite a crab angle with winds aloft about 40 knots coupled with a slow airplane. Then Bob said to turn the VOR off. No problem—I still had that lovely ForeFlight thing on my knee until he took that away too. Eventually I found Hillsboro, Ohio, in the distance—not exactly from where I was supposed to be but, hey, I found it. We came back home into the wind with several simulated forced landings en route and a bunch of landings back at Red Stewart Field.

I passed!

The day after Christmas I flew with a CFI at Lunken Airport (KLUK) to get the required endorsements for complex, high-performance, and tailwheel airplanes. Since then—no longer a passenger in my beloved Cessna 180—I’ve spent lots of time just boring holes in the sky. Well, and trying to get my mojo back on wheel landings. I’m still hitting the books for the rather intimidating instrument written, and then…we’ll see.

What a roller coaster 2021 was! And I’ve had a hard time understanding all the publicity because, honestly, I’m a nobody in the airplane world. So much of the feed-back was positive and encouraging (with some “she should spend time in jail” in the mix). The support really helped—thank you from the bottom of my heart. The downside is my bad example; I would hate to think that I encouraged anybody—especially young pilots—to try that kind of stupid and potentially dangerous stunt.

I truly don’t have an explanation for this fascination, this obsession with airplanes and flying. I never walk outside without looking at the sky to identify cloud shapes, the wind, and weather, or to try seeing an air-plane somewhere overhead. But I suspect many of you understand or you wouldn’t be reading this magazine. While I firmly believe the revocation was unfair, it proved that God works in mysterious ways, or “writes straight with crooked lines.” It put me in touch with so many people, both new and from the past—and I’m truly thankful for this wonderful passion we share.

This article appeared in the Q2 2022 issue of FLYING Magazine.

The post Martha Lunken Earns Her Wings (Again) appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was a dark and stormy night; my electrical system had failed, and the battery was dead. Descending lower and lower in the murk, looking for familiar landmarks, I saw—dead ahead—the magnificent Jeremiah Morrow Bridge spanning the Little Miami River on Ohio’s Interstate 71. My only option was to fly beneath that high-and-wide span and make my way back home to Lunken Airport.

No—that’s a big, fat lie.

The unvarnished truth is: It was a pretty, early spring afternoon on March 2, 2020, and I was randomly boring holes into the sky, making takeoffs and landings at several small airports and planning to call Cincinnati Approach for a practice approach into Lunken. I did some bounces at a nontowered airport near Wilmington, but nobody was home, so I flew north a few miles to an old friend’s semi-abandoned private strip. He’s gone now after a tragic airplane accident, but I still land there sometimes and sit on the empty ramp, remembering and whispering a prayer for him. But that day, I was testing my mettle with a couple of landings on that narrow 32-foot-wide paved strip with a built-in crosswind. My “arrivals” were less than elegant, so after the last jarring touchdown, I gave up and pointed the Cessna 180 west toward Oxford, Ohio.

Now I was in “Martha’s Vineyard,” nicknamed by Johnny Lane when he hired me as a fledgling flight instructor 50-some years ago. I’d use this area south of Lebanon for my students’ practice area while John worked with his to the north. To this day, it still feels like my backyard. Still pretty low, I glanced over my left shoulder at the expansive, recently rebuilt Jeremiah Morrow Bridge. And, friends, even now I can neither explain nor justify my impulsive, unpremeditated and spontaneous decision to fly underneath it. I do remember saying out loud, “Lord, I just have to do this before I’m too old to fly anymore.”

Yeah, those were the exact words, but evidently, He didn’t think it was such a great idea. Neither did Ohio’s state highway department or the FAA.

There’s no excuse for this lapse of judgment, but I am very familiar with the area, having frequently hiked and biked the trail underneath this span over the scenic river. I knew there were no cables or obstructions, and I also knew an airplane flying underneath wouldn’t be visible to traffic on the bridge. As an airline-pilot friend once said to me, “Hell, you could fly a DC-3 under that thing.” So, I didn’t consider it reckless or dangerous; I would never intentionally put anyone at risk. But I sure as hell knew it was illegal.

So where was my guardian angel that day when highway workers were underneath the bridge using a photo drone that caught my blurry image? About a week later, I got a phone call from two inspectors at “my” former FSDO.

“Ms. Lunken, on March 2, 2020, did you fly your airplane under…?”

“Yes.”

“Did you turn off your transponder?”

“No.”

We’d go around about the ADS-B Out transponder which—confirmed by a radio shop—had worked loose in the panel mount and was operating intermittently. Maybe those hard landings and the considerable low-level turbulence had unseated the pins. But the FAA wasn’t buying it, and this remains my word against theirs.

Understand, I’ve been “living” and writing this story for more than a year, agonizing over when and how to confess it to you. It’s time. The sword of Damocles has fallen.

When I received the FAA’s letter of investigation, I had already contacted the Yodice Associates law firm in Maryland. Kathy Yodice and I knew that if action isn’t taken on a proposed suspension within six months, it becomes a “cold case” and the FAA issues a “no action” letter. For six months, I checked the mailbox daily with my heart in my throat. I’d even put a tiny crucifix inside the box and retrieved each day’s mail, saying, “Lord, this is up to you…”

Read More from Martha Lunken: Unusual Attitudes

I was mildly hopeful after a year passed—until Kathy reminded me there’s no time limit on certificate-revocation actions, which can be executed years after an alleged event. Yeah, I’ve jabbed at the FAA for years in my monthly column, but it’s hard to believe the administrator would “get even” by revoking my certificates for a relatively benign prank. Especially with no previous violations in 60-plus years of aviating?

You bet.

More than a year after flying under the bridge, a large box appeared on my porch. Opening it, wondering what I’d ordered from Amazon, I felt gut-punched as I stared at a letter titled “Emergency Order of Revocation,” stating, “Effective March 2, 2021, any and all airman pilot certificates you hold, including your airline transport pilot certificate, were revoked.”

FAA enforcement attorney Brian Khan’s letter stated that—after I’d been flying for a year—protection of the public required immediate revocation of everything. My deliberate, egregious operation of an aircraft without an activated transponder and flying under a bridge within 500 feet of persons and structures showed disregard for the regulations, lack of compliance disposition, and defiance of safety regulations. Because I can’t be trusted to conform, I lack the qualifications to hold an airman certificate.

Well, I’ve never claimed to be a role model, but what a cruel and harsh punishment. You can’t begin to imagine how devastating it feels to have everything I’ve worked for, held dear and loved for 61 years suddenly erased.

The Yodice firm would appeal such a severe FAA sanction to the National Transportation Safety Board, but attorney and expert fees in litigating the case could run well in excess of $25,000. Even a decision that mitigated the sanction would probably be appealed to the full NTSB by the FAA. This would drag on, becoming increasingly more expensive, with no guarantee of success.

Kathy got the one-year revocation period reduced to 9 months. So, I can take written exams now and apply for a student pilot certificate after December 2. In the meantime, I’ll stay proficient by flying with an appropriately rated friend as PIC in the 180. Then I’ll take the practical tests for the private pilot with instrument rating. Meanwhile, Flying is temporarily putting my column on hiatus; maybe I’m a little too “unusual” for readers uninterested in the stories of a renegade aviator. I’m scheduled to be back in the January+February 2022 issue, with my story of starting again.

I’ll miss you but will stay busy—as students sometimes say—”studying for my privates.”

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Flying Under a Bridge Too Far appeared first on FLYING Magazine.