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Summers long ago: a 1500-mile trip in a Cessna 120

In the grass of Harvey Young, an airport tucked just south of Tulsa International, there appeared a beautiful 1946 Cessna 120. I couldn’t buy it, but I convinced my buddy that this was the airplane for him. Tulsa, Oklahoma to Boston, Massachusetts: a 1500-mile trip in a 30-year old airplane with no nav radio, a com radio that just barely worked, no gyro instruments except for that needle and ball, and a wet compass. This was adventure!

Home is where the hangar is

Every pilot has more than one home. There’s the place where we sleep, eat, and get our mail (at least most of the time). Then there is another place where we have our being and that’s the airport. In my case, for 17 years, it was Hangar 2 at Fitchburg Municipal Airport.

There’s no place like home

There is a special place in the heart of every pilot for his or her “home patch.” It’s the airport where you know you enter the downwind leg over the lake, turn base over the church and final over the mall. It’s the airport where you know all the little secrets and “gotchas.” Over the years I’ve had a number of airports that I’ve called home and every one of them has taught me something.

Over the river and the wood

We often think of airplanes as a way to make long trips shorter, or make them possible at all, but sometimes we forget that the trip doesn’t have to be very far at all to make it worthwhile to fly, or that it can conquer more than one kind of distance. Here’s the story of one case in point.