Almost to Arkansas

 Almost to Arkansas 

The sun was shining brightly, there was no wind to speak of, and my wife Carolyn and I decided to fly to Mena, AR, to look for information on her ancestors. I had been exploring cemeteries, visiting courthouses, and compiling her family tree for several years. 

This was our third trip to Durant, OK, since I had gotten my pilot’s license, and I was enjoying the easy flying out here where there were no tall mountains in the way. The date was August 1, 1990.

 The two old boys in the airport at Eaker Field wondered why I came out to the field so early in the morning to fly. I told them I liked the smooth air then, and they laughed. “You must be from out west in the mountains!” they said. “The air is smooth all day long in Oklahoma, unless it spins up like a funnel.”

I explained I was from Winnemucca, Nevada, and if you didn’t fly in the morning, the air got turbulent and made it hard to practice precision flying. This day I told them I was flying to Mena, AR, and back, and they told me to be sure and check the weather, as there are some mountains over there in Arkansas, and the fog in the valleys sometimes made flying difficult.

I thanked them and made a quick call to a weather station. I have forgotten which one. It was before the internet, GPS, and radar coverage on a pocket sized phone. No frontal systems were in the area, and ceilings were above 2000 ft.

Carolyn and I loaded our two small bags into the back seat of the Cessna 172, and taxied out to the south end of the runway. I stopped at the end of the taxiway and did a full runup on the engine. The engine was fairly high time, and it barely passed the compression check at the last annual, but it still climbed out at 400 or 500 ft per minute down here in southern Oklahoma. The old Continental six needed a quart of oil now and then, but it was still reliable and sounded good.

As we headed northeast away from Durant we tracked out from the VOR beacon there. Somewhere about halfway to Arkansas I planned on switching to the Rich Mountain VOR, which was just north of Mena.

As we passed over the farms and towns below, I focussed on the gyrocompass, following the heading given by the VOR. It was dead reckoning at its best, and with the plane trimmed out, it was easy to lose track of exactly where we were. We were beginning to get a thin overcast above us, but it was well above me and I wasn’t worried about it.

As we approached the state line the VOR from Durant was getting weaker, and I switched to the Rich Mountain VOR in Arkansas. As I was tuning and adjusting the navigation equipment, my wife said, “I can’t see anything.”

Whoa! It looked like some Twilight Zone out there. Fog had rolled in under us, totally obscuring the ground, and the thin overcast had become thicker. We were sandwiched between the layers, which merged somewhere in front of us. The horizon had completely disappeared.

Suddenly the plains out here weren’t so easy anymore. I immediately went to my training on instruments and started scanning my panel. The artificial horizon was showing us level and the altimeter showed us right on 7500 ft.

My sights moved to the turn and bank indicator, and I carefully banked the plane to the left, lined up the little wing tips to the marks on the gauge, and added a little rudder to keep it coordinated. I started counting chimpanzees. That’s how I learned to count seconds when I was a young kid. Most people I know count by thousands, but it all works the same. After holding the turn for one half minute, I rolled out level and straight and followed the Rich Mountain course heading outbound.

Once I was fixed on the track outbound, I took my hands off the yoke and just used small rudder inputs to keep the plane on course. The smooth air made it simple to trim and hold the altitude. Most airplanes fly straighter and smoother if the pilot lets the plane fly itself. 

One of the first things I had to unlearn during my training was what is called PIT. That’s Pilot Induced Turbulence. Don’t do it! Stay steady on the controls.

In a few minutes the ground appeared beneath us, and the overcast layer burned off as well. I decided that was enough excitement for one day, and I told Carolyn we would fly back to Durant. I couldn’t get a good signal on the Durant VOR yet, so I tried to locate us by the towns beneath us.

On of the bad things about all the little towns in Oklahoma, is they all look alike from the air. Luckily, many years ago, during the early days of aviation, people painted barns and water towers with the town name. I saw a water tower ahead of us, so I descended and circled it, and found myself over Kenefic, OK. That put us due north of Durant, and all I had to do was follow the highway south.

We found the airport and landed with out any further trouble. I filled the tanks and rolled the Cessna into the old WWII hanger just north of the terminal. 

It was a good day, and educational as well. Down here in the South, the humidity can get so thick you can’t see through it. It was never like that in Nevada!