“BILL!!” I screamed, my lungs operating well outside warranty, the sound slicing through the cockpit noise like a mayday call from a pilot who just realised he’s been flying the manual for a toaster. “Let’s do another round! I need to learn this! NOW!!” We were ripping down the runway at fifty miles an hour—on one wheel. One. The tail was kicked skyward like it had been possessed by the Lucifer himself. The right wing was flirting with the asphalt, nearly peeling it off like a cheese slicer on a bad day. I was having the time of my tumultuous, ill-advised life—blasting down the runway on one wheel in a flying deck chair from hell, utterly unaware this level of airborne lunacy was even legal, and fully convinced we were auditioning for the airshow spin-off of Jackass: Aviation Edition.
And I? I was riding shotgun in a CubCrafters “Sport Cub,” a psychotically light, tail-happy little demon of an aircraft. A modern reincarnation of my ancient Super Cub—except this one hadn’t yet developed arthritis or a drinking problem. For the first time, I was in the front seat. And not just in the front seat. I was launched into it—perched dead-centre like the brain stem of a mechanical dragon, held in place by a crosshatch of seatbelts—hugging me like a padded straightjacket—that felt less like safety restraints and more like ritual bindings for whatever unholy ceremony this was turning into.
And oh, it was glorious.
Not like flying a Cessna, where you sit crammed in the left seat like a forgotten ham sandwich—cheeks vacuum-sealed to the plexiglass, while your passenger sits 2.5 inches away, breathing straight into your soul and close enough to exchange DNA through passive osmosis. That’s not flying—that’s hostage negotiation in a lunchbox.
No, this was different. This was raw. This was primal. This was freedom. This was flight. This was aviation with the safeties off and the middle finger fully extended.
The little engine up front roared like it had unfinished business with the runway. And somewhere behind me, wrestling with physics and possibly a minor stroke, was Bill—my instructor for the day. Bill, who by all evidence was a stick-and-rudder necromancer. If he’d announced we were about to barrel-roll into a wormhole, I wouldn’t have even flinched. I had no clue what we were doing. I didn’t care. All I knew, with the clarity of a divine revelation or maybe a really solid uppercut to the soul, was this:
I need to learn this.
Whatever this insanity is—
I want it.
I crave it.
I will burn my former life to the ground for it and laugh while it smoulders.
My wife—God bless her battle-hardened soul—stood next to the runway, visibly torn between joy and sheer existential terror. On one hand, there I was: vibrating out of my skin with childlike euphoria, shrieking with delight like a squirrel strapped to a firework. On the other hand—and this was a Texas-sized “but”—she was probably realising, with the slow-motion horror of someone watching a blender fall into a bathtub, that she would one day be the unwilling passenger in whatever airborne chaos I was about to unleash on the unsuspecting skies. She must've seen it already: me tearing down airstrips like a death defying demon, squaring off with crosswinds like they owed me money, launching vendettas against weather systems, rogue trees, and wildlife that had precisely three seconds to choose between relocating or being converted into airborne protein. I have no doubt she envisioned me chasing elephant poachers across the African savannah like a propeller-wielding wrath angel with a grudge and a license to defy physics.
In hindsight, I do feel a twinge of sympathy...for her. Me? I was already halfway into the abyss—fired like a missile from the hangars of hell, fuelled by aviation fuel and poor life decisions.
***
But, as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. A week earlier, our adventure began with a noble-sounding plan: an extended journey down the West Coast of the Home of the Brave, kicking off in Seattle, Washington.
We were genuinely fired up for this trip—America-bound, tailwheel endorsement in sight, my wallet foaming at the seams to haemorrhage money on bush plane accessories, and my heart swelling like a patriotic balloon animal. It was supposed to be a beautiful, aviation-fuelled pilgrimage down the West Coast. And then—for no apparent reason—we went north first. Into Canada.
Why? I genuinely have no idea. Altitude-induced dementia? A rogue travel brochure laced with maple syrup hallucinations? Some kind of subconscious cry for help? Whatever it was, we crossed that border like confused fugitives chasing a rumour—and instantly stepped into a land so beige it made dishwater look flamboyant. A country where doors allegedly don’t need locks, the military could fit into a minivan with room left for snacks, and the population is so thinly spread across the second-largest landmass on Earth, you'd need a carrier pigeon and six weeks to borrow a cup of sugar. A place where fun had been euthanised quietly behind a Tim Hortons coffee shop, and excitement was last seen hitchhiking south, weeping.
Why did we go? Nicole—who, despite every warning sign in her life, harboured a baffling thirst for voluntary suffering. She wanted to see Vancouver. And since I’m usually the one detonating our comfort zones, I figured I’d return the favour and follow her into this emotional tundra of polite desolation.
To give her credit—to Nicole, not to Canada—there was one glorious moment when the pale veil briefly lifted. We were sitting on the promenade of Vancouver Harbour, staring down at a surprisingly impressive fleet of floatplanes bobbing smugly in the water like seaplane royalty. They belonged to a company called “Harbour Air,” which, in a burst of Canadian creativity, had clearly hired the nation's one remaining poet to name it.
There they were: sleek machines in blue, white, and yellow—models I’d never seen or cared about in my previous, aviation-illiterate life. Back before I launched my “save the elephants” crusade, airplanes ranked somewhere between patio furniture and tax documents on my list of interests. But now? My eyes locked onto a Super Cub on floats—probably just a trainer, but to me, it looked like it had descended from the heavens on amphibious angel wings.
Without engaging even a single brain cell—which, to be fair, is my factory setting—I turned to Nicole and declared:
“You know, I believe one day I’m going to learn how to fly those floaty bastards. Looks kinda fun, doesn’t it?”
For once, Nicole agreed with me. Floating around in lazy circles? Sure. That she could do. Maybe with a cocktail. Maybe with a book. But the moment it involved physics, velocity, or lift? That’s when she’d excuse herself from the storyline entirely—stage left, before things got airborne, flammable, and ultimately…terminal. At the time, I couldn’t have known just how disturbingly accurate my floaty little prophecy would turn out to be.
Fast-forward three years—and approximately one metric ton of African mayhem later—and my grand, cinematic dream of soaring through the skies to make an everlasting difference had exploded like a Soviet-era rocket launch. I left the wreckage of that noble ambition smouldering behind me like a nuclear wasteland of once-lofty goals and severely miscalculated purpose. But naturally, instead of processing the emotional fallout or—God forbid—learning anything, I did what any irrational optimist with a head injury and a pilot’s license would do: I aimed my existential compass due north and locked onto the next reckless obsession.
I had seen a documentary—The Ice Pilots—and yes, apparently that’s all it took. With the deranged clarity of a man who had just crawled out of a blast crater the size of Luxembourg, shirtless, shoeless, and spiritually unhinged, teetering somewhere between a midlife crisis and a very specific flavour of altitude-induced psychosis, I decided—without hesitation or a single functioning neurone left: I could do that.
Why not? I would trade the equatorial heat and lion-infested existential dread of Africa for the soul-numbing frostbite of Alaska’s last frontier. I’d become a floatplane pilot—obviously—because nothing says emotional stability like flying a 70-year-old tin can on pontoons through blizzards so violent they look like nature’s attempt at shredding aircraft into confetti. And if that didn’t pan out, well… even Canada was still on the table. Which, frankly, says more about my mental condition than I’m comfortable unpacking.
But I digress—wildly, recklessly, as usual. Taking Kalli’s advice to check out “CubCrafters,” the Vatican of Super Cubs—where dreams come true if your bank account bleeds avgas—we left Vancouver and made a beeline to Yakima, Washington. I’d contacted the late Jim Richmond in advance, announcing (read: threatening) my arrival. Since I sounded just unhinged enough to fly in all the way from the Peoples Republic of Germany solely to loiter around his hangar, he welcomed me like a man who knew lawsuits were unlikely.
Jim gave me the grand tour of his aviation empire, showing off Cubs that made you weep in three different currencies.
“We’ve got quite a few customers in Kenya,” he said cheerfully, as I spilled my overly ambitious scheme to save the world—or at least keep African elephants from being turned into high-end umbrella stands for the nouveau riche. “One guy—Robert something—his wife runs an elephant orphanage in Nairobi, I think. Maybe look them up sometime.”
I nodded slowly, chewing on the irony like overcooked steak and with haunted expression of someone who’s seen behind the curtain and realised the Wizard runs a gift shop. I knew who he meant. Years earlier—driven by a tragic cocktail of idealism, caffeine, and bad decisions—I’d stumbled into Nairobi’s biggest slum to interview abandoned, handicapped kids salvaged from trash heaps and dragged to an orphanage. Before that life-altering plunge into humanity’s septic tank, I had visited the very orphanage Jim was talking about. It had been swarming with baby elephants and earnest handlers, each pachyderm emotionally attached to a human like a traumatised toddler at a therapy retreat. Noble? Sure. Heartwarming? Maybe. But what truly blew my hair back was the slick souvenir arrangement at the exit, manned by tear-duct-trained volunteers squeezing tourist wallets like emotional citrus presses. Grief was their brand. Suffering was merchandised. Trauma came gift-wrapped. Here, despair wasn’t solved—it was monetised. It wasn’t conservation; it was Broadway with trunks and trauma.
Back to Yakima.
After half an hour of animated aviation foreplay with Jim, I was handed over to a man named Stan. If CubCrafters was the Vatican of Super Cubs, then Stan was the Holy Grail—except this one wore oil-stained coveralls, smelled vaguely of avgas and victory, and could probably bench press a fuselage.
Stan wasn’t just a mechanic. No, calling Stan a mechanic would be like calling Mozart a guy who dabbled in piano. This man knew every bolt, rivet, and washer by name, birthdate, and astrological sign. He could recite torque specs like bedtime stories and had a mystical ability to summon Super Cubs out of cardboard tubes, expired glue, and sheer disdain for gravity. I’m pretty sure he once fashioned a fully functional propeller out of two twist ties and a threatening glare.
Need wings? He’d whip them up out of recycled grocery bags and hope. Need a new tailwheel assembly? Give him five minutes and a spoon. Stan didn’t repair planes—he breathed them into existence. He was a bush-plane whisperer, the Chuck Norris of certified aviation production. If aviation had a spirit animal, it would be Stan.
Naturally, I was elated. Euphoric. Light-headed from the heady scent of aviation fuel and misplaced optimism. Stan was going to be my guy. My oracle. My supplier of dreams. I placed my order for what, in CubCrafters terms, was a laughable sum: $30,000. Barely enough for a wingtip and a handshake—but to me, it was a sacred investment in airborne elephant vengeance.
I left the factory grinning like a man who’d just been anointed by the Pope and knighted by NASA. My crates would arrive in Germany, I was told. Beautiful, shiny, lovingly packed by aviation angels, ready to be bolted onto my tattered canvas contraption and transform it into the poacher-punishing war machine of my delusional conservationist dreams.
Only… they didn’t. Because after I walked out of that building, full of joy and jet-fuelled righteousness, I never heard from Stan again.
Nothing.
Not a peep. Not a bolt. Not a cryptic postcard. It was as if the Earth had opened and swallowed him whole—along with my order, my hopes, and my blind faith in the reliability of human logistics. Stan had vanished.
But as I’ve learned—usually after setting something on fire—everything happens for a reason. And that reason came wrapped in red canvas and good timing: Twin Oaks Aircraft Maintenance, a CubCrafters satellite operation tucked into the misty outskirts of Hillsboro, Oregon.
This was the place I had originally planned to go for my taildragger endorsement—a rite of passage in bush pilot circles, where one learns how to taxi without looking like a drunk on roller skates. Lucky for me, it also turned out to be the place where I could reorder every glorious bolt, bracket, and strut I needed to stage my personal aviation resurrection. Or, if that failed, to at least die trying—with style, altitude, and a $30,000 invoice in my flight bag.
Enter Bill.
We were loitering in front of one of Twin Oaks’ hangars, pretending to know what we were looking at—a lineup of freshly waxed Super Cubs gleaming in the Oregon drizzle—when he arrived.
Bill didn’t walk. He strode onto the scene with the casual swagger of a man who had logged more time in the air than most of us had spent blinking. He had the grin of someone who’d seen the insides of both Heaven and an FAA inquiry and lived to laugh about it. A veteran of every airborne misadventure imaginable, he looked like the kind of guy who could teach you how to land a plane on a moving truck—and then charge you for the truck.
One glance at me and his smile widened like a hangar door.
“Well,” he said, in a voice soaked in sarcasm and engine oil, “you sure look like some crazy German. I believe we’re in for some real fun today. I hear you got yourself a Super Cub and not a damn clue how to fly it?”
He pointed casually to a red-and-white Cub that looked like it had just escaped a retro aviation calendar and decided to give it another go.
“That beauty right there,” he said with reverence, “will take us to the skies today. You’ll be amazed.”
I held up a hand like a traffic cop about to ruin someone’s day.
“Hold it, Bill.” My voice dropped a notch and acquired the tone of a war general who had just discovered someone painted his tank pink.
“Scratch the sky part. I don’t give a shit about that. I’ve had more than enough of high-altitude, mind-numbing, soul-sucking flights where you stare at clouds and contemplate your own mortality. I’m done with airline cruising, done with gliding like a depressed goose across the stratosphere.”
Bill raised an eyebrow. I leaned in.
“I’m here to learn how to fly low, Bill. So low that any animal taller than a shoelace flees in existential terror. I want to fly so goddamn low that even cars would develop vertigo just watching. I want trees to duck. I want mailboxes to scream. Can we do that?”
There was a pause. Then Bill grinned.
Not just any grin. It was the kind of grin the Devil gives you when you ask,
“Hey, mind if I poke around in your fire pit?” It said Yes, and it said You're going to regret this, and it said, But we’re going to have one hell of a time.
He cracked his knuckles. “Hop in, Kraut. Let’s ruin your sense of altitude.”
I beamed like a lunatic who’d just been handed the keys to a jetpack and a bottle of whiskey.
“Can we skip over that boring part of walk-around and weather briefing?”
Bill blinked at me. Once. Slowly. As if I’d just asked whether we could replace the engine with a hamster wheel and good intentions.
“What walk-around?” he said, deadpan, like I’d just proposed flying in a bikini with a parachute made of dental floss.
“And as for the weather—” he gestured grandly to the overcast Oregon sky, “—we’re outside, aren’t we? That should suffice.”
Right then and there, I knew: Bill wasn’t just a pilot. He was my kind of airborne anarchist. This man wasn’t bound by the shackles of checklists or meteorology. He didn’t just laugh in the face of regulations—he invited them to dinner, poisoned their wine, and then stole their plane. Every instructor I met afterward? Just background actors in the low-budget B-movie that was my aviation life. Cardboard cutouts with headsets. Bill, though? Bill was the main character. The kind of man who didn’t fly planes—he convinced them they could escape Earth’s gravity out of sheer fear of his expectations. And as I climbed into that rattling miracle of a bush plane, with zero pre-flight checks and a vague understanding of physics, I knew two things:
- I was probably going to die.
- It was going to be glorious.
I am, however, reasonably certain—meaning I’d bet my last functioning synapse—that Bill, despite holding more flying endorsements than most pilots have working neurones, had spent the better part of his career suffocating under a mountain of safety checklists, procedural monologues, and FAA-approved coma inducers. His daily clientele were mostly the aviation equivalent of boiled potatoes: earnest, beige, and dangerously excited about rudder coordination drills.
And then—I happened. A rogue element. A system error. A rare and undiagnosed psychological condition with a pilot’s license.
There is no career in teaching people like me, because frankly, there are too few of us still alive or not banned from airspace. But for Bill, it must’ve been like being handed a back stage pass to madness. No more pretending to care about crosswind component charts or the sacred geometry of pattern entry. Suddenly, he could unleash that long-dormant, unhinged side of himself that still remembered why he started flying in the first place: for the thrill, the chaos, and the right to break free from the tyranny of straight-and-level flight. No more laminated checklists or “safety culture” pamphlets. Just two lunatics, one aircraft, and a shared, unspoken promise to give this little flying machine the kind of reckless workout that would make air traffic controllers weep into their radar screens.
To be clear—and by clear I mean in the same way a midair collision is “obvious”—my aviation journey has been anything but normal. Between earning a commercial floatplane license in two different countries, and racking up enough private licenses across continents to make the ICAO question its own border policy, I’ve suffered through an entire spectrum of instructors. Some were outstanding, walking encyclopaedias of aerodynamics and air law, from whom I genuinely learned a lot. They served as an educational buffet—smorgasbord style—where I gorged on the essential material just long enough to pass the test… before immediately vomiting most of it out to preserve what was left of my mental health. Because if I’d actually retained it all, I’d be a full-blown aviation zombie by now—shuffling from checklist to checklist, moaning about rudder trim and magneto drops, dead behind the eyes but armed with a kneeboard.
Still, three instructors stand out. Not because they were like me—oh no, they were the polar opposite of my barely-contained airborne insanity—but because they left an imprint deep enough to rival a prop strike.
First up: Enrico. A strict, precision-engineered ex-German Navy pilot who wouldn’t navigate to his own bathroom without a weather briefing, fuel reserve check, and two alternate routes. He was sharp, ruthlessly disciplined, and so obsessed with lift-to-drag ratios he probably dreams in polar diagrams. Despite all that, he did me a solid: he recommended "Stick and Rudder" by Wolfgang Langewiesche. It’s still my second favourite aviation book—an eternal classic written in a time when pilots were men, radios were optional, and you didn’t need a subscription to ForeFlight to find the damn airport.
My favourite aviation book, naturally, was recommended by today's chaos co-pilot and enabler-in-chief, Bill: "Taildragger Tactics" by Sparky Imeson. A book so raw and unfiltered it makes most FAA materials look like kindergarten safety brochures. It's the only book where the author assumes you're already halfway unhinged and just need instructions on how to weaponise it.
Then came Art Hayssen, from North Coast Flight School in Santa Rosa, California. He trained me for my first commercial license, and was so calm—so eerily still—that I began to suspect he was legally deceased. It was like flying with a taxidermy project. If I had crashed, I suspect he would’ve merely nodded and filled out the paperwork with the same detached serenity. He was a true Zen master of the cockpit—or possibly embalmed. Hard to tell.
And finally, the only man who managed to beat IFR flying into my feral, VFR-loving brain: Art Griffin, the aviation cowboy from Wyoming. He taught me the black magic of instrument flight while I reluctantly learned to speak radio again—a skill I had gleefully abandoned in Africa, where radio chatter is mostly just Nairobi pilots loudly sharing their dinner plans over the emergency frequency. Because in Africa, once you’re out of major airspace, the radio goes quiet—not for safety, but so no one has to listen to the verbal diarrhoea of everyone who thinks “traffic advisory” means “personal podcast.”
These three men—Enrico, Art Hayssen the Corpse Whisperer, and Art Griffin the Cowboy of the Clouds—were all necessary ingredients in the volatile cocktail that eventually made me… well, whatever this is. A pilot? Sure. But more accurately: an airborne war crime against aviation etiquette.
Back to the Super Cub—the unsuspecting, innocent little aircraft that was about to be thoroughly violated. I took my time squeezing myself into the front seat without looking like a complete dunce—which, of course, I failed at miserably. There’s an intricate science to entering a Super Cub with grace, but at that stage of my aviation debacle, I was operating strictly on the level of 'try not to herniate anything important while folding yourself in like a piece of busted garden furniture.'
Meanwhile, Bill launched himself into the back seat with the kind of fluid precision normally reserved for stuntmen and tactical paratroopers. He buckled in like this was a hostage extraction and not just a joyride with a certified liability in the front seat
“Start her up, switch on the radio, and get going,” he barked, as if flying a taildragger was equivalent to ordering fries at a drive-thru.
“Aye aye, Captain,” I replied, channeling my inner 747 commander while trying to locate literally anything familiar in the sea of old analog dials and mystery switches in front of me.
“Alright, get her moving toward the runway,” he crackled through the intercom, his voice distorted by static.
“I’ll show you a few tricks for taxiing so you don't end up in a ditch, looking like an idiot.”
Before I could ask what “tricks” meant in his world, we began spinning on the spot like a Tilt-A-Whirl at a country fair. First to the left, then to the right. I was gripping the stick like it might suddenly bite me.
“Now this,” Bill shouted gleefully, “might come in handy someday if you need to raise the tail to avoid a rock, a human being, or, I don’t know… a bag of groceries.”
He shoved the stick forward, gave it a dose of throttle, and the tail popped up like a champagne cork at prom night. Then—just to show off, presumably—he started drawing perfect, demonic donuts on the tarmac, spinning the aircraft with the tail in the air like some kind of redneck ballet performance from hell.
It was majestic. Glorious. Deranged. I sat there soaking it in, wondering whether this was how people accidentally founded religions. I knew instantly I was going to try this at home, probably in secret, definitely without witnesses.
By the time we made it to the threshold of the runway, I was light-headed from the excitement—or possibly the fumes—and Bill was mumbling into the mic like a monk with ADHD.
“Listen, Marcel,” he said, shifting into guru mode. “You can judge any taildragger pilot by how he handles his plane on the ground. First rule: never—and I mean never—take your eyes off the runway. Don’t glance at your hands, don’t check the gauges, don’t even look at your soul. Keep your eyes forward. The moment you look away, bam! You’re sideways in a ditch, and everyone at the field is laughing their asses off while calling you a dumbass on frequency. You’ll never live it down.”
He let that hang in the air like a final warning before continuing. “Next rule: you have to control the plane on the ground like it’s a car. Tail up, all the way. I'll show you how. Watch this.”
And just like that, he shoved the throttle forward. No hesitation, no countdown, just GO. The little bastard of an aircraft rocketed down the runway like it was fleeing a crime scene, tail raised and slicing through the air like a switchblade. At the last second—just as I was wondering whether we’d skip off the ground or get launched into the next dimension—the Cub leapt into the sky, light as a feather, loud as a riot. It was transcendental. Pure madness. The kind of moment that burns itself into your brain and changes your DNA. I wasn’t flying yet, not really. But for the first time in my chaotic, misaligned aviation journey… I understood what I was chasing.
That Super Cub wasn’t just an airplane. It was a drug. And Bill? Bill was my dealer.
“Marcel, you know what slips are?” came Bill’s voice from the back seat, casual as a hitman ordering coffee.
“Sure,” I replied proudly, trying to sound like someone who knew what the hell they were doing. “Like flying sideways to correct wind angles and stay in the centre of the runway.” Somewhere, buried under months of mental debris, Enrico’s Teutonic lectures on crosswind technique had survived the purge. I felt downright intellectual.
“Cute, but no, that’s not what I mean. Watch this.”
Then the world ended.
He stomped the left rudder like he was trying to kill a cockroach with his entire leg. The Cub yawed so violently I was slammed face-first into the door, probably leaving a full cheekbone imprint on the aluminium. At the same time, the right wing dropped to an angle that suggested we were about to begin our descent into Hell—upside down.
We weren’t flying anymore. We were skidding through the sky like a tire ripped clean off a semi. The slip turned into a nosedive dance of aerodynamic blasphemy, and we hurtled toward the runway with a speed and trajectory that made me question if this was still a demonstration or an act of domestic terrorism.
We hit the ground—on one wheel. The right wheel. Bill held the stick in this unholy balance while the low right wing skimmed the Earth like it was looking for roadkill. We screamed down the runway. Sideways. Right before my lungs could collapse from the G-force, he pulled the Cub upright with the grace of a gorilla.
It was… divine. This must be what it feels like to be launched into orbit and like it. But before I could even appreciate the high of surviving, we were back up—and he did it again. This time to the left.
Wham. My face was introduced to the other window. I probably left a symmetrical smear on that one too, the way victims leave blood outlines in crime scenes. Down we came, sideways again, this time landing on the left wheel, gliding like some sort of rogue shopping cart in a wind tunnel.
And then—he kept doing it. Over. And over. And over.
For more than an hour, we slip-skidded, dive-bombed, and one-wheeled our way up and down the strip like a two-man aerobatic cult. I stopped breathing somewhere around the fifth run. Not out of fear, but because my body was too busy memorising. Every move, every twitch of the stick, every savage stomp of the rudder—it was all tattooed into my nervous system like a war hymn.
By the end of that session, I knew Bill’s every move like a deranged stalker with a photographic memory. If I had shown this level of attention back in Germany during my private pilot course, I would’ve been done in a weekend—possibly with honours, possibly while sipping schnapps.
But this? This was something else. This was aviation black magic, passed down in shrieks and adrenaline. I wasn’t just learning anymore. I was becoming.
And I knew—without a shadow of a doubt—that one day, I would inflict these exact manoeuvres on some poor, unsuspecting bastard. Preferably without warning. But first, there would have to be some practicing. And knowing my historically reckless approach to risk assessment—somewhere between “bad gambler” and “drunk with a cutting tool”—these skills would almost certainly come with a body count.
Two weeks later, I was back in the front seat. But this time, it was my Super Cub. My wings. My mess. My future insurance nightmare.
With the nagging persistence of a tourist at an all-you-can-eat buffet—determined to get his money’s worth even if it meant dying with crab legs in both hands—I had pestered Enrico into submission. I wanted my taildragger endorsement now, aircraft condition be damned.
The sensible choice, of course, would’ve been to wait until my Super Cub had all its shiny new upgrades: a cockpit overhaul, actual landing gear, and avionics that didn’t look like they were salvaged from a Cold War museum. A proper altimeter. A compass that didn’t point religiously toward the sun like some pagan relic. A GPS system for redundancy. And maybe—just maybe—a speedometer that wasn’t freelancing its numbers based on mood and wind direction.
But waiting two more months? Absolutely not. That was a non-starter. Waiting is for people with impulse control, a basic instinct for self-preservation, and some vague respect for mortality. I possess none of those things. So when Enrico dared to suggest patience, I looked him dead in the eye and declared—firm as a man who'd binge-watched a hundred hours of bush pilot footage and believed he could land on a moving kayak:
“Okay then—you wait. I’ll just start flying myself. How hard can it be?”
The silence that followed was the kind reserved for moments when you realize someone is not joking. In that single moment, the full weight of inevitability must have hit him: either he taught me, or the skies over the airfield would soon become a war zone of misguided confidence and smoking craters. To his credit—or perhaps his eternal damnation—he agreed to begin training immediately.
After breathlessly recounting my adventures in Hillsboro—“Bill did this thing where I thought I was going to die, and then another thing where I definitely should have”—I triumphantly announced that I was ready for the next level. Possibly advanced manoeuvres. Possibly sainthood.
Enrico stared at me like he was re-evaluating every choice that had brought him to this cursed moment. You could see the existential crisis forming behind his eyes.
Was he about to endorse a future news headline?
Would there be lawsuits? Investigations? Memorial plaques?
Was there still time to fake his own death and leave the country?
I would never know. Probably for the best.
Instead, he cleared his throat and began with all the enthusiasm of a dentist announcing a root canal:
“Well, Marcel, I’m glad you had so much fun there in Hillsboro, but we are not doing circus acts here. First, we start with the theory of taildragger operation. Let us begin with the four forces you have to be prepared to battle once you start your takeoff run—”
“Save it!” I cut in, vibrating with enthusiasm. “I already know them all!”
Oh yes. I was ready.
“There are five of them,” I declared, finger raised like I’d just solved gravity. “Torque reaction, take-off moment, P-Factor, gyroscopic precession, and finally, the corkscrewing effect of the slipstream.”
He blinked. Possibly twice. I didn’t stop.
With the precision of a brain surgeon and the smugness of a pub quiz champion, I pressed on:
“Torque and take-off moment? Just Newton’s third law—every action has an equal and opposite reaction. P-Factor? Asymmetric loading of the propeller blades in a climb—simple. Gyroscopic precession? That’s just an object maintaining rigidity in space while also trying to ruin your day. And the corkscrew thing? That’s how the propeller blast wraps around the fuselage and messes with your tail.”
I beamed. He stared. I hate to be a wisecrack. Well, no. That’s a lie. I live for it. There is a special satisfaction in derailing an instructor mid-lecture—especially when they’ve clearly prepped a tidy little PowerPoint in their head—and watching them realize that their student has read one too many manuals, absorbed them all, and then weaponised that knowledge into unfounded confidence.
I had become that student.
The one that makes instructors weep into their logbooks. The one they warn others about in hushed tones. The one who will absolutely fly sideways for fun and justify it with physics.
Honestly, I had no idea what was coming out of my mouth. Not even a distant, fossilised echo of a clue. But it sounded aerodynamic. And that was good enough. After all, I’d read Sparky Imeson’s Taildragger Tactics so many times on the flight back from the States that by touchdown, the ink had given up and fled the pages out of sheer existential fatigue. In my private little echo chamber of logic, I was ready. Trained. Enlightened. I had inhaled theory like it was spiritual scripture and now, obviously, I was qualified to enter the sacred temple of tailwheel flying—a temple built entirely from poor decisions, warped aluminium, and dark humour.
“Let us get ready, then,” he finally said, voice dangerously calm, “We’ll fly to that secret grass strip I know... so we can put all your theoretical knowledge into action.”
He added a grin. Just a twitch...
We climbed into the plane like condemned men boarding a flaming rollercoaster. He was silent. I, on the other hand, was grinning. I had studied diagrams. I had underlined sentences. I had highlighted words like “yaw” and “ground-loop” as if I knew what to do with them. I was ready to ride the edge of disaster.
“Let’s start with taxiing to the runway,” he said, staring off into the middle distance like a Vietnam veteran hearing distant rotor blades. Possibly picturing a quiet life running a bakery. Or a monastery.
“Yes, sir!” I chirped, giddy as a border collie and turned the key.
“WAIT!” Enrico shrieked, but the propeller was already shrieking louder.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO ‘CLEAR’!?” Enrico’s voice had gone up two octaves and was beginning to fray at the edges. “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO YELL ‘CLEAR’! SO PEOPLE DON’T DIE!”
“Oops. Sorry. Forgot,” I shrugged innocently while he stared at me like I’d just just accidentally started Armageddon.
“But I mean—who’d be crawling around my propeller right now anyway?” I added helpfully.
“Procedure, Marcel…” he wailed, voice hollow now, like a man slowly realising he may have just become the final chapter in someone’s unauthorised autobiography. “Safety procedures…”
He did say no more. Just stared out the windscreen with the thousand-yard stare of a man picturing his obituary:
“Veteran pilot tragically killed when student forgot to yell ‘Clear.’ Funeral pending identification of body parts.”
With the self-assurance of a man too ignorant to be afraid, I taxied onto the runway. Or towards it. Or near it. Who really knows? I was making little s-turns as elegant as a bar fight in a revolving door. Just enough to catch a vague idea of where I was going.
Wheels squeaked. Brakes groaned. The Cub waddled forward and I felt invincible.
My grin stretched from headset to headset.
Chaos, here I come!
As is so often the case in life—and especially in mine—the fabled “secret grass strip” didn’t even come close to measuring up to my vision.
In my cinematic brain, I had imagined a landing site no wider than a malnourished donkey trail and shorter than the vegan aisle in a Wyoming supermarket. I was ready for adventure. I expected we’d fly for at least an hour, battling crosswinds and existential dread, struggling to spot the hidden strip on the backside of some remote mountain, probably guarded by marmots with trust issues. The final approach? I figured it would involve at least three hairpin turns, a screaming dive through wind shear that could yank the rotor blades clean off a helicopter.
I had prepared myself for downdrafts powerful enough to suck a UFO out of orbit, a fog so thick and moody it would make Avalon feel like a tanning bed, and just for good measure, maybe an unexpected appearance by a few Orks from Mordor doing air traffic control. Because why not? In my head, this wasn’t a flight—it was a trial. A myth. A bloody crusade.
It wasn’t.
Reality, as usual, came dressed in beige.
The actual “secret strip” was... twenty-five minutes away.
Including the approach.
And the approach? Wasn’t exactly a white-knuckle ballet through death spirals and volcanic updrafts. It was a lazy float over a sleepy three-foot barbed wire fence guarding a small herd of sheep who looked more interested in farting than fleeing. The “strip” itself? A meadow. A positively spacious one. Thirty meters wide. Long enough to land a wounded space shuttle, drunk, backwards, with one wing missing. IKEA parking lots are more chaotic.
No angry winds. No cursed valleys. No sentient fog banks or terrain-induced trauma. Honestly, the only thing vaguely threatening about the place was a cluster of trees to the right that, on a bad day, might cause minor turbulence or knock your cappuccino slightly off-centre.
But to the strip’s credit: it did have some charm. It lay in the ghostly shadow of an old, disused airforce runway, possibly haunted by the memories of pilots who also arrived expecting drama and left with diarrhoea. No landing fees, no airport bureaucracy, no one charging you for breathing. We could loop, touch, and go as much as our egos could handle. Hell, there was even a little hut with a bar.
You know it’s not a hardcore bush strip when your debrief involves espresso and a biscuit.
But to be fair to Enrico—he was as patient as a doormat and twice as trodden. It wasn’t his fault that his so-called “secret grass strip” had, in my delusional head, mutated into some bush pilot fever dream involving knife-edge approaches, rogue downdrafts, and possibly a few flaming hoops. Honestly, not even a parallel universe—one running on Vodka and 1940s propaganda—could’ve delivered what I’d imagined.
With the stoic persistence of a cadaver in a yoga class, Enrico endured. We flew approach after approach, no matter how often I bounced us toward the bushes, flirted with that lone wind-blocking tree, or tried to land at angles normally reserved for falling furniture. And yet—he held the line. Only taking over the stick when my doom became a mathematically certain event, like taxes or badly parked SUVs.
Credit where it’s due: the man laid the foundation for all the taildragger flying I’d do later. He taught me to feel the air—how to flirt with it just enough to stay airborne, but not so much it filed a restraining order. To keep one eye on the speed and the other vaguely aware of mortality. The oxygen of flying low and slow. Never turning too steep, too sharp, too slow—because the moment the airflow stops hugging your wings, gravity stops pretending to care.
Those “flying by the seat of your pants” lessons?
Let’s just say they were absorbed deeply—right through the seat and into my soul. Along with a few new nerve twitches.
We spent two days on that grass strip, baking, chewing bugs, and wrestling crosswinds. The plan was simple: master the sacred art of taildragger takeoffs and landings. And by “master,” I mean survive just long enough for muscle memory to start replacing blind luck and terminal overconfidence.
Taildraggers, you see, are the aviation equivalent of walking a tightrope blindfolded—while drunk. Modern tricycle-gear planes operate like bikes with training wheels by comparison. There’s a saying in bush flying:
“If you ain’t a taildragger pilot, you ain’t sh*t.”
Now, do I agree with that sentiment? Not really.
Did I immediately buy a T-shirt with that exact phrase in large, aggressive font? Oh yeah. You bet I did. But just as I was beginning to feel like I’d tamed the dragon—Enrico decided to go on a well-earned vacation. As he stood by the plane, bag slung over one shoulder, sun in his eyes, regret already forming in the corners of his soul, he turned to me and said:
“Well... try not to do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
A pause. A stare.
“Better yet—just wait for me. Don’t fly without supervision. Seriously.”
I nodded with the solemn sincerity of a priest in confession.
“Of course. I’ll be careful. I promise.”
It was, of course, a lie so bold it should’ve come with a warning label and its own insurance policy. Because barely a few days later, I would limp into Kalli’s hangar with a bent wing, a bruised ego, and the haunted look of a man who tried to outsmart physics—and lost.
But that...That glorious tale of stupidity, gravity and overconfidence…
That’s for next week.
See you in the wreckage.
Marcel Romdane,
signing off.
Photos below: "Mad Dog Bill" and me about to unleash hell on Oregon's unsuspecting airspace. "Taildragger Tactics", The best book there is if you want to get a grip on tailwheel operations. Took me years to figure out how to enter a Cub not looking like a dunce... Somewhere between the wild potato fields of northern Germany lies a hidden "Secret Airstrip.."
Kommentar hinzufügen
Kommentare