This three-part story was originally published in the November 2007 issue of Piper Flyer magazine.

Part One: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother
Part Two: Sylvia’s Mother Said

After spending over two hours filling out paperwork at the Rome Urbe airfield, I asked the one friendly person in the place for details about getting fuel for the plane. He looked at the clock. “It is Sunday,” he said. “They will leave at noon.” It was 11:30.

“You must hurry,” he told us.

Cliff dashed out to the plane and then came straight back with a scowl. The battery was dead.

We soon found the culprit, a light switched to the on position in the back. My son went pale. Connor had blocked up all the windows to avoid the sun glaring on the screen of his Gameboy and when he found he was sitting in the dark, he had turned on the overhead light. In the excitement of arriving, he had forgotten all about it. And now, the battery was dead.

He ran straight to his grandmother as the only person who might protect him from the lecture that was clearly due. I made a mental note to sort out a passenger check-list for the future flights.

Funnily enough, this took the pressure off as we now had no chance of getting away at a sensible time. We called the people at the gas pumps who expressed sympathy for our situation and arranged to send out help. They committed to staying until we were able to taxi over and get fuel, I was still going to be able to fly the family to Mannheim today. Just one issue left: I still needed VFR charts.

I invited my mother to join me in a visit to the main building to sort out the charts. A long-haired man in a rumpled shirt greeted us. This place looked much more like a general aviation terminal and he confirmed in very slow Italian that this was where in future all pilots would go, but not yet.

His English was minimal and my Italian worse. I waved my clip-board at him and he handed me a blank flight plan which I filled out quickly.

“The time? Do you have the time?” Assuming no further problems, we should be able to take off within half an hour. I tapped my wrist, the spot where my watch would be if I hadn’t lost it.

“Dodici,” he said followed by a moment of thought before he remembered the word in English. “Twelve.”

“No, it’s not,” said my mother. He frowned, wondering what he’d said wrong. “It’s two.”

“Two,” he repeated uncertainly.

“No, twelve,” I said. My mother frowned. “Zulu,” I told her and then more helpfully: “It’s the time in GMT.”

The man didn’t appear to be sure what the problem was. “Dodici,” he said, just to be clear. I nodded with a smile and then tried to ask him about charts.

I drew a rough outline of a boot kicking Sicily on the back of the flightplan with a little dot for Rome and a box around it. He smiled in comprehension. He led me to a table with a glass-encased chart of the area on it. It was beautifully done, clear VFR paths shown for all directions out of the airfield.

It was exactly what I needed. I smiled happily and told him I’d like one.

He looked at me in bemusement for a moment and told me I couldn’t have it.

I tried again: I want to buy one?

Nope. This was his map. It is there, for looking at.

He refused to part with it. I got a blank flightplan and sketched a more precise boot, with notes of our route and the visual reporting points we would pass. I just hoped I could find them again on the IFR chart.

I returned to find the battery charged and the plane fueled. The customs man admitted he had no further reason to detain us. Three hours after our planned start, we were finally ready to go but I was still nervous about not having the local VFR charts. I had tried recreating our route on the IFR charts, using the VORs to cross-check, but it wasn’t exact. I told Cliff that perhaps we should cancel the flight.

Hot and grumpy, he showed little patience: “Well, we could just never fly anywhere when we don’t have the charts.”

“Well, yes, precisely,” I muttered under my breath, with just enough self-preservation to ensure he couldn’t hear me.

On the other hand, I couldn’t quite imagine the response at the airfield if, after all the waiting and the jump start and staying on to get the fuel, I told them that, on second thought, I wanted to cancel owing to bad planning. I looked at the IFR charts and my notes again. It looked straight-forward and there were frequent VOR references for the route out. I was pretty sure I had it right and we had the GPS to ensure I knew where we were at any given time.

We flew at 2,500 feet, following their low-level routing as I watched for my landmarks and reporting points, some of which were marked on the GPS making it even simpler than I’d imagined. As we joined our flight-plan proper, I started to feel more confident.

“Sylvia.”

“Yes, Mom?” She had been so quiet up to now, I was impressed.

“You are talking really fast when you are on the radio. It makes it hard to understand you, especially for non-native English speakers. You need to slow down.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. I knew that her words were undoubtedly true but I really didn’t want to set a precedent of my mother helping me to fly over the next three hours.

“Yes, Mom.”

It was surprisingly easy to understand the Italian guys on the radio. The only problem was place names, I’d never heard of most of them and finding them quickly on the map wasn’t easy. Report where? Pruja? I can’t find it! Ah, Perugia! I dove for the chart over and over again, ignoring my mother’s entreaty to keep my eyes on the road. Each time I found the place in question and we carried on, climbing in preparation for the Alps, the sun streaming in through the windows. Even Connor (still suitably chastised) looked out the window and pointed things out for us to look at.

We crossed the border to Austria and switched frequency to Innsbruck as we climbed to FL105. The view was astounding. Lakes nestled in dark green valleys surrounded by rough mountains glistening with snow. Glaciers loomed up ominously at us, too close for comfort. My instinct was to climb further but we couldn’t get much higher without needing oxygen. I stared, amazed and nervous, at the mountains so close to us; spell-bound until ATC interrupted me with my next reporting point: Brenner Pass.

I had been totally distracted with the view and panicked for a moment – unnecessarily, the pass was part of my route and clear on my map. But still I stuttered and by the time I had responded, we had already reached the pass. I immediately reported it. He sounded vaguely impatient as he asked me to report the Sierra VRP.

Busted – that was neither on the map nor marked on the GPS. I asked if I could report the Patscherkofel VOR instead please.

“Sierra is just south-west of the VOR,” he told me. “You should have a VFR chart with you.” I turned beet red. I could hear my mother shifting around in the back, clearly aware that I was being told off but not sure why.

“If you look down,” he continued. “you might notice there are mountains. It is dangerous.”

I struggled for a moment for the correct response. Affirm? Roger? Wilco? Nothing seemed right. “Understood,” I said after a moment. I prayed for another plane to cause a distraction but the radio remained silent: the other pilots in the air were no doubt grinning quietly as they listened to him reprimand me.

My ink pen chose that moment to begin leaking violently – my fingers and clipboard turning a deep blue. My friend at Innsbruck continued his lecture, this time receiving no response at all while I tried to minimize the staining. I wanted to make a note – “always bring pencil for high level flights!” but my pad was covered in ink. Innsbruck finally concluded the tirade with “report the VOR”. By now I had reached it. I reported this, leaving a blue fingerprint on the control.

We exited the pass and as we gently turned left the autopilot disengaged with a loud series of beeps.

I made sure we were straight and level and then checked – my dark-blue fingers weren’t anywhere near the button. The switch was in the correct position. I re-engaged the autopilot and it took control. Someone must have knocked it.

I was relieved when we switched frequencies to Munich and entered Germany, for which I had the correct maps. Then the autopilot disengaged again. Definitely no fingers near the button, the switch was normal. The electric trim was on, the power settings were correct. I re-engaged the auto-pilot. It disengaged.

My mother became very quiet as I cursed.

I was uncomfortably aware of how long it had been since I had needed to hand-fly the plane. Every time I spoke on the radio, I deviated 5 degrees or 50 feet.

We stuck with our routing but I was sweating, blue ink now smeared on my forehead.

Munich switched me to Stuttgart who cleared me to transit at not above 3,500 feet. I have not tried to fly a precise height since I got my license. Cliff volunteered to do the radio so that I could simply concentrate on keeping it straight and level. I glanced at him and realized that he had turned an odd shade of green: his offer was a desperate attempt to stop me pitching up and down like a rollercoaster.

I agreed and took the chance to check the gadgets again. I reset the electric trim and looked for any anomalies. I made sure I knew where we were on the map and shut down the GPS, resetting everything. It booted up nicely and the autopilot gave me a warm beep to say that it was ready, immediately followed by a series of jarring beeps as it disengaged itself again.

But without the distraction of the radio I was getting back into the swing of it, remembering the thrill of getting the plane perfectly in trim and letting go of the control – look Ma, no hands! She looked terribly disconcerted at my hands in the air, which made it even more of a pleasure. In no time at all we were over-flying Heidelberg and coming into Mannheim. We would arrive just in time for dinner.

As I focused on the approach, Cliff tried the autopilot and it engaged. I couldn’t help but take it personally, we were now ten miles out from our destination and I no longer needed it. I disengaged it and brought the plane in smoothly.

We parked by the terminal and my mother thanked me for a very interesting flight … but would I be terribly offended if next time she just went commercial?

This three-part story was originally published in the November 2007 issue of Piper Flyer magazine.

Come back on the 26th of June for Part Three.

When my mother announced she’d be in Europe for a few weeks, I asked for her itinerary so that we could arrange to meet. She had an eight-hour day dedicated to traveling from Rome to Germany to see her family in Mannheim.

Cliff jumped into the conversation and told her that it was only a three-hour flight in the Saratoga, flying from Roma Urbe direct to Mannheim City Airport. The small airfields at Roma Urbe and Mannheim were clearly much more convenient. She could avoid all the lines and the security checks and the standing around waiting for something to happen. She wouldn’t even miss lunch.

He then told her I would be happy to fly it.

I panicked. I tried to come up with coherent arguments. Meanwhile, my mother was telling everyone how excited she was, stopping strangers in the street to inform them that her daughter was a Real Live Pilot and was going to take her flying and that it was more direct than a commercial flight and wasn’t even going to cost her a cent.

Cliff promised he would sort out all the navigation and planning: all I had to do was fly the plane. We could buy VFR charts there, meanwhile he’d plan it using IFR charts. The clincher was my son. He was so excited about going to see Rome and Grandma that he didn’t even complain about having to travel in the “little plane”.

By the time Cliff flew us IFR to Italy to meet her, I was almost excited. The views on the inbound flight were stunning. I stared down at the dusty Mediterranean coast, jagged and harsh against the bright blue water shimmering beneath us. Islands floated atop a glassy sea, tiny lighthouses on their edges.

My son sat in the back, playing his Gameboy and occasionally muttering “uh huh” when I told him to look out the window. Eventually he closed the window blind to keep the sun from reflecting off his screen. I gave up on him with a stern comment that when we were flying with Grandma in the back, he better pretend to be interested. He agreed and I left him in peace.

Ah, Rome! So beautiful and ancient and vibrant: you could never mistake this for any other city. We were thrilled with every minute despite the heat and the crowds of August. It wasn’t until the night before the flight that my fears came back to me: was I really going to put my mother and my son into that little plane? Did they really trust me to be in control of it? What if I lost concentration and twiddled the vertical speed knob counter-clockwise instead of clockwise, causing us to dive into the ground, ending up a fiery inferno on an isolated Tuscan farm?

These visions of disaster are a standard part of my pre-flight ritual. I have, on one occasion, twiddled that very knob the wrong way. The moment the nose tilted down, I disengaged the auto-pilot and tilted it back up. No drama, no fuss. I know the fear isn’t rational. But, still. My mother doesn’t like getting into a car with me driving but she was willing to climb into the plane? Was she out of her mind?

We arrived at Rome Urbe at nine, expecting my mother to arrive at eleven after everything was ready. The plan was to get away promptly and arrive in Germany in time for a late lunch. We were greeted by a tall man with a gray uniform and a scowl on his face. He asked what we were doing here. We pointed at the plane and smiled ingratiatingly but he was not so easily impressed. “Passaporto, please.” Italy and Germany are both members of the Schengen treaty, there are no border controls. Flying from Rome to Mannheim is like traveling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Savannah, Georgia: a hefty dose of culture shock but no red tape nor official processes. We shrugged and complied but he didn’t seem satisfied. “Follow,” he told us. “Fill out.” Forms. Lots of them.

An hour later, we were still grappling with the paperwork. Our sour-faced friend had put every bag through the metal detector and been making ominous noises about searching the plane itself. A French pilot subjected to the same absurd treatment lost his temper in the heat, “Are we here not in Europe?”

Cliff dealt with the customs man while I dragged the luggage to the plane and did the walk-around. We were no further along when my mother arrived to be greeted with the same surly suspicion: what was she doing here?

I eventually convinced him that she was with us while Cliff continued to struggle with the forms. A embarrassed gentleman was at the desk trying to help. I asked him about charts for the local area. He explained that Urbe is split between two terminals and that I would have to go to the other terminal for that. And fuel? The man’s eyes widened and he looked at the clock. “It is Sunday,” he said. “They will leave at noon.” It was 11:30.

“You must hurry,” he told us.

Cliff dashed out to the plane and then came straight back with a scowl. The battery was dead.

Part Three: Mother Told Me Not to Come

This three-part story was originally published in the November 2007 issue of Piper Flyer magazine. As a result, I received my first ever piece of fan mail – a reader asked if I could possibly put him in touch with my mother regarding a conference that he thought she might be interested in.

Part Two: Sylvia’s Mother Said

Heide is a highly respected literacy practitioner and researcher based in New Mexico. She is highly regarded within her profession and invited all over the world to speak at conferences. She crosses the Atlantic at least once a year and usually ties in the conference with a trip home to Germany to visit her family. She flies United Airlines when she can. She’s very efficient and likes for everything to be just so. She’s also my Mother.

When she told me she was going to be in Italy for a week and then a further week in Germany, I started making plans to meet up with her. I made the mistake of copying my boyfriend on the email with her travel plans. He immediately mailed her.

“Don’t book a flight yet – Sylvia can fly you from Rome to Mannheim.”

Er, Sylvia can do what?

My mother was thrilled. I went into an immediate panic with deadlines looming but Cliff soothed me, promising he’d do the footwork and phone the airfields and sort out the navigation and all I would have to do is fly the plane. How hard could it be?

I relaxed. Big mistake. A week before we were due to fly to Rome, I suddenly realized I had barely flown in the past few months. A look at my log book confirmed my fears: I had not managed to take off a measly three times in the past 90 days, the minimum required for taking passengers. The thought of telling my Mother that I wasn’t going to be able to fly the plane (or at least, not with her in it) spurred me to immediate action: I needed to get up in the air and fast.

The problem is Málaga. Málaga is “the only real airport of merit in Andalucía” and the fourth busiest airport in Spain. In 2006 they handled 13,000,000 passengers and over 125,000 flights.

To put this into perspective, JFK International Airport handled 42.6 million passengers with 25 miles of taxiway and four runways. Málaga has a single 10,500 foot runway with a single parallel taxiway. They are building a second runway, planned for 2010 but in the meantime, it’s a bit busy there.

As a result, Málaga does not allow circuits and have gone so far as to ban VFR traffic during the weekends. The simple solution is to go to Axarquía, the small airfield 30km northeast of Málaga where I did my initial flight training. That’s where all the light aircraft go for practice and I knew I was being unreasonable in trying to avoid it.

I’ve not flown to Axarquía since the flying school took the Cessnas away and I did my conversion to the Piper Saratoga. The airfield is surrounded by hills and the runway is 1090 meters (3500 feet) but it has a displaced threshold and thus the landing distance available is actually 637 meters (2000 foot) if you land on the numbers. This was fine for the Cessna 172s that we trained in but I didn’t fancy trying to get the Saratoga in safely. I knew it could be done: Cliff had taken me there just to prove it was possible. Even then, I closed my eyes as we appeared to race towards the trees at the end of the runway.

However, given a choice between admitting to my Mother that I’d let my license lapse and landing the plane on a runway with an LDA twice the minimum length stated by the pilot’s operating manual, the way was clear. We went to Axarquía.

Cliff relocated the plane from Málaga, a process that involved an hour of prep and 5 minutes in the air. I drove there so that we would have the car: we wanted to leave the plane at Axarquía for its 50-hour check. Also, I wanted to have lunch at Las Cruces, one of my all-time favorite restaurants which is near the airfield but not quite in easy walking distance.

During the week Las Cruces acts as a type of venta, a Spanish restaurant aimed at the working class offering what I like to refer to as “old-fashioned fast food” with a set menu that the waiter rattles off. There are always three starters and three main dishes – you pick one from each category and choose a drink: water, beer or red wine. Because there are so few dishes, your food arrives in minutes. At Las Cruces, they are a bit more up-market: they offer a third course of dessert, again with three options. After your food, the waiter reappears with a cafe sólo and takes your money: a set price of 8 Euros per person. I have seen them deal with difficult tourists who wandered in looking for an authentic experience and then want to personalize their dish: “Can I have chips with that? Substitute the vegetables with some salad, please!” I always cringe but the waiters take it with good grace and comply when they can. Las Cruces is off the beaten track so they don’t get too many tourists, the place is generally full of farm workers and truck drivers shouting jokes at each other as they make their way through the quick and hearty meal.

On Sunday, the scene changes to cater to the after-church crowd with a full menu and more traditional pricing. They run it with a single seating, you are expected to stay the afternoon. They have a huge outdoor barbecue which they fire up at noon with two people working through the dishes as quickly as they can. Lamb chops, slices of pork loin, beef entrecote. Grilled peppers, grilled cheese, grilled bread rubbed with tomato and olive oil. If they can put it on the barbecue, they will and everything is done to perfection.

But the Las Cruces barbecue is off-limits on a flying day: weight and balance would be seriously skewed after such a meal. I knew, deep down, that I shouldn’t combine flying and a three-hour lunch and that it wouldn’t quite be the same if I couldn’t sample their house red wine and so, with regret, we arranged to go in the middle of the week.

I drove up to the airfield and let myself in. There was a new banner draped across the fence advertising the flying school but the place seemed deserted. No one was outside at all. The television at the bar blared the local news into an empty room. A German Shepherd which I remembered well from my training (he ran across the runway in fright as I was landing from my first solo nav flight) was locked behind a chain link fence, watching me balefully.

When I had been here before, everything was organized by the instructors who had flown in from England. I remember them complaining about how lackadaisical everything was, shaking their heads at the street map with Málaga’s visual reporting points drawn onto it, finding out about the local airfields and where we could go for the cross country navigation or even just a few circuits. I hadn’t realized at the time, but they’d livened the place up immensely: from the moment I (or any other student) walked through the door, we were greeted and organized. As I crossed the dusty courtyard, it felt like a ghost town. Cliff had just touched down and parked the plane while I went in search of someone to talk to. I found a woman in the back office who looked unhappy to have been disturbed. I told her that I was planning to fly circuits and she told me not to bother her until I’d done them, then I could pay.

I’d rather hoped for an excuse to put this moment off but Cliff had thoughtfully refueled the plane in Málaga and there was nothing for it: it was time to get into the air. I got into the plane and remembered my first solo flight here: I spoke to myself, DJ style, throughout the circuit. “You’ll be just fine, Sylvia, they wouldn’t have let you out here if they didn’t think you can do it, all you have to do is get the plane up into the air, turn it around, and bring it back down.” As I remembered that first solo, my fear suddenly melted away. I’d been so worried about the short landing distance, the hills, the lack of a tower and blind radio calls that I’d forgotten the huge advantage that this airfield held for me:

I learned to fly here.

I spent 50 hours flying in and out of that airfield, compared to a few hours at any other airfield. I could hear Tom’s voice from the start: telling me to leave my hands on my thighs while I taxied to curb my urge to “steer” with the column, showing me where to pull off the runway and how to best angle the plane into the wind for my power checks without blocking access for other planes. As I took off I immediately heard him telling me that it was inconsiderate to fly too low over villages and that I should turn crosswind just a little bit early to avoid the buildings we could see coming up, the corner of Vélez-Málaga. I knew exactly where the circuit was, as if someone had drawn the lines onto the ground for me to follow.

I struggled a bit trying to get everything done in time for what is definitely a small and very fast circuit in the Saratoga but it was not a big deal – there was no reason for me to be nervous about the airfield at all. By the second circuit I was on top of things and Tom’s voice stopped nagging me by the third. I did two more for luck and then landed the plane just as the banner planes started to head out for their afternoon run over the beaches of Marbella.

My reward followed at Las Cruces. A cold glass of San Miguel, a bowl of picadillo (a soup made with chunks of Spanish ham and pieces of boiled egg) followed by a hot plate of pork in garlic. I was feeling pretty good about everything. In a few days, I would be in Rome, taking my son to see the Coliseum and the Vatican City. Cliff had plotted us a route over the Alps with a slight diversion so that we could fly over my cousin’s Bavarian bed and breakfast on the German-Austrian border which we were saving as a special surprise for my mother. Our destination was Mannheim, the city where I spent a good chunk of my childhood so I was sure I would have no problems finding the airfield, which was quite conveniently located just five minutes away from my Uncle’s house where dinner would be waiting.

What could possibly go wrong?

Part Two: Sylvia’s Mother Said

Our flight last weekend out of Málaga was very frustrating. I couldn’t fly the first leg because they won’t allow VFR traffic Thursday – Monday. The fuel bowser took forever to get to us at which point the driver told us that it wasn’t working right and that he needed to get someone to help him. At one point the plane was surrounded by four cars – one of which belonged to the Guardia Civil who came over to find out what all the fuss was about.

When we finally got our fuel, we were informed that he had not brought the card swiper with him and one of us would need to accompany him to the office to pay.

We spent just over two hours simply trying to refuel. It would have been more sensible to leave Málaga and land at another nearby airfield just to pick up the fuel for our journey.

On the bright side, while we were waiting a friendly mechanic passed by and volunteered to remove our winterization plates which was a bit of luck!

One good thing about being banned from taking off is that I get to take a lot of photographs. As much as I grumble about Málaga, it sure is pretty…