The Walter Mitty Cub, or Armchair Flying

Oh, how I love an adventure! Last summer I looked at a Piper Cub trip from Washington State to North Carolina and thought it would be the flight of a lifetime (which it would have been) but timing, that fickle quash, overrode my plans. The Bonanza had to go first and on the other end the Cub had to go so it became a race to the sale and the Cub won. Dang it. The Bonanza eventually sold (see February’s post) but it was too late for this participant. I found another Cub near my own backyard but the allure of flying through the high mountains of the west still strikes a chord in me.

Enter the internet and a website for Cub enthusiasts and wishful thinkers at www.j3-cub.com . There is a forum thereon called “Cub Talk”, which is open to general discussion of all things Cub-related and where a younger-than-me United Airlines captain opened up a thread that became one of the longer ones on the site. The “New Boy Buying J3” led not only to his finding a fine airplane but to his embarkation upon a four-day trip from Lincoln NE to Southern California.

 

This doesn’t give all the zigs and zags of his route, but you get the general idea. His destination wasn’t Palm Springs, either, but it’s close. The straight line flight would have been just over 1,000 miles; the route he had to take to wind through the mountains and to stay near highways across the desert ended up nearly 1,400 miles. Lucky guy (obviously the beneficiary of airline luck), he had tailwinds a lot of the way! I never have tailwinds.

With today’s satellite technology and a nifty little hand-held device sending sparks to space and back, we were able to track the progress of the flight all the way from Lincoln to his home field. The gadget sent his position every 10 minutes and with a little interpretation you can tell he stopped for fuel between position 38 and position 44, at Buckeye AZ, just west of Phoenix. To add a little more realism, I pulled up Google Earth and traced the route over satellite pictures of the terrain. I can’t wait to see his pictures.

My wife tells me I’m nuts for watching NASCAR races but I haven’t seen a race yet that has captured my imagination like this flight in a little yellow airplane.

Maybe next year.