Park and fly

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bong Figueroa is an avid reader of these pages. He had proposed to write about comparing flying and driving in the past. Today, we grant him his wish, well sort of… Are parking a car and landing a plane really that similar? Read on and find out for yourself…

MANILA, Philippines - A father of a friend once said, “You cannot drive if you cannot park”. It’s one of those golden nuggets of wisdom that I picked up growing up and that I won’t forget because as simple as it sounds, it is absolutely incontestable.

I remember my university days, a particular classmate would often arrive hurriedly in class and, using the powers of the female charm, would ask male classmates to help her park her car. It worked for her. If I was in her place, I guess I would have been towed countless times.

I muse at these thoughts at 2,500 feet above ground level, flying a small Cessna. “You cannot drive if you cannot park.” “You cannot fly if you cannot land.” My flight instructor told me that for this session, landing is on the menu.

Flying in simple terms is a lot like driving, you just point your nose where you want to go, following the right altitude and traffic. The aviation industry has an organized set of traffic patterns much like our highways. In fact as far as aviation is concerned, the sky in simple terms are highways. And runways are quite simply parking approaches.

Now, most drivers will agree that they learned how to move a car forward before they learned how to park properly. The same thing goes for pilots… we learn to fly first before we learn how to land.

And so, after learning how to fly, I found myself learning how to land. As I approached the airport, those parking jitters I had before came back. Multiplied tenfold. With cars you can scrape something. With planes, well you get the picture.

So anyway, there I was… at 600 feet above ground level, I entered the airport traffic pattern. With cars you check your mirrors, sometimes you go out and actually check how you are doing. With this Cessna I’m checking several things simultaneously – the runway parallel on the left, the plane ahead of me in the traffic pattern, my instruments paying extra attention to my altitude and airspeed. I dropped the flaps at 1. I felt the increased drag and lift almost immediately, I compensated with the controls.

At 400 feet above ground level I made a 90-degree turn to the left while adding more flaps. I was now perpendicular to the length of the runway, I could vaguely see the glint of the leading aircraft about to touch down. At around 300 feet I turned another 90 degrees to the left so that my nose would be aligned with the runway. Full flaps. This was my final approach. At this height, the tiny Cessna felt big and the runway so small.

My instructor told me to point my nose on the runway and not to let it out of my sight. And so I did. I felt strong buffeting and vibrations, the plane felt difficult to control, the runway was left, right, down and at times nowhere in sight. My instructor told me to relax and concentrate. It was then that I realized that there was no buffeting. I was in a way over controlling the plane and then compensating and over compensating. The runway was approaching fast! In a blink of an eye I felt it, a squeak of rubber, the main wheels touched down, slightly off-center but on the runway, not bad. I hit the brakes, taxied only to power on again and take off. Dear Lord, I have to go through that again?!

Once again I entered the traffic pattern, and on my final approach the runway was again coming in fast. And then it was gone, I lost sight of the runway, I pointed my nose down and I saw green. Is the runway green? Realization kicked in… It wasn’t the runway! And I don’t know if it was out of supplication or self-preservation or embarrassment at the next day’s probable headline that I cried out, in the vernacular… Diyos Ko! Damooo! And then I was on it, wheels loosening the grass and dirt enough to grow crops on. Surprisingly it felt smoother than it looks. Using the ailerons, I managed to salvage my landing and a bit of dignity by taxiing back to the runway again. The radio crackled, it was the tower…”Nice landing!” I thought I heard some laughing. Hell, I’d laugh too if I saw what I did from where they were. My instructor Capt. Marvin Abadiano, probably the most skillful instructor from Orient Aviation, said that he could not wrestle the controls from me. That’s true. In my mind I couldn’t help quoting the pilot from the movie Top Gun, “Holding on too tight, I lost the edge”.

Before I could digest what had happened, we were powering on again. I was to repeat the exercise several more times. My instructor humoring me, used a metaphor… gentle on the controls treat her just like a woman. So I made a few good ones, many passable ones, and mercifully only one really embarrassing landing.

I now take comfort in the pilots’ bar room joke that one smooth landing is luck, two in a row is pure luck and three is prevarication.

Going back to parking, it is a skill we often take for granted, probably because it has become second nature for most of us. But as we walk away from our cars after we park, we know that it concludes a successful driving session. As I walk away from the tiny, hardy Cessna, it concludes another successful flight. And as they say, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.