Spending time in the Pilot's Lounge at the virtual airport was once probably merely a vice, but over the years it has become a habit. This time it was a weekday evening. I had flown with a student and stuck around after he headed home because it was quiet and I'd run across something I wanted to read. Old Hack came wandering in after about a half hour and broke the silence of the evening all to smithereens. He bellowed, "Are you doing your shallow breathing exercises, again? Why don't you do something useful instead of taking up space? I'm going flying and need some dead weight to help hold the tail down ... want to play ballast?"Hack owns a Piper Super Cruiser that he'd bought either new or almost-new following his service in World War II. It makes him of an age that causes me amazement; he has to be at least 85. He can still pass his flight physical and he flies the Super Cruiser with lan. I sat in back and watched, not saying much, as he took us into the sky for a little evening sightseeing and then shot some landings while the sun worked its way below the horizon. I spent quite a bit of the time just looking at the landscape, and I kept thinking of the recent deaths of two of our country's top jet test pilots -- Scott Crossfield and my good friend, Alvin White -- and seemed to feel their absence from the sky.Helping Hack put the airplane into its hangar; I noticed that the magic of the evening had had its effect on our resident curmudgeon. His voice was quieter and he was less inclined to give insult or a snide remark. Just before we closed the hangar door, and when he thought I wasn't looking, Hack gave the cowling a pat and I saw him mouth the word, "Thanks." I looked away and concentrated on pulling the sliding door closed.Walking slowly toward the office, Hack looked at me and said earnestly, "I truly hope I can have a few more years of this. I don't know what I'd do without it. I've learned so many things about the sky and people because I fly. I've enjoyed almost every minute of it and I don't want it to stop."I asked him what he'd learned and he started laughing, stopped walking and looked at me, "Oh, no, you lazy bum. I'm not writing your column for you."I said that my 100th column for AVweb was coming due soon and I thought that recounting what he'd learned over the years might be a good subject.Abruptly his irascible manner resurfaced, "Good grief, 100 of your half-baked columns. If someone laid them end-to-end they wouldn't even reach a conclusion. But, with the way you write, you can use all the help you can get. Let's go inside and I'll dictate to you, so pay attention."It didn't exactly proceed as he intended, but we came up with some things that we'd learned over the years that have helped keep us alive and well around little airplanes, some basic truths of aviation and some trivia we enjoyed, along with some opinions. We also repeated some things that may not be true, but sure seem to be, and we threw in some stuff about airlines, because there are times we have to ride on them when it's too darned far or expensive to fly ourselves.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/the-pilots-lounge-100-truth-and-some-opinion