Cause For Celebration: Hitting The Big 10K
A milestone in my logbook seems like a fine excuse to take a hot lap in the wildest rental aircraft I've paid money to fly.
Clawing into the sky, I said a few words of thanks to the creator. Thanks for a beautiful blue sky, for the lack of haze on this Georgia summer day, for the chance to fly this aerobatic missile that despite being 60 knots past Vy, was still climbing at a rate that would shock the students in the pattern we’d just left behind. I also said a word of thanks for the occasion being celebrated with this less-than-typical rental aircraft.
I was strapped into the front seat of a Game Composites GameBird GB1, one of the hottest aerobatic machines out there today. I’d just watched one wow crowds at Oshkosh a few weeks prior, a little grin on my lips as I relished the thought that I’d be in the hot seat soon enough.
Thirty years and two months prior, I filled out the first line of my pilot logbook with a 0.5 hour of dual received in a Cessna 150. As the resident airport kid of modest means, the $49 an hour for the airplane emptied my piggybank more often than not when I flew, and despite soloing when I turned 16, I didn’t have enough funds to finish my private ticket for almost a decade. In 1998, I logged a whopping three flights, totaling less than three hours.
I’d love to go back and tell that kid that one day he’d be logging his 10,000th hour and celebrating by flying a monster of an aerobatic machine, but I’ll happily settle for putting those same words to paper now. Somewhere there’s another pilot with big hopes and thin finances. If you’re reading this, hang in there. This is a milestone any of us can reach, eventually.
During high school and college, I fell in with a group of aerobatic pilots, some of them airshow performers, who let me hang around as I finished high school and began college. I wrenched on their planes and cobbled together their websites in the early days of the Dotcom boom. I got to fly a number of cool birds, and some owners even trusted me to wring out their planes solo. The planes were undoubtedly aerobatic, but nothing like the Game Bird. The Zlin 526s I really got comfortable with were from a bygone era, when planes were much slower and the figures didn’t demand a lot of G-force. I could fly a full aerobatic routine with no more than +4/-2G over the course of the flight. The SP-95 came along and despite being a +/-12G airframe, I never flew it nearly as hard as anyone else did—I didn’t have to. I was a mechanic, not a performer, so there was no pressure to do anything that wasn’t fun. And hurting myself with heavy G-forces wasn’t fun at all.
I lost a close friend and mentor in the airshow business in 2003, and we continued for a few years, despite a lot of the wind being lost from our sails. Then, as I sat in training at my first airline in 2007, we disbanded the remaining airshow team. I still flew the Zlins for a few more years until they sold to a new owner, and once the Czech ladies went away, the horizon stayed firmly with dirt beneath the sky as I settled into the airline career and cross-country travel in the Mooney. But deep down, I still told myself I was an aerobatic pilot. That sort of joy never leaves an aviator’s bloodstream.
Once I started flying for a living, the focus on my logbook totals sort of lost priority—other than filling out the job applications as I moved between airlines, the total time accumulated about as quickly, and with about as much meaning as the money in a lopsided game of Monopoly. A thousand hours came and went flying regional jets, then 5,000 loomed as I learned the Airbus. As I approached 10,000 hours, I tried to find something that would be an appropriate celebration of a fantastic career and life. Adding a seaplane or sailplane ticket sounded great but the logistics were a barrier and then doing anything with that training after the checkride is prohibitively expensive.
Meanwhile, my social media stream kept flashing stories as a nearby flight school was adding a Game Bird GB1 to their lineup for spin, aerobatic, and upset recovery training. Dragonfly Aviation, owned by J.D. and Heidi Lambeth, is the school I’ve recommended many friends to use for years. Their operation is a successful independent operation that offers what the puppy mills fail to offer: personalized instruction and service with a fleet of airplanes that is big enough to ensure you’ll have a plane to fly when one goes into the hangar for repairs or maintenance.
J.D. and I have a history going back to 2002 or so, having worked together at a flight school where he was a brand-new CFI and I was swinging wrenches on the trainers. He signed my logbook a couple times and I taught him how to do a decent aileron roll. A couple of years passed and we both flew regional jets together until that airline failed and he found his happy place co-owning a flight school with his wife, Heidi, and teaching a bunch of pilots to fly without going down the puppy-mill route of flight training. At last year’s Reno Air Races, J.D. told me he was preparing to take delivery of a GB1 to teach spins, aerobatics, and upset recovery. I grinned at what I thought was a joke.
Eleven months later, I stood on the ramp, thoroughly exhausted, having just been his first aerobatic customer in the GB1. Renting such a machine isn’t cheap, but unless you’re in the top tier of aerobatic pilots, you’ll tap out in less than an hour. For about what you’d spend doing 90 minutes of dual in a rental 172 these days I checked a few boxes. I celebrated a milestone in my life as an aviator. I learned that over the course of a flying career, our skills and specialties evolve. I'd have been perfect for the Gamebird when I was 24 years old and bulletproof. At age 44, I could still get to that level, but unless I was going to compete, instruct, or fly airshows, why would I? But to spend an afternoon giggling like a kid, groaning under G-loads, and watching the horizon tumble—it was a great full-circle way of celebrating a landmark in my flying life.
I was still technically about 20 hours shy of the official 10,000 hour mark when I flew the Gamebird. I hit my actual 10,000th hour on descent into Jackson, Mississippi, where I celebrated with a quiet meal by myself at the hotel bar. There will be a more verbose write-up of the GameBird flight/celebration in the October Plane & Pilot magazine.
Thanks to Matt Russell, for splicing up the video fragments from my flight.
Ahhh pilots. Y'all will invent ways to spend money. Speaking of which, I need a TW endorsement 😂😂. Congrats on the milestone!!!
Ohhh- And a huge Congrats on the 10k mark !! Outstanding!