Cessna 140 and First 170A

In the spring of 1950 I learned to fly, courtesy of the GI Bill, a government schooling subsidy for those who had been in uniform in the recent War.  For each lesson my young instructor, Roger Atwood, would fly his nearly new 2-seat  Cessna 140, registered as NC2189V, up from Northhampton to a tractor path in a corn field near where I lived and worked for a non-profit youth travel organization in Northfield, Massachusetts.   My lessons were ecstasy alternating with despair.  I loved flying, but it seemed Roger was constantly reminding me that I was OK in one dimension while courting disaster in the other two.   However, after almost 8 hours of instruction I was launched on my first solo flight.   Takeoff and cruise are simple, I thought, but I could wreck the plane on landing.   That first flight was supposed to last just a few minutes, but it was suddenly acutely clear that nobody could help me, and I could delay the landing only until the two gas tanks were empty.   So I landed.   It was the best landing I would make for quite a while, as first solo landings are reputed to be.

My instructor was Robert Atwood, whom you'll see below when Marge and I flew a Cessna 170A to Alaska.  Roger was kept as an instructor in WW2 because his teaching skills were so valuable.  Among his students were my father-in-law Monroe Smith, then me, and then "Abdullah",  a student at nearby Deerfield Academy and future king of Jordan.  When Roger died I used channels to tell Abdullah, but  received no acknowledgement.

Now I was allowed to risk the airplane and my own neck in solo flight, but the law required I have 33 more hours, alternating with and without the instructor, until I could take up passengers and risk their necks.  I was taught new skills, like landing in cross winds and high winds, and flights to other states.  I was also taught how to recover from tailspins, which after years of controversy is no longer taught to new pilots.   I was taught "pilotage", the deceptively difficult skill of navigating by comparing a map with the view outside the windows, necessary because many planes lacked radios and GPS hadn't been invented.   Twenty years later, in 1970,  I first flew a plane with a radio, and thirty years after that, in 2000, I first used a GPS.

That Cessna, like most of the planes I've flown since, was a "taildragger", meaning the third wheel to support the plane on the ground is at its tail.   The great majority of modern small planes have the third wheel under the nose of the plane, making it  easier and safer to land at most airports, but very difficult to land on very rough or soggy fields.   So most Alaskan "bush" planes are taildraggers.

A mere 2 1/2 flying hours after I made that first solo, in the 2-seat Cessna 140,  Monroe Smith,  my father-in-law at the time, let me solo his nearly new Cessna 170A,  registered as NC9115A, which had 4 seats and more horsepower.   The previous link shows the small differences between the 170, the 170A and the 170B.

Monroe was an intrepid risk taker, as allowing a very inexperienced pilot to fly his nearly new airplane costing the price of 5 new Fords would indicate.  He crashed it that year on a very tight Northfield pasture on which I landed successfully 31 years later  in another  Cessna 170A.

Roger Atwood took these photos of Monroe's crash, and gave them to me 51 years later, in 2001.

I flew no more until I went to Luxembourg a month later.