By RAJEEV PANDEY
I would like to tell you how I managed to get a tailwheel endorsement shortly after earning my private pilot certificate, but I need to make some confessions first. I just hope the statute of limitations has come and gone on these incriminating admissions.
The first admission is more of a shameful one than an unlawful one: I’ve forgotten the name of the nursing home resident I kidnapped one fine day on the way to the airport. Let’s not dwell on my shame any longer than we have to and just call him “Hank.”
Hank lived in an assisted care facility located a couple of blocks from my home in Corvallis, Oregon. The new facility had installed a miniature playground on its grounds, per Corvallis city regulations, I suspect.
The playground consisted of a suspension bridge, slide, and swing set that were perfect for my two boys, who were 6 and 4 years old at the time.
I would take Noah and Jonah over to the playground, ignoring the “No Trespassing” signs to play with the boys, chasing the two kids around the play equipment, climbing up the stairs to the top of the slide in pursuit, wedging myself in the slide, down and over to the swings, dashing across the bridge (I didn’t need to calculate weight and balance to know my size and shape would overstress its frame). We would do this over and over and over again.
This spectacle was visible from Hank’s suite in the nursing home and eventually the shrieks and squeals of delight from the kids drew Hank outside one day. He slowly lumbered over to a bench in the play area. Soon, it became a regular occurrence. Hank would sit there, a ghost of a smile playing on his face at our silly behavior.
To their credit, the nursing home staff never shooed us away or even inquired as to our relationship to any residents of the home. Perhaps it was cheap, silly entertainment, or a grown man with two kids in tow was deemed non-threatening, or perhaps they assumed we had an affiliation with Hank, who had started to come out almost every time we were there.
Eventually, we began talking. Initially it was just a cursory greeting (hard to hold a conversation when playing with two rambunctious kids), but once the boys were tuckered out it became easier to chat.
The conversations became longer once I, a newly minted private pilot, learned that Hank was a retired Air Force and airline pilot. The nursing home is right on the instrument approach flight path for Runway 17 of Corvallis Municipal Airport (KCVO), so every so often we would have an aerial prompting go by overhead that would trigger some almost-forgotten memory in the recesses of Hank’s mind.
Hank was a storyteller, telling us about his times in the cockpit in the grand tradition of Gann, Bach, and Saint-Exupery — or at least with enough style and verve to keep a 4-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a newly minted 40-year-old private pilot riveted and hanging on to his every word.
His eyes would brighten, his face would come alive, and the wizened old man would disappear, replaced by the cocky student, the sauntering freight dog, the brash ace of the base, or the confident airline captain as he replayed vignettes of his flying days, eventually winding down to reacquire that air of resigned depression, of stillness, of waiting and boredom that infuses the halls of assisted care facilities.
He wistfully spoke of his children and grandchildren, who were all “too busy to visit” though they lived a mere 40 miles away. I was pretty sure we were Hank’s only visitors and even we were mostly there for the playground.
One day, our story time was interrupted by the head of the nursing home, who came out to berate Hank without even glancing at us. Turns out Hank had thrown the staff into a tizzy the day before. Dearly missing airplanes, he had defiantly absconded on another resident’s three-wheeled bicycle and attempted to make his way to the airport, some eight miles away, without involving any of the caretakers.
About half way there he collapsed from exhaustion. This involved emergency personnel and caused additional disruption among the overtaxed nursing home staff, who were already in a heightened state of panic attempting to locate their wayward charge.
After the woman finished ranting at Hank and went back inside, he turned to me and said with a broken, heavy heart: “You are a pilot — you understand, don’t you? I see the airplanes fly overhead every day and can get no closer. I just want to go to the airport and no one takes me. Public transit doesn’t serve the airport, so I thought I could bike there, but I couldn’t make it.”
I made no response to Hank, busily pretending that I had something stuck in my eye that was causing them to water. I wanted to track down his family members and scream at them: “These stories will go untold and unrecorded! Can’t you come take him to the airport? Can you please just come visit him?”
One fine Saturday, the airport was holding an Open House, one of those modest events where the GA airport positively engages the community, hopefully staves off noise complaints with awareness and outreach, and the flight school and university flying club tries to find new customers. There would even be one or two static displays. My boys were engaged elsewhere, so I would be flying solo for this event. I had almost made it to the airport when it struck me that Hank would love such an event. I turned around.
At this point in my life, my parents and in-laws had not aged enough for me to be familiar with the administrative side of assisted care facilities. I went straight to Hank’s door and told him that we were off to the airport. He eagerly got ready, and told me we needed to check out at the front desk. I sauntered up to the front desk of the facility, where I recognized the woman who had been berating Hank some weeks earlier. I told her I wanted to take Hank to the airport, and was just checking in to make sure she knew where he would be for the afternoon.
I did not realize that Hank was deemed incapable of making his own determination on outings. She pulled out a file, asking for my name and photo ID while doing so. Hank’s file did not list me as an authorized party, and I honestly told her I was not related. She showed me the considerable paperwork I needed to fill out to extract Hank from the nursing home at some future date, although my authorization would also require an explicit OK from a responsible family member.
She also quickly determined that Hank’s family wouldn’t know me from Adam, and she relayed to me in a roundabout way that his family was hard to get a hold of even for matters of more import regarding Hank. Basically, Hank was grounded and the airport excursion was a no-go.
Hank was completely crestfallen. I stood there, wondering what to do and wondering why the woman was making a photocopy of my driver’s license before handing it back to me given the no-fly decision.
She then told me that while I couldn’t take Hank to the airport, I could certainly take him on a “really long walk” around the facility. She asked if my attention would be divided by my sons, and was satisfied when I said it would just be Hank and me on our “really long walk.” She reminded me not to let Hank stay in the sun too long and to keep him hydrated.
Every second of the considerable time it took to get Hank settled in my pick-up truck I wondered if the administrator was truly a kind person or if I would hear police sirens shortly. To this day I don’t know if I misread her intent or we were co-conspirators on breaking Hank out of his solitary confinement from all things aviation.
Luckily I eventually got Hank settled in the passenger seat of my truck and we were off on Hank’s “really long walk.” To this day I have a vivid recollection of Hank’s energy and bubbly enthusiasm on the drive to the airport, along with a memory of the sharp pang in my heart when he pointed out the spot where he collapsed after running out of fuel on his attempted bicycle solo cross-country.
We had a very pleasant time at the airport, although Hank refused to clamber up into the planes on static display.
“Too hard for me to get in and out of now,” he claimed, though I wonder if this remark was aimed more at his physical or mental limitations.
We ran into my flight instructor, “Cap’n John” Larson, as well. I introduced him to Hank, who was busy staring at a somewhat battered plane off in the distance on the tarmac.
The new arrival at the airport had also caught my eye the previous day as it was a tailwheel plane, and I hoped to get a tailwheel endorsement someday in my pilot training progression. But no one in the local area rented tailwheel aircraft, so my dream remained firmly that. Hank told me it was a Stinson 108, “probably a 1947 or 1948 model.”
A discussion between Hank and John on Stinson variants ensued: Franklin vs. Lycoming engines, fuel capacity, vertical fins, baggage doors, and load among the topics. Turns out one of Cap’n John’s military friends bought the Stinson just in time to get deployed to Afghanistan. He left it in John’s care to run it around the pattern every now and again while he was gone. Hank gazed off in the distance as old memories continued to flood him.
Suddenly, in a fleeting moment of clarity, Hank’s eyes returned to John’s face.
“Hey, aren’t you Swede Larson’s boy?”
Turns out it is a small world, and Hank had flown with Cap’n John’s father, Air Force Colonel James Larson. Since I am unburdening my shameful confessions here, I admit I don’t recall much more of the connection, or enough details about the ensuing stories, other than Hank laughingly telling me that the moniker “Swede” had somehow stuck to John’s Norwegian father.
And then Hank’s mind wandered again, his bright eyes dimmed, his energy ebbed, and I knew it was time to return him to the nursing home.
Hank and I checked back in at the front desk, where the administrator asked about our long walk. I learned that day that old men are worse at keeping secrets than my young sons as Hank gleefully laughed and told her “we drove to the airport instead of walking around here!”
The woman said nothing, her face unreadable as she gave me a long look, and then she turned away to feed the photocopy of my driver’s license into the shredder.
The next day, I had an early morning appointment set up with Cap’n John to get checked out in the flying club’s newly acquired Cessna Skycatcher. But John had other plans for me.
“You know, since you were so nice to Hank, I am going to let you come out and fly with me in the Stinson. Let’s knock out your tailwheel endorsement so you can figure out what to do with your feet and learn that those footrests in the nose-draggers you fly actually have a function in real airplanes. You will have to top off fuel and oil, but because you were so thoughtful to Hank, I won’t charge you a cent beyond that, as my instruction is priceless anyway.”
I lost John some years later due to CFIT while he was ferrying a Cessna 206 in Latin America. The Stinson is also gone, no longer on the FAA rolls.
Unfortunately I lost Hank much earlier than that. About two weeks after I kidnapped him for airport day, the boys and I dropped in at the nursing home to show Hank the newly signed tailwheel endorsement in the back of my logbook. He didn’t answer my knock on his door.
Upon inquiry at the front desk, I found out that he had been moved to a memory care facility. Hank had finally lost his fading memory and needed more help with basic functions than he could get at the nursing home.
We all lost out: His family lost the opportunity to see the bright-eyed little boy disguised as an old man staring in wonder at the airplanes or capture his stories that enthralled other bright-eyed little boys and made them want to go to the airport with their father.
Hank did leave me with those two boys, now grown men, who are always up for an air show or air museum or airplane ride, so all is not lost.
But I will always be burdened with the guilt of having lost Hank’s stories because I was too busy with my own life to capture any of his.
Please, if there is a Hank in your life or there might be one at a nursing home near you, visit him, kidnap him, and take him on “a long walk” to the airport. You might just get your tailwheel endorsement in the process.
And if he tells you any stories, would you please write them down for me?
