Flying Adventures

Imagine The Following

It’s a beautiful Saturday morning, over breakfast you read in the newspaper that there is an antique fair being held in Napa county. Your spouse is an antiques nut so you propose that you fly up to Napa to visit the fair, go out for dinner and wine tasting, spend the night and return on Sunday morning in time for lunch. An hour later, you are on your way to the airport. On the way, your spouse looks up a hotel in your flight guide and calls a hotel to book a room. You tell them that you are flying in and they let you know that they have a pilot’s special price for a room. Then you punch speed dial on your cell phone for a preflight briefing from an FAA specialist and get enroute weather and other information relevant to your flight. When you arrive at the airport you drive up to your plane, stow your bags in the baggage compartment and conduct a brief preflight inspection of the plane. You leave your car parked in the plane’s parking spot and taxi out to the active runway. You take off for Napa county. It is exactly 2 hours since you read the article in the paper. After a leisurely 45-minute flight, during which you flew over the San Francisco bay and admired the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island and the coastline, you land in Napa county. You taxi the plane to the guest parking area and secure the airplane. You get your bags out and walk over to the office of the local flying service where they greet you warmly and let you know that if you fill up the plane with gas, then they’ll lend you their courtesy car for free so you can go over to the antiques fair. You agree and they hand you the keys and tell you that the plane will be topped up and ready when you return in the morning. The next day, you drive the courtesy car back to the airport, pay your bill at the desk and then get in your plane and fly home. You secure the plane, get in your car and drive home in plenty of time for lunch.

You reflect on how difficult, if not impossible, this trip would have been before you had your pilot’s license. The drive up to Napa and back would have been about 8 hours. Out of the question for you with the gridlock on the weekends up through the Bay area. Even assuming there was a flight to Napa, then you would have had to make a last-minute booking at exorbitant rates, get to the airport and park, be there 2 hours early, check in your bags, go for a security check, go through the hassle and time-wasting routine of searches, shoe removal, toothpaste and toiletries in 3 ounce containers and plastic bags etc., etc. You would have been crammed into a small seat with no view, jammed in with other travelers, hoping that nobody had a cold or flu for you to catch in such close quarters. At the other end of your journey you’d hope that your bag had arrived, get a rental car or a taxi, and then finally arrive stressed and frazzled at your hotel to decompress before heading out to the fair. Then, the next day, it would be the same routine all over again. You marvel at how the entire trip, from conception to arrival in Napa took less time than just the wait time at the airport would have been had you gone on the airlines.

On Monday, you get a call from a business prospect in Sacramento. They are interested in working with you, but would like to have face-to-face meetings twice a week for the next few weeks to get the project off the ground. They are really pressed for time and would appreciate a presentation and proposal ASAP as they are in the process of selecting the company they will work with. You tell them that you are very interested in working with them and suggest a meeting the next day so that you can present your ideas. You let them know that you can be there at 9:00 AM. They are impressed that you can arrive on such short notice and ask how that can be. You let them know that you are a pilot and will be flying a small plane to Sacramento Executive Airport in the morning. The manager in charge of the project says he’d be happy to pick you up and then drop you off after the meeting. He’s always been interested in flying.

The manager meets you at the airport in the morning and you drive over to the meeting. On the way he says how much he likes your plane and how he sees that working with you will be much easier since you can pop over to Sacramento easily for meetings. The presentation goes well. The introductions have been jovial and respectful, with people obviously intrigued by a woman who is as comfortable in the cockpit of her own plane as in the boardroom of a major corporation. The next day they call you up to let you know that you have won the contract.