Page 20 - Volume 18 Number 10

18 • TWIN & TURBINE OCTOBER 2014From The Flight Deck by Kevin R. DingmanGA-AppreciationFriday morning and come back on Sunday evening. To emphasize the contrast in convenience, let’s attempt this hypothetical trip on the airlines. And you can’t use your plane to get to the mid-sized regional airport to begin the trip either.Go on-line and surf through the jungle of travel and airline web sites to find what you believe to be the best value for this trip. You will discover later, at the unattended kiosk near the ticket counter, that you forgot to pay for your wife’s carry-on. And the checked bag you did pay for is overweight by twelve pounds, so you must pay fifty dollars more. Your golf clubs are an automatic fee of $100. You also can’t sit next to your wife because of a glitch in the system. All of these trials will come later in the adventure. For now, print your itinerary and boarding passes (to save $10 per person at the counter) and hit the road....literally.Glamorous PartDrive your car an hour or three to a regional airport that has air service to the Big City Airport that you need to use for your connection to the next Big City Airport. Don’t stop for directions – prime directive you know. Once you find the airport, park your car a couple of miles from the terminal and pay the equivalent of your annual electronic chart subscription to park for three days. Next, head into the terminal for the glamorous part; I hope you wore clean socks, that you know the 3-1-1 rule about liquids and gels, and that you left every bit of your hunting gear at home in a different bag.Ihad to drive to a GA airport a while back and was having trouble finding it. Ask anyone; ground navigation is not my forte. I searched the sky in the hope of seeing a fellow aviator that could point me towards the airport. Some seagulls appeared but they were landing off-airport, which provided no help at all. A desperate move, but better than what happened next.Succumbing to a stunted level of patience, I violated the prime directive of all male drivers: I stopped for directions. Not to worry, the GPS and compass in my phone will prevent a repetition of this travesty.I figured the destination airport was within about ten miles when the PATIENCE-LOW light on my forehead illuminated. Trained to never ignore such things, I pulled into a gas station. The clerk recognized the wandering look on my face and asked what I was trying to find. When I told him the name of the local airport, he responded with “we have an airport?” He had no idea that the town in which he lived had its very own airport. He thought the nearest airport was one of those big, commercial airliner airports three hours away.DisorientedMy destination was a paint shop at said airport and I eventually got directions from them. It was a bit embarrassing but the owner was sympathetic – likely because being “disoriented” on the ground is a familiar guy-thing. Had he known that I’d violated the prime directive by stopping at a gas station, the Duke might be sporting chastising graffiti instead of a fine paint scheme.When you own an airplane, you benefit from the freedom andefficiencies it provides. And you normally do not need directions. But, as demonstrated by the surprised gas station clerk, most non-pilots know only of the Big City airports. And most don’t know that there are thousands of GA airports. They also don’t know that, if they choose, they to can fly from one of these “little airports” and enjoy the convenience.AirlinesTo highlight the utility of GA and the convenience we enjoy, I offer this dramatization: Take a golfing and dinner trip, of a reasonable distance, from one small town to another small town. Let’s say Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, to Pierre, South Dakota. It’s a 690 nm trip and neither airport is served by scheduled air service. Leave early