Ramblings2

It’s been quite a ride from there to here, It’s been fun and worth all of the ups and downs. For every up there is a down but for pilots those are called happy landings. I’ve been blessed to have had many of those in my life of flying.

I first started flying in 1964, but my love for it started long before that.  When I was about 14 we were living in one of the most beautiful places on earth, Bend Oregon. Its a place where when you wake up there, the first thing you have to do is thank the good lord you are there, and for making such a beautiful place just for you. While there my family made friends with a neighbor and his family.  It just so happened that he was a pilot and really loved airplanes and flying.  He would take us around to the local and nearby towns to visit the airports, and we would walk around the planes and he would tell us about each one, and would always point out what made it special.  You really can’t do that much anymore do to the world we now live in, and the need for security.  Because of this early experience, I too was able to learn to love all aircraft and to value their difference’s.  (I think there’s a lesson for life in there), Example, after I became a flight instructor, students would ask me things like which is better a high wing or a low wing?  I would tell them neither is better than the other, it just depends on how you are going to use it.  For instance working around a busy airport and mostly on good hard surface runways a low wing offers better visibility in the air around other traffic.  Now then, working out of rough short strips where downward visibility is a plus the high wing is a better choice.

Back a little to my time as a young man in Bend Or. we were visiting the local airport one day and my friend was talking with a man who had a J3 Piper cub, what a neat looking plane that was to look at.  The engine sat proudly way out front and didn’t have any covering over most of it so you could get a really good look at it.  It had a beautiful prop made of wood and polished to a shine. So when my friend introduced me to the man he told him I had never been up in a plane before and the man asked if I would like to go up right then.  A magic moment was created right then, I don’t think I could have smiled any more. Remember this was a 1934 Piper Cub with 65hp, I thought it was the neatest and fastest thing I had ever experenced.  We flew low with the top side door open, over the sage brush with the wind and the noise, it couldn’t have been any better.  Little did I know from that spark a fire would start and I would go on to dedicating most of my life to being a Pilot and loving every moment of it. So if you get a chance to take some one up that has never flown before don’t pass up the opportunity, you never no what kind of a spark you might create. An other example we bought our first airplane in 1966, a Cessna 140 a modern airplane compared to the cub, wow it was neat.  My wife and I had three children over the next few years.  A boy a girl and another boy.  Today my first son is a aerospace engineer at Edwards Airforce Base in California and works with our largest airplanes the C5a and the C17.  My daughter never turns down an opportunity to go flying and loves to do extreme unusual attitudes for fun, I think she would rather fly than eat.  Then my youngest son turned out to be a professional pilot of both Airplane and Helicopters, he is currently flying a S61 helicopter air tanker on the fires in southern California, I couldn’t be any prouder of them all.  So there you have it why I’m a Pilot and why I love it so much.

 Ok, after over 40 years of flying I have a lot of story’s I want to share with you all but I thought I better start from from the begining and tell you where I came from.  So stop back by and see what new is cooking and also I want to hear from you, tell me your story and let me share it with others.

Your friend in the sky, Jim Akin

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