If You Can’t Fly the Plane You Love, Fly the Plane You’re In

Jimmy Franklin showed up unannounced at the FBO lounge in Ocala the other day, where I was hanging out during a local fly-in. 

I haven’t seen Jimmy for at least fifteen years, and except for a little less hair on his head and the remaining hair being gray instead of brown, he looked the same as he did at “Pound Night” (all you can drink for a pound) at the bar in Brighton, England, during the London layover when I last saw him.

He was the real deal: Naval Academy graduate, fighter pilot, test pilot, airline pilot and, let’s face it, all-around aviator. After the airlines, he flew a Pitts Special doing airshows. I was curious to find out what he flew in today. 

Would it be a warbird like a P-51? One of those fancy single-engine Cirrus Jets? An antique gem like a Beech 18?

Nope.

It was an Ercoupe. 

Definitely nothing fancy, and it was quite a comedown from the 777s we used to slip the surlies in as we jauntily traversed various oceans together. 

“Nice ride,” I said.

“It keeps me out of the pucker-brush,” he returned.

After drinking the required amount of coffee and catching up, we sauntered out to the flight line so I could get a better look at his flying machine. 

His plane didn’t have full-time autothrottles like our 777s used to, but it did have a com radio, a transponder, and a tail beacon, so it was ADS-B capable. No fancy TV screen displays, but its whiskey compass card was floating happily in a sea of fluid, and the numbers were visible.

The paint on the Ercoupe was not exactly pristine, but it was at least ten dollars better than an Earl Shieb “I will paint your car any color for $49” job. It was white with a faded blue pinstripe, and the N-number was in gold. 

The Coupe looked like it had been flown hard and put up wet, to use a cowboy term, and a very small dab of oil had fallen out of the cowling during the hour it had been on the ramp.

After admiring his machine, we toddled over to my mighty Cessna 140 a few tie-downs away. My bird was in a little better shape than Jim’s, but it also looked a little “well used” if you catch my drift. 

“Nice cowling latch,” he said, noticing that one of my latches was kept in place using gaffer’s tape. 

“I’ve been meaning to get to that,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to for about three years now, but the tape seems to do the job, and you have to admit that it adds to the whole panache of my plane.”

“Well,” Jim said, “I’ve seen worse. Wanna go flying?”

Yes, I did. We flew my airplane first, and it turned out that Jim still had some tailwheel skills even though he hadn’t flown a taildragger in 50 years. His last taildragger was my first—flying banners over the beach. 

We ate lunch and then flew his Ercoupe so I could show off my “no rudder pedals” skills. I hadn’t flown a ‘coupe in a half century. I used to fly the living snot out of one back when I had more zits than money, and I loved flying it out of Lakeland, Florida—buzzing cows and doing amazing low-level 90-knot flybys over the frat parties that Florida Southern College guys used to hold in the cow pastures near the airport.

Those pastures are now the vast showgrounds of the Sun ‘N Fun fly-in, but I digress.

The sun was setting over the Ocala National Forest, and the manatees were bedding down for a good night’s snooze as Jim and I joined up at the Holiday Inn Pub for a dinner of bar food, beer, and memories.

We talked about other bars where we had wasted our youth in places like Shreveport, Tokyo, and Vancouver. We laughed at stories we told each other about the weird people we flew with and the amazingly funny situations we found ourselves in during our years of youthful mustaches, manual-shift sports cars, and late-night overcooked coach meals eaten in a thousand cockpits.

We promised each other to stay in touch. A futile promise, I suspect, and then we stumbled to our rooms using much the same stumble we used when we flew state-of-the-art subsonic people movers back in our youth.

I crashed on my bed but could not get to sleep right away because something occurred to me that I should have mentioned to Jim.

It is all good, I thought. I got to fly some pretty cool airplanes, but you know what? I had just as much fun flying Jim’s raggedy-assed Ercoupe as I ever did flying a huge jet over oceans. Three landings in my Cessna 140 today are just as enjoyable as doing an ILS in a heavy snowstorm in Boston.

Back in the days of me chasing the time to get an airline job and running from one airplane to the other during my career to get one more type rating to go to one more continent, I thought it was all about the airplane I was flying, but it wasn’t.

It never was about the airplane; it was about the flying and the people.

If you are out there in the wonderful world of flight right now, dreaming and fretting about that next bigger, faster, or possibly better-paying airplane, I hope you come to the realization, like I did, that it is the airplane you are flying today, with the people here today to fly it with you, that matters.