Ron was a member of an online photography club that communicated with each other by group email. He was known and even a little admired in this group of 312 enthusiasts for his aviation pictures. He opened a new email and then used his group setting to address it to all 312 members of the photography group, none of whom he had actually met in person. In the subject box, he wrote: Jake Kingsley and his wife visit Pocatello Airport. He then wrote the body of the email.
I was working the ramp the other day at Pocatello Airport and who should fly in but Jake Kingsley and his wife Laura in their Avanti-180! Such a beautiful aircraft! They were nice enough to let me take a few pictures of the plane and one with me standing with them! Very nice people! I’ll try to catch a shot of the plane taking off when they leave. Hope I’ll be there for it!
He attached the jpegs in his folder to the email. This took a while as he could only afford dialup internet access, but finally, the email was ready. He pushed the send button, sending copies of Jake, Laura, and himself out over the internet in a format that could easily be sent onto others and attached to other files.
And soon, this is exactly what would happen.
Chapter 13: Touching Bases
Posted: 29.06.2023, 04:50:27
Pocatello, Idaho
December 7, 1996
It was a beautiful day for flying, with bright sunny skies and only scattered high-level clouds all the way to their destination. The air temperature was still rather cold—it was 31 degrees at Pocatello Airport, 34 degrees at South Valley Regional just outside Salt Lake City—but this was not a concern for an aircraft that routinely flew at high altitude where the temperature was 40 to 60 below zero.
“You’re sure this thing is safe,” asked Joey, Laura’s oldest brother, from the copilot’s seat next to Jake (Jake had locked out his controls). He was gripping the side of the seat and looked extremely nervous.
“I hardly ever crash this thing,” Jake assured him as he rolled along the taxiway toward the head of runway 17.
“Hardly ever?” Joey asked, alarmed.
Jake chuckled. “Just a joke,” he said. “Statistically, you’re about fifty times safer in here with me than you would be driving in a car to SLC.”
“If you say so,” Joey said. The only time he had flown in an aircraft prior to today had been a fishing trip he and Sarah had taken to Alaska five years before, going from Salt Lake City to Seattle to Anchorage and then back again. Those aircraft had been considerably larger than this one. And they had been flown by professional pilots, not a rock musician who perhaps had more money than sense.
“I do,” Jake said. “Now remember. The cockpit is supposed to be sterile right now. No unnecessary conversation until we get up above ten thousand feet.”
“Right,” Joey said. He turned and looked over his shoulder. “You hear that back there?”
Grace and Chastity were sitting in the seats just behind the cockpit. Brian was sitting in one of the rear-facing seats behind them. None of them had ever flown on any sort of aircraft before and all had varying degrees of nervousness on their own faces, but all had enough of a sense of adventure that they had not turned down Jake’s invitation to take them out on a little day trip.
Jake stopped at the hold-line and went through his takeoff checklist to make sure the aircraft was properly configured. As was his habit, he read off the items aloud. Altimeter was calibrated. Flaps were set for takeoff. Bleed air was set to automatic. Aileron trim and rudder trim were both set for takeoff. Altitude was dialed in at fifteen thousand feet, their cruising altitude for most of the thirty-minute flight. The tower controller told Jake he was clear for takeoff whenever he wanted to go. He thanked the controller and then throttled up, getting the aircraft moving. He turned onto the runway and aligned with the center line.
“All right,” he told his passengers. “Here we go.”
He throttled up to ninety percent. The engine noise increased and the plane began to pick up speed, rolling down the runway.
“V1,” Jake called out when they reached ninety-three knots. And then, “Rotate,” when they reached ninety-six knots a second later.
He pulled back on the yoke and the nose came up. The Avanti broke contact with the ground and began to climb into the sky. Joey was looking out the cockpit window in terrified wonder as the ground dropped away.
“Positive rate of climb,” Jake said. “Gear up.” He reached over and flipped up the lever.
When they got more than a thousand feet above the ground, he retracted the flaps and let the plane nose down a bit and start to pick up speed.
“This is sooooo friggin’ cool!” he heard Chastity exclaim from behind him. She was staring out the window in awe.
“I’m not really sure I like this,” Brian said, his voice cracking a little. “It feels like we’re falling.”
“We’re not falling,” Jake assured him. “I just reduced the rate of climb. That makes if feel like you’re falling. The sensation will pass.”
Grace, meanwhile, was snapping pictures out her window with a small instant camera she had bought just for the occasion. “I’m going to paint this view,” she declared. She sounded like she was having a blast back there. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Grace, like everyone else in Joey’s family, had warmed up considerably to Jake and Laura over the past two days. She was still extremely shy, but she was no longer catatonic in his presence. The two of them had actually had an extended conversation the night before about the visual arts and music and how the two differed from and related to each other. She was a very intelligent girl, he had found, with surprising insight into the subject.
Since the runway he had taken off from faced generally south, and since Salt Lake City was just a few degrees east of due south from Pocatello, only a slight turn was needed to get the aircraft on course. He brought them up to fifteen thousand and then let the autopilot take over. He could have actually had it do that shortly after takeoff had he wanted, but it always made first time flyers feel better to see him actually controlling the plane himself during the climb-out instead of just sitting back with his hands in his lap.
“All right,” Jake said as the auto-throttle reduced their engine thrust to sixty-one percent. “We’re at fifteen thousand feet now and traveling at three hundred and fifteen knots true airspeed. That’s about three hundred and sixty miles per hour over the ground.”
Joey, who looked a little more relaxed now (though still quite nervous), nodded his head in approval. “That’s pretty damn fast,” he said.
“That’s the beauty of flying,” Jake said. “It gets you there fast and you get to see some cool shit along the way.”
“The view is incredible from up here,” Joey had to admit. “I can see the whole river down there. And the canyons! I never realized how big and how deep they were.”
“I can see the interstate down there!” Grace proclaimed. “Look how tiny it looks! You can barely see the cars on it!”
“There’s a mountain down there that looks like a big boob!” Chastity added. “It even has a nipple on it!”