Intrepid Women: Piper Cherokee Rising

by Kate St. Vincent Vogl (New York City)

Flying by the seat of your pants is more than making things up as you go along. It’s trusting your instincts. I learned how in a Piper Cherokee. Not the first small plane I’d ever been in, but the first time for me in the left seat.

My flight instructor had a comb-over and shoulders hunched from years of folding into impossibly small cockpits. I was so sure I’d earn quicker than most. For years my family had planes—Beechcraft, Cessena, Mitsubishi. I already knew about the walk around, the preflight checklist. I knew to yell “Clear!” before starting the propeller. But, I didn’t know I couldn’t count on the instruments, white numbers dialed in black upon a dusty instrument panel.My instructor tapped upon the altimeter. “Now, see, this isn’t right,” he said, readjusting the Kollsman window. We were on the ground, props quiet, but the instrument claimed we were already 500 feet in the air. And I’m supposed to rely on that thing?

A simple fix, my flight instructor said, just adjust the dial to the field elevation before take-off. It’s a barometer, not a measuring stick, so the weather affects it. Trusting intuition in decision-making—exactly what Malcolm Gladwell extolls in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

With that, we were off. A simple push of the throttle, and the plane picked up speed along the two-seven runway. (Pilot speak for heading west.) We’d barely passed 55 mph when the plane lifted off the ground. A different feeling of lightness this time, with the control stick in my hands, my feet on both rudders.

I spent that summer in a cerulean sky, looking for other planes not at intersections, but materializing out of specks in that three-dimensional traffic pattern.

And so it went – lesson after lesson of planned stalls, lifting the nose up in the air, higher, higher, until we lifted to a stop, and the instructor would have me power through the machine’s hesitation. Or he’d push the throttle all the way in, at 3200 feet, and ask where I’d land. “Careful banking the wings to look down,” he’d say, “you don’t want to start a downward spiral.” A patch of green below to my left, a soft field landing? He’d nod, smile hidden beneath his bristle-brush mustache.

Then, one day, he asked me to head back to the airport mid-lesson. Unusual, I thought, but banked the plane home. I’d learned how to pick out the criss-crossed lanes of runways, airplane hangers like Monopoly hotels lining the taxiways. I eased the plane into the landing pattern, cranked the ailerons on final without being told.

When we rolled to a stop at the tiny, one-room terminal next to the gravel parking lot, my instructor propped opened his door. “I think you’re ready to solo,” he said, as if not entirely sure. He unfolded himself out of the cockpit. The wind tried pulling him back towards me, but on he pushed to the terminal, shoulders hunched.

Finally. No more telling me when to power back, give more right rudder, or trim the elevator by spinning the dial on the overhead console.

But how would I know when to do all that?

Especially considering that, on this runway, I’d have to clear a stretch of telephone wires just before landing. I’d known a pilot who’d tangled in those wires, losing a fiancé and his future in the paraplegic aftermath.

And then, from the terminal, I was cleared for takeoff. Throttle in, right rudder down, and the little Cherokee jumped in the air, a whole person lighter than I’d flown with before. That’s when I felt the weight shift in my hips from the torque of the engines—the feeling always before masked by an instructor too quick to correct, by a student too eager to listen to a teacher instead of her gut.

I banked the plane in the pattern, down the long stretch and kept the runway in perfect parallel to the path I carved through nothingness.

On final approach, the trees were too large below me. I pushed in the throttle, needing more lift before I could answer my instructor, whose voice began crackling over the radio. He wanted me to give the plane more throttle. “Already powered up,” I said, before flaring the plane to gentle its landing gear upon the ground.

A friend of mine, a president of a bank, once mused how some hesitate making a decision if it’s not clear what to do. Like on those multiple choices that drove us crazy on tests. No absolute rights, no absolute wrongs, just pros and cons hanging in the balance, and still: “Sometimes you just need to trust your gut, you know?” she said.

Or fly by the seat of your pants.