I crashed my yellow OverLord wing Over The Fence (OTF) at Baylands today.

The Fence separates the park from the restored wetlands area, which I think of as The Swamp. In the rainy season it’s spongy and slimy. During the dry months it’s mostly cracked and crumbly dirt nursing a tangle of brambles, burrs and prickly weeds. A finger of brackish water runs though it and within that slip of water lie two miniscule islands.

I’ve named that ribbon of water the Slough of Despond, from John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.”

This miry slough is such a place as cannot be mended: it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore it is called the Slough of Despond.

Last year and the year before I landed OTF so many times that I began to think of The Swamp as a local airport. But these crashes were costly, not just the physical damage, but the humiliation. Was I the worst flyer ever?

Let’s not answer that right now, but in the last six months I changed my flying habits in two ways that greatly reduced OTF incidents: I flew lower, and I flew closer to myself.

As a beginning flyer, I had learned that it’s safest to fly about three mistakes high. In other words, high enough that you can commit three pilot errors before you hit the ground. I also learned to fly far from myself and others so I wouldn’t hit them or their airplanes.

But this distant flying technique had two downsides: it’s hard to judge the orientation of your plane at a distance, which may cause you to lose control and then apply the wrong corrections, and if you do crash you’re likely to spend an hour or so trying to find where your plane landed, OTF or otherwise.

So I tamed my flying, but I wasn’t advancing my technique. My flying friends all fly inverted, execute precision maneuvers and pull off daring acrobatic stunts while I wheel slowly around the field, flying low and close and boring.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to learn inverted flying. The gotcha here is that when you’re upside-down, up is down and down is up. Mercifully, right and left don’t switch.

If I try to fly inverted while I’m close to the ground, I crash. If I fly very high — three mistakes high — and then turn the plane upside down, I can make it work. But now I’m far away again, and if I’m not careful…

So today I’m flying far away and high up, flying over The Swamp, in fact, and I flip the plane over and I’m cruising smoothly, upside down, all is well and Dave Melara walks behind me and says hello.

I turn my head to see who’s talking and quickly forget how to fly upside down. In the distance, I see the yellow wing dive behind a bush, well OTF.

Soon I’m standing at The Fence, wondering if the wing is in the Slough of Despond, or perhaps on Dismal Island, or in the hinterlands beyond. I’m hoping for the hinterlands.

A half hour later I’ve opened an unlocked gate and walked behind Dismal Island. The ground is dry, but my socks are itchy with spiky seeds. I’m thinking the plane is under water when I hear a faint beep. It’s the plane’s speed control, which beeps every 30 seconds or so when it loses the transmitter signal.

In a few minutes the beeps have led me to the plane, undamaged by its abrupt landing.

So it’s a brand new year and I’m already OTF.

Let me see: should I fly conservatively or learn new tricks? Can I do both?

Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Crashes, Flying, Radio Control, Water.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Baylands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.