The six guys pictured on my home page — labeled Frequent Flyers — are the people I fly with the most. (I’ve redesigned the site since I wrote this. The six guys are Doug Traub, Mike Nadler, Dave North, Bruce Crawford, Gary Morgan and me. You can see most of us at the bottom of this page or browse the Faces pages to see everyone.)

Most weekday mornings, Doug, Mike, Dave and I fly together at Baylands (except in winter, when Doug rents a cabin in the mountains and skis). The others show up once or twice a week.

Bruce has to drive an hour to get to Baylands. Gary has a day job: he runs a CNC machine shop. Bob has other stuff to do.

We’re all retired, except for Gary. But Gary can take long breaks while his robotic machines gnaw away at chunks of metal.

By rights, I should add George Kulcher to the Frequent Flyers, because he often joins us. But when I made the page, George was in a different orbit and wasn’t around very much.

Middays we’re joined by the lunch break crowd, many of whom also qualify as Frequent Flyers.

But by the time they arrive, I’m getting ready to leave. So they’re not my Frequent Flyers.

I generally arrive at Baylands around 9 or 10 a.m. and drive home between noon and 1 p.m. By then the wind is usually pretty brisk and the noonday flyers have taken over the sky. Within those three or four hours, I often fly for one solid hour, occasionally a bit more.

Doug appeared at Baylands about a year and a half ago. He showed up one day with a flying wing, similar to what I was flying. Neither of us knew how to fly very well, but we were determined to learn, and we returned every day with our wings.

For a day or two I called him “Dan,” and he was nice enough not to correct me. I soon learned that he had a wicked sense of humor and we became friends.

Months later on a blustery day, Bruce showed up. He was struggling to learn to fly, he told me. By then, I thought I could fly pretty well, so I demonstrated my proficiency with a lovely little Mountain Models Switchback.

The wind, which usually comes from the north, was blowing hard from the south. I took off and the plane went north quite quickly. It went so far so fast that I couldn’t judge its orientation to turn it around. I quickly lost it.

Dave North, always a wise owl, remarked that it’s a good idea to fly one lap around the field when the weather is strange. He was so right!

Bruce thanked me for deliberately crashing my plane just to make him comfortable, and he joined me on my quest to find the plane.

The poor plane was in a watery part of the Great Swamp. I had a rope. Bruce knew some good knots and he could throw the rope very well. We rescued the plane and became friends that day, though I didn’t see him again for a month or two.

Dave was a Baylands fixture, flying ridiculously well. I had read his postings on some of the Radio Control forums and was in awe of his knowledge and his ability.

But Doug, Bruce and I flew recklessly and wreckfully in the beginning, and I’m sure Dave would have been much happier without us.

Bob was a regular, flying very well, teasing us and offering tips on how to improve. (”Fly closer to yourself,” he told me, but I was still too shaky to take his good advice.)

Gary joined us one day, cheerful and strangely competent for a new flyer.

Mike came a while later, a veteran flyer.

We have become a sort of a club, so informal that I can’t figure out where it begins and where it ends.

I consider them all my friends.

Every now and then I’ll find myself all alone at Baylands. That’s a great day — a big empty California sky, 360 degrees of grass and trees and mountains and brush, quiet broken only by the wind, bird calls and the soft whine of my motor. I feel like a privileged guest at a lux flying resort.

But on special days, maybe once or twice a month, the planets align and all the Frequent Flyers show up. Those are the best days.

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I couldn’t find a group picture of the Frequent Flyers for this blog entry. I’ll work on that. What you see instead is Gary adjusting his Morgan Hurler for my Multiplex Micro Jet.

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

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 2:58 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.