It’s got an ASA embroidered liner and has about two seasons of flying on it. It’s in fine shape. $200 cash and I’ll deliver it to somewhere near you (within reason) to expedite/save on the shipping process. That’s a great bargain, especially if you’re a new hire pilot somewhere. Perrone will set you up with a new liner if you want a different style or need a company logo. Most folks don’t bother changing logos – mine has Continental Express in it and I’ve never flown a ConEx flight. A true collector’s item, seeing as how ASA doesn’t really exist as such anymore.

Contact me if you’re interested.

But this year I made a vow to myself. I wouldn’t let another gift card expire, because I’m the world’s worst. In years past, one could buy me an unloaded gift card for Christmas and I’d have never known the difference… because I NEVER remembered to use them.

Today I went to a hobby shop looking to replace the battery in my Cub. They didn’t have a battery by itself, but they had one in a package with a whole new plane that flies even better, so they said. Score. I unloaded two gift cards, and charged the battery on the way home. Took off in the driveway and circled the yard for several minutes.



I went inside feeling like I was age seven, except that nobody yelled at me to pull my shoes off at the door.

(Dear Amy, I did pull the shoes off, though! )

It started innocently enough. When you’re from a small town in Georgia, there ain’t a lot to do for entertainment other than create tricycle motors. I was socially awkward, so the other form of entertainment was 4-H club. Georgia played Texas Tech for 4-H Club night, so we went. I mean, why not? College football. Road trip. Yeehaw.

Well, part of the small town deal is there ain’t but so many adults to go around, and my mom drove school buses. She ended up driving our van for this adventure, which was going swimmingly, until a tire blew out somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Unable to believe that her own son might possibly know how to change a tire, she limped on the rim to a service station, where a wrench bender used an impact wrench to remove the shredded tire. Zip, Zip, Zip, Zip, Zip. Off. Out came the spare.

Zip, Zip, Zip, Zip, Zip. On. My friend Ryan and I exchanged knowing glances. You don’t put a wheel on with an impact wrench going in a circular pattern. You use a star-shaped torque sequence to ensure the wheel is pulled up flush against the hub – otherwise you may end up with a crooked tire. We said something about it as we wobbled out of the parking lot, but you’d best not try to add delay to University of Georgia fans who are worried about missing the opening kickoff.

We wobbled our way to Sanford Stadium, and we watched Georgia get thumped, if I remember. It may have been the other way around. There was a good looking blonde in our group I was trying to woo; the game was of lesser concern.

We worked our way to the van after the game, pointed it west and wobbled homeward. I’ve been in airplanes with unbalanced propellers, and boats that tried to shake themselves apart after striking a stump. This was the worst vibration I’ve felt in a moving vehicle.

The sun sank behind the horizon. On we rolled, just hoping the van could hold together another hundred miles.

It didn’t.

We rolled to a stop on the I-20 exit for Moreland Avenue in East Atlanta, probably sometime around 10 p.m. My Grandmother had joined Mom for this adventure, fully qualified for this venture because she possessed a cellular telephone. Do remember, this was 1994 or so. This phone lived in a bag with a shoulder strap, and that was some well-to-do accouterments at the time in Haralson County-By-God-Georgia.

Granny’s grand moment had arrived: She was going to save the day by calling for help. She would be a hero to us all, except… the phone was locked.

In the panic, she forgot the lock code. She had a thousand-dollar brick in her hands.

Today, I’m a lot more calm about the world than I was back then. We were all a bunch of white folks from the middle of nowhere, stuck on an exit ramp in a somewhat rough neighborhood of Atlanta.

If you’ll pardon my foul mouth in advance, scared shitless is exactly what we were.

I think we’d have gotten hemp quicker had someone thrown that Motorola chunk of plastic in the road. It was big enough to merit someone stopping rather than mowing it down.

A tow truck loomed in the mirror. We were saved. We waved it down, but the driver was responding to another call. He called in our plight to the dispatcher, who ordered another truck to pick us up.

Shortly, we blinked to find ourselves in the towing company’s yard, then hustled into the office where we set up residence while our chaperones tried to make sense of our predicament and how to go from here. For the next two hours, we watched the guy behind the desk play with his pistol while some workers scoured the yard to see if they could find us a wheel to swap out just to get everyone home for the night.

No joy.

They never said exactly where it came from, but some time after the search within the yard concluded, a driver walked in the door with a tire that would fit. We were saved – we just didn’t ask many questions.

We got home considerably later than planned – it was something like 3 or 4 a.m. My folks have never been night owls – in fact, they’re usually in bed before it gets totally dark. So, you can imagine how mom was functioning at this point.

We got everyone to the County extension office and once everyone had been picked up, we went on home. We dropped Granny at her house, then drove the last two miles to our house.

There was a note on the door: “Greg (my daddy) in hospital. Call there to check….” Daddy had stepped in the hole left by a rotting stump while hunting. He broke both bones in one leg just above the ankle, and he was off his feet for a very long time. With him out of work, and Mom scrambling to put food on the table, this very bad night set the tone for what became the very bad winter which gave rise to the charity Christmas. But, that’s another story for another time.

But hey, just remember: If you ever have a wheel stolen, you may have unwittingly helped a club of stranded high school students get home. Probably not, I know, but if you can convince yourself, it will ease the pain.

New Year’s Day. Headed to Jackson, Miss. Just as with my Facebook post, I’m batting 1.000 on putting the wrong year on dates so far.

Taking flight in the Bücker Jungmann is pure time travel... without need for a flux capacitor

My first hands-on aerobatic flying was in 1996 with Chris Smisson, the late, great aerobatic pilot of West Georgia who ended up adopting me as his airport kid. I was 15-years-old. Before my real flight instructor had taught me to land, Smisson taught me inverted turns along a road and around a point.  What normally makes an airplane climb, makes an inverted airplane dive. In an upright airplane, you move the stick the direction you want to go. In an inverted aircraft, you push the stick to the outside of the turn. I’ll give you a minute to think about those maneuvers and where they rank in the pat-your-head-and-rub-your-belly hierarchy.

The Zlin I was flying was a rarity in America, but a staple of aerobatic flying in the rest of the world. Renowned for its nimble, balanced handling, people who know aerobatic planes long to fly a Zlin. They look like a poor man’s World War II fighter plane, with bubble canopies, retracting tailwheel landing gear, and a long snoot filled with an inverted inline engine that snapped and barked like a tiny Merlin or Daimler engines from the warbird crowd.

In other words, I grew up spoiled. Absolutely rotten.

Airborne and climbing fueled by 100LL avgas and a decade of daydreams

But Smisson and the crowd knew that the Zlin 526s weren’t the end-all when it came to beautiful flying machines that looked good, too. He used to tell me that the Zlin flew almost as good as a Bücker Jungmann. He called it the Stradivarius of aerobatic ships. There was one nearly in the backyard, the whole time, and I never did capitalize on the opportunity. Until now.

The comparison was more than just a thin connection – the Zlins and Bückers are kissing cousins. Karl Büker helped set up SAAB in Sweeden, then he came home and decided he could do the same thing on his home turf. In six months, he and a few other players designed and built the Bü-131 “Jungmann” which saw service in the early 1930s as a two-seat aerobatic training aircraft. The later models Bü-133 “Jungmeister” and and Bü-181 “Bestmann” evolved into a single-seat aerobatic beast and a two-seat touring aircraft, respectively. The Bestmann was built under license by the Czech in a town called Zlin, and it’s of little doubt where the lines found in the Zlin -26 series found their inspiration. In fact, many assemblies such as landing gear bits, seats, and control system fitments can be interchanged between the two.

Back to the Jungmann, though. Smisson always told me I had to go fly a Jungmann. Yesterday, I finally did just that.

Enter Gordon Clement. He’s a Gulfstream pilot for a big company here in Atlanta, and he owns N1947G, A Jungmann with a history. This airplane was converted to single-seat configuration for the late Jim Moser, a large Floridian whose frame didn’t fit the teutonic mold cast by most German Luftwaffe pilots of the 1930s and 1940s. He made it a big man’s airplane, and modified it for the air show business. Moser died of cancer in 2002. Gordon bought the Jungmann, and promptly spent a boatload of money undoing much of Moser’s mods. It’s not that he’d made a bad plane of the Jungmann, at all. He’d added horsepower and that’s usually a good thing. But he’d also nixed the bird’s ability to haul a passenger along.

The grin is still there as I write.

Right now I want to thank Gordon for shelling out the bucks to un-modify his plane, which allowed Amy and I to be signatures 124 and 125 on the list of people who’ve gone for a ride with him. Wingwalking was never a hobby of mine, and I’m glad I didn’t have to start that in order to go up with him.

Taxiing out, I recognized many of the sights from the Zlins: clusters of small steel tubes made structures that seem intricate and delicate by contemporary American standards. (Remember, this airplane was the European contemporary of the Stearman, a giant box-kite in comparison). The way the upper fuselage tubing angles in and goes under the corners of the instrument panel is identical to that in the Zlins I’m so used to. It felt very familiar, except for the place where my left arm came to rest: the throttle pushrod. I found that if I scunched down, either to give Gordon a better view, or under increased G-loading, that the power eased back. It’s something I’ll have to learn to deal with!

To answer the question right out front: No, I didn’t solo it. I didn’t even get to wring it out. Sadly, my stick and rudder skills have decayed so far in 4 years of airline flying, that all I could do was a couple of tight turns, a roll or two, and a half-Cuban-eight.

Rolling circles in the Zlin were sort of “My” maneuver. I WANT SO BADLY to do one in the Bücker but I’d have just embarrassed myself yesterday had I tried.

It was like getting the nod from Scarlett Johansson, then getting it stuck in your pants zipper. There was some heavy petting and a little kissing, enough of a test drive to let me know I’ve got to have one, someday. After I’d flopped around the sky, frustrated at my lack of ability to handle a rudder anymore, I handed her back to Gordon. He pulled right up into a hammerhead turn, reversed direction and slowed back to what felt like a crawl, and we flicked around in the most graceful snaproll I’ve had the pleasure of riding through. A stock DeHavilland Chipmunk tries to shake every pane of glass out of the canopy. Zlins buffet pretty aggressively. The Jungmann yawned, as if to say, “well, if you insist,” then  flew the aerobatic figure that has made her a star for nearly 70 years. This is where the artsy types would use the Stradivarius reference. Alas, most folks can’t play the fiddle and have no appreciation for what a fine piece of kit that a Stradivari axe really is. So…

Flying the Jungmann is, to me, the embodiment of all the flying dreams we have. One doesn’t dream of buffets, shudders and having to gear my brain to mesh into an airplane’s automation. One dreams of the bovine-scented air rising up from the pasture off the end of the runway, the swish of air around a flying helmet, and of the horizon tumbling round in a perfect, gentle snap roll.

Now the Bücker can’t hold up against the modern aerobatic steeds in terms of numbers, and I don’t mean to let on that it could wow the Xbox-desensitized-crowds of teens and tweens today. But they’re honest airplanes with the best control harmony I’ve felt. And I’ve flown a bunch of airplanes. You think about where you want to go, and you get there. There is no difficulty communicating inputs to the airplane – you become one in short order.

Gordon, Amy and I.

Reading list:

http://www.bucker.info/

Budd Davisson takes 1947G for a spin, 31 years ago: http://airbum.com/pireps/PirepJungmann.html He’s a better storyteller than I’ll ever be.

Shrimp and grits taco. Verde Taqueria, Atlanta