“Best Landing Anyone Ever Made,” Greg’s Father’s Day legacy Flying Carpet column

“We’re out of control!” yelled my father, grabbing the wheel.

“No we’re not.” I replied, grabbing it back.

Ignoring my father wasn’t easy, as he’d been a pilot since before I was born.

He bought his first airplane in 1949, a tiny Aeronca Chief. Soon afterward he traded for an Ercoupe, which he landed in a Missouri farm field to wait out thunderstorms. Pilots don’t do that sort of thing anymore.

“We’re in trouble! I’m taking over!”

“Dad! Please believe me. We’ll be okay…”

Next came a triple-tailed Bellanca Cruisair. “Most efficient airplane I ever owned,” he claimed, “150 mph on 150 hp.”

He earned his instrument rating in that Bellanca, using just a headset, compass, and turn-and-bank indicator. In those days pilots flew airways defined by Morse code — “a” indicated one side of course, and “n,” the other. On course aviators were treated to a steady tone. No frilly moving maps, back then.

My dad’s one metal bender occurred in that Bellanca, which had retractable landing gear manually extended by many turns of a crank…

**Read Greg’s complete legacy Father’s Day column, “Best Landing Anyone Ever Made“** (Mobile-friendly version here.)

Photo 1: “Harold Brown kisses his Cessna 310’s good engine in the Azores Islands, after losing the other engine 250 miles from land.” 

Photo 2: “Cessna 310C similar to the one flown by Harold Brown and Eddie Hayes ‘the long way’ across the Atlantic, in 1962.”

(This column first appeared in AOPA Flight Training magazine. **Read an expanded version of this story in my book, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane.)

Greg

©2019 Gregory N. Brown