Previous Bravo Blog...

I became interested in flying at a very young age, as I watched T-38s screaming through the skies around the former Williams AFB in Mesa, Arizona. I entered AFROTC to become an F-15 jock and was a senior scheduled to go to Undergraduate Pilot Training when the Vietnam Conflict ended.

With the war over the AF had too many pilots and didn't want to train anymore, so I was put into Air Intelligence and sent to Lowry AFB in Denver. The week after I reported for duty I joined the Base Aero Club and started learning to fly. It was just $12 per hour wet and $5 per hour for an instructor.

A few weeks after getting my license - with a total, by then, of about 50 hours - I was shipped off to Okinawa, Japan, where I didn't fly for 3 years. There was no place to fly, and the exchange rate made it impossible.

Well, twenty-five years later, our sixth child moved out, and it was time to start flying again. What a shocker to find FBO's charging $110 per hour and $45 per hour for an instructor, not mention the fuel surcharge!

I spent twice as much money to get back up to speed and pass a BFR than I did to get my license originally. But it was worth every penny to be allowed to slip the surly bonds again.

After renting 172s and 182s for a while, I realized I wanted to fulfill another life-long dream: owning my own plane. It had to have plenty of leg room (I'm a pretty big boy!), have good fuel efficiency, and look sporty.

After looking around and talking to many people, I landed on the Cessna 177 Cardinal and started scouring the websites and "for sale" sections. I made a spreadsheet to compare the planes I was most attracted to, allocating points on a 1-10 basis for various items like age, HP, hours to TBO, avionics, exterior, interior, comforts, and cost.

About six months into my search I found my dream on one of the websites: N29304, a 1968 original Cardinal in great shape.

I had already started saving for a down payment, but wasn't quite there. And a couple of months later, N29304 disappeared from the ads. Good Cardinals don't stay there for long and I just knew I had missed my chance.

I decided to call the seller just to see if he got his price. He is a pilot for one of the airlines based out of Kansas City, and to my relief he explained that the ad had expired because he had been traveling so much he just forgot to renew it! I kept saving.

A month or so later I decided it was time to buy. I called the owner and set-up a date to fly from Arizona to Springfield, Missouri to look the plane over. I enlisted my oldest son as my "navigator," and even purchased a new Garmin 296 and programmed the flight from Springfield back to Phoenix.

Then, about an hour before we were supposed to leave for Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, I received a call from the owner saying that some guy that had flown the plane 3 or 4 weeks earlier had just e-mailed him a deposit and would be picking up the plane in a week.

Again, my heart sank. Once again my plane had seemingly slipped from my grasp. I returned to my spreadsheet, only to find that most of the other planes on it had already been sold.

A couple of weeks went by. And one day, I received an email I will never forget: "If you are still interested, she's yours." The owner of N29304 explained that the guy who sent him the deposit was extremely difficult to work with and never showed up to pick up the plane.

I called him right away, made arrangements to go to Missouri a week later and sent him a 10% deposit. On a Thursday evening in February, my son and I made our way to Springfield.

My heart jumped when I saw her. She was just as described and pictured in the ads, not perfect but certainly good enough. Flying her for the first time I knew I had picked the right model for me - just a light touch required now and then as she basically flew herself. I was definitely hooked on this Cardinal.

The previous owner had owned her for 18 years and had bought her with his dad. He seemed to have a very hard time letting her go, as he came back to the plane three different times while my son and I were preparing for departure.

I had planned a course basically along I-40 all the way to Flagstaff because we were new to the plane and there were airports all along that freeway. It got dark just as we reached Weatherford, OK, so we landed at Stafford Airport there for the night and found a Holiday Inn Express (also found a great steakhouse if you are ever in the neighborhood - Lucille's, right next to the hotel).

The next morning we headed for home. More headwinds, but this time we climbed to 10,500 and made better progress. After another stop in New Mexico, we decided to fly direct to Falcon Field (FFZ), N29304's new home base.

It was a beautiful leg over the White Mountains, the pines all covered with snow. We touched down at 1645, 15 minutes earlier than I had told my wife. We logged 9.8 hours on the flight home and you could barely tell we had used any oil - not bad for 40 years old!

What a great trip! Really an amazing adventure, and quality time for my son and I to spend together. Now he is sold on learning to fly, and I'm like a little boy who just woke up on Christmas morning.

Article by Richard Harmon; Send him an email