Flying. Once. Again.

Calm yourself: That title just up there isn’t one of those obnoxious hipsterish I-can’t-write-so-I-do-emphasis Just. Like. This. things. No. Forget those exist.

I flew. Just once though. And it’s not the first time this has happened.

Say what?

Part of the appeal of the He-Dog Run is that to even begin it means I’m actually able to fly a helicopter — something I’ve long wanted to do, and have started and stopped in past, largely because it’s just so damned dear.  Since Alaska, my main concern has been starting up, then having to stop a few hours in. And it’s still plenty expensive — in fact, here at Palo Alto airport it’s considerably more expensive than it ever was in Alaska — but I’m also not getting any younger and you have to take the first bite of the apple before worrying about the second.

So last week, I wrenched myself from my baseline state of “someday” and set up a Discovery Flight in a Robinson R44. I “discovered” less than some people presumably do, since I have done a couple hours helicopter flying before, but that’s what they call the first flight and it comes with a discount, so Discovery it is.  To be clear, I was no more ready for this step than I was a year ago:  my appetite to spend a school-loan-sized chunk of money has not increased, nor really has my ability to do so.  (Note to budding financial planners: Driving race cars really doesn’t help.)  But I am almost a year older, and the threat of toddling toward the sunset bearing the albatross of “someday” really doesn’t appeal.  Steps needed to be taken, and so they were.

The flight itself was intense.  The instructor, John, is a super-high-time heli pilot who flew Hueys and Cobras in Vietnam and has seen just about all there is to see.  He wears a flight suit in his office.  We landed on Mission Peak and in a ravine.  He was singularly unperturbed by my attempts to hover the craft in any meaningful way, stepping in to correct only when the aircraft attitude got truly sporting. He’s a cool cat.

And then, suddenly, we were done and the calendar was open and it was time to schedule the next lesson.  The rubber met the road, laying bare the utter fiction of a one-off Discovery Flight as well as the yawning chasm between what the full thing will cost and anything I can meaningfully set aside to do it.

But I’ve been here before and I do have some thoughts. First, the R44 is an expensive ship to fly compared to the R22 I started on in Alaska.  They don’t have R22s at my local school, but they do just about everywhere else.  And an outfit in Van Nuys does accelerated instruction (of the “come for two intense weeks and you’ll log 40 hours and maybe get your license” type) at a fraction of the cost of doing the full thing here.  But that still requires (a) the not-insubstantial cost of their program, and (b) two weeks set aside for what is by all accounts a fairly grueling “vacation.”  I could perhaps do something like that next spring, but that would still leave almost nine months to fill before then — which is nine months for me to get slowly drawn in to the largely unproductive and money-hemorrhaging hobby of occasional helicopter lessons, pooping around once or twice a month flying R44s here.

Which may be the ticket, in fact.  The current thinking looks like this: I fly when feasible here, but stripped of any urgency to work toward a license with these helis at these prices.  Amass a few hours and get back into it a bit, then go bang out forty-ish hours in an intense (and cheaper) R22 program.  I could take the test there, or return here to wrap up.  Either way, the real flying I ultimately do will probably involve these local R44s and will probably be from my local airport, so it does make sense to include them in my training.  But racing is a jealous and pricey mistress, as, it turns out, is my law school.  So we’ll see.

The next flight, of course, is booked.

Toward the He-Dog Run!