The Adventures of A Lifetime Student Pilot.
By Ted Bender
Tale #1.

My first airplane ride happened around age 14 when my oldest brother, Robert, took me with him to an airport near Jackson, Michigan. He was taking flying lessons there and managed to get me a free ride in a J-3 Cub. After landing, they informed me that it was a test-flight after repair of major damage to that plane. That was okay by me, because it was such a thrill to be "up there" where I had been dreaming of being ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.

Two years later, at age 16, I started taking my first formal lessons at Gottschaulk Aviation at Adrian [Michigan] airport. It cost me $11.50 per hour for dual instruction, which was half of my $21.00 pay as a hired hand on Mr. Hyatt’s farm. I worked 6 days at a job that I loved and got to fly for an hour on Sunday afternoons. It was as close to heaven as any teenage boy could be.

They started me out in J-3 Cubs until I was told that the Aeronca Champion cost the same as the Cub. To me, the Champ looked sleeker than the Cub, however I found it was just as noisy and had that weird dog-leg stick with the ball on top. After 5 hours of dual my instructor told me that I was ready to solo, but there was just one glitch--school was starting the next week and so I had to quit my job on the farm.

The next summer, while working as a handyman at a golf course, I told my best high-school
buddy how much fun it was to fly, and so we both started taking lessons at Gottschaulk. With
8 hours of dual under my belt, it happened again--only this time it was my enlisting in the
Army Air Corps, either that or killing my good-for-nothing stepfather.

After basic training at Lackland, I was shipped to McChord Field near Tacoma, Washington. There I met “Frenchy”, a crazy Canadian who was an NCO in my dormitory. He was flying out at Entis Sky Ranch and so I started riding with him on weekends and taking lessons again. This time it was in Taylorcrafts and I fell in love with those side-by-side, wheel and rudder cockpits! With less than another 2 hours of dual [9:20 hours total], after a few touch-and-goes, my Instructor climbed out and gave me these strict instructions: "Make 3 touch-and-goes and taxi back here to the hangers, but DON'T go out of the pattern!" Okay, that was fine by me. I had already psyched myself into accepting that "empty seat" beside me in the cockpit, so my first take-off went smoothly and my first and second touch-and-goes were wonderful! Then Murphy showed up on the scene! As I was climbing out and turning to the down-wind leg, I spotted a plane coming into the landing pattern above me. Not wanting to experience a “midair” on my first flight, I did a maneuver that earned me a butt-chewing by my instructor after landing--I simply flew a big circle out and back into the pattern. Finding that the other plane had disappeared, no longer in the pattern and not taxiing on the ground, I completed my third landing and taxied back to my waiting Instructor who had smoke coming out of his ears.

And--guess who was piloting that other plane? Yup, it was Frenchy, and when I talked to him later, he told me that he saw me in the pattern below him--and made an identical circle above me. The only difference was he was an old, bold pilot with oodles of hours in his logbook. Frenchy later got drunk one night and ate a broken light bulb--but that's another story.