Adventure by Plane

Last Tuesday, at about 4:25 PM, I had just started to take a nap when the phone rang. It was my friend Aaron Svec (the husband of one of the other Spanish teachers at Stony Brook)—he’s a pilot. He informed me that he was taking his wife, Tanya, up to visit a friend in Connecticut, and asked if I would like to come along for the ride? I was no longer tired. Aaron is actually a flight instructor, and I thought that I might get a chance to take the controls of the plane, at least a little bit.

Cessna 182

Once I got to the airport, we hopped aboard the airplane (I think it was a Cessna 182) and Aaron explained various things to me about the plane while he prepared it for flight. Then he let me taxi the plane at the airport! We stopped near the runway to finish the pre-flight check. Then Aaron put the plane in position, I gave the plane full throttle, and then I pulled back on the controls and we were airborne! Needless to say, it was awesome—a dream come true. Aaron also let me bank the plane a couple of times before he took over and we headed to CT. But out adventure was only beginning.

We arrived in CT, where we picked up Tanya’s friend Kate, and then we took off again to go eat dinner in Massachusetts (apparently its common for pilots to fly to dinner 🙂 ). It was really neat to fly so low to the ground (compared with international flight) and see all of the terrain and structures and such. As we approached the airport in Massachusetts, I even saw what looked like some military jets (also cool).

So, we landed, parked the plane, and Aaron asked to have the plane refueled, while Tanya and Kate went to go get a seat at the airport restaurant. At that moment another plane parked near us, and it happened to be a friend of Aaron (a fellow flight instructor, he also had a “student” with him). Than something interesting happened. The person fueling the plane discovered that one of the two tanks was missing its cap! Needless to say, Aaron was concerned. We even found traces of fuel along the fuselage–proof that fuel had been leaking. The danger in this was of running out of fuel, rather than of an explosion or something like that, so we were glad that we had made it with enough fuel.

It was already 8:30PM when the fuel cap was found missing, and the mechanic had already left for the day—there was no way to get in touch with him, or to acquire a new cap. So that meant we could be stuck in Massachusetts for the night. At Aaron’s request I went and joined the ladies for dinner and told them we should go ahead and order. Thankfully, though, we didn’t need to spend the night in Massachusetts. Aaron asked his friend if he (and his student) wouldn’t mind taking us back to Long Island. They very graciously agreed, and thankfully they had a 6-seater plane. We dropped Tanya and Kate back off in CT (where Tanya would stay for a while), and Aaron and I were flown back to the Islip airport on Long Island (which happened to be the final destination of our pilots as well).

But the adventure wasn’t quite over. When we left Long Island, we did so from the Brookhaven airport, so we didn’t know how we would get back to Stony Brook (at nearly midnight). Providentially, though, there happened to still be someone in the office of the flight school Aaron works for, and this person happened to live near the Brookhaven airport, and he was quite willing to take us there.

Needless to say, Aaron and I were quite thankful and amazed at God’s providential provision for our safe return home! Also interesting to note, the following day, Aaron was looking around the airport for the gas cap of the plane. He was eventually told that it might be on the runway, and indeed it was! So this means that we flew our whole trip missing one of the fuel caps—which also means that we may have arrived in Massachusetts with barely any gas to spare. Now I’m even more thankful for God’s provision!

All in all it was an amazing adventure and I’m glad I was able to be a part of it. Here are a couple of pictures I took:

Aaron preparing to land

The Approach to land in CT