Back in the day

The airport where I earned my private pilot license is gone now. The last I heard it was a corn field, which is fitting since that's probably how it began life.

I stumbled across a photo of Martin Field on Paul Freeman's Abandoned and Little Known Airfields site and it brought back some fond memories.

When I was there in 1992, Martin Field was just hanging on. The lifeblood was a small skydiving operation that operated an ancient Cessna 182 jump plane. There were maybe a dozen other airplanes based there, tied down outside in the grass.

When a transient airplane stopped in to buy fuel it was always a big deal simply because it didn't happen very often. We'd walk outside and look at this strange interloper that had disrupted the normally sleepy rhythm of 5D4. I'm sure those transient pilots thought we were all a bunch of crazy backwater hicks and for the most part they'd be right.

It was a wonderful place, with two grass runways and not much else. After the sun went down and the flying was done for the day we'd sit outside drinking beer with the skydivers and talk about flying.

On weekends we'd light a bonfire with aviation fuel and the skydivers would party long into the night, crawling into their tents for a few hours sleep before an early morning jump.

Skydivers are a different breed. One night during a particularly raucous party one of them suggested it just might be fun to waterski across the low spot on the field that had filled up with water after a long rainy spell.

Since the water was only a foot or two deep and there wasn't a boat to be found anyway we improvised and hooked the tow rope to the back of a pickup. Incredibly, there was an old waterski tucked away in a dusty corner of the only hangar so the idea was looking possible.

As the only sober person on the field, I was appointed safety officer. My duties included trying to talk everyone involved out of such madness. When that failed I settled on making certain nobody was in line with the truck's intended path and insisting the waterskiers wear helmets. Since the water was so shallow life jackets were deemed optional.

It all worked out alright and nobody got hurt, although the tow vehicle wound up stuck in the mud after a particularly wobbly run.

One night when we were coming back from my dual night cross country we lost electrical power on the long-suffering 172 that I was using for training.

The winds were out of the southwest, or at least had been when we'd left, so we decided to land on 23, which was the shorter of the two runways but at least it was into the wind. It even had a few lights spread along it's 1,900 feet although most had burned out. Since hardly anybody ever used that particular runway in the daytime, much less at night, replacing the lights wasn't a high priority.

23 also had the advantage of being the only runway on the airport with a clear approach path. 5 was particularly hazardous during the day and suicide at night due to a string of high-tension lines not too far from the approach end. 9 had houses, a road and a set of power lines right at the threshold. 27 wasn't much better, with trees near the approach end.

9-27 was our main runway and it's most distinguishing feature was a rather large hump about two-thirds of the way down on the Western end. When the wind was out of the east and we were using 9, the hump could be a real bastard. It was positioned such that on landing you needed to flare on top of it, or even better on the backside, if you wanted to be sure of not landing too long.

On takeoffs using 9 the hump was even more interesting, as you'd reach it not quite at flying speed and it would tend to catapult you into the air before the airplane was ready to fly.

But the approach to 23 was over a gently rolling corn field so it was looking to be a good bet.

As luck would have it, I wound up fast and high on my approach. Stupidly, we'd put in 20 degrees of flap with our last remaining electrical power and they would neither go up nor down so we were quickly getting into a tough spot.

To his credit, my instructor never touched the controls. I had gotten us into this mess and I was going to have to get us out.

We finally touched down about half-way down the runway and to my horror the end of the runway was approaching much faster than I expected.

My instructor, who was normally calm and quiet, shouted “Brakes!” and I stomped on the tops of the pedals. It was the only time I ever remember him raising his voice in the airplane.

We skidded to a stop a few feet from the end of the runway then carefully taxied back in the darkness trying to avoid the dips, ruts and tires marking the tie-down spots in the grass.

To this day the fact that my instructor let me land that night sticks with me. It was a tremendous confidence booster but it was also the first time I really understood the balance between letting a student figure a way out of a problem and keeping your own skin nice and safe.

I thought about that night just the other day when the charging system failed on our 172 in the middle of a lesson. As we approached Crystal I told my student to leave the flaps up in case we needed to go around and kept my hands to myself as he made his first no-flap landing.

The last time I flew out of Martin Field was the day of my checkride and my last landing there was over the high-tension wires to the seldom used runway 5.

The examiner looked over at me and said “Well, that sure takes care of the short-field landing.” I couldn't have been more proud than if I'd flown to the moon and back.

It was a great place to learn to fly