Journalists share stories.
We also have our own.
A few months into my career, I got a call from the editor of the Burlington Post, where I was pulling weekend photo and relief reporting shifts.
“You wanna go up in a plane?” he asked. “It’s the best assignment of the year.”
The annual Hamilton Air Show was a couple of weeks away and the Canadian Warplane Heritage Foundation was offering a seat in one of its vintage WWII Harvard training aircraft to get photos of some of its other historic planes flying in formation to promote the upcoming event.
When I checked in at the Mount Hope airport, I was escorted to a hanger and introduced to my pilot, who showed me how to strap on my parachute in case anything went wrong and we had to bail out.
He also told me what to expect during our flight, how to communicate my needs to get the photos I required and to hang on very tightly to my film, because if I dropped it, the canisters would roll down into the back of the hollow fuselage.
As I recall, it was a beautiful August afternoon. The flight was smooth, if a little noisy, especially when I slid the canopy back to aim my lens at the neighbouring planes.
On our way back to the airport, I settled in to enjoy the scenery, as I maintained a death grip on the three or four rolls of Ektachrome and B&W film I’d shot.
Passing over the farms that surround the airport, I noticed the vehicles passing on the roads beneath us seemed a little large considering our distance to the runway. A herd of cows, their markings easily distinguishable, barely stirred as we passed overhead.
And still the runway seemed far off.
We cleared the airport’s perimeter fence, barely.
Then, our excursion got really bumpy. Dust billowed up into the cockpit area.
We shuddered to a stop, the runway still a couple of hundred metres distant.
In my headphones, the pilot calmly advised we should probably climb out. Once safely away from the aircraft, he explained the single engine had quick during the return leg of our flight and when it became apparent we couldn’t make it to the runway, he left the landing gear up so the bumpy landing on the field wouldn’t end up flipping us over onto our heads.
The pilot said he hadn’t told me any of this beforehand, so I wouldn’t panic.
A veteran captain for Air Canada, he was a little concerned about the plane’s bent prop and any possible damage to its undercarriage; it was his own aircraft.
I was just relieved I was still in one piece. And that I’d managed to hang onto all my rolls of film.
MARIO BARTEL 