Nocturne

It was not my intention to fly home in the dark. But after a day of reuniting with cherished friends and family, I was in no hurry to depart southeast Michigan. Driven by the cold machinations of the heavens, sunset waits for no one.

Broken Connections

I spent the first 22 years of my life in southeast Michigan, but most of my time on Earth has been lived elsewhere. I have many friends and family in that part of the Mitten that I do not see as often as I would prefer. Losing my mother in 2018 further severed those connections, both because she kept me involved with the family and because I found myself making far fewer visits home without her there to welcome me.

On August 3, my cousin Barb's husband Tony was involved in a fatal motorcycle accident near Sturgis, South Dakota. I liked Tony. Though we had exactly zero things in common, whenever I attended a family gathering, he always made an effort to check in with me to see how I was doing. For many years, Barb and Tony hosted Mom's side of the family at their house for Thanksgiving. They are a half generation older than me and one of my early memories is attending their wedding as a little kid where I danced the night away like a goofy fool with my best childhood friend, Rob. It was clearly an event that occurred before I developed any form of inhibitory self consciousness.

For that matter, I had not seen Rob in over 20 years, another connection broken with time and distance. As kids, we spent every summer day together scheming and building new things, our imaginary adventures every bit as fantastical as those of Phineas and Ferb (but without the teal, shoe-box shaped platypus). Not surprisingly, most of those adventures involved a lot of purely imaginary flying.

When I was invited to Tony's Celebration of Life on August 20, no one from the family genuinely expected me to make an appearance. However, with an airplane, such feats are easily accomplished.

Back to the Mitten

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
20 Aug 2023	N21481	SDC (Sodus, NY) - PTK (Waterford, MI)	3.1	2708.4

At the fuel pump in Sodus preparing for departure.

I flew to my hometown against a 30 knot headwind that stretched the flight time to just over three hours. Considering that the drive time is reliably six hours, even a slow flight is unquestionably an improvement over a fast car. Stress is also a factor and there is something to be said about lounging in a mostly deserted sky with HAL controlling the airplane and shoes comfortably kicked off versus navigating the crowded mad rush of traffic on the QEW.

Over the years, I have developed an odd relationship with Niagara Falls. Many pilots fly from far away just to get an aerial peek at the Niagara River tumbling over its escarpment. What is a bucket list item for some pilots is just one of many landmarks on the flight home for me. I always enjoy seeing the falls, but every time I capture a photo I think, "Well, that looks just like the last photo I took." Yet I keep taking them. I do not know what I am searching for, but I hope to recognize it when it appears.

Haze over Ontario, Canada.

Michigan Aviation, my go-to FBO at Oakland County International, remains generous with their courtesy cars. The facility received a significant facelift in the years since I partially lived there in 2018, but what really makes the place feel different is Scott's absence. For years, Scott marshalled me to parking there and always greeted me by name. He made me feel like I belonged whenever I returned to my hometown airport. Now that Scott is retired, I am just another unknown transient pilot. But at least they still loaned me a car for the day.

I had lunch at one of my favorite places, Parker's Hilltop Brewery. From there, I checked in on Mom's former house, visited with Greg's parents, and successfully navigated by memory to the hall in Oxford hosting Tony's celebration.

Barb was stunned to see me. Being able to support her in that moment made the entire trip worthwhile. I reunited with other family members, including my wonderful cousin Jerri. She was a teenager when I was a little kid, but always made time for me. During Mom's final days, when I put a call out to the family inviting over anyone who wanted to talk with her one last time, it was Jerri who came with my aunt. I caught up with several relatives that I had not seen in many years and even managed to impress some friends of the family by remembering their names despite not having seen them in decades.

Before departing New York, I reached out to my childhood friend Rob and shared the news about Tony and the celebration happening in his memory. Barb was Rob's babysitter when he was young (back when she was still known as Barbie and he was still known as Bobby), which was why he was at her wedding with me in the early 1980s. We grew apart while I was in college and the last time I saw him in person was during my wedding in 1999, but with the swirl of people and activity around me that night I did not find time to sit down and talk with him. I was delighted to see him again and to meet his sixteen year old son for the first time. My reunion with him was bittersweet as I learned that his youngest sister Raquel -- who used to pester and chase after us when we were kids -- died unexpectedly in 2022.

After leaving the event, I met my dear friend Kristen for dinner. Despite passage of many years since we last met in person, we connected as well as we always had, as though our last meeting occurred mere days before. Seeing her caused me to reflect fondly on the summer after high school graduation when we often went to the local Big Boy (the only sit-down restaurant in town that fit teenage budgets) and I regularly made her laugh loudly enough that the manager used to scurry over and threaten to throw us out. Good times.

Despite the tragic event that precipitated my trip, reconnection with so many friends and family that day was nourishing to my soul. Although my focus in coming was to support Barb and the family, that support was generously reciprocated. It was a day-long embrace by family and friends that I did not consciously recognize needing prior to making the trip.

Halo

I love it when Pontiac Tower overrides the FAA computer that assigns IFR routes to give me what I asked for instead of the problematic default routing over the waters of a Great Lake. All it takes is a note in the flight plan "requesting no route across Lake Erie" to catch a human's eye and inspire intervention. Thanks guys, as always.

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
20 Aug 2023	N21481	PTK (Waterford, MI) - SDC (Sodus, NY)	2.5	2710.9

The sun was setting as I sped down Oakland County International's runway 27L and took to a sky suffused with a ruddy evening glow. Detroit Departure provided radar vectors out of Oakland County's delta airspace before clearing me to the approved route. By the time I crossed into Canada, the landscape ahead was cloaked in darkness with the western horizon at my tail dimly radiating twilight's residual warmth. Near London, Toronto Center offered a direct route to Sodus that eschewed the longer airway route that I was following. I genuinely love flying after sunset and swimming through the calmed air after nightfall. Radio chatter diminishes and becomes tonally gentler, as though the brusquely staccato delivery of daytime communications might offend the peaceful darkness.

Photo of my right wingtip while flying through clouds at night over St Catherine's, Ontario.

Reaching Hamilton, civilization's terrestrial constellations flickered as intervening clouds blocked their light from below. East of Hamilton, I became engulfed in the clouds entirely. It was my first time conducting an extensive flight through clouds at night. The experience was magical. I switched off the strobes and marveled at the hypnotic way the Warrior's navigation lights fluttered and danced on the wingtips as they sliced through the inhomogeneous surrounding vapor. I was my own light show, my airplane enveloped in a misty halo of diffusely reflected exterior lighting. Over the Niagara River, I momentarily emerged on top of the clouds, flying through a phantom range of gauzy mountains that were vaguely discernable in sepia tones against the darkness, barely illuminated from within by attenuated rays reaching through the deck from city lights below.

Because of trees encroaching on the final approach courses, nighttime instrument procedures are no longer authorized at my airport. Though I remained within the clouds for the rest of the flight home, roughly 0.7 hours, the 4,000 foot ceiling over the Williamson Sodus Airport was high enough that no instrument procedures were needed that night. However, even for visual flying, those trees have become a hazard at night due to the visual glideslope lighting system being temporarily out of service. Without guidance, I flew a high and steep approach to runway 28 to ensure clearance with the treetops lurking invisibly in the darkness. Imperceptible except for points of light outlining its perimeter, the runway grew larger in my windscreen, its defining pixels spreading apart then flattening as I approached, the view briefly recalling the crude graphics of a 1980s flight simulator. Once close enough for the Warrior's landing light to illuminate the piano keys and other runway markings, that particular illusion gave way to physical reality and I rolled the airplane's wheels onto the pavement.

I landed at 10:40 pm, much later than I originally planned, but content that my tardiness was for all of the right reasons.