Soaring with Sagar

By Sagar Pathak

Sagar with instructor Justin Phillipson. (Courtesy of Sagar Pathak)Hi, my name is Sagar and it’s been one year, three months and nine days since my last flight as Pilot in Command. I feel like an addict craving his next fix. But while I could see the plane on the ramp, I knew that I couldn’t just jump in and leap again towards the sky. One little thing stood between me and my joy. A Biennial Flight Review, the mandatory flight and ground instruction with a certified flight instructor that is required every two years. And just my luck, I didn’t have mine. FAA 1, Sagar 0.

As with most newly minted pilots, there is a drop off in flight hours after we get our ticket. Sure, we may say that we are going up every weekend to chase that elusive hamburger or take our friends out for a weekend getaway to a far and exotic destination, but often those ideas just fade away. I fell into that trap and, over time, my flying slid to once every 90 days to keep up my San Carlos Flying Club was able to create a personalized program for Sagar, combining tailwheel instrkuction with his Biennial Flight Review. (Courtesy of Sagar Pathak)currency. Eventually even that lapsed leaving my headset to sit alone in my flight bag.

By Sagar Pathak

Sagar Pathak with the TU-U2S that the model was designed after. (Sagar Pathak)Ever since I was little, my parents had always bought me toy airplanes as gifts.  While some kids love to collect baseball cards or matchbox cars, model airplanes (and aviation in general) have always been my passion for as long as I can remember. Some of my favorite toys growing up were my Ertl Force One F-14 Tomcat, Micro Machines Airport play sets, and any dozen of my Dyna-Flites metal jets.  They looked more like blobs of metal than actual airplanes but details really didn’t matter much back then.  As long as that plane had rolling wheels and wings, I supplied all the thrust, engine noises, and imagination necessary to make those planes come alive in my living room.

Air Mobility Rodeo 2011

Story and Photos by Sagar Pathak

Every two years, the best of the best from across the Air Mobility Command get together at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Wash., in an undisputed, winner-take-all competition that pits more than 50 aircraft and 2,500 airmen from across the world in a skills competition to crown the best of the best. This year, I had the chance to observe the March ARB Team as they participate in the Air Mobility Rodeo 2011.

First held in 1945, the AMC Rodeo is a weeklong competition that has featured more than 2,500 competitors from across the globe. More than 50 aircraft (C-17, C-5, C-130, KC-10, KC-135, T-1, C-37, C-32, etc.) fill the ramp at McChord Field and compete in contests such as air-to-air refueling, on/off loading cargo, aero-medical evacuations, low-level flying and air drops.

As we took off from March ARB, our team was already in the first event of the competition and would be judged on our landing. We had to land at McChord Field at exactly 10:05 a.m. and within 3,000 feet of the end of the runway. And delay in flight or lack of accuracy on the landing would cause our team to lose points. After the few-hour flight to McChord, the team landed one second early and right on the mark. It was a great start to the competition.

Real World Refueling

By Sagar Pathak

Boom Operator SrA Shawn Racchini peers through a hydraulic fluid soaked window and still manages to fly the boom to the awaiting F-16. (Sagar Pathak)Laying on my belly in the back of the KC-135 from March ARB at 20,000 feet, I stared out into an ominous grey cloud. I couldn’t see the ground nor had any sense of depth or movement even though we were going 315 knots. It was as though we were in a grey void hanging in the sky. And to compound my fear, there was a thin coating of hydraulic fluid all over the boom’s window. It was like looking through a window coated in Vaseline. Knowing that there was going to be an F-16 just 10 feet away from us, both of us bouncing around due to turbulence from the clouds, and the boom operator not clearly being able to see the plane was less then comforting. 

But out there somewhere in the void was eight F-16s from Luke AFB that needed fuel to complete their training. And one way or another, SRA Shawn Racchini, boom operator for the 912th Air Refueling Squadron, was The crew from the 912th Air Refueling Squad conduct a pre-flight briefing before take off. (Sagar Pathak) going to get them that fuel. With nearly five years under his belt as a boom operator, SRA Racchini has been deployed oversees five times and knows how to get the job done. 

Go for Launch!

By Sagar Pathak

(Sagar Pathak)With half open eyes, and in a semi-awake state of mind, I spotted the now familiar, 52-story Vertical Assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center. It was three a.m. eastern time, and I had just flown in the day before. My body was wondering why I was just waking up when normally I would be falling asleep at this time. It was confused and for a fleeting second so was I. But then I saw the innocuous sign on the side of the road. “Days till Count Down: 0.” And a small smile crept across my face. This was finally the day I would get to witness history and create some of my very own. 

Seventeen days prior, a small, but important group of components in the Aft Load Control Assembly No. 2 (ALCA-2) caused the cancellation of the STS-134 mission launch four hours prior to launch, disappointing not only me, but hundreds of thousands of spectators and especially six eager astronauts strapped into the worlds largest bottle rocket. But as I heard someone at NASA say, “we may not do it fast, but we do it safely.” Knowing that a faulty ALCA would put the six astronauts in possible danger should have been an easy decision to ward off the disappointment of traveling half way across the country and spending hundreds of dollars on airfare, rental car, and hotel nights. But along with those hundreds of thousands of others, I knew that their safety was more important then witnessing one of man’s greatest accomplishments…a space shuttle launch. So I put my disappointment aside and re-booked my tickets to come back again for the next launch attempt. 

Air Force One

By Sagar Pathak

(Sagar Pathak)How does the most powerful man travel around the world? Any way he wants. And in the case of the President of the United States (POTUS), he travels aboard one of two specially modified Boeing 747-200s,  affectionately known as “Air Force One.” Operated by the 89th Airlift Wing out of Andrews Air Force base, these fortified aircraft are tasked to transport President Obama and the White House staff all over the globe and allow him to execute the full powers of the Office of the President of the United States.

Fear of Flying

By Sagar Pathak

As pilots we often take for granted the luxury of being able to jump in a plane and taking off on a whim. What we believe is a sense of freedom is a grip of fear to others. While physics and science reassure us that our steel bird will stay airborne, to others it’s a steel cage of death waiting for gravity to take over and plummet to the ground.

Even to this day, when I am lined up on the center line, barreling down the runway approaching my rotate speed, I pull back on the yoke and for a split second wonder if we are going to leap towards the sky or stay locked to the earth. But for many, this fear is more pronounced and a lot more debilitating. A few weeks ago, I had a chance to help a friend and fellow writer, Jean Dupenloup, out with his own fear of flying. I asked if Jean would be kind enough to share his experience with our readers in the hopes that others who are afraid can use this and overcome their own fears.

Destination: Moffett Field Museum

Moffett Field is the home of the massive Hangar One. Measuring nearly 1200-feet long, it can fit 10 football fields inside. (Sagar Pathak)By Sagar Pathak

Chances are if you’re a pilot, you love aviation. From loud jets, to classic propellers, pilots are into all things aviation. While simply just being in the air is a blast, I also get a lot of joy planning my flights around fun and exciting places. And other the the classic “$100 Hamburger” or in my case the “$100 Slice of Pie”, one of my favorite places to visit is the local aviation museums.

Ever since I fell in love with aviation, I’d look forward to going to airshows and seeing the planes in the air. But the reality was that airshows come around only once a year. So I went out to fill my addiction elsewhere and found myself at the local aviation museums. It truly is the best “hangar flying” that one can get.

Literally hanging out the door of our photoplane, a harness safely secures me from falling out of the airplane. (Sagar Pathak)You Spin Me Right ‘Round

By Sagar Pathak

You look outside and all you see is the ground flying past you; greens and browns all blurring into one shade. A second ago you were performing an “immelman” in your new Pitts Special S-2B, and now you and your plane are in a spin hurdling towards the ground. Your instincts kick in, you pull the power back to idle, let go of the stick, look over the nose and figure out which direction you are spinning, full opposite rudder, stop the spin, and recover.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get a taste of flying a high-performance aerobatic airplane with airshow great Tim Decker in his immaculate S-2B. In his sixth year of airshow flying, Tim has perfected flying at the edge of the envelope and invited me out to his hangar in Lincoln, CA (KLHM) for a weekend crash course (no pun intended) of unusual attitude recoveries, spin training, and a taste of some basic aerobatics.

The First Passenger

By Sagar Pathak

Gratitude with a little attitude…Sagar takes his dad flying for the first time. Of course, it was his dad who encouraged his son’s lifelong love of aviation. The attitude: Sagar demonstrated his skills with a steep turn and dad held on tight! (Sagar Pathak)With my ticket in hand, I was ready to fly to the far reaches of the globe. Or at least as far as my Piper Cherokee could go before I had to land for fuel or return the airplane to the flying club. But before I flew away, I noticed that somewhere during the last seven months of my training, I had accumulated a substantial list of people who wanted me to take them flying: Friends, cousins, co-workers, random cute girls in the bar, and a few not so cute ones.   

A License to Learn

By Sagar Pathak

Sagar Pathak, associate editor for In Flight USA and newly licensed private pilot.After two weeks of trying, she reached over and offered me her congratulations on becoming the newest private pilot in the United States. But this story began years before this moment. At the young age of 10 months old, I took my first flight from India to Germany to the United States. And for as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to fly; and I didn’t care how I got in the air. Jumping off my bed for that millisecond of freedom from gravity, to staring skyward watching planes lumber overhead, or flying across the country alone to spend the summers with my family in Philadelphia. And during the past 30 years, I managed to have dozens of aerial adventures, from doing night-time aerial refueling over the Atlantic ocean, to flying in an open-cockpit biplane, being shot off an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, flying with the Blue Angels, breaking the sound barrier in an F-15E, doing inverted flat spins in an Extra 300 (and not passing out), to loops and rolls in a helicopter, and a lot of things in-between. But the one thing that eluded me this entire time was being at the controls of the plane by myself. To be able to go where I wanted, and when I wanted to. To turn to someone and say “Why yes, I am a pilot.”