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I posted this on the Piper Facebook group and it was well received. Figured I'd share here too.
I took this picture on Saturday at FD04 (Leeward Air Ranch) near Ocala, FL. There was a fly in on Saturday. It was the first fly in I've flown my own airplane into.
My dad lives nearby and flew in to meet us. Strangely, we barely even coordinated our meet up, but he ended up joining right downwind for 18 right behind me, lol. Couldn't have timed it better had we tried.
His is the airplane on the left and mine is on the right. He bought his in 1998. I was 16 years old and was about 9 months away, I guess, from getting my PPL. I had already soloed. But, I was a 10th grade high school student, ink still wet on my DRIVER's license, lol. My parents were still married then. Life was so different. But, I have pictures and memories of flying that airplane when I was still growing hair in new and strange places.
It's a cool shot here, to me, to see across twenty years of time. The idea of owning an airplane one day, when I used to fly his regularly, was just a dream. So out of sight! I think around 16 is when I got my first job straightening shelves at K-Mart for $5.20 an hour! Just very cool for me to stop and look at this picture now as a 37 year old guy and see these symbols of the past and the present/future in a single frame. His is a '68, mine is a '74. Both have a lot of history before we ever bought them. I guess mine, more than his did at the time he bought. But both airplanes, one so pivotal at the start of my aviation journey and the other so pivotal at a completely different, and much later, point upon that journey...both symbolic of huge "starts" of something cool really cool in aviation for me.
I took this picture on Saturday at FD04 (Leeward Air Ranch) near Ocala, FL. There was a fly in on Saturday. It was the first fly in I've flown my own airplane into.
My dad lives nearby and flew in to meet us. Strangely, we barely even coordinated our meet up, but he ended up joining right downwind for 18 right behind me, lol. Couldn't have timed it better had we tried.
His is the airplane on the left and mine is on the right. He bought his in 1998. I was 16 years old and was about 9 months away, I guess, from getting my PPL. I had already soloed. But, I was a 10th grade high school student, ink still wet on my DRIVER's license, lol. My parents were still married then. Life was so different. But, I have pictures and memories of flying that airplane when I was still growing hair in new and strange places.
It's a cool shot here, to me, to see across twenty years of time. The idea of owning an airplane one day, when I used to fly his regularly, was just a dream. So out of sight! I think around 16 is when I got my first job straightening shelves at K-Mart for $5.20 an hour! Just very cool for me to stop and look at this picture now as a 37 year old guy and see these symbols of the past and the present/future in a single frame. His is a '68, mine is a '74. Both have a lot of history before we ever bought them. I guess mine, more than his did at the time he bought. But both airplanes, one so pivotal at the start of my aviation journey and the other so pivotal at a completely different, and much later, point upon that journey...both symbolic of huge "starts" of something cool really cool in aviation for me.
