Your Ideal Aircraft Should Handle a Variety of Missions

When my wife, Alexa, and I began shopping for an airplane, we pictured a winged family station wagon with room for our then-preteen kids, friends, dogs, and whoever else wanted to come along. By the time we acquired Annie, our Commander 114B, last year we realized that four seats would be enough in most cases.

Today our flying family car feels more like an airborne empty nest. We have been planning our usual end-of-summer trip to Maine, our first with the whole family in the airplane, but we find it difficult to fill the few seats we have. Our sons, now 19 and 16, are busy with friends, sports, and getting ready for the new school year, and have opted to skip this vacation getaway.

We are learning what many parents already know: The hours saved by flying to a distant vacation spot instead of driving mean far less to kids than the fact that they are still vacationing with their parents.

Well, if it is going to be that way, the boys can look after the dogs while Alexa and I enjoy a little time away. Of course, we will miss having them with us, but there must be ways to steer this development to a positive outcome. Perhaps we can visit some of the places we have always wanted to see but avoided because we did not want to torture the kids with boredom. Certainly there are restaurants with eclectic menus we can finally enjoy without hearing complaints as the kids pick onions, peppers, and other bits out of the sauce.

In some ways, the coming trip feels like a return to our earliest Maine vacations together, starting almost 30 years ago. Back then we would not think twice about driving all day to check out as many flea markets as possible, explore unfamiliar parts of the state, or see if we could reach the Canadian border by dinnertime.

We knew these activities would drive small children to distraction, so once offspring arrived we found kid-friendly things to do for the next couple of decades. Now we have an opportunity to resume exploration of the vast Maine landscape—and its strong network of airports.

For years we have gazed at sectional charts and assembled a wish list of places that would be much easier to visit if we had an airplane. These include several interesting airports, from Twitchell (3B5), on the Androscoggin River, where I hope to earn a seaplane rating someday, to Presque Isle (KPQI), featured in Fate Is the Hunter, Ernest K. Gann’s book about the Air Transport Command during World War II. I would also love to land on the 12,101-foot runway of the former Loring Air Force Base (ME16) in the northeast corner of the state just a few miles from Canada. During the Cold War, Convair B-36 Peacemakers and Boeing B-52 Stratofortresses were based there.
Now, with Annie waiting in the hangar and the boys happily pursuing other interests, we have no reason to hold back.