Flying Pictures & Stories
Flying Pictures & Stories
By Gary Agranat
Amityville Flying Service, Zahns Airport,
Amityville, Long Island, New York. (Circa 1979.)
This used to be a familiar sight to me every weekend, the flight apron of
Amityville Flying Service at Zahns Airport. My first flight lesson started here.
One day I just walked in to that shack on the right. I told the man behind the
desk that I wanted to take
flying lessons. He had me fill out some paperwork. And then off I went.
I continued to take lessons here for almost a year.
The type of aircraft I flew was the Piper
Cherokee 140. It was a low wing, two seater, single engine airplane.
The first plane you see on the right is one of the school's 140's.
The 140 was nothing fancy. But it was rugged. I felt it's layout was very
straight forward and easy to use. The instruments and radios were simple and
easy to understand. I liked the manual flap handle between the seats that
you physically had to pull back -- you could feel the flaps move and the
airstream move around it. And you could open and see the whole engine
compartment to inspect it, unlike the Cessnas I flew later. The
school also had Cherokee 180's and Piper Cubs, but I didn't get the chance to fly
those.
Zahns was a small uncontrolled airport with its own unique character.
It was home to lots of small airplanes, old hangars and tall grass. The field was
quiet, but not too quiet. It was located on Long Island about 40
miles east of downtown New York City. It was far enough from the city that
you didn't have to compete with the city commercial air traffic.
But it was still close enough to
get enough air traffic to keep you alert. And it was close enough for me to drive
to, within an hour from home.
The runway pattern was shaped like a "T." Most of the time I
used the longer north-south runway. The shorter
east-west runway ran along the north side of the field. Just to the north of that
was a line of small hangars. And beyond that was a mainline track of the
Long Island Railroad. Both runways seemed to have potholes from years of
"wear & tear," but the east-west runway seemed to me
to have more. I only used that short runway
once, when there was a strong westerly wind blowing right down it. I don't
know which scared me more, that strong gusty wind or that very short runway with
its potholes and the hangars so close!
At Zahns you still did have to be aware of traffic.
Just within a mile to the
north was Republic Airport in Farmingdale. It had a control tower, jet traffic
and an ILS instrument approach. Zahns' airport traffic pattern fit just between
the approaches to Republic's runways 1 and 32.
And above 3000 feet overhead was the outer ring of the terminal control area for
JFK International. You learned the controled airspace demarcations and prominent
landmarks very quickly.
But to the south was the relatively quiet South Oyster Bay, the airport's
practice area. The boundaries were easy to see: from the barrier
beach island of Jonese Beach along the south to the Long Island inland
shore along the north, and
from the parkway bridges at Jones Beach at the west end to the Robert Moses Causway
at the east. In between you could go from sea level to 4000 feet.
You literally could go
from sea level -- because in the bay there was a small island with a paved surface
that my instructors sometimes had me use as a target for emergency landing
practice.
And coming back to the airport, whether from a practice session or a cross-country
flight, was like coming back to a quiet place in your heart.
Everywhere around the airport
was the fast paced life of some of the busiest airports in the country, along with
their busy neighbors. But once you fit yourself into the traffic pattern at Zahns,
you put all the rest of that behind you. It was just you and this small airfield
that you thought about. Landing was like rekindling a relationship.
My mother liked to tell a story of when she was waiting for me to return back from
my longest cross-country flight. I had gone up to Northampton, Mass., then out to
Cape Cod, and then was returning back to Zahns. The flight took a little longer
than I had planned. I was less than an hour late. That didn't bother me too much.
But my mother began to worry. That was a weekend, and on
weekends most of the traffic at Zahns consisted of student pilots practicing
their take-offs and landings. As my mother told me later, she watched each
small plane awkwardly come in, wondering how close each one was to crashing.
And she expected that one of those hopeful "fledgelings" might be me. But
when they would come to the ramp, I didn't appear in any of them. She
considered walking in to the flight school shack to ask if they heard about me.
But she decided if she did that she'd embaress herself or me. So she just kept
watching and waiting. Meanwhile, a plane came in
to land without any fuss that she almost didn't notice it To her surprise -- that
was me. This is one of my mother's stories that I don't mind hearing. : )
Unfortunately, Zahns closed about a year after I started flying. By then I still
hadn't quite finished all my requirements for my license.
And so I was confronted with continuing someplace else.
Eventually I went to a flight school at Republic Airport. But I had
to learn in a different airplane, a lighter, high-wing Cessna 152. I needed about
an extra half year after Zahns closed before I was ready for my flight exam. But
when I took my flight exam I was ready. I got my license, in the Cessna 152 you
see here.
- Gary Agranat
A Cessna 152 I flew, at Cosmopolitan Aviation, Republic Airport. Summer 1980.
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