OLD FLYING YARN—

This item is from a two week flying vacation with our high school and lifetime friends, Nancy and Jerry Kulka, which went from Ohio to Arizona to California, to South Dakota and back many years ago.

We were level in the clear, cool air at 9,000 feet on an IFR flight plan from Casper, WY to Rapid City, SD. While our wives were relaxing in the back seat of the Cessna 182 Jerry and I were discussing my experience in flying zero gravity with the US Air Force.

We decided to try our own experiment and laid a pencil on top of the instrument panel while I described flying a parabolic arc with our relatively small airplane. Then, I dived to increase our airspeed followed by pitching the nose up in a modest climb while adding full power.

As the airspeed bled off I unloaded the G forces from the wings by pitching the nose down gently through level flight to a slight descent.

Bingo! Our pencil floated in mid air.

We enjoyed a very brief celebration over the success of our experiment, then pandemonium struck.

There were multiple screeches from the back seat and I turned to find the problem and was immediately confronted by Jerry’s wife’s posterior floating just above my shoulder and my wife dangling upside down under Nancy’s left leg.

At the same time, naturally, everything else in the airplane that wasn’t attached—floated, everywhere, including the immeasurable contents of both ladies’ purses.

Ooops.

Just seconds later I returned my attention to flying the airplane while Jerry stuttered through the beginning of what turned out to be a long series of apologies on how we could be so immersed in our experiment to have forgotten they always flew the enroute portions of our flights with their seat belts unbuckled.