'Seeing From A Different Perspective'

RURAL RETREAT, Va. – “The main thing: Just don’t touch anything,” Curtis Pennington tells me as he fastens my harness.
Before me are about 18 mysterious dials and phrases such as: “Check release if guard is deformed.”
“I won’t,” I accidently shout, unable to gauge the volume of my voice through my headset, which, I was warned, was sure to mess up my hair. That was the least of my concerns.
I’m in the sole backseat of a yellow T-34B, a 50-year-old “no frills” former U.S. Navy plane, getting ready to take off.
Bob Harrison is in the pilot’s seat, and all I can see is “wizard” printed on the back of his gold helmet. The propeller starts spinning and the breeze kicks back through his cracked-open canopy.
He peers through his tiny rear view mirror and gives me a thumb’s up.
Although we’re technically able to communicate through our headsets, the static is as thick as the radio on an Oklahoma road trip.
“How long have you been flying this?” I shout into my microphone.
“Oh ... static, static ... about a year ... static static ... new ... static static. ... Ready to go flying?”
Panic.
The truth, as I later learned it, is that Harrison was new only to this particular aircraft. He actually learned to fly before he learned to drive a car.
At 8 years old, his dad rented a plane and he fell in love. On his 16th birthday, he got flying lessons, then flew army helicopters in Vietnam. He went to Papua New Guinea as a missionary pilot for eight years before ending his career as a commercial pilot for Continental.
“It’s all I ever wanted to do,” he says. “Cars and motorcycles are two-dimensional, you can’t go up and down in those.”
He turns a corner and we’re off down the runway. We rise up, the mountains to the left, the interstate to the right.
“The rain really cleared out the haze,” he says, and I can see a big smile on his face through his little mirror.
Cows become ants as we ascend, our plane casting a little plane shadow on the treetops below. It dances through a cemetery and over the roof of a little white church.
We make a 180 degree turn to the right to pass back over the airport.
“This’ll be the fun part!” Harrison shouts, as he turns again and lowers back toward the runway.
But we don’t slow down, we’re up in the air again, and Harrison said he just wanted to get the land lovers below a good photograph.
We float back around, at 150 mph, and my pilot points out where we cross from Smyth to Wythe county. It’s an approximation – somewhere between two silos and a dairy farm, one of many carved out in perfect squares on perfect green grass below.
A little city appears, and Harrison said its two orange water towers are Rural Retreat’s aerial landmark. We fly over Harrison’s actual workplace: Rural Retreat Middle School where he teaches sixth-grade science.
He said he took the day off to take me flying.
“For 30 years I got paid to do this,” he says, laughing. “When I retired, I had to get a job.”
We soar over the interstate, exactly parallel to the airstrip, as Harrison talks about this, his third, plane.
Built in 1957, it was the Vietnam-era training aircraft for the Navy. For years, it was on display at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and when they replaced it, he found it in a trade magazine and chased it down from a man in Indiana.
Harrison and his wife, the plane’s namesake, Nancy, bought the warbird with a business loan. She’s a clinical psychologist who likes to take pictures and he’s a school teacher who likes to fly planes. They combined their passions into a aerial photography business and pick up real estate and corporate clients here and there. Harrison offers rides on the side, sometimes for money, sometimes for good test scores.
The antique plane costs about $100 for every 15 minutes of flight, with insurance, inspections, repairs and fuel. They barely make any money from it.
“It’s worth it, I love to take people flying,” he says. “It’s the ability to see everything from a different perspective, from a 3-D perspective. If you want to see what’s over the hill, you just slide off and go.”

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531