Taiwan - National Palace Museum, Crowd Pleaser / Flying a Beech 18

Now for a look or two inside the museum.  As noted in this post from another trip, people going crazy over the subject of their photographs is often a good subject in itself.

Tomorrow's post will feature what they're gawking at...
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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/01]
I don't regret that I never took it to the end to acquire a full pilot's license.  I'd been soloing for a while since turning 16 and was at the point where I was practicing for the check ride to become fully qualified.  So I'd fly out to the practice field, climb to the usual 6,000', then practice figure-8 turns, steep turns, stalls, etc. but really wasn't into it, and as stated before it was boring at an altitude where the ground seems to barely move along as I puttered at a measly 100 knots or so.  Besides, the money (now earned as a disc jockey at a local radio station instead of the paper route) gravitated to a then-becoming-serious girlfriend.  There just wasn't much practicality in becoming a pilot.  So I simply stopped going to flying lessons and let the matter rest.

But the flying days weren't quite over.  During my college days my brother Bob was living in Houston as a practicing attorney.  He was working with a client who was a professional pilot making a cargo run in a Beech 18 between Houston and Brownsville every day.  Due to my experience with airplanes Bob hooked us up one day so that I could tag along for the experience.

I met the guy at Hobby in this building across the field from the terminal.  The first thing I noticed about him was his youth and that he had thick glasses on.  I thought, "here is a guy with thick glasses and I'm about to fly to Brownsville with him."  He was a very friendly fellow, though, and I was not as intimidated as I thought I might be with a professional pilot.  Pretty soon we went out to the plane on the tarmac, and it was my first glimpse of a Beech 18.  I was struck by its resemblance to a DC-3, though a bit smaller.  Being the only other person on the plane, I was designated to fly right-seat as the copilot.

Then came a surprise.  We were doing the preflight together, and he hauled a full box of oil cans over to the plane.  When asked he told me that the radial engines had a voracious appetite for oil, and he wanted to be sure we had enough.  He hopped onto the wings and put oil in both engines before start-up as part of the preflight routine.

So we climb into the cockpit, he and I work together to start the engines and go through the other checklists, and off we went.  He had headphones on all the way down to Brownsville so there wasn't much talk, so I spent our time in the air getting a feel for the instrumentation and where we were along the route.  In pretty good time we landed in Brownsville and offloaded the cargo, then waited a while for the Houston-bound cargo to be loaded.

On our leg back to Houston I did quite a bit of the flying, and was proud when he said I stayed on course better than he usually did.  In my approach to Houston I was a bit over-cautious, however, and ended up a little high.  After making an adjustment we landed on the numbers.  After thanking him for the experience I hopped into my old blue Rambler and headed back to Bob's.