Boulder City, Nevada. The 13th Annual Albatross Fly-In.
I drove out from Los Angeles to Boulder City because the plane I was supposed to fly, N26132, had a 100-hour inspection that ran long. Six hours driving each way versus around two and a half hours flying. You do the math and then you drive anyway because the destination is worth it.
The Grumman HU-16 Albatross is a large flying boat — built for the Navy, twin-engine, designed to land on the open ocean and retrieve downed pilots. They’re enormous and graceful in the way that only things with zero pretension to elegance manage to be graceful. Dennis Kuhn’s company, American Warbirds, rescues them from the Tucson boneyard and brings them back to flying condition. There were eight Albatross on the flight line at various times that weekend.
Bill Da Silva, of the Quiksilver plane, offered to take me out in the nose. Up in the cockpit, under the dashboard, there’s a little door to the bow hold — where the old radar dome used to be, now capped with a Plexiglass bubble. I lay on my belly in the very front of the plane as we flew in a four-plane formation over Lake Mead, then down through a slot canyon, a few hundred feet up, the pilot weaving stop-to-stop on the controls through the walls of rock.
I came home and processed 203 photographs. Someday I’ll take lessons in one. I’ve been saying that since 2005.