1. Why Airplanes?
I’ve always been curious about flight, but also a bit terrified. Before I started flying, and now maybe even more so, I found myself pausing often from my fencing and tending sheep near the rural Montana airport to watch the little airplanes take off and fly across the Bitterroot Mountain Range. I couldn’t keep it out of my head, I want to be up there too! My neighbors are hay farmers ad pilots with a grass landing strip in their field. Craig called just as the sun set on the hills one evening, “it’s about to get LOUD!” I raced outside, fired up the old tractor and drove out to the far edge of the pasture just in time to catch the roar of the mighty 300 HP Cessna 185 take off from the nearby airport, swoop back against the mountain range and land right across from me on the flat part of the pasture. It was so exciting! Craig later gave me a ride in the 185 into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness on a supplies delivery to a friend’s ranch airstrip nestled in the mountains off the Selway River. The thrill of snaking low and slow through the canyons and landing on the greenest carpet imaginable in the middle of the most beautiful mountain valley rocked my world. I had to find a way to learn how to fly!
Physics, aviation, and exploration is in my blood. My family encouraged me to get my pilot’s license. My grandparents were pilots, both getting their private certificates in 1947. My dad was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, deciphering radio transmissions for the CIA from DC-3 airplanes. My brother Tim flew gliders as a teen, my brother Ryan is a Test Pilot for the Air Force flying The Globemaster C-17 and is also an Antimatter Physicist working on novel rocket and aircraft propulsion systems, and my middle brother Todd was also in the Air Force.
Grandma Weed
We try to have a Christmas project each year involving either Physics, Robotics, Aviation, or all of the above while trying to stay out of reasonable trouble. Despite the connections, I never believed that flying was for me or that I could ever learn to fly. One Christmas, we all took a ride in a Beaver on floats out of Kenmore to Lake Union in Seattle. My mom, always encouraging me to go fly, convinced the pilot to let me be the one to sit up front in the right seat. When that lovely guttural radial engine fired up, so did my heart. I was hooked.
