As we pull up the dirt road, the orange phosphor lights wash over our red car turning it a clay grey. About 10 cars sit in the lot; a busy night. We open the doors and step out into the into cold, calm air. A plane powers up and drones into the air, breaking the silence. It’s a two engine machine but all I can see are the marker lights and flashing strobes, then it’s gone and the air is quiet again. This doesn’t feel like an airport.
In the official Transport Canada sense, Burlington airport is every bit as much an airport as Pearson but in every other way it couldn’t be more different. For anyone who hasn’t visited a private airstrip like this you might mistake it for a few storage garages in a field. A paved, unlit runway runs along the length of the property which is nestled along one side by the Niagara Escarpment and with the surrounding farms on all others.
The orange of the outdoor lights is replaced by warm incandescent yellow as we walk into the terminal building. There’s cottage smell of wood and very inviting. Two men stand holding headsets and talking excitedly about something. A single teenager sits in front of a radio at a table behind the counter. He’s barely old enough to drive a car but already has enough flying time logged to be a eligible for his commercial license, over 1500 hours.
My friend Jeff greets us with a smile and a joke and we walk over to a table with a bag, clipboard and 3 headsets on it. I’ve known Jeff for many years: we met working at a motorcycle dealership in 1995. He was in sales and I was in the shop. It didn’t take long to realize we operated on the same wavelength: enthusiastic and curious with a craving for adrenaline. We raced Grand Prix bikes together in the Canadian championship making a great team as we shared a similar physics founded cause and effect approach to riding. In his 40′s, Jeff decided to hang up the leathers and take up his next adrenaline fix in flying. I became his defacto 1st officer.
60's era Cessna Bravo Juliet Whiskey
After some chit-chat, my sister, her boyfriend and I grab our headsets from the table and follow Jeff outside. We’re now on the other side of the building and standing on the tarmac. A Cessna sit’s still and cold in front of us, it’s boxy shape and brown/orange striping in no way betraying it’s 1960′s vintage. Next to it sits Kilo Oscar Victor, our bird, a much newer Cessna with more modern graphics and sleeker shape. The registration letters C-GKOV emblazon the tail and I understand now where it’s phonetic name comes from. We wait as Jeff does his walkaround checks and I can see the impatience building in my sister and her boyfriend after only a few minutes. Ten minutes later we all pile into the four seater.
Pre-flight checks
It’s another 20 minutes of checks and tests inside the plane before we taxi to the end of the runway and await our turn to takeoff. The caution and respect for the dangers inherent in aviation impress you quickly when you see it outside the coddling of an international airport terminal. Dozens of checks, rechecks, protocols and regulations are present and followed by everyone from the private Cessna pilot to the 747 captain. Jeff does not mess around when it comes to safety and coldly ignores insinuations that it’s taking too long. I feel safer flying with Jeff than driving with most people, I think to myself.
A twin engine Seneca flares, touches down and powers back on and takes off again. He’s doing circuits. Jeff radios to the kid sitting in the terminal and we’re clear for takeoff. Jeff powers up the engine, the plane leans forward and then launches down the runway as he releases the brakes. We accelerate, passing the terminal on our right and a few seconds later everything goes quiet. No more vibration, no more bumps, we’re airborne. The hard, abrasive earth is below us and we turn ourselves over to the laws of fluid mechanics.
Jeff pulls back on the controls and we climb sharper before turning right twice; we’re now doubling back towards Lake Ontario. I look out the window and see the veins of streets flowing into their highway arteries, the QEW the most prominent, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other. We bank lightly to the left and continue parallel to the shore and heading to Toronto.
Off to the left we can see Pearson International Airport, the commercial aircraft lining up and forming a clearly visible highway in the sky. The air traffic is heavy tonight and Jeff spends alot of time on the radio communicating with control and adjusting to their requests (a little Cessna sits at the bottom of the pecking order of the air). We continue along the shoreline and when cleared by the island airport, turn into the downtown core where we spend 15 minutes flying figure eights and contemplating the urban accomplishments of man; tonight I marvel at how it all works together so flawlessly.
A net of lights looking east from downtown Toronto
Jeff eyes the time and fuel gauge and decides it’s time to go. We stretch a tangent from the top of our figure eight and trace our path back to Burlington. Before landing, he does a couple “pushovers” to scrub altitude and we get that rollercoaster feeling in our stomachs; everyone giggles, laughs and wants more. By now fuel is running low so we join the circuit and Jeff brings us down flawlessly. We’re home on the ground once again but my head’s still in the clouds, thinking of my next flight.
