The Grace Of The Base To Final Turn

There are stories about what comes next. Base to final. This is the most beautiful turn in the sky. This is also the turn you can't do badly. Overbank or get too slow, and the ride is over. Stall/spin. An airplane falling out of the sky with no room to recover.

I remember my early left-seat days. This turn, for me, meant hope. Hope I wasn't too high. Hope I wasn't too slow. Hope I didn't fly too far, overshoot the runway. Hope I didn't overbank Two Nine Bravo, a wonderful old 152. I knew trying to force the turn at the end would be a bad idea. Nose on the centerline was a wellspring of relief.

Today, however, a clear winter Sunday morning, I'm not flying the airplane. This day I'm in the right seat of a Cessna 172, camera in hand, looking for the aerial version of take my breath away. Fargo, North Dakota, glistens in fresh snow. The ballpark, home of the minor league Fargo RedHawks, is pristine---a snowhill for the pitcher's mound. The Red River is mostly ice-covered, but where there's open water, it steams. My friend Tajae is flying, and we have no real business except to look around and have fun.

Left traffic for runway two-seven. No wind. Thick air. And then there's something I don't expect.

When we begin the turn, the wing lowers and everything disappears. No airport. No runway. No Fargo Jet Center, the FBO I call home. It's like a curtain coming down. I've always known this happens, but I've never had the time to really look. Watch your speed. Find that county road that serves as an extended centerline. Look at your bank angle. Watch your speed.

I've always known there was something beautiful over my shoulder, out the corner of my eye. But I remember mostly the worry when I could no longer see the runway. Now, because Tajae is flying, I understand the joy of anticipation. When the wing goes down, it's very much like a lowering curtain. We wait for the nose to come around, for the runway to appear. When the wing comes back up, there's a new set on the stage. A thousand things about to happen.

My flying is high-wing, prop in front. Low-wing pilots, multi-engine pilots, they see this turn differently. But it's still the same turn. It's still the aim for home. I ask a friend who flies commercial jets what the turn looks like to him.

"Sometimes, when going into smaller airports," he says, "I'll build a visual approach into the FMC. I use the box to create random fixes and assign random altitudes to essentially create downwind, base and final legs. Usually, the final leg would be identified by the final approach fix and altitude or a specific distance from the airport on final at an appropriate altitude. Once all these points are connected, I can engage VNAV and LNAV modes, and the airplane will fly it all the way to the ground."

I don't tell him I think this is sad. This is safe, certainly. But also flying by machine. Then he continues, "It's sometimes fun to play around with this, but normally I'd disconnect the autopilot and auto throttles and fly it myself."

There's a grace to the base to final turn, a lesson about hope. At the last moment, everything we hope for is hidden. There's a hard risk to what we do. But at the moment after that, our destination is revealed. Centerline. Flare. Smile.

W. Scott Olsen is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He holds the world and national records for the fastest flight across North Dakota in a Cessna 152. Scott's books include "Hard Air," "Never Land" and "Prairie Sky."