Aviation clubs share joy, costs of flying

Although it's actually 5,501 feet in length, the airstrip at Nashua Airport seems to be endless.

There are hundreds of small, private planes parked on the tarmac at midfield, and pilots climb into the glass cockpits and taxi their planes passed the flight control tower to the end of the runway.

The single- and twin-engine planes accelerate in a burst of speed and liftoff at the last dangling moment into the distant blue-grey skies of the hazy morning.

Jack Ham of Merrimack is one of the pilots, among many local fliers and students from nearby Daniel Webster College, who come down to the airstrip to fly.

Ham has been flying since 1966, the year that he got his pilot's license, and joined the Queen City Aero Club in 1999.

Aviation clubs are a popular way to share the cost for the hobby of flying, he said.

The 15 members of the club jointly own a 1971 single-engine Cessna plane. The used airplane is a small four-seater and would bring about $50,000 on the market, he said.

The club charges $3,250 to gain membership, and therefore stock in the plane, and $30 per month to pay for a rental space and an FAA licensed mechanic to maintain and repair the plane.

The sea green and white plane, number N20172, travels 122 miles an hour, and Ham has flown it to Colorado Springs, Florida, Bahamas and took a journey to Arizona.

"One of the things I have done is to fly through the Grand Canyon, 2,000 feet below the rim, when you were still allowed to do that," he said.

He began flying for business, about 150 hours a year, to visit clients while working as a manufacturers representative. He later began flying for vacations, and now wants to use the plane for missionary work.

Ham said that Fixed Base Operators, private companies that operate at the airfield, can provide instruction and flight lessons to obtain a pilot's license. The process usually takes a minimum of 40 hours, and the cost, including instruction, plane rentals and fuel, can run $5,000 to $6,000.

Beginning pilots also need to take 30 to 40 hours of ground school classes to learn about rules and regulations, wind and clouds, air currents and aeronautics, basic instruments and systems of the plane.

Pilots can then get an instruments license that allows them to fly according to instruments.

"Instrument flying is when you fly only with reverence to the instruments, and it enables you to fly in overcast, clouds and make tight landings," Ham said.

The importance of taking flying lessons with instructors, who have dual controls, cannot be understated. The action of flying is procedural, and often requires a pilot to make instant corrections without thinking, and no second chances, Ham said.

Preparation is important because even experienced pilots can run into trouble. Ham was recently flying when two key instrument panels went out.

"I lost one instrument and then the other, and I figured out that it was the vacuum pump. I deduced that it was the vacuum because both of those systems shared this common part." He looked up the appropriate response in the Visual Flight Rules book he had in his plane and learned that the breakdown was not critical. The moment, however, illustrated the value of understanding the operations of a plane.

"It is important to know your systems," he said.