D THE SPOTLIGHT travel
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Embalse de Mediano, Spain
I
was raised next to my grandfather’s private airstrip in New York, near the Canadian border. He restored antique aeroplanes, generally restricted to the Piper Cub and Super Cub models, with variants in between. I spent my youth riding in his planes, eventually taking my first solo flight in the 1990s in the aeroplane I now own, a 1949 Piper Cub Special. The latter is a postwar model that sits between the iconic Cub (which trained most American pilots for WWII) and the Super Cub (which became the de facto bush plane of Alaska). My aircraft model,
rare in that slightly over 1,300 were produced, can do both basic bush plane landings and ‘low and slow’ flying, for which Cubs are treasured. The aeroplane eventually made its way from New York down to North Carolina, out to Colorado, back to the Atlantic Coast, out to Wyoming, then off to Germany and then Spain. Other than the Atlantic crossing in a shipping container, it flew to all its new homes at painstakingly slow cruise speeds of 120 km/h, with one fuel tank, requiring stops roughly every 320 km for refuelling. While crossing America as PA11 in Cerdanya
28 / OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020
