You don’t just wing it

Your car sits in the driveway. You walk outside, slide behind the wheel, activate the ignition and drive away. But when it’s your light aircraft tethered outside, it’s not so simple. Just ask Stan Vander Ploeg. For starters, he doesn’t assess the weather just by looking out the window.

He checks with AWS – Aviation Weather Services – for current and forecast conditions along his planned route and over his destination, noting temperature, clouds, atmospherics (fog, etc.), and wind speed and direction, both on the surface and aloft.

Preflight is a verb. A crucial one. He doesn’t want an unforeseen problem at 3,000 feet above sea level.

Starting at the nose and circling the aircraft clockwise, he visually and physically checks every component for airworthiness, wary of letting familiarity lead to complacency.

He checks the propeller for damage. Lifting the engine cowling, he “sumps,” meaning he examines small samples of fuel and fluids for colour and contamination.

With practised concentration, he examines engine components. He tap-tap-taps along the fuselage, assessing structural integrity. He grasps, pokes, rotates and presses, assessing struts, lines, cables, hinges, vents and baffles; finger checks nuts and bolts, fittings and fasteners; manually waggles ailerons, flaps and elevators.

Satisfied, he releases tie-down ropes from loops anchored in sunken concrete, looks up into a bright, cloudless sky, and smiles.

Walkaround has taken 10 minutes.

In the four-seat cabin of the 1948 Stinson 108-3, Stan takes the left front seat, fastening lap and shoulder belts, making sure I do the same as I settle

Through their business, Grand Valley Aircraft Restoration, heavy double black line – Highway 11. I followed it and landed at Muskoka Airport. Sheila remembers kissing the ground. She probably kissed me.”

Today, the Vander Ploegs’ airfield lies long and slim and green behind their beautifully kept and restored Victorian brick farmhouse. Its backdrop is conifer and walnut woods, some of which they planted to replace trees taken down for the airstrip.

But the couple will soon move on from what Stan calls “the love of our lives.” They plan to sell their home, workshop, hangar and the business, and move to the Collingwood area.

Still, they’re not leaving everything behind. The Piper Cub is going with them. Stan will relocate it to a hangar at the Collingwood Airport (CNY3), where he will also mentor an eager young man, passing on the knowledge of what he calls a “dying art” – the restoration of classic biplanes, such as the storied Tiger Moth.

And Stan and Sheila will continue flying. “We live,” says Sheila, pointing to the sky, “up there.” into the right front seat beside him. Canadian air regulations oblige him to indicate all emergency exits to passengers, the same as in an airliner.

A telescoping metal control column topped by a D-shape (the steering wheel) is before him. A matching one juts out at me in the seat beside him. Rudder pedals below his feet are similarly duplicated.

Holding a laminated Before Flight checklist he could probably recite by heart, Stan starts engine run-up and system checks, physically touching each of the many gauges and toggles clustered on the metal arc of the instrument panel while saying each check aloud, even when alone.

“Master switch on … primer in and locked … auxiliary pump on … altimeter set [to 1,665 feet, the height of Grand Valley above sea level] … okay.”

The view over the high nose and through the blur of spinning propeller as he taxis out isn’t great and is further obscured by a central strut dividing the windscreen and two diagonal supporting rods crossing it.

At the end of the airstrip, he turns the plane tightly around to head into the wind. Ahead is a long, seemingly narrow, lawn of mowed turf.

He makes final system checks to a rising racket as he warms the engine. He looks ahead intently, adjusts his headset and sunglasses. And smiles.

Full power! The engine screams and the plane thrusts forward, bouncing from side to side. He appears very calm while seeming – to the uninitiated, at least – to wrestle with the control column and fiddle with an extended twist-push-pull rod mid-dash, which is the throttle.

Amid all the exertions and concentration, we gently lift off the earth. The little plane climbs quickly.

At 2,600 feet (or 1,000 feet AGL – above ground level), he powers back, levelling off and soaring above the astounding patchwork of greens, browns, yellows and aquas carpeting Headwaters.

It’s very beautiful.

Nature Exposed

BY JOHANNA BERNHARDT

SITTING IN A COZY WOODEN LOFT overlooking a pond on her Mono property, photo artist Jo Thomson is surrounded by striking examples of her latest work – cameraless photographs of botanicals. Adorning the walls are her framed prints of Queen Anne’s lace, ferns and feathers against black or blue backgrounds.

Jo uses cyanotype printing to create the blue-based images and traditional darkroom printing for the black-based photograms. Both art forms have endured for more than a hundred years despite the advent of digital technologies, and both rely on direct contact between items foraged from nature – feathers, leaves, fresh and dried flowers – and lightsensitive paper.

Growing up near the rugged coast of Devon, England, Jo loved exploring the area’s sandy beaches, plunging cliffs and hidden coves. After completing high school, she studied art and developed a love of recording the world around her. She went on to earn a BA in photography, spending many hours in the darkroom. “I never really forgot the magic of that time,” she says.

In 2015 Jo and her husband, Blair, along with their children, Zach and Dexter, now 16 and 12, moved to Mono from bustling Exeter, England. Jo marvels at the differences between her former city life and her country existence. The family resides on 10 acres that include forest trails, a pond and plenty of enchanting places for her boys to roam.

Jo works alongside Blair in their graphic