Good Student, Bad Teacher

submitted by Jack Lenehan

At one time, we lived in New Jersey, and it was especially nice to get away from the cold winters and head for the tropical island resorts, and so we started out on this one trip to the Bahamas with my wife being extremely interested in helping out with the navigation.

The night before we left, we sat at the kitchen table while I explained different points of interest in reading the flight charts, pointing out the difference between a non-controlled airport and one with a control tower, and where and how to read the radio frequencies needed to make contact with the towers.

Believing that I had covered enough to get us on our way, after a good nights sleep, we were up at the crack of dawn, and after a day at the office, we were taking off in our 1963 250-Comanche, gears up, climbing out, and heading for our R&R in the sunshine. We had a main fuel tank in each wing plus tip tanks that held another 15 gallons each.

Everything went like clockwork but somewhere along the way I apparently had caught a bug of some sort and was beginning to feel somewhat shabby by the time we were coming over North Carolina. It was well into the evening hours and I thought if we stopped, stretched our legs and maybe had a cup of coffee, I’d feel better so I asked Ruth to find a controlled airport close by and crank in the radio frequency so I could land.

I felt good that I had such a good student because before you knew it, she had the radio up and running and I was requesting landing instruction for a refueling stop, not really wanting to get into a big discussion about how terrible I was feeling. I was sure out of touch with the world because all I could hear was that I was cleared for landing on whatever runway the controller had given me.

I didn’t think that it was possible to feel any worse then I did at the time, but I was wrong. As I flew over the numbers on the correct runway assigned to me, I felt a nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw along both sides of the runway, camouflaged military jets with their wings folded up and cannons sticking out of the noses. I shouted out, "Where the hell are we?" and Ruth said, "The name of this airport is Lejeune- does that tell you anything?"

It was then that I realized that I had neglected to explain what the various colors meant.

We pulled up on the ramp and a real nice sergeant came out and after explaining my stupidity and my now puzzling predicament, he told me not to worry. After he cleaned my windshield and shared some of his coffee with us, he directed me out through the maze of taxi lights to the active runway and told me just to say "Ready to Go", and the controller would think it was one of the officers on the field that had his own plane, and the next sweetest sound was hearing, "Yes, sir... you are cleared for takeoff."