Once upon a time, when I was a young lad of 16, I thought I would "shoot" some landings in our club's Taylor Craft! I took off but did notice a lot of thunder storms around, but if one gets close I will just land and put the bird up. But, alias, my romantic side kicked in and I just had to go to my girl friends house about 10 miles away and show her my excellent airmanship skills. After making several pass over her house and getting waves of response from my girl friend, I decided it was time to go back and shoot those landings. As I approach the field, holy cow Batman, there is storm over the field, now what do I do? As I wandered around, things were starting to get exciting as I was getting helmed up by all these storms around.
I decided then I was going to have to make a "forced" landing to avoid a bad situation. I looked and found a pasture which did not appear to have any live stock in it, lined up and made a successful landing. I sat there as the rain beat down and heard lots of thunder, but after a while, things quieted down, so got out of the bird after setting the brakes and "propped" the old T craft in preparation for a takeoff.
The grass and weeds were about 8 or 10 inches high, but I thought I will just follow the tracks which I had made when landing. I taxied to the end of the pasture and proceeded to takeoff! uh, oh, what is wrong, this thing is not accelerating to takeoff speed! No amount of time of trying, I just couldn't even get the a/s indicator to even wiggle, let alone get to 50MPH indicated. I become concerned there was something wrong with the engine, so I shut her down and walked about a 1/2 mile to a house, called mom and shortly they arrived to retrieve their #1 son.
After a couple of days passed and a farmer mowed out a runway of sorts and a elder in the club flew the thing back to home base, I found out real quick how grass and weeds would slow down a aircraft and prevent it from taking off.
I guess that qualified me to make the statement, "I learned about flying from"!
