As a schoolteacher-turned-aviator-turned-instructor-turned-airline-guy, I have enjoyed reading many of your columns over the years, but for personal reasons, none more than Martha Lunken's. Weaned on Fate Is the Hunter and Stick and Rudder, I grew up with Peter Garrison's Melmoth exploits and Gordon Baxter's fly-in exploits and Richard Collins' instrument-flying exploits and Len Morgan's airline exploits - and I've come to enjoy the younger crop of writers who now grace your pages - but I count myself lucky to have known Martha personally, if briefly. One gets to an age when one's heroes become one's contemporaries; on a breezy October 17 many years back, I flew a rental Beech from now-closed Blue Ash Airport down to "Sunken" Lunken for my CFI check ride (Lunken's terminal, the building Ernest Gann nearly took out with an ice-laden DC-2; the FSDO, in those days, a brisk walk across the bike trail and Wilmer Avenue).
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