How I conquered the big, white tire.

In my essay, “When I Became a Pilot” (which has since been lost in various Web site changes), I discuss the various flights I’ve made that have led up to me finally feeling as if I really am a pilot. One of these flights was my private pilot check ride. And in one of those paragraphs, I mention the big, white tire.

The tire is a truck tire, painted white, that sits out in the desert in a practice area my old Scottsdale-based flight school sometimes uses. The area is about four miles northeast of Deer Valley airport (DVT). I’d tried on several occasions to find it, but was never successful. Until today, that is.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. First you need to know the back story.

During my check ride, the examiner asked me to hover up to that big, white tire, face it, and hover all the way around it, facing it the entire time. This is an exercise in hover control and frankly, when I attempted it on my check ride, I did quite poorly. In fact, I thought I’d botched the check ride, mostly because of my failure to do this one maneuver anywhere near satisfactorily. I passed the check ride, but I vowed to return to the tire and try again.

Today, after a late lunch at Deer Valley’s airport restaurant, I decided to try to find the tire again. And this time, I found it.

It’s not very hard to find, if you know where to look. There are actually two big, white tires there. But more obvious from the air is the landing square, marked out with small, white tires and the orange windsock, which must have been recently replaced. Today, it hardly moved, with a two- or three-knot wind from the northwest.

I landed in the square, then hovered up to the big, white tire. I faced it with the tip of my cockpit only a foot from its closest edge and my skids only two feet off the ground. It seemed to mock me — after all, it was just a big, white tire in the desert, but it had been in my thoughts for years. It was as if I were making a pilgrimage to pay homage to its greatness.

And then I began my circle, to the left. It amazed me, at first, how easy it was to perform this simple task. Slight movement to the left with the cyclic, slight pressure on the right pedal, miniscule adjustment of the collective. Within half a minute, I’d circled it, returning to my starting point. Then, just for good measure, I circled to the right.

Ha! I could do it after all!

(Of course, I’ve logged over 600 hours since my first check ride. If I couldn’t do it by now, I should go back to flight school.)

I left the practice area, proud of myself. I flew low around the mountains of New River, over Anthem and the outlet mall, over Lake Pleasant and the golf course, into the Wickenburg Mountains. I flew low, a hundred feet above a car on Castle Hot Springs Road, past a man parked out in the desert with a camera, over some ATVers in the Santo Domingo Wash. I passed the shooting range and the rodeo grounds, then climbed to a respectable altitude to overfly Wickenburg. I came in to the airport on Runway 23, and set it down at the pumps, feeling more like a pilot than I have in a very long time.