Harder than it looks
Earlier this year, Scott Douglas found himself without the one and only plane he uses to make a living.
His Cessna 172 crashed in January. Douglas said the pilot flying that day did a superb job getting the plane down. Although the plane was totaled, the occupants walked away without a scratch. Local photographer Fred Stockwell, one of the two men aboard the plane, took pictures on the way down.
Since 90 percent of his work involves teaching pilots, it goes without saying he needed another plane.
Douglas found his replacement in Fredericksburg, Va., and made plans to pick it up, which is just a touch harder than ordering something on the Internet, or buying products on eBay. The small airplane had to be flown back across the country.
The ideal plan for flying coast to coast, he said, in a perfect world, is to fly seven hours each day for two days and six hours on the third.
So much for the ideal. "That has never happened," he said, talking about the various times he's made the flight.
Preparation
Douglas shipped survival, first aid, emergency and navigational equipment to Virginia, to be fully prepared for anything. But didn't have to use any of the exigency material except for a screwdriver.
Douglas, who has flown coast to coast more than a half-dozen times, prefers to go alone because of the tedium and fatigue involved with sitting still for a few hours at a stretch — all day long. Flying in a small plane does entail touching down every two to three hours for refueling.
But Stockwell, Douglas's buddy, elected to put up with the fatigue.
Stockwell, also a pilot but primarily an aerial photographer, had never flown from one side of the country to the other in a small plane.
"It's a dream to fly coast to coast," he said, adding that pilots really have to know what they're doing to complete the feat. "It's an endurance test."
For Stockwell, London-born who has spent much of his life living and working in various countries around the world, the trip presented an opportunity to get another sense of the U.S. as well as engage in his photographic passion. That passion involves not just getting the view from above — the overview that goes beyond eye-level ground perspective — but preserving a record of the planet.
The desire to show people the state of the world and the planet as it is has led him to places like New Orleans, where his photos aimed to capture the sheer magnitude of the Katrina disaster in visual ways he felt the news media did not adequately portray. It has led him to Cambodia, a forgotten land where the brutal rampages of Pol Pot are still in evidence — as caught in his photo displaying an enormous pile of skulls framed in a doorway, on the verge of tumbling out. It has also led him to places like West Africa, Iran and Afghanistan, and to Ashland's sister city in Mexico.
"What I love about traveling is that you learn so much," he said. "Every time I go off, I learn new things."
Although he considers much of his environmental shots as in-your-face photography, he doesn't particularly care to provide commentary on his visual images.
"What I can do is say, 'Look at this,'" he said.
The journey
Stockwell got an eyeful of America on this flight.
Douglas, a second-generation pilot, chose the middle route across country for this flight. The two pilots left April 2 on a commercial red-eye flight, which landed in Washington D.C. at 10:30 the next morning. From Fredericksburg, they flew to Lexington, Ken., a short flight, where they rested to stave off fatigue from the previous flight. On April 4, they left Kentucky and landed in North Platte, Neb. At 5 p.m. it was 70 degrees and clear skies. Twelve hours later, it was 20 degrees and snowing, forcing an unplanned day and overnighter in North Platte.
On April 6, they took off for Cheyenne, Wyo.
The flat magnitude of agricultural land between Lexington and Cheyenne stunned Stockwell.
"The Nebraska landscape went on forever," he said. "You really get a sense of the expanse of the land and this agricultural part of the country."
Stockwell took a slew of photos chronicling the crop circles and the ubiquitous satellites that serve to stave off the rural isolation. Even more mesmerizing for him was coming into Utah and Wyoming territory where the corrugated terrain — testimonials to ancient geologic events — sprawls, unfolding in pouches and hollowed grooves and pockets like the wrinkles in an old lived-in face, holding secrets.
"When you go to other countries, they have all this stuff that we don't," he explains. "Here, it's the geography -"" they [have] old castles, our pyramids — [that is] our monument."
On the approach to Cheyenne, while a preoccupied Stockwell was recording a view most people never have a chance to see, Douglas flew directly into deteriorating weather, switching from visual flight rules to instrument flight rules — meaning the pilot's navigation relies solely on instruments. In Cheyenne, they waited out the weather, then took to the skies again three hours later. The original plan called for an overnight in Salt Lake City, but they felt good enough to power on through.
"As we approached Klamath Falls, there was a thunder and lightening show about 8:30 p.m.," Douglas said. "As we approached (about 100 miles away) we saw it moving out and so continued on."
The coast-to-coast flight can be done in two and a half days if there are no weather delays. Douglas and Stockwell sandwiched their flight between a series of deadly tornadoes on the other side of the country and slipped out from Virginia just before the nor'easter crashed in. Although the goal was to be back by lunchtime, they arrived at 9 p.m., having pushed a long day. A Cessna typically flies about 100 knots an hour — or about 115 miles per hour in car-speed terms. Flying east to west means flying into the wind, and goes slower.
"At times, we were down to 70 mph — trucks were faster than we were at some points," Stockwell said.
"We were excited when we were able to get back to 100 knots," Douglas added.
Locally, Stockwell's work can be seen at Jefferson State Pub and is frequently exhibited at the armory or visit www.stockwellphotos.com
