Cockpit Conversation: Small Town Cab

I’m in a small town not too far from a big city, at a hotel early in the morning, and need to get back to the airport for another day of making lines in the sky. The cab is on time, but it turns out that it’s the driver’s first day, and I’m her first ever customer.  I had to give her instructions on how to close the door. It’s one of those new ones where you can’t slam it, you have to kind of indicate that you want the door to close, and then wait patiently for it to close itself. Not a Type A person’s door. It took me a while.

There’s an odd sound from the motor. I ask if the vehicle is an electric
hybrid. “I dunno,” the cab driver admits, “They just told me to pick a
car.”

I have to give the driver directions to the airport. People in small towns near big cities often aren’t aware that they have their own airport. “The airport” means the big city airport.  Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing, especially if English is not the driver’s first language. This driver is fluent in English and she is willing to believe there is an airport in this direction. We go there.  I landed here once in an airplane with a GPS that didn’t have the
airport in the database, and the poor thing went into panic mode,
thinking I was crashing instead of landing. It is one of those almost-deserted airports with a waist-high chain link fence, a little gate where you just lift the latch to swing it open, and engineless airplanes sitting in the long grass beside the pavement.

My notes say she charged me double, but not how I dealt with that. I probably just told her she was wrong and let her go through the credit card machine procedure again. While she was searching for the receipt book, I noticed that her fleece vest bears the logo of a transit company in the big city.  I asked about it and said she usually drives a school bus.

And then I suppose I went flying.