There are speedboats that go as fast as Bob May's
floatplane. Even pepped up with a larger, 150-horsepower
engine, the 1946 Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser tops out at 85
miles per hour.
"That would be 130 miles per hour with wheels, but the
pontoons add a lot of drag," he explains. Not that he minds
— what counts is the freedom of f lying a f loatplane, which
makes almost any body of water a ready runway.
"My wife and I will fly over
to Lake Martin for lunch at Kowaliga.
Pilots call that a $100 hamburger."
– Floatpl ane pilot Bob M ay
Calling May a veteran pilot hardly covers it. For more than
three decades, he's flown big jets for a major airline, mainly
out of Atlanta. (Fifteen years ago he moved from there to his
Alabama lake house, in commuting distance of the South's
biggest air hub.)
"I've logged more than 32,000 air hours and have flown
about 200 different types of planes," May says, in that matterof-fact pilot manner.
He relishes the low-and-slow flying his Piper Cub calls for,
as both a break from piloting massively complicated jetliners
and an echo of his earliest airborne hours, flying a small plane
over the fields of Idaho at the age of 14.
Left: Photo by Bernard Troncale — Charles Welden, pictured flying over Lay Lake,
trains pilots on various lakes.
Above: Photo by Bernard Troncale — Bob May flies over Lake Harris.
S hor el i ne s | 2013 Vol:4
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