Arizona again — and the alternator again

This was the second time we’d flown this route — Norfolk out to Arizona and back — and, as it turned out, the second time the alternator gave up on exactly this run. The year before it had waited until the way home and then held on by a thread, working just well enough to limp us back into Norfolk. This time it wasn’t so generous.

The Mooney (N28FY) is a lovely aeroplane and I’ll happily take it across a continent any day; it’s the electrics on this particular trip that seem to be cursed. With me were two friends from the club in Weißenhorn — Christoph and Corinna Maier, a brother and sister who both wanted to see the American West from a small aircraft.

We staged west in long legs — Mount Vernon, Wiley Post at Oklahoma City, Moriarty up in the high New Mexico desert — and then the ground fell away into the good stuff: Monument Valley off the wingtip, the Grand Canyon opening up under the nose, the red rock around Sedona. Down into Goodyear for the night, then a day-run over to Las Vegas and back, the Strip glittering below in the dark.

Goodyear is where the alternator quit — and a single-alternator aeroplane with a dead one isn’t going anywhere far. That was the end of the westbound leg. We left the Mooney on the ramp in Arizona, bought airline tickets, and flew the boring way home: Phoenix to Norfolk, in the back, with peanuts.

Rather than call it there, we grabbed the most tired-looking Cessna 172 on the field — N75938, a genuinely scruffy old thing — and made a day of the Outer Banks instead. Up the coast to a New York flyby: the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan standing up out of the haze. Then south down the barrier islands to First Flight at Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers got the whole business started, taxiing in under the memorial on the dune.

Eighteen landings, a little over 4,000 nautical miles between the two aeroplanes, one more dead alternator, and a much better ending than the day at Goodyear promised.