How a Ghost Airport in Poland, a Jammed GPS Near Belarus, and a French Pilot Made This the Most Memorable Flight of My Life

(Photo: Right before departing Lithuania)

There is a moment somewhere over northern Poland, dodging rain showers low enough that you can see individual cows getting nervous about the weather, when you start asking yourself serious questions about your life choices.

I was not asking those questions because I was scared. I have been in worse spots than a Beechcraft A36 Bonanza skimming under a gray ceiling near the Belarusian border. I was asking them because somewhere around that point our GPS started lying to us, and there is nothing quite like watching your own navigation system develop a drinking problem at 1,500 feet to make you reconsider the whole concept of trusting machines.

But I have been here before. Not over Poland specifically. In the general territory of things going sideways. And every time I end up there, I usually think about my kids.

On my mother’s side of the family there is a piece of aviation history that still makes me laugh every time I tell it. A relative of ours named Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan became one of the most gloriously defiant figures in American aviation when he flew solo across the Atlantic in 1938 without official permission. He filed a flight plan for California, took off from New York, and somehow ended up in Ireland.

The authorities were not amused. The public absolutely was. He claimed the whole time it was a navigational error, a story nobody believed for a single second. The papers called him Wrong Way for the rest of his life and he wore it like a badge of honor. You can read it all here.

I have always wanted to fly since watching Star Blazers, Tales of the Golden Monkey, and Baa Baa Black Sheep as a young boy.

Eventually I got my pilot’s license and instrument rating in my late twenties. Then aerobatics, a seaplane rating, and my Formation and Safety Team (FAST) card. I couldn’t get enough and still can’t.

I’ve always treated aviation as a professional hobby and have been fortunate to learn from some of the world's best pilots. Especially during my time flying air combat with my Yak 52. My hangar neighbor, “Condor”, was one of the original Top Gun instructors and flew the F-4 Phantom in Vietnam. Then there was Bill who had hundreds of hours flying the space shuttle, and another Top Gun pilot, “Moto”, and many more.

My daughter was barely out of diapers when I started taking her up for touch and go landings. Car seat strapped into the back of the plane, binkie working overtime, completely unbothered by the fact that her father was practicing his circuits at a general aviation field while most parents were pushing strollers around the neighborhood. She did not know what any of it meant. She just trusted that wherever we were going, I had it handled.

Years later I taught her to roll my RV6 upside down over New York. She was 12!

“That was pretty cool, Dad.”

I wrote about this in Puddle Jumpers because it applies to parenting the same way it applies to aviation. Kids do not need a perfect flight. They need a pilot they believe in. Someone who stays calm when the turbulence starts, and the plan needs to change in real time.

The kids and I had many flight adventures as they were growing up.

(Photo: Left to right. Talisa my daughers Bestie, my daughter, Me and Apollo after a day flying in Portugal)

So when my friend Bastian asked me to help him ferry his new Bonanza 3,735 kilometers from Pociūnai, Lithuania to Cascais, Portugal, I said, “Hell yes!”

Bastian is a new pilot, and his insurance required him to fly with an experienced pilot with retractable time. I’ve flown the Bonanza before and owned a Fuji LM-2, which is basically a four-seat aerobatic Beechcraft that the Japanese used as a military trainer. Bottom line, I was comfortable to roger up for the job.

What followed was one of the strangest, most human, most unexpectedly instructive trips I have taken in a long time. Not because anything went according to plan. Because nothing did.

We left on a partly cloudy afternoon in Lithuania, and as soon as we hit the border of Poland we encountered low ceilings and scattered showers. I made the call to land at a local field and we decided to stay the night and get up early to try and push south into improving weather.

The next morning we were off with good visibility, but we still had to dodge the occasional rain shower but air traffic control in Poland was very helpful.

Flying VFR means you live and die by what you can see and what your instruments tell you, and for a stretch near the Belarusian border my instruments told me a story that had nothing to do with reality. Russian electronic warfare units along that border have a habit of jamming GPS signals for drones, and apparently somebody decided that morning was a good morning to scramble everything within range.

Your position on the screen starts drifting. Not crashing. Drifting, like a guy at a party who has had four drinks too many and is still convinced he is doing fine.

We adjusted, and just flew visually on our compass heading, radar vectors from Poland control, and old-fashioned pilotage, and pressed on toward the Czech border where we had a planned gas and snack stop.

As we got closer to the Czech Republic low clouds shut that door, so we diverted into Lubin, Poland for fuel.

(Photo: Lubin field, Poland)

It turned out to be one of the strangest airports I have ever set wheels on. Massive runway. Full infrastructure. Built for serious traffic and not a single human being in sight. It was like a scene out of some zombie movie after the world ends.

So much for coffee and a snack. I took a quick bathroom break and then helped Bastian fuel up the bird.

The weather was starting to get much better, but now we had afternoon thunder showers to dodge, and a huge black cloud was rolling over the aerodrome as we fired up the engine for take-off.

From Lubin we pushed west, dodged one more serious rain cell with the help of the Polish controller. "Bonanza, turn 30 degree turn, right. Weather coming. No good."

Roger that!

After that cell the skies cleared as we ran the line along the German, Czech, and Swiss borders. For the first time in hours flying actually felt like flying instead of negotiating.

The Alps showed up on the distant horizon to the east, catching the afternoon light like they had been placed there specifically for our benefit. It was a beautiful sight.

(Photos: Me somewhere over Germany. 2nd, Alps in the distance as we entered France.)

Getting closer to the French border, I kept thinking about my pilot friends who’d told me that in France, the aviation culture and camaraderie were among the best in Europe.

Say what you want about the French, but I can tell you, as soon as Germany handed us off to the French ATC, it became obvious we were flying in a country that loved aviation. The controllers in France were some of the most helpful I’ve encountered outside of America.

(Photo: Pilot talk over a glass of wine with our new friend.)

We landed at this little airfield near Mâcon, France, tired and ready for the ground to stop moving.

Rolling off the runway, I turned to maneuver the Bonanza and found a soft patch of grass, and we dug in. An easy move in my lighter RV6 but the A36 had other ideas. We were briefly stuck in the soft grass. Not dangerously, just embarrassingly, the kind of stuck that makes you grateful nobody is filming.

A French pilot wandered over, assessed the situation without drama, and offered to help. No judgment, no lecture, just the quiet competence of someone who has clearly been the guy stuck in the grass before. He offered a ride into town and then, in the way these things happen at small airfields everywhere, handed us off to another pilot who had just landed.

His name Anton, and we connected immediately. We helped him push his little red and white Robin, registration F-GDKX, into the hangar for the night, tucking it in under a corrugated metal roof where the late afternoon light came through the skylights in long dusty strips. He had converted the aircraft into a sleeper for overnight camping trips, which told me everything I needed to know about how he spent his weekends and what kind of person he was.

Then we sat with a bottle of wine between us, trading stories in broken French and broken English, three people from different countries (Bastian was Dutch) who happened to share the same obsession. Pilots have a language that does not require fluency.

It was magic, and in this moment I was reminded that humanity is capable of great and compassionate things.

I thought about all the times I had sat in a cockpit with my kids and tried to give them some version of this. The understanding that strangers who share a passion are never really strangers. That the world is full of people willing to help if you show up without pretense and with enough humility to accept it.

Anton drove us into town in a 1979 BMW 7 Series was meticulously cared for but was the kind of car that looks shabby on purpose because anything too polished would be embarrassing by French standards. The seats needed attention, but the engine purred.

Bastian and I checked into the hotel, showered up, and walked into town to find a spot to eat.

Dinner in Mâcon was everything you want from rural France. Escargot. Dover sole that dissolved at the touch of a fork. Wine that made you question every bottle you had called good before that evening. We ate slow, debriefed things that went wrong, and right and shared a few laughs. It was the kind of satisfaction that only comes from a hard earned adventure.

Morning brought a short hop to Pau in the foothills of the Pyrenees for fuel, and we finally got the autopilot working, which reduced the workload dramatically and let us actually look at the world instead of fighting the control trim every minute.

The giant Pyrenees rose up fast and serious, sharp ridgelines standing guard over the Spanish border and the Atlantic coastline like they took the job personally.

After cutting through the pass over San Sebastian we ran into a cumulonimbus the size of a small continent parked between us and Madrid, Spain.

I made the call to turn west, and watched the great plain of Spain open up gold and wide beneath us, and pressed through scattered showers toward the Atlantic coast.

The coast into Portugal greeted us with coastal summer fog. Portugal ATC vectored us on top at 3,000 feet and then the fog opened up right when we needed it to. We approached runway 35 for final and put wheels down into Portugal fourteen hours and twenty-four minutes of flying time after leaving Lithuania.

(Photo: Escargot in Macon, France)

Jammed signals. Ghost airports. A plane stuck in the grass. A French stranger who became a friend over wine and pilot talk. That is what the trip became. Not the flight plan we wrote. The one the universe handed us instead.

My kids learned to see the world from small cockpits before they could fully articulate what they were looking at. I am convinced that is part of why they turned out the way they did. Not because aviation is special. Because being raised by someone who treats the unknown as navigable rather than threatening changes how you move through your entire life.

Madison in that car seat, binkie in, completely trusting the process.

That is the whole lesson right there.

The rest is just weather.