I had a full day planned yesterday, a flight lesson to give bright and early Saturday morning, and an aerial photo session planned for shortly thereafter. Never mind it being September 11 (although Darrell, my aerial photographer and friend, said he was a bit nervous and asked me not to mention the date); the weather was beautiful and the planes were waiting.

My first appointment was at 8 AM, PDK airport in Atlanta, with a post-solo student and a Cessna 150 that happens to be five years older than I am. The plan was for me to do a short flight with this student, make sure he's on his game, then send him off on a planned solo cross country flight to Dalton in north Georgia, but a pocket of mist and low crap in Dalton was forecast to stick around most of the day, so the cross-country portion of this flight was scrapped. All we wanted to get in was an hour of local practice.

Despite its age, this airplane is exceptionally well-maintained by its owner, a retired airline and military pilot. The engine compartment is literally clean enough to eat from, which is rare for airplanes used for primary instruction. Generally speaking, things may be aged, but they work. But yesterday wasn't our day; the radios would power up, but the digital display on the radios was inoperative, making it impossible to know what frequency we were currently on, impossible to dial in another frequency. Particularly at a towered airport, this is a no-go item. I turned them off and on a few times, jiggled the unit (for the communication and navigation radios are in a single unit), rolled the frequency selection knobs a bit and flipped garbled frequencies between the active and standby windows, tapped the frequency display a couple of times, etc, but to no avail. The flight was scrubbed. I left a message for the owner to apprise him of his problem.

Enroute to meet Darrell and follow him to another airport, Covington, east of Atlanta, where we would be taking off on our aerial photo mission, I got a call back from the owner of the 150. He explained that this happens now and then, especially after it rains, or on a cold day, or particularly when both conditions apply. Yesterday was not a cold day, and it had been a few days since it had rained, but we'll overlook that. "You just have to let them warm up," he explained, "maybe ten minutes, long enough to get through the runup. Usually it's cleared up by the time you need to talk to tower. If you're lucky, the last guy to fly it left the ATIS and ground frequencies in." At the end of the phone call, I was promising to drive out to PDK later in the day to make sure a good warm-up would indeed render the radios usable again.

In other words, this was a case of mechanical witchcraft syndrome. In an older vehicle of any kind, there are a few things that don't work just right and so you just ignore them, and a few things you gotta jiggle just right if they act funny, and the like. It's a defining characteristic of most old vehicles, as you probably know being on this forum. It's also common to old guys who own these old vehicles that they know all the tricks, but the tricks have become so ingrained that it doesn't occur to them to convey the arcane rights to their disciples. Really, these guys need to work up a supplemental manual, to which they add entries as they encounter malfunctions and determine the proper exorcising rite to use to address it, because without that manual, 'borrowers' like me sometimes get stuck. It's often difficult for the initiate to determine if a given problem is a failure, or one of things you have to jiggle the key just right to get it to work.

At Covington, our aerial photo plane, a Cessna 172 that is also, if I'm not mistaken, older than I am, waits for us. Darrell's dad is part-owner, which is how we have free access to it. It is also moderately less well-maintained, despite the fact the other owner is an A&P, but it is certainly airworthy. Usually. But again, yesterday wasn't our day. Once preflighted and buckled in, I engaged the starter, and although the starter itself was doing just fine, it wouldn't engage the prop. Again, I try to anticipate the proper spell to use, guessing that although the starter isn't engaging at the moment, moving the prop to another position may give the starter better bite. We go through the ritual several times: turning off the master and the mags, moving the prop to another position, turning everything on again, and cranking the starter, but our strategy was unsuccessful. The last few attempts, the starter made a pretty nasty grinding noise as it wound down, which seemed to me a sign that it was time to stop trying. I called the aforementioned A&P to inquire whether there was anything else I ought to try. "Not unless you want to hand-prop it," he said. "And I wouldn't advise that." "No," I agreed, "Homey doesn't hand-prop." Especially when you consider it's been ages since I saw an older Cessna with a working parking brake, heh. So that was that, until the starter is repaired or replaced.

Two scrapped flights on September 11; maybe someone was trying to tell us something. Darrell and I went off to retrieve his dad, who was waiting at a major intersection near one of our photgraphy sites with a handheld radio, intending to direct us to our target, which he felt we may not be able to identify easily from the air. We found him standing by his parked car in an empty church parking lot, radio in hand, looking up at the sky. As we drove up, he said someone had just flown overhead, and he thought it was us, so he'd been directing 'us' on the agreed-upon frequency. "I was yelling at him because he went flying off the wrong way," he said. "I wondered where you damned fools were going."

Picture a man in his sixties, standing in a church parking lot just off a major thoroughfare, stained as always with printer's ink, staring at the sky and shouting angrily into a radio. If he'd been wearing a tinfoil hat someone may have had him committed -- or he may have garnered a few disciples, who knows.

On the way there, Darrell and I had speculated that his dad would probably have some sort of folk remedy we should have applied to the starter in question. "You know," Darrell said, "park it with the cowling facing the sun so it gets nice and warmed up, then walk around it backwards three times, say a prayer, and start it up." I laughed, because the best thing about the witchcraft syndrome is that this is perfectly plausible. The true test of the typical old guy vehicle wizard is to ask him whether a certain sequence of witchcraft will indeed revive a piece of hardware. A skeptic, unschooled in the dark arts, will dismiss the ritual out of hand. The true old guy will have to think about it a while before dismissing it. So we asked him.

"So, dad," Darrell asked, after explaining our problem. "Do you think it might have helped if we turned the 172 into the sun for a while, let the starter get warmed up, and then tried it?"

His dad thought about it a while, turning the possibilities over in his mind. "No," he finally allowed, "I don't think that would have helped." We had to laugh.