Right after I got my pilot certificate in May 1993, I got checked out to rent airplanes at airports in my area.

N2870Q, a Cessna 172, belonged to Dub. Dub and I were the first students to graduate from Phil’s class at the Ada airport. That was Saturday morning, May 1, 1993. Dub took his check ride in his airplane, and I took mine in the rental, N6059G, a really nice Cessna 150.

That 150, named Old Gomer, was apparently involved in a September 2023 crash in Huntsville, Texas that killed both occupants.

In April 1997, I ferried Dub’s Cessna to Tulsa, where he was having work done on a Piper twin he had recently bought. It flew like every other Cessna 172. I was surprised to learn that in November 2005, someone (I don’t think it was Dub) crashed this airplane after running it out of fuel in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Another Cessna 152 I rented pretty regularly, including to fly with Abby in the spring of 2003, N6202M, was demolished in a fuel-exhaustion crash in 2018 at Horseshoe Bay, Texas.

For a while I was renting a Piper Cherokee 160, N5422W. It was easy to fly, but had a couple of oddities I didn’t like, such as the Johnson bar flaps, and the overhead crank for elevator trim.

I took it to Tulsa a couple of times. The most interesting Tulsa trip involved a stubborn thunderstorm directly over my destination, Tulsa International Airport, which happened to be close to where a friend lived at the time.

I dutifully listened to the ASOS, but instead of weather and NOTAMS, all I heard was, “developing situation; contact ATC.” Weird. On the other radio I heard an American Airlines flight asking to return to Oklahoma City. Weirder. I called ATC and they told me a thunderstorm was parked right over Tulsa International, and hadn’t moved in an hour. I told them I would land at Riverside, which was reporting VFR. The Riverside controller had me do a right downwind for 17, and said he would call my base turn. The thunderstorm was right in front of me. I slowed the airplane down and waited for what seemed like forever before he called my base. The landing was uneventful.

A few months later I called to rent that plane again, but no one seemed to know where it was. Word on the street was that someone had flown it to Mexico and left it there.

The airplane finally found it’s fate in August 2000 when the pilot reportedly “encountered a gust and lost directional control while attempting a go-around, resulting in an in-flight collision with trees and terrain.”

Possibly the weirdest fate of any airplane I flew regularly was a Cessna 172 with the tail number N172JF. An accident report from October 1998 states, “Witnesses observed the airplane roll into a steep bank and descend vertically into the ground… the accident site was located adjacent to a church where a friend of the pilot was attending services. The friend had reportedly declined a marriage proposal from the pilot the night before the accident. The medical examiner classified the pilot’s death as a suicide.”