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Kilauea at the Big Island.

     On the next day, 17th October 1991, I went back to the flight school at HNL, and rented me a new Piper Cherokee 180, along with the same instructor I had on the helicopter. The Cherokee is a low-winged monoplane, with a single Lycoming 180 HP engine, which gave us a solid cruising speed of 140 mph. 

     I hand-flew the Cherokee (the fun part) while I had the instructor handle the radio and navigation (the boring part). The instructor guided us past the west sides of Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe and Maui – observing all these islands in the far distance.

     Later he set me up for a run down the northeast coast of the Big Island, which in a word was stunning. 

     I viewed a series of cliffs a thousand feet high covered in green, with deeply recessed lush valleys possessing white ribbons of waterfalls cascading hundreds of feet to their floors. The wind that day was blowing from the east - slamming into the face of these cliffs - then tumbling up and above them, creating whipped-creamed clouds all along their tops. There were no highways, hotels or fast-food joints; tourism hadn’t placed its ugly footprint here yet. 

     Eventually the cliffs fell away behind us to a flat area where we landed at Hilo. Of the five major Hawaiian airports, Hilo is the smallest in terms of passenger count, due to the lack of tourism within its service area. Even though we landed on its longest runway, at 9,800 feet in length, it was as if we’d touched down at a ghost town; the lack of ground or air traffic was disturbing. 

     We refueled the Cherokee, and then ran across the highway to a local café for lunch – refueling ourselves. Returning to the Cherokee, we saw a USAF Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, a monster of an air transport, executing practice landings and takeoffs – known as “touch and goes.” It never retracted its landing gear – instead leaving it out in the wind, cooling its gigantic wheels – as it dragged itself round and round in the traffic pattern after each brief touchdown. 

     The lack of any air traffic at Hilo, proved to be the perfect “ghost town” for such Air Force training activity. 

     After launching our Cherokee from Hilo, my instructor guided us inland on a southwest course to the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Eleven miles downslope from the 4,000-foot, active Kilauea Volcano, on its northeast side is a vent called Pu'u 'O'o. Compared to the other giant volcanoes, this one appears as a lonely hill, abruptly rising from the flat landscape with its top chopped off, at the 3,000 foot level, and ten miles inland from the sea. 

     We dropped down in the Cherokee to get a better look. As I approached it, I detected wide rivers of cooled-black lava flowing southeast to the coastline - proof of this island growing in size – while its sister islands, in the Hawaiian chain, are shrinking and sinking from the Pacific’s erosion. 

     Previously this lava had wiped out highways, homes and villages in its rush to the sea. 

     Apparently the Pu'u 'O'o Vent is being fed by an underground lava tube from Kilauea.

     And, as I approached the vent, I spotted a segmented line of white vapors rising from invisible cracks in the earth’s surface, caused by this lava tube, which led us straight to the Pu'u 'O'o Vent. 

     By now I had handed the flight controls to the instructor – requesting a low pass – as I fumbled with my camera to get shots of this trail of white vapors. The instructor then dropped even lower – 150 to 200 feet above this vent resembling a miniature volcano – and rolled into a left bank allowing me to shoot directly down the crater’s throat.

     At the bottom of the steaming crater, I spied two pools of bubbling, orange-hot molten lava in its southeast corner. The shots I got knocked my socks off! 

     And then we were gone in a flash, as my instructor rolled out, applied power and entered a climb – setting course back to Honolulu. It wasn’t until years later, dear reader, that I scanned these shots to my computer and blew them up. At which point my stomach turned to ice water. I hadn’t been aware of how close we had come to disaster; my being distracted by our traveling at 110 mph, while I fumbled with framing and focusing. All the same, my computer revealed molten globs of orange lava, the size of freezers and VW Bugs, being fired at us in a shotgun spread from that crater! Had we made contact with only one of them, we would have surely crashed on the slopes of that vent! Once again proving there is a God, and He, or She, must love idiot aviators.

Evidently the Hawaiian Goddess Pele cut us a break that day. 

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