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From on high, Fayette looks like a great story

By J. FRANK LYNCH

When The Citizen’s chief photographer, Beth Snipes, announced she was going up in an airplane on the day after Thanksgiving to shoot pictures of holiday shoppers and traffic from above, you know I volunteered to go along for the ride.

How often do you get the chance to survey a place you know so well up close and from a fresh perspective, even if for only an hour? For me, it had been about 25 years.

Peachtree Flight Center at Falcon Field, which this week changes its name to Falcon Aviation Academy, arranged to have instructor Andy Hale take us up in a Cessna 172.

The morning was bright and sunny but cold, and the 30-year-old single-prop plane with room enough for four wasn’t fooled. When Hale went to turn the ignition, she whined and chugged stubbornly but refused to turn over.

Hale told us that airplanes often have to be “jumped” in the mornings to get them going, and it makes sense, though I’d never really thought about it (does Delta have that problem?).

A quick tow to the hangar, however, and a couple of quick jolts of power soon found us speeding down the runway and heading up over the Starr’s Mill School complex.

Hale was an excellent pilot and very accommodating, though he said he was relatively new to the area and we’d need to give him directions.

In the skies above Fayette County, there aren’t any stop signs and intersections to use as landmarks, so Beth and I found ourselves using the phrase “over there” a lot.

That was fine for the most part, because you don’t have to be too high up to see just about everything there is to see — the county isn’t that big after all — and the weather was incredible.

With no clouds or haze and unlimited visibility, Hale called it a perfect day for flying. Beth said it was a perfect day for taking pictures. I thought it was a perfect day to sit back and enjoy the view.

I quickly found out it was no free ride when Beth yelled through her headset for me to “hold on” and lifted up the window along her side of the plane, sending a sudden rush of frigid air directly into my face.

Beth wasn’t just tossing out her chewing gum or adjusting the side-view mirror, but positioning herself to lean out the side of the plane, camera safely strapped around her neck — a maneuver that anybody else might call “going in for a closer shot.”

And so for the next hour, a very brave Beth hung out the open window on her side of the plane while I shivered uncontrollably in the back seat handing her various lens and image disks and ever so often screaming into my headset mouthpiece, “Are we there yet?”

I was grateful for the headset, even though it pinched both sides of my head and made a terrible mess of my hair, because it kept my ears warm.

My nose was fully exposed, and it began to sting in minutes. My eyes watered and my fingers turned red, and eventually I realized that my lips had turned numb — frostbite was setting in already, I thought.

As I said before, the intent of this instructional flight was to check out “black Friday” shopping crowds. But the trip between The Avenue in Peachtree City and Fayette Pavilion in Fayetteville only takes about 5 minutes as the crow flies, which left Beth plenty of time to shoot everything in between.

I considered jumping out when we arrived high above Piedmont Fayette Hospital, figuring as cold as I was, the fall wasn’t going to hurt me. But I’m glad I didn’t because the “medical district” is going to be the story in Fayette County for the coming decade and beyond.

The recent name-change was no small move for Piedmont, which has plans to expand what we all still call Fayette Community into a regional medical center.

Already, a new office building and parking lots are complete, another office building is on the way and construction has started on the new patient wing even though the babies still aren’t a sure thing.

Seeing it from the air makes it all the more striking. What will become of the vast acres of undeveloped farmland that stretches beyond the hospital?

Homes of some sort are certain, as are new schools (a middle school is coming, a high school is planned).

The YMCA wants to build an indoor swimming pool and a performing arts facility.

The development authority says this is where a high-tech research park should go, and Clayton State thinks it’s a good location for building a university campus in Fayette.

There’s nothing there now but empty fields and forests, which is what the whole county pretty much looked like from the air back in 1980, which was the last time I took such an up-close flight.

Back then, I was a teenager along for the ride when my father went flying with a friend training to get his pilot’s license. We took off and landed at Falcon Field, and it might have even been the same plane for all I know.

But that’s where the similarities end. Nothing then could have prepared us for what we have now.

Chances are good that in another quarter decade, neither Beth nor I will still be around, or else we won’t care, about seeing how it all turned out.

In the meantime, though, it would be wise for all of us to pay attention. This is going to make a great story.