SC eclipse adventure at 8,500 feet: Lowcountry pals chase total solar event in a plane

Tommy Oliva could barely finish a sentence.

Because of that he could rarely start a new one.

And so on this day — the day the moon completely blocked the light of the sun and turned a 70-mile-wide swath of the Earth dark from Oregon to South Carolina — conversation existed in clipped expressions of awe between the incessant radio chatter directing air traffic over the Palmetto State.

At the controls of his Cirrus SR22, Oliva, a Beaufort restaurateur, tried to describe the view from 8,500 feet, somewhere between Clemson and Columbia.

His other passengers — his girlfriend Karen Datz, friend Robert “Moose” Rini, a Hilton Head Island Realtor, and yours truly — tried to do the same.

“Oh, wow,” one of them said.

“I see it!” said another.

I glimpsed it once — a bright gold ring like a flaming wedding band — off to the right of the airplane, as we were in a right turn cutting figure-8s across a cloudless patch of sky searching for the best view. I did not get a good picture.

“Awesome,” I think I said.

It was.

And what a fleeting moment, witnessed by some from boats — on Lake Murray, which we flew over on the way to Clemson — and from parachutes. That’s right: reports of “jumpers” sounded a couple times over the radio. We never saw them.

We weren’t, of course, the only people watching Monday’s total solar eclipse — the first coast-to-coast edition in about a century — in an airplane.

A call to Beaufort County Airport on Lady’s Island in the morning found six local pilots had filed flight plans to be aloft during the event, according to airport director Joel Phillips. He also said three pilots from Florida had flown up earlier in the day, with eclipse-viewing plans.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued guidelines for pilots flying Monday: file flight plans; make sure you have enough fuel; watch out for drones.

Oliva, who’s been flying for over a decade, said, before going up, that he would be on the lookout for weather balloons.

No drones or weather balloons.

It was an uneventful flight, in many ways.

Oliva dodged some storms on the way out and back in. Rini and I, sitting in the back seat, swapped seats once, which luckily did not break the airplane. And the two of us got to know each other better, practically sitting on each other’s laps at times to get better views.

The little single-engine airplane glided through the sky feeling much like a boat on the water as it swayed side to side in crosswinds and rose then fell as the air thinned and thickened beneath the wings.

When we landed around 3:45 p.m., about three hours after we’d taken off from Hilton Head Island Airport, Rini’s wife texted him with some news — trying to view the eclipse in Bluffton had been “a total bust.”

Earlier as we were watching the sky darken somewhere between Columbia and Clemson, and the radio chatter kept interrupting our conversation, I was finally able to slip in a question.

“Is there usually this much traffic on the air like this?” I asked Tommy.

It’s a little more than usual, he said.

Then, he added: “Over Clemson, you get just as many planes in the air during a football game.”

This story was originally published August 21, 2017 at 5:00 PM with the headline "SC eclipse adventure at 8,500 feet: Lowcountry pals chase total solar event in a plane."