By Luige del Puerto
A few hours before he sat down for a Q&A one humid August afternoon at a coffee shop, former Mesa mayor and one-time gubernatorial candidate Scott Smith had flown a plane, delivering a supply of blood to northern Arizona.
On the way back to Mesa, he saw a wall of dust rushing into the Valley. The wind was picking up. He made a deliberate calculation: There’s time to beat the haboob, he concluded, and so he maneuvered his single-engine Cirrus for landing, and hit the runway at Falcon Field Airport in Mesa mere minutes before the storm enveloped the tarmac.
