Biplane

I learn, over a black formica tabletop and a cup of hot chocolate, what to expect as I fly west, to the Texas border.

“You want to stay by the road, going out of here. If you go down in the trees a mile off the road, it will be months before they find you. First part of the way, ‘round here, is fine . . . you got the fields to land in if you need. But thirty, forty miles out, you better stick by the road.

“Don’t know the land much into Texas, but after a while you got fields again, and a little place to come down. Weather’s been good the last days, wind picks up toward noon, be a tailwind for you. We might get some thunderstorms the afternoon, but by then you’ll be long gone . . . .”

If I ever have need for a detailed knowing of how to fly Louisiana, I can draw on the experience that passed across the tabletop in the café at Rayville. For a moment I am listening to a lonely man, an aviator marooned on an island where no one speaks his language. There is not another person in town who would be happy to know that tailwinds are promised today, or who would be grateful for a warning about trees in the west. My host is practicing a language he doesn’t often speak, and it is clear that he enjoys the practice.

“You get a big high-pressure cell sits up over Oklahoma, and the weather’s good for days. But with the Gulf down there, we get our share of bad stuff, too. You get so that you know the land pretty well, where the wires are, and that sort of thing, and you can work even when the weather isn’t too good . . . .”

By the time the buildings across the street are turning dull red in the dawn, the truck is crunching once again through the gravel, squeaking again to stop by the Parks’ bright wingtip.

“Can I give you a hand, here? Help you at all?”

“Sure. You can hop in that cockpit, if you want, Lyle, while I crank the starter. Couple shots of prime, maybe; pump the throttle. She should catch the first time.”

The steel handle of the starter handcrank jutting from the cowl is like the steel of an ice-cube tray, cubes installed. I can feel the frost of it through my gloves.

Stiffly, at the very first, t-u-r-n. (Whirring sounds, slowly, within.) And. Turn. And . . . turn; and . . . turn and . . . turn and, turn and turn and turn and turn, turn, turn turn turn turn-turnturnturn . . . pull the crank as the inertia wheel screams and clatters inside, ready to engage and slam its energy into the propeller.

“CLEAR! HIT IT, LYLE”

One very tiny clink of the Engage handle pulled, the falling scream of the starter and one Wright Whirlwind engine blows silence into ten million tiny pieces. The president of Adams Flying Service is smothered and lost for an instant in a cloud of smoke the color of pure blue fire. Another instant, and the smoke is twisting and shredding in the propellerblast, is tumbling back toward the sun glow, through a fence, and gone.

A tiny voice, shouting from the center of a hurricane:

“STARTS RIGHT UP, DON’T SHE?”

“NICE OLD AIRPLANE! LET HER IDLE ABOUT 900 RPM; TAKE HER A WHILE TO GET WARM.”

Ten minutes of warming time for the Whirlwind, of cooling time for its pilot. Ten minutes in shouted promises to stop by if I’m ever in the country again, in assurance that I’ll be looked up if Lyle Adams makes it out to the West Coast. No goodbyes at all. A fringe benefit of flying, that: a host of friends in odd little places around the world, and the knowing that chances are you’ll see them all again, someday.

It was cold enough at ground level; now, at two thousand feet, it is colder than freezing, if that is possible. The highway writhes westward, the trees close back in through Shreveport and across the state line into Texas, almost unseen.

It’s like an ice-frozen towel, this wind, pulling and chafing across my face, never stopping. I have to swallow time and again, and it is hard to breathe. The sun crawls up grudgingly, unawake. Even after it is well above the horizon, it refuses to warm the air.

By slipping the leather gloves forward on my fingers, I discover that I can keep them warm for nearly a minute. Stomping up and down on the rudder pedals and turning the big invisible crank does nothing but transform me from cold to cold-and-tired. Below, on the road, no automobiles yet by which to gage my ground speed, though early smoke shows a tailwind. Good, a tailwind is almost worth freezing for, when one sets out to cover as many miles as he can in a day’s race.

Even so, I think of landing soon, so that I can stand still, or curl up in a ball and get warm. I wonder if it would be possible to fly an airplane without getting out of one’s sleeping bag. Someone should invent a sleeping bag with legs in it, and arms, so that aviators can keep warm when they cross the South. The invention would come a little late, though. Splash it across every magazine and newspaper in the country, put it in every sporting goods store, and even so one probably couldn’t make much money on an Aviator’s Form Fitting Sleeping Bag. Not too many aviators left around that have a great deal of need for them. Those that do will have to take second-best, rely upon an old-fashioned medium-heat G-type star, and hope that it is quick to rise in the mornings.

I look for a groundspeed indicator, for any wheeled vehicle to move along the road, against which I can compare my speed. No luck. Hey, drivers! Sun’s up! Let’s get going down there! One single automobile wheeling down the road toward me. He’s no help. Three minutes pass. Five, in the coarse hard wind. At last, turning out of a driveway, a green sedan, heading west. A few moments to allow him to reach his cruising speed; should be about sixty-five this morning with the roads clear. And we pass him handily. It is a good tailwind. I wonder if he knows that he is very important to me, whether he knows that there is an old biplane aloft this morning and watching him. Probably doesn’t. Probably doesn’t even know what a biplane is.

Even freezing, one learns. Something learned about course and speed from some

one who is paying attention only to his own course and speed and who doesn’t even know I exist. We owe much to green sedans, and the only way that we can pay our debt to them is just to go our way as best we can and be an indicator ourselves without knowing when, for someone we have never seen.

How many times, I ask, grateful now for the first particle of warmth from the east, have I taken freely and used the example that other men have set in their own lives? My whole life is patterned on examples that others have set. Examples to follow, examples to avoid. More than I can count. The ones that stand out, surely I can single them out, the ones that have greatly formed my own thought. Who am I, after all, but a culmination of my time, one meld of every example that has been set and in turn one single example for another to see and judge? I am a little of Patrick Flanagan, a little of Lou Pisane. There is in my hands a little of the skill of flight instructors named Bob Keech and Jamie Forbes and Lieutenant James Rollins. I am part of the skill, too, of Captain Bob Saffell, one of the few survivors of the air-ground war in Korea; of Lieutenant Jim Touchette, who happily fought the whole Air Force when he thought it was being stupid and who died as he turned a flaming F-86 away from an Arizona schoolyard; of Lieutenant Colonel John Makely, a gruff rock of a squadron commander who cared about nothing but the mission of his squadron and the men who flew its airplanes; of Emmett Weber, of Don Slack, of Ed Carpinello, of Don McGinley, of Lee Morton, of Keith Ulshafer, of Jim Roudabush, of Les Hench, of Dick Travas, of Ed Fitzgerald. So many names, so many pilots, and a little bit of each one of them is in me at the moment I fly an old biplane through a blue-cold Louisiana dawn.

Without bending a bit of effort, I can open my eyes to the great crowd of pilots who are flying this airplane. There’s Bo Beaven, looking across at me and nodding coolly. Hank Whipple, who barrel-rolled a cargo transport and taught me how to land in pastures and on beaches and tried so hard to teach me to think far ahead of the airplane and of those who would restrict flight through their own fears and through meaningless regulation. Christy Cagle, who set an example about enjoying old airplanes, who would rather sleep under the wing of his biplane than in any bed.

In the crowd are other teachers, too. Look there, the shining silver Luscombe that first took me away from the jealous ground. A big round-engined T-28 that itself called the crash trucks by trailing a stream of black smoke from its damaged engine, at a time when I was too new to flying to know even that there was something wrong. A Lockheed T-33, the first jet airplane I ever flew, that taught me that an airplane can be flown by holding the control stick in thumb and forefinger and thinking climbs and dives and turns. There’s a beauty-queen F-86F to show me how strongly a pilot can become enchanted and in love with his airplane. A little dragonfly of a helicopter, to point the fun of standing still in the air. An ice-blue Schweizer 1-26 sailplane, telling of the invisible things that can keep a pilot drifting on the wind for hours without need of an engine. The good old rocksolid F-84F, covering my mistakes and telling me many things during a night flight over France. A Cessna 310, saying that an airplane can get so luxurious that the pilot is hardly aware it has a personality at all. A Republic Seabee, saying there’s no fun quite like turning from a speedboat into an airplane and back, feeling clear water splash and sparkle along the hull. A 1928 Brunner-Winkle Bird biplane, asking me to taste the fun of flying with a pilot who has found a forgotten airplane, spent years rebuilding it and who at last turns it free once again in the air. A Fairchild 24, that in several hundred hours of exploring the sky brought me the sudden revelation that the sky is a real, true, tangible, touchable place. A C-119 troop carrier, much maligned, that taught me not to believe what I hear about “bad airplanes” until I have a chance to see for myself, and that there can be a good feeling in throwing the green-light Jump signal and dropping a stick of paratroopers where they want to go. And today, an old biplane, trying to cross the country.

Fast or slow, quiet or deafening, pulling contrails at forty thousand feet or whishing wheels through the grasstops, in barest simplicity or most opulent luxury, they are all there, teaching and having taught. They all are a part of the pilot and he is a part of them. The chipped paint of a control console, the rudder pedals worn smooth during twenty years of turns, the control stick grips from which the little knurl diamonds have been rubbed away: these are the marks of a man upon his airplane. The marks of an airplane upon the man are seen only in his thought, and in the things that he has learned and come to believe.

Most pilots I have known are not what they have seemed. They are two very separate people within the same body. Pick out a name . . . and here’s Keith Ulshafer, the perfect example. Here’s a man you’d never expect to see in a fighter squadron. When Keith Ulshafer said a word, it was a major occasion. Keith had no need to impress anybody; if you were to step in front of him and say, “You’re a crummy pilot, Keith,” he’d smile and he’d say, “Probably am.” It was impossible to make him angry. He couldn’t be hurried. He approached flying as though it were a problem in integral calculus. Although he had calculated his takeoff roll hundreds of times, and when any other pilot would look outside and feel the wind and temperature and guess the takeoff distance within fifty feet, Keith would figure it out with the planning charts before every flight and write it in carefully-penciled figures at the bottom of a form that was rarely read. Neat, precise, meticulous. For Keith to hurry or to guess an airspeed or a fuel-consumption figure would have been for a chief accountant to step into the ring with the Masked Phantom. It was almost a joke to sit in a preflight briefing with him and listen to the flight leader outline the details of an air combat mission. Not a word from Keith as the wild vocabulary of the mission to come flew about his ears, as if he were a correspondent for a technical journal that happened to be sitting in the wrong chair when the briefing began. You’d never know that he was listening at all until the end of the briefing, when he might softly say, “You mean two-fifty-six point four megacycles for channel twelve, don’t you?” and the flight leader would stand corrected. More often Keith wouldn’t say a word when the briefing was done. He’d amble to his locker, zip his G-suit slowly about his legs, shrug into his flight jacket, emblazoned by regulation with lightnings and swords and fierce words that are supposed to typify fighter pilots. Then, carrying his parachute as something a little bit distasteful, he’d stroll to his airplane.

Even the boom of his starter firing wasn’t as sudden as those of other airplanes, and his engine wasn’t as loud.

Keith flew by the book. In formation, his airplane did not bounce or rock from side to side. It was as solid as if it had been bolted to the wing of the lead airplane. Then the mission, the air combat, would begin. And then, of course, look out.