A Gift of Wings

Only when the plane is locked away in a private hangar is the owner’s mind at rest, and private hangars, especially near cities, cost more to own than does the airplane itself.

Flying is one of the few popular sports in which the penalty for a bad mistake is death. At first, that seems a horrible and shocking thing, and the public is horrified and shocked when a pilot is killed committing an unforgivable error. But such are the terms that flying lays down for pilots: Love me and know me and you shall be blessed with great joy. Love me not, know me not, and you are asking for real trouble.

The facts are very simple. The man who flies is responsible for his own destiny. The accident that could not have been avoided through the action of the pilot is just about nonexistent. In the air, there is no equivalent of the child running suddenly from between parked cars. The safety of a pilot rests in his own hands.

Explaining to a thunderstorm for instance, “Honest, clouds and rain, I just want to go another twenty miles and then I promise to land,” is not much help. The only thing that keeps a man out of a storm is his own decision not to enter it, his own hands turning the airplane back to clear air, his own skill taking him back to a safe landing.

No one on the ground is able to do his flying for him, however much that one may wish to help. Flight remains the world of the individual, where he decides to accept responsibility for his action or he stays on the ground. Refuse to accept responsibility in flight and you do not have very long to live.

There is much of this talk of life and death, among pilots. “I’m not going to die of old age,” said one, “I’m going to die in an airplane.” As simple as that. Life, without flight, isn’t worth living. Don’t be startled at the number of pilots who believe that little credo; a year from now you could be one of them, yourself.

What determines whether you should fly, then, is not your business requirement for an airplane, not your desire for a challenging new sport. It is what you wish to gain from life. If you wish a world where your destiny rests completely in your own hands, chances are that you’re a natural-born pilot.

Don’t forget that “Why fly?” has nothing to do with aircraft. It has nothing to do with by-products, the “reasons” so often put forth in those pamphlets to potential buyers. If you find that you are a person who can love to fly, you will find a place to come whenever you tire of a world of TV dinners and people cut from cardboard. You will find people alive and adventures alive and you will learn to see a meaning behind it all.

The more I wander around airports across the country, the more I see that the reason most pilots fly is simply that thing they call life.

Give yourself this simple test, please, and answer these simple questions:

How many places can you now turn when you have had enough of empty chatter?

How many memorable, real events have happened in your life over the last ten years?

To how many people have you been a true and honest friend—and how many people are true and honest friends of yours?

If your answer to all these is “Plenty!” then you needn’t bother with learning to fly.

But if your answer is “Not very many,” then it just might be worth your while to stop by some little airport one day and walk around the place and find what it feels like to sit in the cockpit of a light airplane.

I still think of my salesman acquaintance of the airline flight between San Francisco and Denver. He had despaired of ever finding again the taste of life, at the very moment that he moved through the sky that offers it to him.

I should have said something to him. I should at least have told him of that special high place where a few hundred thousand people around the world have found answers to emptiness.

I’ve never heard the wind

Open cockpits, flying boots, and goggles are gone. Stylized cabins, air conditioners, and sun-shaded windshields are here. I had read and heard this thought fo

r a long time, but all of a sudden it sank in with a finality that was disturbing. We have to admit to the increased comfort and all-weather abilities of modern lightplanes, but are these the only criteria for flying enjoyment?

Enjoyment is the sole reason many of us started to fly; we wanted to sample the stimulation of flight. Perhaps in the back of our minds, as we pushed the high-winged cabin into the sky, we thought, “This isn’t like I hoped it would be, but if it’s flying I guess it will have to do.”

A closed cabin keeps out rain and lets one smoke a cigarette in unruffled ease. This is a real advantage for IFR conditions and chain smokers. But is it flying?

Flying is the wind, the turbulence, the smell of exhaust, and the roar of an engine; it’s wet cloud on your cheek and sweat under your helmet.

I’ve never flown in an open-cockpit airplane. I’ve never heard the wind in the wires, or had only a safety belt between me and the ground. I’ve read, though, and know that’s how it once was.

Are we doomed by progress to be a colorless group who take a roomful of instruments from point A to point B by air? Must we get our thrill of flying by telling how we had the needles centered all the way down the ILS final? Must the joy of being off the ground come by hitting those checkpoints plus or minus fifteen seconds every time? Perhaps not. Of course, the ILSs and the checkpoints have an important place, but don’t the seat of the pants and the wind in the wires have their places too?

There are old-timers with frayed logbooks that stop at ten thousand hours. They can close their eyes and be back in the Jenny with the slipstream drumming on a fuselage fabric; the exhilaration of the wind rush through a hammerhead stall is there any time they call it up. They’ve experienced it.

It isn’t there for me. I started to fly in a Luscombe 8E in 1955, no open cockpits or wires for us new pilots. It was loud and enclosed, but it was above the traffic on the highways. I thought I was flying.

Then I saw Paul Mantz’s Nieuports. I touched the wood and the cloth and the wire that let my father look down on the men who fought in the mud of the earth. I never got that delicious excited feeling by touching a Cessna 140 or a Tri-Pacer or even an F-100.

The Air Force taught me how to fly modern airplanes in a modern efficient manner; no covering the airspeed indicator here. I’ve flown T-Birds and 86s and C-123s and F-100s. The wind hasn’t once gotten to my hair. It has to get through the canopy (“CAUTION—Do not open above 50 knots IAS”), then through the helmet (“Gentlemen, a square inch of this fiberglass can take an eighty-pound shock force”). An oxygen mask and a lowered visor complete my separation from possible contact with the wind.

That’s the way it has to be now. You can’t fight MIGs with an SE-5. But the spirit of the SE-5 doesn’t have to disappear, does it? When I land my F-100 (chop the power when the main gear touches, lower the nose, pull the drag chute, apply brakes till you can feel the antiskid cycle), why can’t I go to a little grass strip and fly a Fokker D7 airframe with one hundred fifty modern horses in the nose? I’d pay a lot for the chance!