A Gift of Wings

My F-100 will clip along at Mach One plus, but I don’t feel the speed. At forty thousand feet, the drab landscape creeps under the droptank as if I were in a strictly enforced twenty-five mile speed zone. The Fokker will do an indicated one hundred ten miles per hour, but it will do it at five hundred feet and in open air, for the fun of it. The landscape wouldn’t lose its color to altitude, and the trees and bushes would blur with speed. My airspeed indicator wouldn’t be a dial with a red-line somewhere over Mach One, it would be the sound of the wind itself, telling me to drop the nose a little and get ready to hop on the rudders, for this plane doesn’t land itself.

“Build a World War I airframe with a modern engine?” you ask. “You could get a four-place plane for the money!”

But I don’t want a four-place plane! I want to fly!

I shot down the Red Baron, and so what

It was not a Mitty dream. It was no fantasy at all. That was a hard roaring black-iron engine bolted to the firewall ahead of my boots, those were real Maltese-crossed wings spanning out over my cockpit, that was the same ice-and-lightning sky I had known most of my life long, and over the side it was a long fall to the ground.

Now, down there in front of me, was a British SE-5 fighter plane, olive drab with blue-white-red roundels on the wings. He hadn’t seen me. It all felt exactly the way I had known it would feel, from reading the yellow old war-books of flight. Exactly that way.

I stepped hard on the rudder bar, pulled the joystick across the cockpit and rolled down on him, tilting the world about me in great sweeping tilts of emerald earth and white-flour cloud, and blasting slants of blue wind across my goggles.

While he flew along unaware, the poor devil.

I didn’t use the gunsight because I didn’t need it. I lined the British airplane between the cooling jackets of the two Spandau machine guns on the cowl in front of me, and pressed the firing button on the stick.

Little lemon-orange flames licked from the gun muzzles with a faint pop-pop over the storm of my dive. Yet the only move the SE made was to grow bigger between my guns.

I did not shout, “Die, Englander pig-dog!” the way the Hun pilots used to shout in the comic books.

I thought, nervously, You’d better hurry up and burn or it’ll be too late and we’ll have to do this all over again.

In that instant a burst of night swallowed the SE. It leaped up into an agonized snap roll, clouting black from its engine, pouring white fire and oil smoke behind it, emptying junk into the sky.

I dove past him like a shot, tasting the acid taste of his fires, twisting in my seat to watch him fall. But fall he did not. Smoke gushing dark oceans from his plane, he wobbled half-turn through a spin, pointed straight down at me, and opened fire with his Lewis gun. The orange light of the gun barrel flickered at my head, twinkling in dead silence from the middle of all that catastrophe. All I could think was, Nicely done. And that this must have been just the way it was.

The Fokker snatched into a vertical climb in the same instant that I hit the switch labeled SOOT (foof! from beneath my engine) and the one next to it labeled SMOKE. The cockpit went dim in roiling yellow-black which I breathed in tiny gasps. Right rudder to push the airplane into a falling slide to the right, full back-stick to spin it. One turn … two … three … the world going round like a runaway Maytag. Then a choking recovery into a diving spiral, followed every foot by that river of wicked fog.

Presently the cockpit cleared and I recovered to level flight, a few hundred feet above the green farms of Ireland. Chris Cagle, flying the SE-5, turned a quarter mile away, rocking his wings in signal to join in formation and fly home.

As we crossed the trees side by side and touched our tailskids to the wide grass of Western Aerodrome, I counted that this had been an eventful day. Since dawn I had shot down one German and two British airplanes, had myself been shot down four times—twice in an SE-5, once in a Pfalz, once in this Fokker. It was a lively introduction to the way that a movie pilot earns his keep, and there was a month more of it to come.

The film was Roger Corman’s Von Richthofen and Brown, an epic featuring a fair amount of gore, some sex, a tampering with history, and twenty minutes of aerial footage that several living pilots nearly stopped living to produce. The gore and sex and history were make-believe, but the flying, as flying always is, was the real thing. Chris and I learned that first day in the air what every movie pilot since Wings has known: nobody has “ever told the airplanes that this is all in fun. The aircraft still stall and spin, they’ll have real mid-air collisions if you let them do it. No one else but pilots can understand this.

The camera tower was an excellent example. Our camera tower was a place built of telephone poles, a platform thirty feet above a knob of ground called Pigeon Hill. The cameraman and two assistants would climb to that platform every morning in sweet assurance that since this was only a film, they would live to climb down from the tower

every afternoon. They had a trust in Chris and me and Jon Hutchinson and the dozen Irish Air Corps pilots that was beyond blind … the cameramen acted as if the aircraft diving down on them for head-on shots, guns blazing, were already pussycats safe on film.

It is ten a.m. We are a flight of two Fokker D-7s and two SE-5s. The engines and the wind are clattering about our heads and down there off our wingtops is the lonely lump of Pigeon Hill, with its tower on top and its cameramen on their platform.

“We want a tail chase this morning,” they tell us on the radio. “An SE in front, a Fokker after him, another SE, and the other Fokker. You got that?”

“Roj.”

“Come on close to the tower, please, then bank up on one wing and turn around us so we can see the tops of your airplanes. Close as you can to each other, please.”

“Roj.”

So here we go, from a thousand feet above the ground we fall into tight line-astern formation, the airplane ahead looming gigantic in our windscreen. Here’s the dive at the tower, that tiny pyramid down there.

“Action! This is a take!”

The SE in the lead jinks violently back and forth, aiming for the tower and the ground. We follow him in the Fokker, firing short bursts of oxyacetylene from our fake guns, aware that another SE is close under our tail, firing, and that the other Fokker is under his. From moment to moment we catch the propwash of the plane ahead, which slams us up into a roaring bank that takes full opposite aileron and rudder to control. This is no problem, with room beneath us. But the room dwindles fast, and in a few seconds the camera tower is a pretty big thing, then a monster, and the cameraman is wearing a white shirt and a blue jacket and a red-and-blue scarf and the SE banks hard around the tower and we’re in the WASH AND STICK RUDDER LOOKOUT WE’RE GONNA ROLL RIGHT INTO …

Gag. Ark. Foosh. We caught it in time the camera tower has flicked past and we’re in one piece and man I thought we had had it then what a way to start off a day and oh boy this ain’t fun this is WORK!

“All right. That was all right, chaps,” comes the radio. “Let’s try it again, and this time could you come a little closer in to the tower and don’t get quite so far apart. Bunch it up a little bit more, please.”