A Gift of Wings

“Roj.”

Dear God in heaven, he wants us CLOSER!

Down we come again line-astern, jinking, swerving, guns popping, close as we can force ourselves to dare, slamming in propwash that grabs us like a big hand and torques us, if we don’t fight, all the way upside-down. The tower rises up at us like an Aztec pyramid of human sacrifice and then “SMOKE NOW, NUMBER ONE, SMOKE SMOKE!”

The SE we’re chasing hits his smoke a hundred yards from the tower and it’s like flying into the side of a thundercloud. The plane rolls wild left and we can’t see a thing except a corner of blurred green that was the ground a second ago and we can’t breathe and somewhere an instant away is the camera tower with those poor dumb trusting slobs cranking away with their little Mitchell, taking pictures. Stomp the right side of the rudderbar for dear life, snatch the stick back hard and we come blasting out of the smoke twenty feet left of the tower. We miss them by twenty feet. It’s interesting to see how quickly a leather flying helmet can get soaked through with sweat.

“That was perfect. That was absolutely right. Now let’s do that one more time …”

“ONE MORE TIME? REMEMBER THIS IS A HUMAN LIFE YOU’RE DEALING WITH!”

It was an Irish pilot who said that, and I remember thinking that his words were well said, my friend, well said.

I kept seeing, the more the tower called for closer and closer passes, that comedian who stands with a banana cream pie while the other one shouts, “Let me have that pie! Let me have it! LET ME HAVE IT!” The temptation is to fly right straight down the center of that Mitchell, rip the thing to a billion pieces over the countryside, then pull up and say, “There! Is that close enough? Is that what you guys want?”

The only one who gave in to temptation was Chris Cagle. He came at the camera in anger, from below the tower, and climbed full throttle, splitting seconds, into the lens. Pulling up at the very last quarter instant, he got the grim pleasure of a millisecond view of the camera crew diving for the deck. That was the only time in the month that they thought the airplanes might be real, after all.

Most of the air-to-air photography in Von Richthofen and Brown was shot from a jet helicopter, an Alouette II. The helicopter cameraman wasn’t visited with quite the same death-wish as the tower crew, but a helicopter is an unnerving thing to fly with. Just because the machine is pointed forward, of course, doesn’t mean that it is moving forward—it could be stopped, or going straight up or down or backward. How does a pilot judge where to aim, to come a safe distance from an object of unknown velocity?

“OK. I am hovering,” the pilot would tell us. “You can come in any time.” But closing rate on a stopped helicopter is just the same as closing rate on a cloud, and that can be alarmingly fast, in the final seconds. One keeps thinking, too, that the poor souls inside the Alouette don’t have parachutes.

Bit by harrowing bit, though, we made the film. We got used to the airplanes, for one thing. Most of the replicas did well to climb two hundred feet per minute after takeoff, and on some days were pressing their luck to clear the canvas hangars at the end of the field. In the immortal words of Jon Hutchinson, “I have to keep telling myself, ‘Hutchinson, this is marvelous, this is lovely, you’re flying a D-7!’ Because if I don’t, it feels like I’m flying a great bloody Pig.”

The four miniature SE-5s were not only at full power to stay with the other airplanes, they were at more than full power. On one flight I chased the Fokker Triplane with a camera mounted on the cowl of a mini SE, and just to stay in the same sky with the Fokker, eighty miles per hour, I was pulling 2650 rpm on an engine red-lined at 2500. Out of that fifty-minute flight, forty-five minutes were spent on the other side of full throttle. The film, like a war, was a mission that had to be accomplished. If an engine blew up that was just too bad … we’d have to land somehow and take up another airplane.

Odd, but one gets used to this kind of flying. In time, even on the tower at Pigeon Hill, caught in propwash and rolling out of control thirty feet in the air, one thinks, I’ll save it. She’ll recover at the last second. She always has … all the while pouring the power of Charles Atlas into the controls, fighting to pull out.

One day I saw an Irish pilot all alone, wearing a sprig of heather in the lapel of his German flying jacket.

“Flying kind of low, aren’t you?” I said, by way of a joke.

His face was gray; he didn’t smile at all. “I thought I had had it. I am lucky to be alive.”

It was such a somber voice that I was caught in morbid curiosity. The leaves in his lapel came from the downslope at Pigeon Hill, and he had harvested it with the undercarriage of a Fokker.

“The last thing I remember was the propwash and all I saw was the ground. I closed my eyes and pulled hard as I could on the stick. And here I am.”

The tower crew confirmed it that evening. The Fokker had rolled and dived as it passed the tower, bounced off the side of the hill and back into the air. The camera was pointed the other way.

One of the airplanes at Weston was a two-seater, a Caudron 277 Luciole, which was translated for us as Glowworm. It was a square sluggish biplane with a Lewis gun mounted in the rear cockpit in such a way that there was not quite enough room for the gunner to wear a parachute. Hutchinson, just down with the machine as I was about to take it up, described it for me in his pure British tones: “It’s a fine luciole, actually, but it will never be an airplane.”

Thinking that over, I fastened myself into the front seat, started the engine, and took off for a mission in which I was to be shot down by a pair of Pfalzes. It was not an enjoyable scene at all. It was much too real.

The poor Caudron could barely stumble out of its own way, much like the great majority of real two-seaters of the First War. It could neither turn nor climb nor dive, and the pilot sits directly between the wings so that he cannot see up and he cannot see down. The gunner blocks the view behind and the pilot gets what’s left over: a slice of sky ahead, and, sieved through the struts and wires, to the side.

I thought I had understood that two-seater pilots lived a hard life in 1917, but I hadn’t understood that at all. They couldn’t fight, they couldn’t run away, they could hardly tell that they were being attacked until their little fabric coffin burst into flames and then they didn’t have parachutes to bail out with. Perhaps I was a two-seater pilot in another life, for in spite of myself, in spite of saying, “This is a movie, Richard, this is only a movie that we are taking pictures for,” I was frightened when the Pfalzes came in. Their guns sparkled at me, the director shouted, “SMOKE, LUCY, SMOKE, SMOKE!” I hit both smoke switches, slumped in the seat, and wallowed the Luciole into a low-speed spiral dive.

That was the end of the scene for me, simple as that, but I dragged back to Weston like an exhausted snail.

Turning downwind to land, I suddenly saw a flight of Fokkers turning toward me, and went cold in shock. It took seconds to remember that this was not 1917 and that I was not going to be incinerated in my own traffic pattern. I laughed, then, nervously, and got the airplane on the ground as fast as I could. I had no wish to fly the two-seater again and I never did.

Nobody was killed in the time I flew with Von Richthofen and Brown; nobody was even injured. Two airplanes were damaged: an SE with an axle failure while taxiing, a Pfalz in a groundloop. Both were flying again within a week.

The cameras rolled through thousands of feet of color film, hours of film. Most of it looked pretty tame, but for every time that a pilot was truly frightened, certain that he was going to be a mid-air collision, positive

that this time the plane was not going to recover at low altitude, there was another exciting scene caught in celluloid.

We gathered in tight little knots to watch the previous day’s action on the six-inch screen of the Movieola. No sound save the whir of the projector; quiet as a small-town library. Occasional comments: “Move it in!” “Liam, was that you in the Pfalz?” “That’s not too bad, there …”