A Gift of Wings

He flew the Yankee the way he last remembered to fly; he flew it like a North American F-100D. Our turn on course wasn’t a gentle sweeping general-aviation turn, it was WHAM! the wing slammed into a steep bank, dug into the air, turned, then flew back to wings-level in a furious hard whiplash.

I had to laugh. For the first time I could see what another human being saw, I could look inside his mind. And I saw not a little civilian Yankee slicing along at one hundred twenty-five miles per hour with a hundred horsepower spinning a fixed-pitch propeller up front, but a D-model F-100 single-seat day fighter streaking ahead of fifteen thousand pounds of thrust blasting diamond lights out the afterburner and the ground blurring by beneath us and that button-studded control stick under his hand, that magic grip that one need only touch to spin the world, or turn it upside-down or make the sky go black.

The Yankee didn’t mind the game, for its flight controls very nearly match the ’100’s. The wheel is light and positive as a racing Ferrari’s, so that one is tempted to fly hard fast eight-point rolls, just for fun.

Bo discovered the sky he had once known so well. “Will we ever own an airplane?” Jane had said. “I hope so. Because he’d fly. I can’t explain to you why, because the inner workings of his mind are always his own, but I think he feels better, I think he feels more like living … this sounds very corny, but I think his life means more to him when he can fly.” It didn’t sound corny to me at all.

Bo squinted into the horizon. “Looks like the clouds are going broken, here. What do you say, over or under?”

“You’re flying the airplane.”

“Under.”

He chose that for the fun of coming down. Carb heat and throttle, the Yankee snapped its wings up like a daylight bat, and we flashed down toward the trees. Bo was thinking ahead of the airplane now, and happy, though of course he didn’t smile. The wings lashed level and we shot above the Pennsylvania Turnpike, heading eastward.

“He’s a little bit afraid to let loose and commit himself completely,” Jane had guessed about him. “He’s a little bit leery to become again so totally involved as he was with airplanes before. He won’t let himself go. But there’s one thing about Bo. He doesn’t have to use a lot of words. He can communicate with flying.”

Right you are, Jane. It was there all around as he flew, ten years of standing on the ground wanting to shout, now that the time had come to fly again, and his pain that our mission was just to deliver this airplane straight and level to Philadelphia, instead of taking it there in loops and slow rolls. He didn’t have to say a word.

“What do you remember about instrument flying?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“OK, then, you’re on the gages. I’ll be approach control. ‘Four niner Lima in radar contact, climb to and maintain three thousand five hundred feet, turn right heading one two zero degrees, report crossing the one six zero degree radial Pottstown VOR.’ ” I had meant to bury him in instructions, but it didn’t work. All I had given him was a target to shoot for, and he aimed and shot, offering no excuses. The Yankee climbed and turned smoothly now under his hand, it leveled, and he remembered out loud.

“A radial is always outbound from the station, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

He called, crossing the radial.

So I was around to watch my friend learn again, to watch the sky blast dust and cobwebs from a man who had been a magnificent pilot and who just might be one again.

“I’m joining the Yankee flying club,” he had told me. And another time, “It wouldn’t be too expensive, would it, to get a Cub or a Champ, just to fly around in? And as an investment, of course; the way prices are going up it would probably be a good investment.”

We dropped into the pattern at the 3M airport, and there it was again, I was watching through his eyes, and there was the smooth silver nose in front of us, and the arrow of the pitot boom, and we were smoking down final approach at one hundred sixty-five knots plus two knots for every thousand pounds of fuel over a thousand and speed brakes out and gear down and flaps down and trim …

The J-57 of the F-100 thundered soft in our ears, eighty-five percent rpm on final, hold the sink rate, antiskid on, stand by to deploy the drag chute. We touched, the two of us, in a 1959/1969 F-100/Yankee in Nevada/Pennsylvania, USA.

Then he pulled the nose up, after touchdown, way too high up, so that we nearly scraped the tailskid. “Bo, what are you doing?” I had forgotten. We pulled the nose up high, in those days, for aerodynamic braking, to slow the plane and save a drag chute. Of course he had forgotten, too, why anybody would want to pull the nose of an airplane up after touchdown.

“What a lousy landing,” he said.

“Yeah, that was pretty grim. I don’t know whether there’s hope for you or not, Bo.”

But I did have hope. Because my friend, who had saved my life, and then been dead himself for so long, was flying. He was alive again.

Words

We were fifty miles northwest from Cheyenne, level at twelve thousand five hundred feet. The Swift’s engine hushed along up front as it had for three hours since takeoff and as I hoped it would for another thirty hours of cross-country flying. The instruments were relaxed and content on the panel, touching pressures and temperatures and metals and airs and telling me that all was well. Visibility was unlimited. I had not filed a flight plan.

I was just up there flying along, thinking about semantics, without the faintest premonition of what was to happen in four and a half minutes. Looking around at the mountains and the high desert and the altitude and the oil pressure and the ammeter and the first few scattered clouds of the day, and thinking about some of the words of aviation, and what they mean to the rest of the world.

About flight plan, for instance. To thinking people a flight plan, obviously, is a plan for a flight. A flight plan is a certain order, a discipline, a responsibility to move with purpose through the sky. Flying without a flight plan, to any rational person, is flying without order, discipline, responsibility, or purpose.

Oil temperature seventy-five degrees Centigrade … it’s a good feeling, to have that forward-mounted oil cooler, on a Swift.

But to the Federal Aviation Administration, I thought, a flight plan isn’t a plan for flying at all. It is an FAA Form 7233-1. A flight plan is a five-by-eight-inch piece of paper which is filed to alert search and rescue when an airplane is overdue at its destination. To those who know, a flight plan is a piece of paper. Those who do not know believe that a flight plan is a plan for a flight.