A Gift of Wings

I considered that, cruising west of Cheyenne. I remembered the news reports that I had read: “Today an airline jet transport taxied over a light Cessna training plane, parked and tied down at the airport. The Cessna, which was squashed flat, and had not filed a flight plan …”

Had not filed a flight plan, in news parlance, means. Guilty. Cause of accident. Deserved everything he got.

Why has the FAA never defined flight plan for news reporters? Is it because the Administration wants them to believe that anyone who has not requested search and rescue service on Form 7233-1 is guilty, and the cause of any accident? Strange how convenient it is, at the moment of any incident, to mention to reporters that the light aircraft was not on a flight plan. Or better, when they ask, “Did the little plane have a flight plan?” to reply reluctantly, with pain, “Well, gentlemen, no. Much as we hate to say it, the light aircraft had not filed a flight plan.”

It was not just two minutes till the event-of-which-there-were-no-premonitions was to happen. Engine instruments steady. Heading 289 degrees. Altitude 12,460 feet. But I kept thinking about words. Th

ere are so many of them, so many labels and terms so carefully chosen by officials that suspicious pilots might almost think they were cunningly set snares for the private citizen who has learned to fly.

Control tower. Air traffic controller. Where did those names come from? They control nothing at all. The people in that tower talk to airplane pilots, advise them of conditions. The pilots do every bit of controlling that’s done. A semantic detail, that, and of no importance? How many times have you heard nonfliers say, “Your airport has no control tower? Isn’t that dangerous?” Imagine how they feel when they find that the official terminology for a no-tower field is uncontrolled airport! Try explaining that to a news reporter! The words alone show an accident waiting to happen, airplanes trembling to fall out of the sky onto schools and orphanages. Here is a description of millions and millions of takeoffs, the kind of takeoff made every day, every minute: The light aircraft took off from an uncontrolled air port, without radio control, without a flight plan. Wow.

Airway sounds like highway, a smooth place on the ground where automobiles move swiftly and efficiently. In fact, an airway is a channel forcing airplanes to fly as closely to each other as possible in what would otherwise be a limitless sky.

Quadrantal altitude. A very technical authorized term to describe a system that at its very best assures that every mid-air collision will occur at an angle of less than 179 degrees.

Look around for other airplanes. It’s just too simple. In any society that refuses to trust a human being, in any civilization that requires guaranteed safety from infallible tin boxes instead of individual care, look around is embarrassingly undignified. Why, it’s unsophisticated, that’s what it is.

My time was up. I flew at exactly 12,470 feet, thirty feet below prescribed quadrantal altitude for westbound flights. I was on Victor 138, the airway from Cheyenne to Medicine Bow, Wyoming.

The other airplane was also on Victor 138, also at 12,470 feet, but it flew in a direction that would take it head-on through the spinner of the Swift, through the cockpit and aft fuselage, thence through to the rudderpost and the clear air beyond. The other aircraft was thirty feet below what was exactly the wrong altitude. I had the right of way, but he had the C-124, which was at one time the largest four-engine transport in the world.

The Swift and I decided not to argue about rights, and turned gently out of the way. The ’124, we saw, is actually a very large airplane indeed.

I was astonished. Why, that man is a professional pilot, an Air Force pilot! And he’s at MY altitude. He’s at the wrong altitude! He’s eastbound at the westbound altitude. How can a professional pilot, how can he possibly be so wrong, in such a gigantic airplane?

It wasn’t a near miss. The ’124 is a sufficiently monstrous chunk of iron to be seen long before near-miss time. But still, there it was, dead on my altitude, a hundred tons of aluminum-steel, going the wrong direction.

Had I been involved in an overlong session with my map, and had the giant in fact vaporized the Swift, no doubt exists as to the report that would appear in the news. After explaining that the Swift had been smashed to powder against a minor wing fairing of the transport, and perhaps showing the small dent that we would have made there, the news would have concluded like this: “FAA spokesmen expressed regret over the incident, but did admit under questioning that the light airplane had not filed a flight plan.”

Across the country on an oil pressure gage

Do you ever get the feeling that everybody else knows something you don’t know? That everybody else in the world is taking for granted something you haven’t even heard about, as if you missed the Big Briefing In The Sky or something?

One of the primal points covered in the Big Briefing apparently was that People Don’t Fly Old Airplanes From Coast To Coast. People In Their Right Minds, that is. Then along comes old Bach, who missed the Briefing.

The airplane that I wanted was a 1929 Detroit-Parks P-2A Speedster open-cockpit biplane, and it was in North Carolina. I wanted to trade my Fairchild 24 for it, and I was in California. Now doesn’t it seem the most logical thing in the world to fly the Fairchild to North Carolina, pick up the biplane, and fly it to California? If that sounds logical, you missed the Briefing too. There’s always us two percent who never get the word.

Therefore, not knowing any better, I flew my gentle, smooth-purring, instrument-humming cabin monoplane to Lumberton, North Carolina, and traded it for a ratchety, roaring, snarling, windy biplane whose only reliable instrument was an oil pressure gage, that had never heard of an electrical system, let alone a radio, and was extremely suspicious of any pilot who did not learn to fly in a JN-4 or an American Eagle.

Also discussed at the Briefing, I’m sure, was You’ve Got To Be A Mighty Good Aviator To Land Old Biplanes In A Crosswind On A Hard-Surface Runway. Which explains why suddenly there I was at Crescent Beach, South Carolina, listening to a strange scrunching, tearing sound as my groundloop collapsed the right main landing gear, demolished the right wheel, and turned the right lower wing into a frayed and haggard pretzel. Later I listened for a while to the distant roar of the Atlantic Ocean, and later still, after dark, to the tin pelting of sad rain on the hangar into which my wreckage-pile had been towed. And there were only twenty-six hundred miles to go. I longed for hemlock to drink, or a bridge from which to throw myself into the sea. But we who missed the Briefing are so helpless and deserving of pity that we somehow manage to crawl through life despite our shortcomings. Pity, in this case, came from the former owner of the Parks, by name Evander M. Britt, custodian of an unquenchable fount of southern hospitality. “Now don’t worry, Dick,” he said when I called. “I’ll be down right away with a set of new landing gear. There’s an extra wing here if you want it, too. Don’t you worry. I’ll be right down.”

And with him, driving through the rain, Colonel George Carr, barnstormer, fighter pilot, squadron commander, antique airplane restorer. “Is that all that’s wrong!” Carr said when he saw the wreckage. “From what ’Vander told me, I thought you had hurt something! Help me with this jack, and we’ll have you in the air tomorrow.”

The comfortable web of the Antique Airplane Association closed about its member in distress, and from Gordon Sherman, president of the Carolinas-Virginia Chapter, as from the Celestial City itself, came a rare old wheel from his Eaglerock for my right main gear. In a few days the Parks and I were as good as the day we rolled from the factory, and having learned some lessons about the mixture of crosswinds and hard-surface runways, we gave humble thanks to our benefactors, accepted a survival-ration package from Colonel Carr, and began to nibble on the twenty-six hundred miles.

We nibbled, too, at thirty-five years, and I discovered that the pioneer barnstorming pilots who flew the Parks and her sister ships were the oiliest and the coldest men of their time. I discovered that firsthand. After each day’s flying, in field or on airport, out comes a grease gun to force the sticky stuff into each rocker-box housing. Five cylinders, ten rocker-boxes. After each flight, out comes a rag to wipe the rocker-box grease from where it has been thrown onto everything behind the engine: goggles, windscreens, fuselage, landing gear, stabilizers. Wipe it off quickly, before it hardens. The Wright J-6-5 Whirlwind is an oily little personality itself, and opening the cowl to strain the fuel each morning marks the barnstormer with a tenacious film, the print of his calling.

I had known, of course, from reading my air temperature gages in airplanes past, that the higher one flies, the colder grows the air. But I discovered that looking at COLD on a gage and having it smash and twist through the cockpit, slicing through leather coats and woolen shirts, are two very separate and distinct experiences. Only by ducking well forward under the windscreen could I avoid the thundering icy knives of a hundred-mile wind, and ducking well forward for three hours at a time can be less than comfortable.

I discovered a great and basic fact early in my acquaintanceship with the Parks, as I flew westward with the first days of spring, 1964. One enjoys the land over which one flies in direct proportion to the speed with which he flies over it. Caught in headwinds over Alabama meadows, I saw for the first time that each tree in spring is a bright green fountain, gushing brilliant leaves into the sun. Some of the pastures are like the rolled greens of the most exclusive country clubs, and it was all I could do to keep from landing in them for the sheer fun of rolling along the bright untouched grass. The Parks wasn’t at all convinced that I was worthy to be her pilot, but from time to time she would show me these views of her world, views of What It Was Like Then. Farm after weathered farm sifted by, each reigning at the end of its own dirt road, guarding its fields and forests just as it did when the Parks was new and seeing it all for the first time herself. More than one farm drive harbored even the 1930 automobiles and trucks, pastures grazed 1930 cows, and I was for a moment the cold and oily Buzz Bach, helmeted and goggled barnstormer of the untrodden skies. It was so good an illusion that it was true.

But as I looked away for a moment to write a note on the corner of my road map, the Parks showed unhidden jealousy. Roaring along straight and level, I glanced aside and wrote “trees are green fountains” on the map. By the time my pencil point was finishing “… ns,” the engine roar was much louder than it had been and the wind was screaming in the wires. I jerked my head up to see a great tilted earth rushing to crush me, and to hear a little soft voice say, “When you fly me, you must fly me, and not take notes or think of other things …” And sure enough, the Parks was impossible to trim to fly hands-off, and try as I might, she would invariably roll into a wild unusual attitude whenever I thoughtlessly diverted my attention from her needs.

Hours blended and ran together into long days of flying as the face of the southern United States rolled along beneath me. Three hours of flying were enough to cover the front cockpit windscreen with oil and roc

ker-box grease, but the Whirlwind’s five cylinders thundered right along and didn’t miss a single beat.

The Parks taught me something about people, when she judged me ready to learn. Get away from the cities, she said, and people have time to be outgoing and friendly and terribly kind. Take a little place like Rayville, Louisiana. Land on the little strip there as the sun is going down. Taxi to a short row of hangars, a fuel pump. Deserted, all. Shut down the engine, by a sign that says Adams Flying Service, with a Grumman Ag-Cat and a Piper PA-18 sprayer tied outside. Get out of the cockpit and stretch and start wiping rocker-box grease. And suddenly there’s a pickup truck and a voice. “Hi, there.”