The sky, very simply, is.
It is, whether we wish to see that fact or to bury ourselves under a thousand miles of earth, or even deeper still, under the impenetrable roof of unthinking routine.
It happened a year later that for some reason I was in New York City, and everything was going wrong and my total assets equaled twenty-six cents and I was hungry and the very last place I wanted to be was in the prison streets of sundown Manhattan, with iron-barred windows and quintuple-lock doors. But it happened that I looked up, which is something one never does in Manhattan, of course, and again, as it had been by the sea—way on up there, way high over the canyons of Madison Avenue and Lexington and Park—was the sky. It was there. Unhurried. Unchanged. Warm and welcome as home.
What do you know, I thought. What do you know about that. No matter how tangled and twisted and distressful goes the life of an airplane pilot, he always has a home, waiting. For him always waits the joy of being back in the air, of looking down at and up to the clouds, for him always waits that inner cry, “I’m home again!”
“Bunch of mist, bunch of empty air,” the people of the ground will say. “Get your head out of the clouds, get your feet on the ground.” Yet in times as far separated as that lonely beach and the crowded Manhattan street, I was lifted from black despair into freedom. From annoyance and anger and fear to a thought, Hey! I don’t care! I’m happy!
Just by looking into the sky.
This kind of thing happens, perhaps, because pilots aren’t far-traveling wanderers after all. It may be that pilots are happy only when they are at home. And it may be that they are home only when they can somehow touch the sky.
Steel, aluminum, nuts and bolts
An airplane is a machine. It is not possible for it to be alive. Nor is it possible for it to wish or to hope or to hate or to love.
The machine that is called “airplane” is made of two sections, the “engine” and the “airframe,” each of which is built of common machine-building materials. There is no secret, no dark magic, there are no incantations said over any airplane in order to make it fly. It flies because of known and invariable laws which cannot be changed for any reason.
An “engine,” briefly, is a block of metal that has been drilled with certain holes and set with certain springs and valves and gears. It does not in any way come into life when it is bolted on the front of an airframe. Those vibrations through an engine are caused by the rapid burning of fuel within its cylinders, by the action of its moving parts, by the forces that a spinning propeller creates.
An “airframe” is a sort of cage built of steel tubing and sheet aluminum. It is tin and fabric and wire. It is nuts and bolts. An airframe is made to the calculations of the aircraft designer, who is a very wise and practical man who makes his living at this sort of thing and does not mess around with esoteric mumbo-jumbo.
There is no part in any airplane for which there does not exist a blueprint. There is no part which cannot be unscrewed into simple plates and castings and forgings. The airplane was invented. It did not “come into being,” it was never brought to life. An airplane is a machine as an automobile is a machine, as a chain saw is a machine, as a drill press is a machine.
Is there a voice in reply to this, from perhaps the newest of student pilots, saying that an airplane is a creature of the air, and so has special forces acting upon it that a drill press does not have?
Wrong. An airplane is not a creature. It is a machine: blind, dumb, cold, dead. Every force upon it is a known force. A million hours of research and flight tests have shown us all there is to know about an airplane: Lift-Weight-Thrust-Drag. Angles of attack, centers of pressure, power required versus power available, and parasite drag increases as the square of the airspeed.
Yet there are a few airplane pilots who somehow want to believe that this machine is an animal, that it is alive. Make certain that you do not believe it. That is absolutely impossible.
The takeoff performance of any aircraft, for instance, depends upon wing loading, power loading, airfoil coefficients, and upon density altitude, wind, slope and surface of the runway. All these are things that can be measured with tape measures and test machines, and when they are run through charts and computers, they give us an absolute minimum takeoff distance.
There is no sentence, no word, no hint in any technical manual ever printed that even remotely says that this machine’s performance can possibly change because of a pilot’s hopes or his dreams, or his kindness to his airplane. This is critically important for you to know.
I give you an example. I give you a pilot. Let’s say that his name is … oh … Everett Donnelly. Let’s say that he learned to fly in a 7AC Aeronca Champion. N2758E.
Then later, let’s say that Everett Donnelly became a first officer with United Air Lines, and then a captain, and that for fun he began looking for that same old Aeronca Champ. Let’s say he asked questions and wrote letters and searched for a year and a half across the country, and that at last he found what was left of N2758E, smashed under a fallen hangar at an abandoned airport. Let’s say he spent just under two years rebuilding the airplane, touching and finishing every nut and bolt and pulley and seam of it. And then perhaps he flew that Champ for five years, and perhaps he refused quite a few good offers from people who wanted to buy it, and perhaps he kept it in perfect condition because it was a part of his life that he enjoyed and because the airplane itself had become something that he loved.
Now let’s say that one day he landed in a high mountain field with a broken oil line. Let’s say he fixed the line, added oil from cans he always carried, and was ready for takeoff.
Now read this next part carefully. Let’s say that if Everett Donnelly does not take off at this time, he will be buried in the blizzard of December 8, 1966. Let’s say that there is no road to this mountain field, no civilization nearby. And let’s say that there is a stand of sixty-foot pines all around the field and that there is no wind.
I give you this situation. I then set these figures into a computer that is programmed with this particular Champ’s performance specifications and with this particular field’s terrain and atmosphere. The final sum that the computer presents, after clicking for a while, is a minimum distance of 1594 feet to clear a sixty-foot obstacle, assuming perfect pilot technique.
Everett Donnelly, not knowing as precisely as a computer, but knowing that the takeoff will not be an easy one, paces the distance at 1180 feet from the start of the roll to the base of the trees facing him. By pulling the tail of his machine back between two trees, he can increase his field length to 1187 feet. This means nothing. The field is 407 feet too short.
And now I give you some facts that cannot possibly make any difference in the takeoff roll of Aeronca Champion N2758E.
Let’s say that Everett Donnelly thinks of the blizzard on its way, of his cold death and the destruction of his airplane if he does not fly out of this field at once.
He remembers the first day that he saw the Champ, sun-yellow and faded red-earth trim, splashed with mud, hopping passengers and flying students from a little field in Pennsylvania after the war. He remembers working weekends and all summer to pay for learning to fly this machine.
He remembers fifteen thousand flying hours, and of finding the Champ again, under the hangar.
He remembers the years rebuilding and of Jeanne Donnelly’s first flight in it and that she will fly in no other machine than N2758E.
He thinks of his son’s first flight and instruction, and of his solo only a week earlier, on the morning of the boy’s sixteenth birthday.