A Gift of Wings

And he swings the propeller of his machine and he steps into the cockpit and pushes the throttle all the way forward and the Champ begins to move toward the trees at the other end of the field, because it is time to go home.

Please believe that my research about airplanes is complete. There are no flaws in it. That research covers all the learning of all the aeronautical engineers and aircraft designers and mechanics since man first began to fly. There is no theory that these people have not checked and proved in practice.

And every one of them and every one of the facts are dead set against there being any hope for Everett Donnelly if he tries to make that takeoff from a field that is 407 feet too short. Better dig a cave and try to survive the blizzard; better let the airplane blow to shreds in the wind while the pilot tries to walk out of the mountains; better anything than try to clear an obstacle that is absolutely impossible to clear.

An airplane, I have shown, is a machine. This is not my idea, it is not what I have wished into being. It is not even me, writing this, but the tens of thousands of brilliant minds that have given mankind the speed and the technology of flight. All th

at I have done is merely ask, in my research, if any of them believes that an airplane is anything more than a machine. And in a thousand books and a half-million pages and diagrams and formulas, there is not one word, there is not one unspoken hope set against the mathematics and the computation of Everett Donnelly’s takeoff roll. Not one voice said that if conditions are right, that if a pilot loves his airplane and shows this in his care, then an airplane might just one time and for the briefest of moments become a thing alive, that can love in return and show this in its flight. There was not one word that said this could be so.

The computer clicked its answer and that was final. The figure given was the absolute minimum takeoff distance: 1594 feet.

There was no error, I assure you. The Champ could not possibly clear those trees. It was impossible for it to do so. By precise calculation, it must hit the trees twenty-eight feet above ground level at a true airspeed of fifty-one miles per hour. The impact, centered upon the right main wing spar, seventy-two inches from the wing-fuselage attach fittings, would be of sufficient force to collapse the main and rear spars. The inertia of the remaining aircraft weight, acting through a new center of gravity, would whip the aircraft to the right and toward the ground. Impact with the ground would cause stress on the engine mount in excess of design load factors. The engine would move backward through the firewall and fuel tank. Gasoline sprayed across the exhaust manifold would make a flammable vapor that would be ignited by exhaust flame from the broken cylinders. The basic structure of the aircraft would be consumed by fire in four minutes thirty-seven seconds, which may or may not be sufficient time for the occupant to recover from any induced unconsciousness of the impact and leave the machine. The last point, the sufficiency of that time, is uncertain because it does not fall within the realm of aerodynamics and stress analysis.

The whole point of my report to you, then, is that you remember this: The airplane that you fly is a machine. If you love it and treat it well, it is a machine. An airplane is a machine.

It is not possible for me to have seen Everett Donnelly this morning, shooting landings in his Champ and taxiing in for gas.

I couldn’t have said, “Everett, you’re dead!”

He couldn’t have laughed at me. “You gone crazy? I’m no more dead than you are. Tell me, how did I die?”

“You went down in the mountains, forty-two miles north of Barton’s Flat and the field was only 1187 feet long and the density altitude was 4530 feet and your wing loading was 6.45 pounds per square foot.”

“Oh, that. Sure I was down. Oil line broke. But I put a hose clamp on it and added some oil and took off again and flew home before the storm. Couldn’t very well stay there, could I?”

“But the takeoff roll …”

“You better believe it! I had pine needles in the landing gear when I got home. But the old Champ will do nice things every once in a while, if I’m good to her.”

It is impossible for that to have happened. It is impossible for anything like that ever to have happened. If you have ever heard of anything like this ever happening to any pilot, if anything like this has ever happened to you, it could not have happened. That would be impossible.

An airplane cannot live.

An airplane cannot possibly know what “love” is.

An airplane is cold metal.

An airplane is a machine.

The girl from a long time ago

“I want to go with you.”

“It’s going to be cold.”

“I still want to go with you.”

“And windy and oily and so loud you won’t be able to think.”

“I know, I’ll wish I had never done it. But I want to go with you.”

“And sleeping under the wing at night and storms and rain and mud. And little small cafes in little small towns is where you’d eat.”

“I know.”

“And no complaining allowed. Not one complaint.”

“I promise.”