A Gift of Wings

If this were day, we’d feel at home; a glance downward would show us mountains and lakes, highways and cities, familiar things we can glide down to and be at ease. But it isn’t day. We swim through a black fluid which hides our home, our earth. Engine failure now, and there’s no place to glide to, no decision to make where to go. My plane can glide for a hundred miles if the rpm falls to zero and the tailpipe cools, but I’m expected to pull the handgrips, squeeze the trigger, and float down through the darkness in my parachute. In the daylight, I’m expected to try to save the airplane, try to put it on a landing strip. But it’s night, it’s dark outside, and I can’t see.

The

engine whirls faithfully on, and stars shine steadily. You fly the flashing light, and wonder.

If Lead’s engine failed now, what could I do to help him? Simple answer. Nothing. He flies now twenty feet away, but if he needed my help, I’d be as far away as Sirius, above. I can’t take him in my cockpit or hold his airplane in the air, or even guide him to a lighted field. I could call his position to rescue parties, and I could say ‘Good luck’ before he fired his ejection seat into the black. We fly together, but are as alone as four stars in the sky.

You remember talking to a friend who had done just that, left his plane at night. His engine had been on fire, and the rest of the formation was completely powerless to help. As his plane slowed and started down, one of them had called, “Don’t wait too long to get out.” Those helpless words were the last he had heard before he fired into the night. Here was a man he had known and flown with, who had eaten dinner with him, who had laughed at the same jokes with him, saying, “Don’t wait too long …”

Four men, flying alone together through the night.

“Checkmate, fuel check.”

Once again, the voice from Lead cuts into the silence of the engine’s airy roar. Once again you move away, read the dim needle, pointing.

“Checkmate Two, twenty-one hundred pounds,” your stranger’s voice calls into the thin static.

“Checkmate Three, twenty-two hundred.”

“Checkmate Four, twenty-one hundred.”

Back in you slide, back to the flash of the red light.

We took off just an hour ago, and already the fuel says it’s time to go down. What the fuel says, we do. Strange what a complete respect we have for that fuel gage. Pilots who respect neither laws of man nor of God respect that fuel gage. There’s no getting around its law, no hazy threat of punishment in the indefinite future. Nothing personal. “If you don’t land soon,” it says coldly, “your engine will stop while you’re in the air, and you will bail out into the dark.”

“Checkmate, descent check, and speed brakes … now.”

Black air roars outside as the two metal slabs that are your speed brakes push into the slipstream. The red light keeps flashing, but now you push forward on the stick to follow it down, toward the invisible ground. Abstract thoughts fly to the depths of your mind, and you concentrate on flying formation in the steep descent. Those thoughts are for high places, for as the earth approaches, there is more to do to fly the airplane safely. Temporal, concrete, life-depending thoughts jumble your mind.

Move it out a little, you’re too close to his wing. Fly smooth, don’t let a little rough air bounce you out of formation.

Impersonal turbulence pounds your plane as you turn together toward the double row of white lights that mark the waiting runway.

“Checkmate, turning initial, three out with four.”

“Roger Checkmate, you’re number one in traffic, winds west northwest at four knots.”

Funny, that in our sealed cockpits at three hundred miles per hour, we still must know about the wind, the ancient wind.

“Checkmate’s on the break.”

No thoughts now, but reflexes and habits as you land. Speed brakes and landing gear, flaps and throttle; you fly the landing pattern, and in a minute there is the reassuring squeak of wheels on concrete.

Think white. Think glaring, artificial light shining reflected from waxed tabletops in the flight shack. A sign on the blackboard: “Squadron Party … 2100 hours tonite. All the beer you can drink—FREE!”

You’re down. You’re home.

Found at Pharisee

It happened on a Tuesday, at Pharisee, Wyoming. I remember that I had just grounded myself for a week, because the approved mechanics were busy and wouldn’t be able to change my airplane’s oil till Tuesday next. I had logged twenty-four hours fifty-seven minutes since my last twenty-five-hour oil change, so of course I couldn’t fly.

As I turned to leave the FAA-approved repair station, there was a great thunder in the sky, and a dozen lightplanes landed suddenly on the grass, where it was forbidden to land, and, I later learned, without radio. They converged upon the FAA-approved repair station like multiple lightnings, and a dozen masked, black-clad men leaped from the cockpits and surrounded us, .44s drawn and cocked.

“We’ll take all your technical files, right now,” the outlaw leader said in a low, calm voice. A black silk cape hung about him, and from the cool manner in which he pointed his revolver, it was plain that he had done this many times before. “Everything you have, anything written about any airplane, any engine, bring it out here, please.”

It was preposterous, incredible, in this day … a holdup! I started to cry out, but the FAA-approved inspector, without moving a muscle, said, “Do as he says, boys; give ’em the tech data files.”

Three of the approved mechanics backed toward the office, covered by the outlaws.