A Gift of Wings

“Ah, my honored guest,” the outlaw said, and leaned forward across the table, “you seek your god in rule books and idols made by men, and all the while that god is within you. Safety is that which you know, not what somebody else thinks it would be nice for you to comply with. Ask your FAA agent for the approved definition of safety. There is none. How can any agency guide toward that which it can’t even define?”

“You poor lonely outlaws,” I said, with as much pity as I could feign for the lunatic. “There are so few of you …”

“Think so?” my captor said. “Open your eyes. In the cities, with hard-surface runways and FAA offices crowded in the terminals, we are few. But come away from your executive transportation centers someday and see what is going on in the other ninety-nine percent of the country. Outlaws. It is not only impossible to fly daily without breaking Federal Air Regulations, but following them blindly can kill a man.”

“An empty slogan, my good fellow.”

“Is it? Fly in two-mile visibility into a controlled airport, sometime, with no radio. It isn’t legal to land, is it? If you are seen landing and the FAA isn’t in the mood to overlook the law that day, a violation will be filed against you.

“So you keep flying, hoping for an uncontrolled airport nearby. The weather goes bad around you, but you’ve never landed in a pasture—that sort of thing is considered dangerous and is not in the flight training requirements. It is now raining hard and you can’t find an airport, so you decide that with your five hours of instrument hood training you are able to climb through the cloud to on top in uncontrolled airspace. What is instrument training for, if not for use in an emergency? By evoking the emergency prerogative section of the General Operating Rules, you can even do this legally. But your chances of coming through alive are zero.

“Just one instanc

e,” he said, “one logical everyday instance in which blind obedience to law will kill you. Want more? Plenty more examples, and lots and lots of outlaws. We’re content to let the FAA live in its little dreamworld, as long as it doesn’t make us try to live there, too. And it doesn’t. I used to be an editor for an aviation magazine, and I had the chance to talk to many an official agent of the FAA. I found that the experienced men agreed with the outlaws right down the line, as long as I promised not to quote them on it. One of them said, ‘There are more outlaws in the FAA than out of it!’ Word for word, my friend, from a high-ranking regional official of your agency.”

At my command, the man obediently passed the salt.

“There are quite a few old-time pilots in the FAA who know us well,” he went on, “and who know that our kind of safety works better than the official kind, and so don’t apply the law to us, or bend it sharply for us. We’ve all agreed to be very quiet about the fact that a great number of regulations are ridiculous violations of common sense, and we’ve agreed that no one will rock the boat. We’re grateful that the old-timers are there, of course. If anyone seriously tried to enforce the regulations on maintenance, for instance, virtually every owner of a low-cost lightplane would have a price on his head, and would have to counterattack for his very survival as an airplane owner. The magnitude of that counterattack would destroy a great many people in the FAA, and it would reform the law. The end result would be good, certainly, but the process would be so painful that none of us has the courage to begin it. We are happy as long as we’re left alone. The FAA is happy as long as no one shatters its dreamworld about the law-abiding little guy.”

My patience came to an end, I had had enough of this self-righteous prattle. “Admit it, Drake,” I said. “You’re looking for a license to fly recklessly, to do whatever you wish, whether it be safe or not. You don’t care whether you live or die, but how about the innocent people on the ground who are snuffed out when your reckless nonsense pays you in full?”

He laughed. “My friend, you do a lot of flying at night, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. An airplane is for transportation, day and night. What’s that to do with your recklessness?”

“Do you wear a parachute when you fly at night?”

“Of course not. What a juvenile thought!”

“What do you do, then, if your engine stops at night?”

“I have never had an engine failure in flight, Mr. Drake, and I do not intend to have one.”

“Isn’t that interesting!” He was silent for a moment, studying the engine diagram woven into the tablecloth. “There is not an outlaw here who would fly an airplane at night without a parachute, unless the moon was so bright that he constantly had a landing place in sight. We don’t believe that engine failures never happen, and if we can’t see to land, and if we can’t carry a parachute, we don’t fly. There’s not a pilot here, except yourself, who would fly over an undercast of fog, or over a ceiling lower than he can shoot a forced landing from.

“Yet no-parachute night flying is perfectly legal, and flying on top of any amount of fog is FAA-approved. Our rule says that pure safety is pure knowledge and pure control. Whether our airplane has one engine or two is immaterial. If we can’t see to land, and if we can’t carry a parachute, we don’t fly.”

Naturally, I didn’t listen to a word the man said. The only safety that wildman would ever know would be the safety of a prison cell.

“Your connecting rod,” he went on “is legal right now. It is FAA-approved and it is all signed off. But it is cracked and it is going to break soon. If you had the choice, would you rather have the crack in the rod or that signature in your log?”

I could only be firm with him. “Sir, the mechanic and the inspector are responsible for their work. I am entirely within my rights to fly that airplane exactly as it is.”

He laughed once more, a curiously friendly sound, as though he meant me no harm. At that moment I knew I would escape his lair, and soon.

“All right,” he said, not knowing my thoughts. “The inspector is responsible, and you are innocent. All you have to do is let your airplane be destroyed in these mountains because you are not required to know how to survive in any land that you fly over. Everyone else is responsible, you are just the guy who does the dying. Is that it?”

That is it, of course, but again he made it sound foolish and wrong. But who can believe a band of outlaws, living in the badlands, flying and maintaining their airplanes without licenses just because they happen to know how an engine works or how an airplane flies? Radicals and extremists all, and there should be a law against them. Well, of course, there is a law.

Outlaws is what they are, and when I return to a law-abiding city, I’ll see that the FAA files serious charges against them all, and revokes their … and comes out here and puts them in prison. They think they’re so much better than everyone else, just because they know how to hold a wrench and land without power. But do they know about approach control? What do they do in the traffic pattern if the tower doesn’t give them permission to land? They’d sing a different tune, then, and I’d reach over when they beg me to save them and I’d ask the tower, “Respectfully begging your permission to land,” and then I won’t have to know my airplane or how it flies because the tower has cleared me number one.

I abruptly took leave of Drake and his unsavory fellows, and neither he nor his men made any move to stop me. They no doubt saw my anger, and thought it much safer to hold their peace in my presence.

Back in the rock hangar, I found the button that slid the wall away, and since the outlaws were now clearly afraid of a law-abiding man, I took time to write this all down, every word we said, to use as evidence in the FAA hearings that will send these men to prison. Those wonderful, simple hearings, in which the FAA, because it knows what is best for us, can both prosecute us and judge us fairly. Fortunately, these wild ones are surely the only men of their kind in the country.

Note to myself: Type all notes following, since ruf air makes pencil words hard for prosecutor to read. Wouldn’t have thot wind 20 so ruf. Save this paper, tho, show outlaws they wrong. Can fly out of their mountains with one hand, make notes with other.

Downdrafts bad. 1500 fpm down, tho full power and climb speed. Must hit updraft soon.