A Gift of Wings

There. Worst is behind, and outlaws soon to justice. I see Pharisee airport, and I could almost stretch glide from here unless—chance in a million … chance in billion—the engine qui

School for perfection

I had flown west for a long time. West through the night, then south, then sort of southwest, I guess, not caring. You don’t care too much about maps and headings when you’ve just lost a student. You go off by yourself, after midnight, and think about it. It had been an unavoidable accident; one of those rare times when fog forms right out of mid-air and in five minutes the visibility goes from ten miles down to zero. There had been no airport nearby; he couldn’t land. Unavoidable. By sunup, the country around me was strange and mountainous. I must have flown quite a bit farther than I thought, and the fuel gage pointers were both bouncing on E. Lost, with the sun barely up, it was pure luck that I saw a green-painted Piper Cub rocking its wings to me, turning to land on a tiny grass strip at the base of a mountain. It touched the ground, rolled for a moment, then abruptly disappeared into a wall of solid rock! The place was empty and still as a frontier wilderness, and for a moment I thought that I had imagined the Cub.

Still, that little strip was the only possible place to land an airplane. I was glad I had taken one of the 150s, instead of the big Comanche or the Bonanza. I dragged up to the field, full flaps and power, facing right into that granite wall. It was the shortest landing I could make, but it wasn’t short enough. Power off, flaps up, brakes on, we were still rolling at twenty knots when I knew we were going to hit the wall. But there was no impact. The wall disappeared, and the 150 rolled to a stop inside a huge stone cavern. It must have been a mile long, that place, with a great long runway. Airplanes of all types and sizes were parked about, each painted in dappled green camouflage. The Cub that had landed was just shutting down its engine, and a tall, black-clad fellow stepped from the front seat and motioned me to park alongside.

Under the circumstances, I could only do as he asked. As I stopped, another figure emerged from the back seat of the Cub. That one was dressed in gray; he couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old, and he watched me with mild disapproval.

When my engine stopped, the man in black spoke in a low, even tone that could only have been the voice of an airline captain. “It must not be much fun, losing a student,” he said, “but it shouldn’t make you forget your own flying. We had to make three passes in front of you before you finally saw us.” He turned to the youth. “Did you watch his landing, Mr. O’Neill?”

The boy stiffened. “Yes, sir. About four knots fast, touched down seventy feet long, six feet left of centerline …”

“We’ll analyze later. Meet me in the projection room in an hour.”

The youngster stiffened again, inclined his head slightly, and left.

The man escorted me to an elevator and pressed a button marked Level Seven. “Drake’s been wanting to see you for some time,” he said, “but you haven’t been quite ready to meet him until now.”

“Drake? You mean Drake the …”

He smiled, in spite of himself. “Of course,” he said, “Drake the Outlaw.”

In a moment, the door hissed open, and we walked a long, wide passageway, carpeted and quiet, tastefully decorated in detail diagrams and paintings of aircraft in flight.

So he really exists, I thought. So there really is such a man as the Outlaw. When you operate a flying school, you hear all kinds of strange things, and from here and there, I had heard of this man Drake and his band of flyers. For these people, the story went, flight had become a true and deep religion, and their god was the sky itself. For them, it was said, nothing mattered

but reaching out and touching the perfection that is the sky. But the only evidence of Drake’s existence was a few handwritten pages, an account of meeting the man, found in the wreck of an airplane that did not survive a forced landing. It had been printed once in a magazine, as a curiosity, and then forgotten.

We entered a wide, paneled room, so simply furnished that it was elegant. There was an original Amendola painting of a C3R Stearman framed on one wall; on the other was a fine-detail cutaway of an A-65 engine. My guide disappeared, and I couldn’t help but examine the C3R. There was no flaw anywhere in it. The fasteners were there on the cowl, the rib-stitching of the wings, the reflections in the polished fabric. The Stearman fairly vibrated on the wall, caught in the instant of flare, just above the grass.

If only reality could be as perfect as that painting, I thought. I had been to so many seminars, heard so many panel discussions affirm in parrot voices, “We’re only human, after all. We can never be perfect …”

For a second I wished that this Drake could live up to his legend, say some magic word, tell me …

“We can be perfect, my friend.”

He was about six feet tall, dressed in black, with the lean, angled face that independence gives to men. He could have been forty years old or sixty, it was impossible to tell.

“The Outlaw himself,” I said, surprised. “And you read minds, as well as fly airplanes.”

“Not at all. But I think you might be tired of excuses for failure. Failure,” he said, “has no excuse.”

It was as if I had been climbing up through clouds all my life, and in this moment had broken out on top. If he could only back up those words.

Yet suddenly I was very tired, and threw the full weight of my depression at him. “I’d like to believe in your perfection, Drake. But until you show me the perfect flight school, the perfect staff of instructors, with no failures and no excuses, I can’t believe a word you say.”

It was my last hope in the world, a test for this leader of these very special outlaws. If he was silent now, if he apologized for his words, I’d sell my flying school cold, take the Super Cub back to Nicaragua for a living.

Drake’s answer was a half-second smile. “Follow me,” he said.

He led the way into a long hall, lined in glowing aviation art and pedestals mounting bits and pieces of world-famous airplanes. Then we turned down a narrow corridor and abruptly into cool air and sunlight, at the brink of a steep, grassy slope. The grass fell away some fifty feet, and where it merged with level ground was a huge fluffy square of what looked like feathers, a hundred yards on a side and perhaps ten feet deep.

A man, gray-haired, dressed in black, stood by the feather pile and called up the slope. “All right, Mister Terrell, whenever you’re ready. No hurry. Take your time.”

Mister Terrell was a boy of fourteen or so, and he stood to our left, on the edge of the slope. Resting on his shoulders was a great frail set of snow-linen wings, thirty feet from tip to tip and casting a transparent shadow on the grass. He took a breath in readiness, reached forward, and gripped the adhesive-taped bar of the main wing beam. Then all at once he ran forward, tilted the wings upward, and lifted free of the hillside. He flew for perhaps twelve seconds, swinging his body as a gymnast would, in slow feet-together motions that balanced the white wings smoothly down through the air.

At no time was he more than ten feet above the slope, and he dropped free of the wings a second before his feet touched the feathers. It was all slow and graceful and free, a kind of dream turned into white linen and green grass.