A Gift of Wings

Voices drifted up, tiny, from the meadow. “Just sit there for a while, Stan. Take your time. Remember what it felt like. Remember it through, and when you’re ready, we’ll take the wings up and fly again.”

“I’m ready now, sir.”

“No. Live it through again. You’re at the top of the hill. You reach up to the spar. You run forward three steps …”

Drake turned and led the way into another long corridor, into a different part of his domain. “You ask about a flight school,” he said. “Young Mister Terrell is just beginning to fly, but he has spent a year and a half studying the wind and the sky, and the dynamics of unpowered flight. He has built forty gliders. Wingspans from eight inches up to the one you just saw—thirty-one feet. He made his own wind tunnel and he has worked with the full-size tunnel on Level Three.”

“At that rate,” I said, “it’s going to take him a lifetime to learn to fly.”

Drake looked at me, and raised his eyebrows. “Of course it will,” he said.

We turned now and then, through a maze of halls and corridors. “Most of the students choose to spend about ten hours a day around the airplanes. The rest of the time they give to other work, their own studies. Terrell is building an engine of his own design, for instance, learning casting and machining down in the shops.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “This is all very nice, but it’s just not …”

“Practical?” Drake said. “Were you going to say that it isn’t practical? Think, before you say it. Think that the most practical way to bring a pilot to perfection is to reach him when he is caught with the idea of pure flight, before he decides that a pilot is a systems operator, pushing buttons and pulling levers that keep some strange machine in the air.”

“But … bird wings …”

“Without the bird wings, there can be no perfection. Imagine a pilot who has not only studied Otto Lilienthal but who has been Otto Lilienthal, holding his bird wings and leaping from his hill. Then imagine the same pilot, not only studying the Wrights, but building and flying his own powered biplane glider; a pilot who keeps within him the same spark that fired Orville and Wilbur at Kitty Hawk. After a while, he might be a pretty good pilot, don’t you think?”

“Then you are taking your students, firsthand, through the whole … history …”

“Exactly,” he said. “And the next step from the Wrights might be …?” he waited for me to fill in the blank.

“A … a … Jenny?”

We turned the corridor into the sunlight again, at the edge of a broad, flat field, furrowed with the mark of many tailskids. A JN-4 teetered there, painted olive drab and camouflaged as the airplanes in the main cavern had been. The OX5 engine pushed a big wooden propeller around with the sound of a giant, gentle sewing machine whisking a needle through deep velvet.

A black-clad instructor stood by the rear cockpit.

“She’ll fly a little lighter, Mister Blaine,” he said, over the sewing-machine sound, “and she’ll lift off a little quicker, without my weight. Three landings, then bring her back here.”

In a moment, the Jenny was trundling out into the wind, moving faster, tailskid lifting just clear of the grass and holding there, at last the whole delicate machine rising slowly, so that I could see pure sky under its wheels.

The instructor joined us, and inclined his head in that curious salute. “Drake,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Drake said. “Young Tom doing all right?”

“Quite all right. Tom is a good pilot—might even be an instructor, one day.”

I could restrain myself no longer. “The boy’s a bit young for that old airplane, isn’t he? I mean, what if the engine stops now?”

The instructor looked at me, puzzled. “Pardon me? I don’t understand your question.”

“If the engine stops!” I said. “That’s an old engine! It can quit in flight, you know.”

“Well of course it can quit!” The man looked to Drake, as if he wasn’t sure that I was real.

The outlaw leader spoke patiently, explaining. “Tom Blaine overhauled that OX5 himself, he machined parts for it. He can diagram the engine blindfolded. He knows where it’s weak, he knows what kind of failures to expect. But most of all, he knows about forced landings. He began to learn forced landings with his first glide down Lilienthal Hill.”

It was as if a light had been turned on; I was beginning to understand. “And

from here,” I said slowly, “your students go on into barnstorming and racing and military flying, right on through the history of flight.”

“Exactly. Along the way, they fly gliders, sailplanes, homebuilts, seaplanes, dusters, helicopters, fighters, transports, turboprops, pure jets. When they’re ready, they go out into the world—any kind of flying you can name. Then, when they’ve finished flying on the outside, they can choose to return here as instructors. They take one student, and begin to pass along what they’ve learned.”

“One student!” I had to laugh. “Drake, it’s clear that you’ve never had to operate a flight school under pressure, where the stakes are high!”