A Gift of Wings

“In your flying school,” he said mildly, “what are the stakes?”

“Survival! If I don’t keep turning out pilots and bringing in new students, I’m through, I’m out of business!”

“Our stakes are a little different,” he said. “It’s up to us to keep flight alive in a world of airplane-drivers—the people who come out of your school, concerned only with moving straight and level from airport to airport. We’re trying to keep a few real pilots left in the air. There’s not too many left who don’t carry that book of excuses, those ‘Twelve Golden Rules,’ next to their heart.”

I couldn’t have heard him right. Was Drake attacking the Golden Rules, distilled from so much experience?

“Your Golden Rules are all don’ts and nevers,” he said, knowing my thought. “Ninety percent of the accidents happen in these conditions, so you must avoid the conditions. The one last logical step they didn’t print is ‘One hundred percent of the accidents are caused by flying, so for complete safety, you must stay on the ground.’ It was Golden Rule number eight, by the way, that killed your student.”

I was thunderstruck. “It was an unavoidable accident! The temperature-dewpoint came together without being forecast, the fog just formed around him in five minutes. He couldn’t reach an airport!”

“And rule eight told him never to land away from an airport. In his last five minutes of visibility, he flew over eight hundred thirty-seven landing places—smooth fields and level pastures—but they were not ‘designated airports, with known current runway maintenance’ so he didn’t even think about landing, did he?”

It was quiet for a long time. “No,” I said, “he didn’t.”

We were back in his office before he spoke again.

“We have two things here that you don’t have in your school. We have perfection. We have time.”

“And machine shops. And bird wings …”

“All the effects of time, my friend. The live history, the motivated students, the instructors … they’re all here because we decided to take time to give a pilot skill and understanding, instead of listing rules.

“You talk about your ‘crisis in flight instructing’ on the outside, you’re going through a frenzy of renewing all your instructors’ licenses. But every bit of it is wasted unless the instructor is given time with his student. A man learns to fly on the ground, remember. He just puts that learning into practice when he steps into an airplane.”

“But the tricks, the bits of experience …”

“Certainly. Prop-stopped forced landings, downwind takeoffs, control-jam flying, zero-G stalls, full-blackout night landings, off-airport landings, low-level cross-countries, formation flying, pride, instrument flying and no-instrument flying, low-altitude turn-arounds, flat turns, spins, skill. None of it taught. Not because your instructors don’t know how to fly, but because they don’t have time to teach it all. You think it’s more important to have that scrap of paper, that flying license, than it is to know your airplane. We don’t agree.”

I threw the last of my resistance at him, as hard as I could. “Drake, you live in a cave, you’ve got nothing to do with reality. I can only pay my instructors for the hours they fly, and they can’t afford to spend nonflying time talking with their students on the ground. If I’m going to survive, I’ve got to keep my planes and instructors in the air. We’ve got to put the students right through, give ’em forty hours and a copy of the ‘Twelve Golden Rules,’ get ’em ready for the flight check, and then start all over again with the next bunch. In a system like this, you’re bound to have accidents now and then!”

I listened to myself, and all at once I was filled with loathing. It wasn’t somebody else saying those words, fighting to defend failures, that was me, that was my own voice. My student’s death wasn’t unavoidable; I had murdered him.

Drake said not a word. It was as if he had refused to hear me. He lifted a tiny glider from his desk and launched it carefully into the air. It turned one full circle to the left and slid to a stop precisely in the center of a small white X painted on the floor.

“You might be just about ready to admit,” he said at last, “that if your system involves accidents, then the solution is not to find excuses for the accidents. The solution.” he said, “is to change the system.”

I stayed a week at the cave, and I saw that Drake had not missed a single avenue that would bring perfection in flight. Instructors and students held a very formal relation, on the ground, in the air, in the shops and special-study areas. An incredible respect for the men and women who were instructors, almost a worship of them, filled Drake’s domain. Drake himself called his instructors “sir,” and the flying records of each one of them was printed and open to the students.

Sunday afternoon was a four-hour air show, with formation flying demonstrations of student-built airplanes, and a low-level aerobatic show by one of the best-known air-show pilots in the Southwest. Drake’s influence and ideas ran deeper than I had dreamed … I began to wonder about a few other excellent pilots I knew; ag pilots, mountain pilots, airline captains who flew sport planes in their spare time. Could it be that they had some tie with Drake, with this school?

I asked, but Drake was enigmatic. “When you believe in something as true as the sky,” he said, “you’re bound to find a few friends.”

The man operates an incredible flying school, and when it was time to leave, I frankly told him so. But one thought persisted. “How can you afford it, Drake? This didn’t all come out of thin air. Where do you get your money?”

“The students pay for their training,” he said, as if that explained everything.

I must have stared at him rather dumbly.

“Oh. Not at the start. Not one student ever had a penny to his name, at the start. They just wanted to fly, more than anything else in the world. But every student pays what he thinks his training has been worth. Most give about ten percent of their income to the school, as long as they live. Some give more, some less. It averages about ten percent.

“And ten percent from a thousand bush pilots, a thousand military pilots, a thousand airline captains … it keeps us in gas and oil.” Again, that half-second smile flashed across his face. “And it keeps them in the knowledge that there will be other pilots coming along that know more about flying than how to steer an airplane.”

Heading north and east, flying back onto my map, I couldn’t get his words out of my mind. To teach more about flying than how to steer an airplane; to take time with the students; to offer them the priceless thing that is the ability to fly.

I can change my school, I thought. I can choose my students carefully, instead of taking everyone that walks in the door. I can ask them to pay what the instruction is worth. I can pay my instructors four times what I’m paying them now; make instruction a profession instead of an odd job. Some extra training aids, perhaps—an engine dismantled, a cutaway airframe. My instructors’ experience written for their students to read. Pride. Some firsthand history, some aerobatics, some soaring. Skill. Not the scrap of paper, but understanding.

I shut down the engine at the gas pump, still thinking. Choose the student, and give him time.