A Gift of Wings

On January 27th, Toronto had its worst blizzard of the century. Towns were buried under snow, rescue operations were underway.

We were glad for this news; the deeper the snow, the closer we could land to town. When you are barnstorming, you might as well go home if you can’t land close to town.

Extremely early on the morning of the 29th, Munson and I started engines under the dim place in the night that would be dawn … our engine exhausts were blue in the terrible stillness. It is around sunrise that adventurers reach that point at last where they begin to understand that they are out of their minds, just like everybody says.

“Russ, do you realize that this whole trip is folly? Do you realize what we are getting ourselves into? Look, I’m sorry I brought this whole idea up …” I wanted to say it, but didn’t have the courage. Adventurers are cowardly about things like that.

Munson wasn’t saying anything either, as the sky lightened and our engines warmed, and at last we climbed without words into our airplanes, taxied over the deserted concrete, and took off north, across Long Island Sound, across Connecticut. The outside air temperature at five thousand feet was eighteen degrees below zero, though I must admit that in the unheated cockpit it didn’t feel any colder than ten or fifteen below. In the first place, I couldn’t believe that I was going to spend a month in that temperature; in the second, I was thinking about summer, when the roads get so hot you can’t walk without shoes and butter turns into yellow pools if you leave it out.

At our first stop, our very first stop, I noticed that my engine seemed to be blowing a little oil out the breather pipe. It always lost some oil, but this was more than usual. I unhooked the extension and let the pipe breathe in the warm engine compartment.

Since his airplane had a gyro compass, VOR and ADF radios, Munson was the flight leader to Toronto. My one magnetic compass was as sensitive to direction as a bench anvil, so I merely flew along as wingman and enjoyed the scenery, which was white and soft. Why this strange feeling, then, an hour after our second takeoff, that this was not the way to Canada at all? Those mountains to the right, weren’t those the Catskills? And shouldn’t the Hudson River be to our left? I moved into close formation and pointed to my map, looking a question at the flight leader. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“Russ!” I shouted, “Aren’t we heading south? We’re heading SOUTH!” He couldn’t understand what I was yelling, so at last I fell back and followed uncomplaining, as a wingman should, to see where he was going. He’s been flying for ten years, I thought, so it must be me that’s wrong. We’re just following a different river. I noticed that he was checking his map, and this was reassuring to me. He

didn’t change course. We must be headed north … it’s me that’s lost, not for the first time.

But after a while it began getting warmer. There was less snow, down there on the ground.

The Super Cub realized, with a jolt, that somehow there had been a terrible mistake. It banked sharply right, changed course one hundred sixty degrees, and then drifted down to land at a little airport by the river. It was the Hudson, all right. For once in my life I was lost and it wasn’t my fault!

“You may live this down,” I told him gently, when we had landed, “but believe me, it is going to take a long time …”

I was sorry at once, for he was deeply upset.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me! I was following the highway and I noticed that the compass was a little off and the VOR wasn’t quite right, but I was sure it was the highway! I just sat there and didn’t pay any attention. I saw the compass, but I didn’t pay any attention!”

It was not hard to change the subject. There was oil all over the belly of my airplane, blown out in the last hour. The landing gear and cowling were covered with it, congealed and frozen everywhere. A broken ring, perhaps, a cracked piston? We talked about turning back to check it over, but it sounded like the quitter’s way.

“Let’s press on,” I said. “It’s probably just suction there at the end of the breather pipe, taking out more than it should.”

Munson nailed the course north on the Hudson, turned left at Albany, drove dead-on toward Toronto. An hour past Albany my oil pressure dropped one psi, then two. I have never had the oil pressure drop in any airplane engine without something bad happening soon … I pointed “down” to my flight leader and we landed at the next airport, five minutes away.

Another quart gone. The prospect of forty hours flying over the Canadian wilderness with an engine spraying its lifeblood into the sky was not the adventure I had chosen to play. It is one thing to be ready for engine failure, barnstorming, but quite another, and not so wise, I thought, to be convinced of it. Proceed or return, I was going to be a quitter; but better to be a warm quitter than a cold one perched in some Pentanguinishe treetop. Besides, the weather people told us, there’s a fresh blizzard at the border.

I filled with oil and took off south, puzzled that I should be sad at missing out on a freezing. Once one gets started on an adventure, no matter how crazy a thing it is, the only way to rest easy is to carry it through, no matter what.

An hour and a half later the oil pressure fell five pounds, then ten, and then clunked against the peg at zero, leaving me to glide down the runway we had started from before dawn.

The problem with the engine was not as simple as a cracked piston or a broken ring. The problem was that the cylinders had all worn oversize, beyond tolerance even for chrome plating. Four overhauled cylinders were available, at eighty-five dollars each, plus rings at thirty-two dollars and gaskets …

By the time I collected the money for engine parts, spring had come to Canada. Snow melted to grass, fields to crops, lakes dissolved from ice into blue water.

How’s that for adventure? The winter raging wild up in Canada and you can challenge it and call it names and still sit all month by the fire … here’s to adventure and adventuring! And next year, by Ned, it’s on to the Pole!

Cat

It was a cat, a gray Persian cat. It had no name and it sat very carefully in the tall grass at the end of the runway, studying the fighter planes as they touched down in France for the first time.

The cat did not flinch as the ten-ton jet fighters whistled airily by, nosewheels still in the air and drag chutes waiting to spring from their little houses beneath the tailpipes. Its yellow eyes watched calmly, appraising the quality of the touchdowns, angled ears listening for the faint pouf! of the late-blossoming drag chutes, head turning serenely after one landing to watch the final approach and touchdown of the next. Now and then a touchdown was hard, and the eyes narrowed ever so slightly for an instant as the soft paw-pads felt the jar of airplane and soil for an instant as an airplane did not correct for crosswind, and great gouts of blue rubber-smoke angled from tortured wheels.

The cat watched the landings for three hours in the cold of an October afternoon, until twenty-seven airplanes had landed and the sky was empty and the last whine of dying engines had faded from the parking revetments across the field. Then the Persian stood suddenly, and without even a feline stretch of graceful body, trotted away to disappear in the tall grass. The 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron had arrived in Europe.

When a fighter squadron is reactivated after fifteen years of nonexistence, there are a few problems. With the barest nucleus of experienced pilots in a squadron of thirty, the 167th’s problems centered around pilot proficiency. Twenty-four of its air crews had been graduated from gunnery training schools within the year before reactivation.

“We can do it, Bob, and do a good job of it,” said Major Carl Langley to his squadron commander. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been an operations officer, and I tell you I’ve never seen a bunch of pilots who are more eager to learn this business than the ones we have right here.”

Major Robert Rider pounded his fist lightly against the rough wooden wall of his office-to-be. “That point I will grant you,” he said. “But you and I have a job cut out for us. This is Europe, and you know European weather in the winter. Aside from our flight commanders, young Henderson has more weather time than any other pilot in the squadron, and he only has eleven hours of it. Eleven hours! Carl, are you looking forward to leading a four-ship flight of these pilots, in old F-84s, through twenty thousand feet of weather? Or to a GCA touchdown on a wet runway in a crosswind?” He glanced out the dirt-streaked window. High overcast, good visibility beneath, he noted unconsciously. “I’m going to run this squadron, and I’m going to run it well; but I’ll tell you that I can’t help but think that before the new 167th is a real combat-ready outfit, a couple of our boys are going to be scattered across the sides of mountains. I’m not looking forward to that.”