A Gift of Wings

The snowflake and the dinosaur

Have you ever wondered how a dinosa

ur felt, trapped in a Mesozoic tarpit? I’ll tell you how he felt. He felt exactly the way you would feel if you had force-landed in a winter hayfield in northern Kansas, fixed your engine, and tried to take off again through a carpet of wet snow. Helpless.

They must have tried and tried, those poor stegosaurs and brontosaurs, turning up full power, thrashing like crazy, sending tar flying all directions till sundown caught them in darkness and at last they got so tired it was a blessing to give up and die. It’s the same way in snow, for an airplane—in a mere six inches of picturesque, level snow.

With sundown coming on and a long walk from nowhere, the pilot’s alternative to dying is a cold night in a sleeping bag under shadow of new storms coming. Yet in spite of that, to me, the trap of snow wasn’t fair. I didn’t have time for it. Twenty tries at takeoff had won me only the understanding of the power of a snowflake, multiplied a thousand billion times. The heavy wet stuff turned to thick soup blurring underwheel, blasting violent hard fountains against the struts and wings of my borrowed Luscombe. Full power would drag us up to thirty-nine miles per hour at the fastest, and we needed forty-five minimum to take off. An atom-age dinosaur, we were caught in the wilderness.

Between tries, while the engine cooled, I walked the field, frowning at the injustice of it all, stamping down a narrow white runway, wondering if I’d be camping in the cockpit till spring.

Every new try at takeoff smashed the snow easily enough under the wheels, but at the same time built walls alongside, in ruts a foot deep. Jerking in and out of those tracks was like trying to take off with a balky rocket engine bolted to the plane. In the rut, we accelerated like a shot, but swerve two inches and bam! the nose pitched down, I was thrown forward in the seat, and we lost ten miles per hour in a split second. It was a kind of fixation. Bit by bit, I thought, I’ve got to wear down a runway till we can finally take off; or else it’s the rest of the winter here. But it was hopeless. If I had been a dinosaur, I would have laid me down to die.

When you fly old-time airplanes, you expect to have forced landings now and then. It’s nothing special, it’s part of the game, and no wise pilot flies an antique out of gliding distance of a place to land. In my few years flying, I’d had seventeen forced landings, not one of which I had even thought unfair, for all of which I was more or less prepared.

But this was different. The Luscombe I flew now was hardly an antique; it had higher performance than ultramodern planes of greater horsepower, and had one of the world’s most reliable engines. I flew this time not for fun or for learning, but for a business trip from Nebraska to Los Angeles and return, and I was almost finished with the flight and this was no time for a forced landing. It was more a bother because the engine had never quit. The problem had been a fifty-cent throttle-linkage connection, snapped in two. So when the engine power fell back to idle rpm on the last leg of my business trip—with an appointment waiting in Lincoln—it was the first unfair forced landing I had ever had.

Now, having repaired the linkage, I couldn’t get off the ground again, and it was just an hour till sunset, when dinosaurs must die.

For the first time in my life, I understood the modern-airplane pilots who use airplanes as business tools and don’t want to be bothered with such things as aerobatic training and forced-landing practice. Chances are rare that they’ll ever stop or that a minor little linkage will break in half. It is fair for that sort of thing to happen to a sport pilot, who pays attention to such esoteric trivia and enjoys being ready for it, but not for me in my business plane when I have people waiting for me at the terminal and a dinner planned for six p.m. sharp. Because a forced landing for a businessman is quite honestly unfair, I began to realize that he gets to thinking it can’t possibly happen.

I planned to make one more try to get out of that little field in Kansas before dark. I was already late for my meeting, but the snow didn’t care at all. Nor did the cold, or the field, or the sky. The tarpits hadn’t cared about the dinosaurs, either. Tarpits are tarpits and snow is snow; it’s the dinosaur’s job to get himself free.

The twenty-first try at takeoff, then, the Luscombe, spraying snow, tracking down a rut just long enough, bounced to forty-five, shuddered, wallowed, staggered into the air, touched snow again, shook it off, and at last flew.

I thought about it all as we turned for Lincoln, scudding along over the shadows of dusk. I now had eighteen forced landings in my logbook, and only one of them was unfair.

Not a bad record.

MMRRr?rrowC?HKkre?lchkA?UM … and t?he par?ty at LaGua?rdia

Do you come suddenly awake, ever, to find yourself standing on the rail of a monster bridge, or the ledge of some hundred-story office building, find yourself swaying, teetering out over empty space, and wonder how it’s happened that you’re there, ready to jump? And in answer, do you get a pushing volley of reasons all poking at you—wars here and hatreds there and dog-eat-dog across the way and the only thing that matters is the lousy buck and the meadows are all junkyards and the rivers are all slag and nobody cares about right instead of wrong and good instead of evil and gentleness instead of wrath, and chances are a mistake was made somewhere and you were in fact born into the wrong world, that this isn’t the earth you applied for at all and the only way to change it is to hop off some high place with the wish that the ground below will be a doorway into other lives, and better ones, with challenge and joy and the chance for getting something worthwhile done?

Well, wait a minute before you jump. Because I have a story to tell you. The story is about a couple who are as crazy as sane folk in Bedlam, who just might be friends of yours. Who decided that instead of jumping they would grab the world and whack it a couple of times and make it turn out the way they want it to turn out.

The man is James Kramer, pilot. The woman is Eleanor Friede, an editor in a book publishing company. What they did to the world was to start an airline.

East Island Airways was founded because Jim Kramer saw a 1941 twin Cessna T-50 Bamboo Bomber going to ruin on an airport tie-down and he wanted to rescue it, he wanted to save it.

East Island Airways was founded because Eleanor Friede wanted a way from New York City to her Long Island beach house that would not strangle her dead in four hours of bumper-locked summer automobiles.

East Island Airways was founded because Mrs. Friede met Mr. Kramer when she learned to fly, and not long after he came running and shouting into her house that he had found a Bomber that had to be saved and he’d put up half the money if she’d put up half and they could do something with it to make it pay its way but just come out now, turn off the stove and come out now and look at this airplane and Eleanor if you don’t think this is the most beautiful thing and maybe let’s not think we’d make a lot of money but there must be other people who hate the traffic too and they could at least be enough, on the tickets, to break even and we could save the Bomber!

So it was that Eleanor Friede saw the old round-engine twin waiting there in the sunlight and she thought it was lovely and she liked it as much as Jim Kramer did, for its majesty and its charm and its style. It had all these things, and it cost seven thousand dollars, at a time when other Bombers sold for four thousand, and five. But other Bombers didn’t need to be rescued from owners who did not love them and seven thousand dollars split is only thirty-five hundred dollars apiece. Then and there, East Island Airways was born.

There were already air taxi lines flying from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to East Hampton, Long Island. So what.

The other air taxis had modern airplanes; they had several modern airplanes each. Imagine that.

The Bomber would have to be completely inspected and most likely rebuilt, and that would be expensive, that could take most of the money the two had saved all life long. Interesting.

There would be papers required, and work to form the company, to qualify for operating certificates, to calculate and buy insurance. Quite so.

Statistics show, logic shows, common sense shows without the smallest flicker of doubt that there would hardly be a dime’s profit and more likely a dollar’s loss, perhaps a many-dollars’ loss. Remarkable.

Mr. Kramer was president and chief pilot.

Mrs. Friede was chairman of the board and secretary-treasurer.