A Gift of Wings

“I remember a time when I was late,” said Kramer. “There was a thunderstorm had closed LaGuardia and everybody else canceled air taxi flying for the night. I was at Republic Field on Long Island, and Eleanor and the passengers were at LaGuardia waiting for me. I was calling LaGuardia every hour, trying to coax the controller into saying there wouldn’t be an hour delay, landing. All I had was one dry cheese cracker, waiting at Republic, and I finally got through and landed at LaGuardia and they were having a party in there! One guy had gone out and bought a whole delicatessen and put it in a box and dragged it over to the airport. I walk in and the guy says, ‘Here, want some roast beef?’ and he gave me a thing of roast beef and I had had that one cheese cracker all that time and I said, ‘We’re leaving, now. The airplane is leaving, now.’ Back with the baggage and in they went, but their little party went right on. I said, ‘Quiet, please,’ I gave Eleanor a dirty look and everybody quieted down.”

“He gave me a lot of dirty looks from time to time,” Mrs. Friede said, “and I knew which ones were for real. He’d put up with a lot of noise and nonsense in that big back cabin, as long as it didn’t interfere with his flying. But if a passenger got careless with a cigarette—well, we had a message going and we’d cool it, then.”

In a way, the curious hard world finally won. When the air taxi insurance rates doubled, from fifteen hundred dollars for a summer to three thousand dollars, it was too much. But the partners don’t sound beaten at all.

“I don’t think we’ll be running the Bomber again this summer as a commuting deal,” Kramer said. “I might have to take a job someplace. But every once in a while it will come flitting into LaGuardia making that bopping and croaking noise that it makes as it taxis around, that the line boys know right away. They say to me things like, I come in at night and they say, ‘My, you know, that—see them flames come out the exhausts!’ And that noise … MMRRr?rrowC?HKkre?lchkAUM … croaking and everything and they say, ‘Boy, that’s nice!’ It seems to make everybody happy, wherever it goes.

“And the future? I think it would do Cessna no harm to promote one of the truly great

airplanes that it built. It would be sort of a thing for them to say, ‘Here is a thirty-year-old Bamboo Bomber that has just flown around the world.’ So I would like to take it around the world. Because the airplane deserves to go around the world.”

One has the strangest feeling that Kramer will somehow do just as he says, although the airline probably won’t make a cent in profit and might even lose money, on the flight.

But that is the story of East Island Airways. You may go ahead and jump from that ledge now, if you wish. I just thought that you should know that these two people discovered that an alternate to jumping is a laugh, and a decision to live by their own values instead of the world’s. They made their own reality, instead of suffering in somebody else’s. According to East Island Airways, the hard earth was not made for leaping into, but for flying around.

And that bopping croaking sound you hear in the night is the Bamboo Bomber, thirty years old, taxiing for another takeoff into its adventures, blue flames from the exhaust, chuckling and chortling, and not particularly caring whether or not the world happens to approve.

A gospel according to Sam

An old guru surely must have said it to a disciple ten thousand years ago. “You know, Sam, there will never live anyone who will ever own anything more than his own thoughts. Not people, not places, not things will we ever keep for possessions through vast times. Walk a little while with them we can, but soon or late we’ll each take our own true possession—what we’ve learned, how we think—and go separately around our lonely turnings.”

“Ah, so,” Sam must have said, and written it all on lotus bark.

What was it then, these thousands of years after that truth was written, that I should feel sad, signing papers to trade away a biplane that had become a part of my life? There was no question that it had to be done. My new home is edged on three sides by water, on the fourth by a high-density area. The airport, without a “control tower,” thanks be, is nevertheless all hard-surface runway, is all buttered glass for the biplane to land upon, concrete strips poured into a jungle of oak trees without a single field for landing should an engine fail on takeoff. I moved nine hundred miles from the place where the biplane was at home, and the longer I left her in the hangar the worse it was; she fell to the mercy of house-hunting sparrows and cord-hungry mice. There was no choice, if I loved that airplane and wished her to live in the sky, but to trade her to someone who would fly her well and often. Why was the moment that I signed the papers such a sad moment?

Perhaps because I remembered the six years we had flown together. I remembered the dawn in Louisiana when everything went suddenly wrong, when all of a moment she had to fly after an impossible hundred-foot ground roll, or be torn apart by a dike of earth. She flew. She had never lifted off so quickly before, she never did since, but it happened that one time—she touched the dike and flew.

I remembered the day of the handkerchief pickup, barnstorming in Wisconsin, when I had flown her hard into solid ground that I thought was only grass, slamming her propeller a hundred miles per hour into the dirt, smashing a wing, tearing a wheel loose. She didn’t crush into a ball; that instant, she bounced off the ground, turned into the wind, and eased down into the shortest, softest landing we ever made together. Twenty-five times the propeller blades hit the ground, and instead of flipping on her back or cartwheeling to splinters, the biplane bounced and flew to that marshmallow featherdown landing.

I remember the hundreds of passengers we had flown from cow pastures, who had never in their lives seen a farm from the air until the biplane and I came along to give them the chance, three dollars the ride.

It was sad to part with that airplane, in spite of knowing that one never owns anything, because that flying was finished for me now, because a full good time of my life was finished and done.

The airplane I took in trade is an 85-horsepower Clip-Wing Cub. A completely different personality from the biplane, light as thirty feet of spruce-framed Dacron; that doesn’t even blink at the concrete; that lifts me from takeoff to a thousand feet over the trees in one length of the runway. It flies aerobatics happily that the biplane never could honestly enjoy.

Still it was all rationalization, still I felt a gray melancholy, a wistful sadness that the biplane and I had parted and that it was my fault.

It happened one day, after a practice of slow rolls out over the sea, that I realized a simple fact that most people discover who have to sell an airplane. I learned the fact that every aircraft is two separate life-forms, not just one. The objective frame, the steel and spars, is one airplane. But the subjective, the airplane with which adventures have been shared, with which we forge this intense personal bond, is another machine entirely. This machine, flying, is our breathing past, is as truly our own as thought itself. It can’t be sold. The man whose name is now on the registration papers of the biplane does not own the biplane that I do, that one hushing down through dusk to a summer hayfield in Cook, Nebraska, wind signing in her wires, engine a soft windmill, gliding over the road at the edge of the hay. He doesn’t own the sound of Iowa fog changing to raindrops on the top wings, pomming down on the drum-cloth of the lower wings to wake me, asleep by the ashes of last night’s campfire. The new owner didn’t buy the delight-terror cries of young lady passengers at Queen City, Missouri, at Ferris, Illinois, at Seneca, Kansas, who found that steep turns in an old biplane feel the same as stepping off the roof of the barn.

That biplane will always be mine. He will always keep his own Cub. I learned this from the sky as well as Sam from his guru, and it was no longer necessary to be sad.

A lady from Pecatonica

Remember when you were a kid, how important it was to be loved and admired? How great it was, now and then, to turn up the hero of the game, with the girls watching and the other guys glad because you scored a point or brought glory upon the team? A strange thing, flying, to come along and reverse all that.

I was barnstorming Pecatonica, Illinois, in the summer of 1966. It had been a good weekday, we had flown thirty passengers from supper to sunset, and there was time for just one more flight before it would be too dark to fly. The crowd was still there, parked in cars or standing in groups of friends, watching our planes.

I stood at the wing of my biplane and called to them in the twilight. “One more ride, folks; last ride of the day—best ride of the day, coming up right now! No extra cost, just three dollars! Room for only two passengers!”

Nobody moved.

“Look at that sunset, all red up there! Twice as pretty when you see it from the sky itself! Step into this cockpit and you can be right in the middle of it all!”

The hills and trees were already dark silhouettes on the horizon, like the cutouts along a planetarium rim before the lights go down for the star show.

But nobody wanted to fly. I was helpless—the keeper of a magnificent beautiful gift, trying to share it with a world that wasn’t interested.

I tried one more time to convince them, and gave up. I started the engine and took off to see the sunset all by myself.