A Gift of Wings

It was one of those startling times when I hadn’t known how truly I had spoken. The ground haze topped out at fifteen hundred feet, and from the crystal air above, in the last of the sun, it was a sea of liquid deep gold, with the hilltops rising green-velvet islands out of that sea. It was a sight that I had never seen so purely, and the biplane and I climbed alone, watching, soaked in the color of that living time.

Somewhere around four thousand feet we stopped our climb, unable to take the moment all so passively. The nose came up, the right wings went down, and we fell away in a power-off wing-over that melted into a loop that eased into a barrel roll, the silver propeller just a slow fan whisking away in front of us as we came down, earth beneath us, earth over our head. It was flying for the pure joy of being in the air, and for thanks to the God-symbol sky for being so kind to us both. We thought humble and proud at the same time, all at once in love again with this painful bittersweet lovely thing called flight.

The clear wind streamed around us in that airy shriek it has at the bottom of loops and rolls and then it went soft and calm, gently flowing over us at the tops of our great lazy hammerhead turns when we almost stopped in the sky.

The biplane and I, we who had shared so many adventures—storms and sun, rough times and smooth, good flights and bad—plunged at last together into that pure golden sea. We sank far down into it, wings going level, and we glided to the bottom, to land on the dark grass.

Switch off, and the propeller clanked sadly around to a stop. I stayed for one long minute in the cockpit, not even unbuckling the parachute. It was very quiet, although the crowd was still there. The high sunlight must have been flashing from our wings, and they must have stayed to watch.

Then in the middle of that silence I heard one woman say to another, her words loud across the night air:

“He has the courage of ten men, to fly that old crate!”

It was like being slugged with an iron pipe.

Oh, yes, I was the hero. I was loved and admired. I was the center of attention. And I was disgusted, instantly, with every bit of it, and with her, and I was terribly deeply sorry. Woman. Can’t you see? Can’t you even begin to know?

So it was in Pecatonica, Illinois, in the summer of 1966, in the cockpit of a biplane just landed, that I found it is not being loved and admired by other people that brings joy to living. Joy comes in being able, myself, to love and admire whatever I find that is rare and good and beautiful—in my sky, in my friends, in the touch and the soul of my own living biplane.

“… the courage of ten men,” she had said, “to fly … that old … crate …”

There’s something the matter with seagulls

I’ve always envied the seagull. He seems so free and uninhibited in his flying. In contrast with him I fuss and figure and clutter up the sky with noise just to stay in the air. He’s the artist. I’m the tyro.

Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder about the gull. Although he zooms and dives and turns with a grace that leaves me green-eyed, that’s all he does—zoom and dive and turn. No aerobatics! Either he lacks initiative or he’s faint-hearted. Neither of these conditions is becoming to a top hand in the air. I don’t want to be hard on him—don’t expect eight-point rolls and clover-leafs initially but it doesn’t seem too much to ask for a simple loop or an easy slow roll.

Many times as a confirmed gull watcher, I’ve been sure some young ace was

going to show me something. He’d come screaming down toward the water, building up speed enough to satisfy any pilot and pull up … up … up … till I would be sure he was going over the top. I’d stand there muttering “Pull it in!” but something always seemed to happen. You could see him slackening off the G’s and the pullup arc would widen. He would roll out and lose himself in the crowd of his fellows as if thoroughly ashamed that he had dogged it.

“You look so lordly,” I’d think, “but put a sparrow on your tail and I’ll bet you couldn’t shake him.”

Other birds have developed some precision flying and a few aerobatics. Geese sometimes fly a passable formation, and that’s worth mention. Some geese, though, evidently fear the mid-air collision. Many a formation has been spoiled by number four or five taking too much spacing and straggling all over the sky. Add to this the quacking of the others telling him to close it up, and it’s just plain sloppy flying. No wonder hunters shoot them down.

The unlikely pelican is almost a candidate in the aerobatic field. He can execute a neat split-S, but he doesn’t meet a prime requirement of the maneuver: pulling out. He doesn’t even seem to try to pull out, and ends in a geyser of white spray in the water. This isn’t even playing the game.

So we come back to the seagull. We can excuse pelicans and geese, robins and wrens, but a seagull was plainly designed for aerobatics. Consider these qualifications:

1. Strong wings and spars properly proportioned.

2. Slightly unstable design.

3. High limiting Mach.

4. Low stall speed.

5. Rugged construction.

6. Extreme maneuverability.

But all these factors are useless because he isn’t aggressive in his flying. He’s content to fly his life away practicing fundamentals that he learned during his first five hours in the air. So, although I do admire the seagull and the free way he flies, if I had to forego an aggressive spirit to trade places with him, I’d choose my noisy cockpit any day.

Help I am a prisoner in a state of mind

Something must have gone wrong at the very first, when I was learning to fly. I remember that I had a very difficult time believing that these little machines actually lift up off the ground; that one minute they are all solid on the earth like a pool table or an automobile or a bright-fabric hot-dog stand and the next minute they are in the air, and you can stand beneath them at the airport fence and they go right over you and there is nothing at all connecting them to the ground, nothing there at all.

It was hard to grasp that, to take it in. I’d walk around an airplane, touch it, knock on it, rock it a little bit by the wingtip, and it merely stood there: See, student? Nothing up my sleeves. No gimmicks, no tricks, no hidden wires. It’s real magic, student. I happen to be able to fly.