A Gift of Wings

Although he is in a very small minority, the Flyer is allowed to walk both his own world and the world of Aviation. Any Flyer can step into the cabin of any airplane and fly it anywhere that an Aviator can. He can overcome distance any time it strikes his fancy.

An Aviator, however, isn’t capable of strapping himself into the cockpit of a sailplane or a racer or an aerobatic biplane and flying it well, or even flying it at all. The only way that he can do this is to enter the same long training that ironically transforms him into a Flyer by the time he has gained the skill to operate such airplanes.

Far from the relatively simple process of learning to aviate, Flying rears itself a gigantic towering mountain of unknowns to the fledgling, so that where Flyers are, one often hears the cry, “Good grief, I can never learn it all!” And of course it’s true. The professional aerobatic pilot, or air racer or soaring pilot, practicing every day for years, is never caught saying, even to himself, “I know it all.” If he stops flying for three days, he can feel the rust when he flies on the fourth. When he lands from his very best performance, he knows that he still has room to improve.

Bring these two worlds together in any but the same man, and sparks fly. To the distance-conquering Aviator, the Flyer is a symbol of irresponsibility, a grease-stained throwback to the days of flight before Aviation came to be; the very last person one would exhibit to the general public if one would wish Aviation to grow.

To the skill-seeking Flyer, the unskilled world of Aviation has already grown too much. The poor Aviators, he says, don’t really know their airplanes when they are performing any maneuver but level flight, and they are the ones who, not caring to study their machines or the face of the sky, turn themselves daily into stall-spin statistics. They are the ones who press on into bad weather, not knowing that without the ability to fly on instruments, those clouds are just as deadly to them as pure methane gas.

“No one is so blind as the man who refuses to see,” the Flyer quotes in ill-con

cealed distaste over any pilot who does not share his own zeal to know and to completely control any airplane he touches.

The Aviator believes that air safety is the result of proper legislation and strict enforcement of the rules. The Flyer believes that perfect safety in the air means the ability of a pilot to perfectly control his airplane; that any airplane, perfectly controlled, will never have any accident unless the pilot wishes to have one and controls the airplane into it.

The Aviator tries his level best to obey every regulation he knows. The Flyer is often airborne when regulations forbid it, yet just as often refuses to fly under other conditions that are quite legal.

The Aviator trusts that the modern engine is very well designed and will never stop running. The Flyer is convinced that any engine can fail, and he is always within gliding distance of some suitable place to land.

It is the same sky over both, the same principle keeps both men and both machines aloft, yet the two attitudes are so different as to be farther apart than miles can measure.

So the newcomer, from his very first hour in the air, is faced with a choice that must be made, though he may be unaware that he is making any choice at all. Each world has its own special joys and its own special dangers. And each has its own special kind of friendships formed, that are an important part of any life above the earth.

“Well, we defied gravity one more time.” Reflected in that common after-flight saying is a hint of the tie that binds airmen together, each in his own world. Airborne, the airman is matching himself against whatever the sky has to offer. The sky and the airplane combine in a challenge, and the airman, Aviator or Flyer, has decided to accept that challenge. The far-traveling Aviator has friends of similar thought and decision all over the country; his circle of friends has a radius of a thousand miles. His counterpart, the Flyer, makes his own fierce friendships, bound as he is in a defensive minority which is convinced of the Tightness of its principles.

Why fly? Ask the Aviator and he will tell you of faraway lands brought right to where you can see and touch and hear and smell and taste them. He will tell you of crystal blue seas waiting in Nassau, of the bright clattering casinos and the smooth quiet river at Reno, of the horizon-wide carpet of solid light that is Los Angeles after dark, of marlin leaping up from the ocean at Acapulco, of history-soaked villages in New England, of blazing desert sunsets as you fly down through Guadalupe Pass into El Paso, of Grand Canyon and Meteor Crater and Niagara and Grand Coulee from the air. He will urge you into his airplane, and in moments you’ll be covering two hundred miles per hour to some favorite place with a magnificent view and where the chef is his special friend. Back at the airport after a night flight home, locking his airplane, he’ll say, “Aviation is worth your while. More than worth your while. There is nothing like it.”

Why fly? Ask the Flyer and he will pound on your door at six a.m. and whisk you to the airstrip and buckle you into the cockpit of his airplane. He will bury you deep in blue engine smoke or in the soft live silence of soaring flight; he will take the world in his hands and twist it all directions before your eyes. He will touch a machine of wood and fabric and bring it alive for you; instead of seeing speed from a cabin window, you will taste it in your mouth and feel it roaring by your goggles and watch it fraying your scarf in the wind. Instead of knowing height on the dial of an altimeter, you will see it as a tall, wide air-filled space that begins at the sky and drops right straight down to the grass. You will land in hidden meadows where no man or machine has ever been, and you’ll soar upslope on a mountain ridge from which the snow sifts downwind in long misty veils.

You’ll relax in soft armchairs after supper, in a room whose walls are covered with airplane pictures, and feel the thunder and shock of ideas and perfection surge like a hurricane sea over the faces of skill around you. The sea calms near sunup, and the Flyer drops you off at home in the morning ready only to fall into bed and dream of airfoils and precision flying, thermal-sniffers and racing in the ground effect. Great suns roll through your sleep, and colorful checkerboard land drifts below.

When you wake you might be ready to make a decision one way or another, for Aviation or Flying.

Rare is the man who has been exposed to the intense heat of a pilot’s enthusiasm, without being in some way affected by it. The only reason that this can be is the unreasonable itself, that strange distant mystique of machines that carry men through the air.

Aviation or Flying, take your choice. There is nothing in all the world quite like either one of them.

Voice in the dark

For a long time, ever since I first touched the starter switch of a flying machine, I’ve wanted to know what an airplane really is. A thousand hours of flying with them through good weather and not-so-good have taught me a little about airplanes, what they will do and what some of them won’t do. It’s taught me what goes together to make an airplane, and fairly well how it goes together. I’ve learned that skin is riveted to stringers which are in turn riveted to ribs and bulkheads. Mechanics have taught me that props are matched to engines and that turbine blades are fitted in balanced pairs. I’ve heard that some planes hold together with baling wire and others need bolts torqued to the exact inch-pound.

Through all this, though, I’ve never understood what an airplane really is, or why it is different from any other machine.

A few nights ago, on the anniversary of my sixth year flying airplanes, I found the answer. I walked out on the flight line of a jet fighter base and leaned against the wing of an old friend. The night was very quiet, without a moon. Dim starlight and a pair of flashing red obstacle lights outlined a black hill at the side of the runway, and I breathed JP-4 and starlight and aluminum and still night air. In the quiet I talked to my friend, who happened to be a T-33, and asked point-blank the questions I could never answer.

“What are you, airplane? What is it about you and all your wide family that has made so many men leave all they know and come to you? Why do they waste good human love and concern on you who are nothing but so many pounds of steel and aluminum and gasoline and hydraulic fluid?”

A light breeze swirled by and whistled to itself in the landing gear. As clearly as a voice in the dark the T-Bird’s answer came, as if she were telling me, patiently, something she’d been telling me since we first met. “What are you,” she asked, “but so many pounds of flesh and blood and air and water? Aren’t you more than that?”

“Of course,” I nodded in the darkness, and listened to the high lonely murmur of one of her sisters at altitude, cutting a gentle path in the quiet with her tiny airy roar.

“As you are more than your body, so I am more than my body,” she said, and she was quiet again. The trim sweep of her vertical stabilizer was an intermittent silhouette against the solemn split beam of the tower beacon turning its endless path around.

She was right. As the character and life of a man is not found between the covers of an anatomy book, so the character and life of an airplane is not found in the pages of a manual on aeronautical engineering. An airplane’s soul, which he can never see or touch, is something that her pilot senses: an eagerness to fly; a little bit of performance that according to the charts should not be there, but is; a spirit behind the bullet-holed mass of torn metal with three propellers feathered, touching down on an English airfield. Not the metal, but the soul of an airplane is what her pilot wants to fly, and the reason he paints the name on her cowling. And with that soul, airplanes have an immortality that you can feel when you walk onto any airport.

The air over the runways, slashed by propeller blades and burned in the Niagara-roar of a shimmering tailpipe, is part of the immortality of an airplane. The still blue lights along the taxiways at night are a part of it, and so is the anemometer at the top of the tower and the white paint that marks the runway numbers on the concrete. Even the empty sod strip at the end of a hundred miles of rolling plains lives with the calm expectancy of an engine’s advancing roar and blac

k wheels touching grass.