A Gift of Wings

“Was it really all right?” The only effect of the crash was that she wanted to explain. Usually she didn’t care what I knew or thought. “I wanted to turn around and land down the length of the runway, but I just wasn’t high enough. When I got low, I thought I’d better level the wings and land it.”

The more I stood there and looked at the space in which she had landed that airplane, the more I felt uneasy. After a minute, or two looking, I began to wonder if I could have done as well, and the more I wondered, the more I doubted that I could; with all my old engines failing and off-airport landings and short-field tricks, I doubted that I could have brought that Aircoupe down any better than this student who wasted her practice time flying straight and level, looking down through the air at the fields and the sea.

“You know,” I told her later, with a little more respect in my tone than I wanted to show, “that landing … it wasn’t a bad piece of flying, at all.”

“Thank you,” she said.

The engine had quit from a vapor lock in the fuel line, and when we rebuilt the airplane we changed the line so that it couldn’t happen again. But I kept thinking about the way she had flown that landing. Did the practice help her, the day that we flew the three simulated engine-failures-on-takeoff? It was hard to believe that they had—she had done them only as a favor to me. I began to believe that she had the skill she needed within her all along, and the cool thinking, waiting the moment she’d want it. I thought about that, about how I had nothing at all to do with her ability to fly. Finally I came to think that maybe everything we need to know, ever, about anything, is already within us, waiting till we call for it.

I had told her so, and now she believed it: even new engines can fail on takeoff.

But I still think, now, that there are times when a flight instructor is nothing more than pleasant company when a girl wants to go flying on a pretty day.

Journey to a perfect place

The field was grass and square, a half mile through, set out in the middle of Missouri, and that’s about all it was. Some hills poufed up in trees, and a pond for swimming in; way off in the distance, a dirt road and a farm, but most of all it was a soft square of green, and the color came from the dye in the cool, deep grass.

We had landed there in two airplanes, small ones, to build a fire by the pond, untie bedrolls, and cook a supper over the fire while the sun ran out.

“Hey, John,” I said, “this is not too bad a place, is it?”

He was watching the final shreds of sunset, and the way that the light moved in the water.

“This is a good place,” he said at last.

But strange: though this was indeed a good place to fly, we had no wish to camp more than overnight. In that short time, the field went familiar and vaguely boring. By morning, we were quite ready to take off and leave the pond and the grass and the hills to the horses.

An hour after sunrise, we were two hundred feet in the air, droning along together in loose formation over fields the color of young cornstalk and old forest and deep-plowed earth.

Bette flew the airplane for a while, concentrating on the demands of formation, and I looked down over the side and wondered if there was such a place in all the world as perfect. Maybe that’s what we’re really looking for, I thought, with all this flying around and gazing down from our moving mountaintops of steel and wood and cloth—maybe we are all looking for one, single, perfect place down there on the ground, and when we find it, we will glide down to land and we will never need to fly anywhere again. Maybe pilots are just people who aren’t quite happy with the places that they’ve found so far, and as soon as they can locate that one spot where they can be as happy on the ground as other people are, they will sell their airplanes and not go seeking any more across the sky.

Our talk about the fun of flying must be talk about the fun of escaping. Even the word “flight,” after all, is a synonym for escape. Why, if I were to see, over this next little line of trees, my own perfect place, I would have no more wish to fly.

It was an uncomfortable thought, and I looked at Bette, who paid me no attention other than to smile without looking at me because she was still flying her formation.

I looked out again, and the land below changed for a moment to all the most perfect places I had seen. Instead of farmland beneath us, suddenly there was the sea, and we were turning to land on a strip cut on the edge of an ocean cliff, all lonely lost and still. Instead of farmland there was Meigs Field, ten minutes walking from the unexplored jungles of Chicago, Illinois. Instead of farmland there was Truckee-Tahoe, surrounded in razor-peak Sierra. Instead of farmland there was Canada and the Bahamas and Connecticut and Baja California, day and night, dusk and dawn, storm and calm. All of them interesting, most of them pretty, some of them beautiful. But not one perfect.

Then the farmlands were back below us and the engine power was coming in and Bette was pushing throttle to follow John and Joan Edgren’s Aeronca up above the level of the first summer clouds. She turned the plane back over to me, and for a while, I nearly forgot about escape and flight and perfect places.

But not quite. Is there such a place that, found, will bring an end to a pilot’s need to fly?

“Pretty clouds,” Bette said, over the sound of the engine.

“Yeah.”

By now, the clouds were all over the sky, puffing tall and pure up toward the sun. They had hard, clean edges, the kind you can drag a wingtip through without getting mist on your windscreen, and there were shifting, flowing snow shelves and giant cliffs and chasms all around us.

It was about that time that the answer reached out and grabbed me by the neck. Why, the sky itself is the land to which we are escaping, to which we fly!

No beer cans and empty cigarette packs strewn around a cloud, no street signs or stoplights, no bulldozers changing air to concrete. No room for anxiety, because it is always the same. No room for boredom because it is always different.

What do you know about that! I thought. Our one perfect place is the sky itself! And I looked across at the Aeronca and I laughed.

Loops, voices, and the fear of death

It was supposed to have been a simple inside loop, out off the airways, way up high, just for fun. With the wind shredding itself in a great thundering hundred-mile cry through the flying wires, I lifted the biplane’s nose through a steep climb, through straight up, through an inverted climb … then stalled there, hanging from the seat belt upside down over thirty-two hundred feet of clear and empty air. The control stick went dead in my glove, the airplane wallowed lazily this way and that, and fell flat, like a giant slow-motion pancake, out of the sky. Dust and hay from the cockpit floor poured up past my goggles and the wind changed from clean thunder to a strange loud buffeting hum, a thirty-foot bumblebee in agony.

The nose made no particular effort to point down, the engine stopped in zero G, and for the first time in my life I was pilot of an airplane that was falling … just as if it had been derricked off the ground and cut loose.