A Gift of Wings

Do not expect me to go into detail about my performance at the Test, because you see this story is not about my ability as a pilot but about this strange fly-in with all these strange competitions and all these other pilots who had somehow grown to be very good indeed, with their airplanes.

I’m not sure, in fact, that the whole thing wasn’t a dream, after all, a remarkably vivid dream. I certainly would have flown much better in all the events had they actually happened instead of being some kind of self-destructive Freudian dream brought on, perhaps, by a slight bounce in an otherwise perfect landing with the Cub.

That must be it. None of this could possibly have occurred. There is no such place as an airfield where lawns slope to runways and one can taxi into tree shade, no such sky as that was, or grass. But most of all there could be no such pilot as the man who flew that Taylorcraft, or the one in the Cessna 140 or that easy gray-haired chap who flew the Ercoupe to the Turn-around and around the Slalom with nothing more than a ruffle of silk ribbon.

I am not so bad a pilot, myself, to have hit any ribbons, anyway. Let me tell you about the time I was flying this Skyhawk. It is another story, not like this silly dream that means nothing because nothing like it ever happened anywhere, but if we ever meet and you want to have a much more honest picture of how good a pilot I in fact am, ask me about the time in the Skyhawk when the engine stopped at ten thousand feet and the only place to land was this little tiny field in the trees. And frightened? I wasn’t frightened at all because I knew my airplane and it would be child’s play even with oil all over the windshield …

Ask me sometime about that day in the Skyhawk. I’ll be glad to tell you.

Egyptians are one day going to fly

They could have done it, the Carthaginians. Or the Etruscans, or the Egyptians. Four thousand years ago, five thousand years ago, they could have flown.

If you and I were living then, knowing what we know, we could have built an all-wood airframe—cedar, bamboo for spars and ribs, fastened together with dowel pins, glued with casein glue, lashed with thongs, covered with paper or light fabric, painted with root starch. Braided cords for control cables, wood-and-leather hinges, the whole affair light and wide-winged. We wouldn’t have needed any metal at all, not even wire, and we could get

along as well without rubber or plexiglass.

We might have built the first one swiftly, crude but strong, launched on rails down a hillside into the wind, turning at once into the ridge lift to fly for an hour. Cautious forays, maybe, to hunt thermals.

Then we would have gone back to the shop, having proved it possible, and alone or with Pharaoh’s skilled technicians we could have advanced from glider to sailplane to fleets of sailplanes. Learning the principles, the men around us would have discovered flight, would have helped the art in their own way, and before too many years we’d be soaring twenty thousand feet high, flying two hundred miles cross-country, and farther.

Meanwhile, for fun, we’d start to work on metals and fuels and engines.

It was possible, all those years ago, it could have been done. But it wasn’t. Nobody applied the principles of flight because nobody understood them and nobody understood them because nobody believed flight was possible for human beings.

But no matter what people believed or didn’t believe, the principles were there. A cambered airfoil in moving air produces lift, whether the air moves today, a thousand years from now, or ten thousand years ago. The principle doesn’t care. It knows itself, and is always true.

It’s us, it’s all mankind that cares, that stands to gain all kinds of freedom from the knowing. Believe that some good thing is possible, find the principle that makes it so, put the principle into practice, and voilà! Freedom!

Time means nothing. Time is just the way we measure the gaps between not knowing something and knowing it, or not doing something and doing it. The little Pitts Special biplane, built now in garages and basements around the world, would have been proof of miraculous God-power a century ago. This century there are scores of Pitts Specials in the air, and nobody considers their flight supernatural. (Except those of us to whom a double vertical snap roll followed by an outside square loop to a lomcevak have been supernatural right from the start.)

For more of us than care to admit, I’ll bet, the ideal of flight lies beyond even a Pitts Special. Some of us just might nourish a secret thought that the very best kind of flying would be to get rid of the airplane altogether, to find a principle, somehow, that would turn us loose all alone in the sky. The skydivers, who have come closest to the secret, also come right straight down, which doesn’t quite qualify as flying.

With the mechanical things, the lifting platforms, the rocket belts, the dream is gone—without the tin you’re dead, run out of fuel and down you go.

I propose that one day we find a way to fly without airplanes. I propose that right now a principle exists that makes this not only possible, but simple. There are those who say that now and then through history it’s already been done. I don’t know about that, but I think that the answer lies in somehow harnessing the power that put the whole unseen universe together, that power of which the law of aerodynamics is only an expression in a way that we can see with our eyes, measure with our dials, and touch with the clumsy crude iron of our flying machines.

If the answer to harnessing this power lies beyond machinery, then it must lie within our thought. The researchers in extrasensory perception and telekinesis, as well as those who practice philosophies suggesting man as an unlimited idea of primal power, are on an interesting path. Maybe there are people flying all over laboratories this moment. I refuse to say it’s impossible, though for the moment it would look supernatural. In just the same way that our first glider would have looked scary-weird to the Egyptians standing all heavy and small in the valley.

For the time being, while we work on the problem, the old rough fabric-steel substitute called “airplane” will have to stand between us and the air. But sooner or later—I can’t help but believe it—all us Egyptians are somehow going to fly.

Paradise is a personal thing

Whether I saw them sauntering out across an acre of concrete to their aircraft, black-leather cubes of flight bags in hand, or silver-flashing at the point of a four-streak contrail way on up at forty thousand feet, I always thought airline pilots the most professional aviators in the world. And “most professional” means highest-paid and that means best. I could never lay a claim to becoming the best pilot alive if I did not fly an airline transport, and besides, the money … It is a logically painted portrait into which many a man has walked.

After holding out for years against what I feared would be an exercise in aerial bus driving, boring as sin, I decided that perhaps I was unnaturally prejudiced against airlines. If I am truly excellent in my knowing of flight and sky, I thought, the only proper place for me is on some Boeing flight deck, and the sooner the better. I applied at once to United Air Lines. Gave them all my lists of flying time and certificate numbers and types of aircraft flown, and gave them in full confidence, because I know that if I can do anything at all, I can fly an airplane. I planned to buy the Beech Staggerwing and the Spitfire and the Midget Mustang and the Libelle sailplane all fairly quickly, on an airline captain’s pay.

The examinations for the job included one that tested my personality.

Answer yes or no, please: Is there only one true God?

Yes or no: Are details very important?

Yes or no: Should one always tell the truth?

Yes or no. Hm. I puzzled a long time over that test to become an airline pilot. And I failed it.

A United-pilot friend chuckled when I numbly told him what had happened.