A Gift of Wings

Even when the weather cleared and I flew away at last from the snows of Logan, Utah, I couldn’t honestly tell Brent Brown that I would ever love his airplane.

Now, nearly a hundred flying hours later, having flown the Seabee across winter America, down the coast to Florida and the Bahamas and back into spring, I can begin to answer his question. We’ve flown together thirteen thousand feet over mountains sharp as broken steel, where her engine failure would have meant some cool discomfort; we’ve survived some rough-water ocean takeoffs where my slow beginner’s ways in seaplanes could have sent us in large pieces to the bottom. Through these hours I’ve come to find that the Seabee is generally worthy of trust; perhaps she’s found the same is true of me. And perhaps, back in Logan, Utah, Brent Brown could call this the beginning of any real love.

Trust comes not without difficulty overcome. The Bee, for instance, is the largest airplane I’ve ever owned. With extended wings and droop tips its span is nearly fifty feet. The vertical stabilizer is so high that I can’t even wash the tail of the plane without a ladder to climb. Its all-up weight is just over a ton and a half … I can’t push it alone even across the taxiway, and two men together can’t lift the tailwheel clear of the ground.

Take this huge machine to Rock Springs, Wyoming, let’s say, take it there and land in a fifty-degree crosswind twenty gusting thirty (thanking God that the rumors about crosswind landings in Seabees aren’t true), struggle it to the parking ramp (cursing the devil that the rumors about crosswind taxiings are), freeze it overnight so the oil is tar and the brakes are stone. Then try to get it flying, come dawn, by yourself. It’s like coaxing a frozen mammoth to fly. A Cub or a Champ, you don’t need help to get it going, but a Seabee sometimes you do.

After hurling my body like a fevered desperate snowflake against the smooth aluminum mountain of the Bee, hurling it twice and again, I was trembling on collapse and hadn’t moved it a fraction of an inch. Then out of the wind came Frank Garnick, airport manager, wondering if he could help. We hitched his snowplow to the mammoth, towed it in compound low till the wheels shattered ice and turned, set a preheater in her engine compartment and a charger on her battery. Half an hour and the mammoth was a fawn, engine purring as though Rock Springs was Miami. You can’t always do everything alone; a hard lesson eased by a fellow who didn’t mind helping.

With a big airplane one learns too about systems, and how they work. Take the landing gear and the flaps. They all move up and down under the calm physics of the hydraulic system, which is so reliable that it requires no mechanical backup or emergency mode. So that if you squeeze the landing gear down with forty strokes or so of the hydraulic handpump on a night landing to runway 22 at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and touch down with the gear not quite locked, you hear this loud sound—ZAM!—and then a moment later comes a screeching crunching roaring sound wild as freight cars slid sideways on rock.

After you shut the engine down in utter disgust, it gets quiet in the cabin, there in the middle of runway 22, and into that quiet comes a voice, from the tower.

“Do you have a problem, Seabee six eight Kilo?”

“Yeah. I have a problem. The gear collapsed out here.”

“Roger, six eight Kilo,” comes the voice, pleasant as America itself, “contact ground control on one two one point nine.”

You listen to that, and you start to laugh.

Sure enough, just as the factory said, a wheels-up landing on concrete only shaves a sixteenth of an inch from the keel of your new Seabee. Fort Wayne Air Service was there to extend the lesson on help with big airplanes. A clevis had broken in the gear system and a mechanic there hunted me a new one.

“What do I owe you for this?”

“Nothin’.”

“Free? You’re an airplane mechanic and you’re giving me a stranger this clevis free?”

He smiled, thinking of a price. “You’re parked at our competitor’s place. Next time park here.”

Then Maury Miller drove me for nothing all the way back across Baer Field, where John Knight at Consolidated Airways helped me run a gear retraction test, also free of charge. It was either something about the Seabee, or about these people, or about that particular sunrise, but Fort Wayne couldn’t do enough to help me out.

“Don’t think of a Seabee as an airplane that can land on water,” Don Kyte had told me years before. “Think of it as a boat that can fly.” A boat that can fly, if you don’t care if it’s not as fast as, say, a cross-country minie-ball. The Bee trues out at around ninety miles per hour at low cruise, one hundred fifteen at high; this and patience will get you anywhere. At low cruise, the seventy-five-gallon tank holds nearly eight hours flying, at high cruise it’s just over five.

Flying his boat over Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the captain has time to look down and notice

tens and scores of little towns right on the edge of blue quiet lakes and wide rivers, and in time he thinks of a way to make a Seabee pay for itself.

“A boat that can fly, folks, just three dollars buys you ten full minutes aloft! It’s perfectly safe, your government-licensed pilot, Captain Bach, the air ace, thousands of flights without a mishap, former Clipper pilot on the Hong Kong–Honolulu run, himself at the controls!”

Towns, lakes, breathed away below. Sure enough. It could be done.

After twenty hours in the Bee, I began to feel gingerly at home. Every day the airplane seemed a little smaller, a bit more maneuverable, more a controllable creature than a houseboat in the sky, although the latter is the literal truth. The cabin inside is something over nine feet long, and that before opening the door into the hollow tower under the engine, which adds another three or four feet. The seats recline to make a full double bed. The Seabee Hilton, in fact, is the first flying hotel in which I’ve been able to stretch out full length and sleep soundly all night … a point not to miss in a machine built to spend its nights anchored in wilderness lakes.

The Seabee is fitted with three enormous doors, one right, one left, and then one bow door, set four feet forward of the copilot’s seat. According to the owner’s manual, this door is for “docking and fishing”; it is also an excellent ventilation door for noons in Bahama waters, when otherwise the cabin overheats in direct sun.

If he’s landed by a coast of rocks, or just doesn’t feel like leaving his ship, the captain can leave the cabin by any door and stretch out in the sun on a towel or on the warm aluminum along the wingspar, writing or thinking or listening to the waves lap down the length of the hull.

With an alcohol stove, he can prepare hot meals on the cabin top or within, on a galley set on the right half of the flight deck.

I had heard many a discouraging word about the Seabee’s Franklin engine, which is odd in that it has a special long propeller shaft and in that it is mounted backwards in the airplane, so that the prop is a pusher. In spite of the words, I’ve had only one brief engine problem. I noticed in cruise that the engine said mmmmmmmmmm on the magneto-fired sparkplugs when it said mmm-m-mmmm-mm-mmm-m on the distributor-fired ones. I reached back into the workshop as I flew along, took out the engine troubleshooting guide, and deduced that the cause had to be distributor points gone a bit tacky. Sure enough. Next landing I removed the points, replaced them with a new set (which also fits a ’57 Plymouth) and the engine said mmmmmmmmmm thereafter, on all sets of plugs.

According to the overhaul manual, the Franklin is good for six hundred hours between overhauls. At two hundred fifty since overhaul, mine burns two-thirds quart of oil per hour at normal cruise. This pleases me because there are Franklins in Seabees which throw that much oil on the vertical stabilizer and are still considered normal.

It’s said that a Seabee without the wing extensions is occasionally reluctant to fly. The manual admits that the stock Bee, brand new, can take over 13,690 feet to make a high-altitude water takeoff. Not having flown the airplane without long wings I can’t comment, save to say that 68K was flown from Bear Lake, Utah, six thousand feet above sea level, all summer long, with full passenger loads. The long wings and the tips do make a difference.

One special pleasure for Seabee owners resides in a small lever over the pilot’s head: the reverse-pitch control for the propeller. It was installed because the Bee, unlike pontoon planes, normally approaches a dock head-on, and so has to leave by backing away tail-first. In the hands of a practiced pilot, reverse pitch makes the plane as maneuverable as a large heavy alligator.