One can use reverse on land, too. The captain taxis into a tight space at the fuel pump, fills up, and then with everybody looking and wondering what happens next, he can yawn, back slowly out of his parking place, and be on his way.
This is hard to top, yet the plane has other and even better features. Last month I flew some twenty-five hundred miles in the Seabee, most of it over the Inland Waterway. It was the most confident secure flying I’ve done anywhere. Should the engine have failed, I had only to glide straight ahead, or to turn slightly to land on the water. Horizon-wide swamps we flew over, that hadn’t enough firm ground for a Cub to land, yet they were all one vast international airport for the Bee: cleared to land whenever we wished, on any runway, upwind, downwind, crosswind, no traffic reported. The airplane is not equipped for instrument flying, but under these conditions it is the best instrument airplane possible.
Following the lee shore of Cape Hatteras, the clouds lowered to two hundred feet and visibility to a bit over a mile—weather one would never consider in a land-plane unless he happened to be flying directly above a hundred-mile runway. In the Seabee, I was. I dropped down to fifty feet over the water, kept my thumb on the map, and pressed ahead like next year’s Chris-Craft. When the visibility worsened, I dropped half flaps and slowed. When it worsened still, I decided to land, a matter of easing the throttle back and raising the nose slightly. But just before touchdown, ripples flashing below, I saw a line of light that meant higher ceilings ahead. So we air-taxied along the water for another mile and sure enough, things got better. As I am a chicken in weather, this single feature is my favorite of the Seabee’s qualities.
The one dangerous aspect of the airplane, and of most amphibious aircraft, is the other face of its ability to land anywhere. I have talked to three pilots who landed Seabees on the water with the wheels down. Two of them had to swim out of the airplane as it sank upside-down, the third merely had to rebuild the nose section of the plane where it was smashed violently by the sea. For this reason I taught myself to say aloud in every traffic pattern, “This is a land landing, therefore the wheels are DOWN,” and, “This is a water landing, therefore the wheels are UP, checked UP, left main UP, right main UP, tailwheel UP. Because this is a WATER landing.” I like to say the water-landing check twice before touchdown. It’s being a little overcautious, but there is something about the picture of thirty-two hundred pounds on top of me, squashing me against a lake bottom, that I don’t mind being overcautious. Then too, aside from being the biggest, the Bee is the most expensive plane I’ve owned. I do not wish to look down from some rowboat, grappling with a hook for nine thousand dollars of my fortune. If it were a normal-priced Seabee, five thousand to seventy-five hundred dollars, maybe I wouldn’t mind.
By the time I had logged fifty hours in the airplane, I had learned how to land it. Thirty hours were spent to believe that I could actually be so high in the air at the moment the wheels first touched; the other twenty were required to discover that just because the wheels had touched didn’t mean I wasn’t flying the airplane as much as ever. The reason for both learnings was the same—the Seabee has such long oleo shock absorbers that the wheels drop below the place one thinks they ought to be; they roll along the ground a few seconds after the plane is actually flying and for a few seconds before it has actually landed.
The warning is that the Seabee is a high-maintenance machine. I haven’t noticed this because I enjoy working on airplanes and don’t count the difference between necessary maintenance and work not really required. But here is part of a shopping list made shortly after buying the plane:
Anchor and chain
Raft
Grease gun, grease
Silicon cement
Silicon spray
Weatherstripping
ADF
Scissor jack
Hydraulic fluid
Brake hose
Bilge pump
Bicycle
Cork
There’s a story for every item there, even for the cork, which is pressed into the end of the engine compartment oil scupper, to keep black oil from spraying out on the white hull.
The propeller needs to be greased every twenty hours or so, as do wheel bearings and landing-gear fittings. All this can be fun, climbing around and servicing an Alumigrip mountain.
Other elements of Bee flying one learns only by experience. It’s a delight, for instance, to taxi up from the water to a lovely virgin beach, but one had best be sure he gets above the high-water line and points the airplane back downhill before he allows it to stop rolling. If not, the captain has an hour’s shoveling and messing around with jacks and old boards before his Seabee is unearthed and back in the water.
If the wingtip floats are not sealed around the tops with silicon rubber, water pours in during crosswind water-taxiing, when the downwind float is sometimes completely underwater. Mark the trim indicator overhead for takeoff with different loads; the Bee is very much a trim airplane. Once when the trim froze at high altitude, just a little bit nose-up, I had to ease back the power till the plane flew level by itself—I just didn’t have the strength to manually override that trim for more than a few minutes at a time.
Somebody once said that anything worthwhile is always a little bit scary. I was a little bit scared and a little bit cautious about the Bee—how do you know what happens to a summerhouse in flight until you go up and fly one? But in time the captain learns to know its strengths and its quirks, begins to discover its secrets.
One secret of the Seabee I found by chance, that I have found on no other airplane. If one happens to be cruising at ninety-five hundred feet at twenty-two rpm with twenty-two hundred inches of manifold pressure, indicating ninety-seven miles per hour with an outside air temperature of minus five degrees Fahrenheit, and if one is alone in the left seat and if one happens to sing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen or another song in that frequency range, one’s single voice becomes four … one becomes a kind of airborne Willie the Whale. The strange acoustics have something to do with the thin air, no doubt, and the resonance of the engine at the rpm, but the result is of more than passing interest for those captains who choose to sing only when there
’s no one else to hear. What other aircraft in the world offers all these features and a full quartet as well, en route to your lake-wilderness hideaway?
I give you, dear reader, the Seabee.
Letter from a God-fearing man
I can keep quiet no longer. Somebody has to tell you people who fly airplanes how tired the rest of us get of your constant talk about flying, about how wonderful it is to fly, and won’t we come out on Sunday afternoon and take a little flight with you just to see what it is like.
Somebody has to tell you that the answer is no, we won’t come out on the Sabbath, or any other day, to go up in one of your dangerous little crates. The answer is no, we do not think that it is all so wonderful to fly. The answer, as far as we’re concerned, is that the world would be a far better place if the Wright brothers had junked their crazy gliders and never gone to Kitty Hawk.