Nothing by Chance

I smiled in what I hoped was a disarming way, and pointed to the lake. They turned to look at the table-napkin sailboats and the cut-glass sparkle of sun on the water, and I went back to picking my forced-landing fields, turning ever so slightly so that we would never be out of gliding range from them.

It was fun to see what a different pilot I became for my different passengers. I had flown a few folk who had left mink jackets in their Cadillac convertibles, and for these few I was a two-dimensional creature, a blank-faced chauffeur, taking this flying all as a very boring job and unaware that the lake from the air was even mildly attractive. A hired man cannot be expected to appreciate the finer things. These people got a straight conventional ride, a ride that they would get from an uninspired workhorse chauffeur. Take off. Circle town. Circle lakeshore. Circle town. Land. Everything by the book.

The college girls, all windblown ahead of me now, had taken the biplane for something of a gay novelty, and for them I was a gay novelty of a pilot, with a bright disarming smile. For them, I could know that flying can be pretty, I could even point a good place to look. One of the girls looked back at me with a how-pretty-it-is glance, and I smiled again, to say that I understood.

Most of the passengers flew just for the fun and adventure of the flight, and with them I made experiments. I found that I could make most people look where I wanted them to look; it was just a matter of banking the airplane in that direction.

I could test their aptitude for flying, too, by banking. When a person sits up straight in the seat, riding with the airplane through the turns, when he looks fearless down to the ground during a steep bank, when he doesn’t bother to grip the cockpit rim, he is a natural-born airplane pilot. About one passenger in sixty met the tests, and I always made it a point to tell them of the fact… that if they ever wanted to fly an airplane, they would be very good pilots. Most just shrugged and said it was fun. I felt sad, knowing that I couldn’t have passed those tests myself, before I began to fly.

For the girls, now, as I steepened the bank, the biplane was a noisy high carnival ride. At 40 degrees of bank, the girl on the right screamed and hid her eyes. When we leveled, she looked out again, and again we would gradually increase the bank. Every time, when we tilted to precisely 40 degrees, she would make some kind of cry and bury her face in her hands. At 39 degrees she looked down happy; at 40, she screamed. Her friend looked back at me and shook her head, smiling.

On the last turn before landing, the turn closest to the ground and with the most sense of speed and blurred action, we banked up to 70 degrees and fell like a cannonball toward the ground. The girl on the right didn’t uncover her eyes until we were stopped again next to her car.

I shut the engine down while Stu helped them from the cockpit.

“Oh it’s WONDERFUL! It’s just WONDERFUL!” she said.

Her companion thanked us quietly, but the other girl couldn’t get over how wonderful it was. I shrugged. The wonderfullest parts to me were the parts that she had closed her eyes upon.

They left, waving, and in a few minutes Method C brought Everett Feltham back to us, with a box of rags.

“Hey, you sack rats! Why don’t you come on out to the house and eat up some strawberries, huh?”

It took us three minutes to tie the covers on the airplane and find a place in his car. We spent the next hours with Ev, fetching a case of oil for the biplane and sitting in the shade of his elms, consuming great bowls of strawberries and vanilla ice cream.

“Man, this barnstorming is rugged, Ev,” I said, leaning back in my lawn chair. “You don’t ever want to try it.”

“I’ll bet. You guys sure look overworked, lyin’ down under that wing out there. I wish I had a biplane. Be with you in a flash.”

“OK. Get a biplane. Join The Great American. Any other problems?”

Ev had a schedule to fly out of O’Hare International that afternoon, so dropped us off on his way toward Chicago. We said those goodbyes that flyers say, a confident sort of “See-you-’round,” certain that they actually will, as long as they don’t make any very dumb mistakes while handling their airplanes.

Stu dragged out his parachute, still field-packed from his last jump, and stretched it out on the ground for final packing. A pair of boys arrived to watch and ask questions about what it feels like to fall all alone through the air, and what the parts of the chute were called and where you learn to jump.

“Gonna jump today?” one said. “Pretty soon, maybe?”

“Not if the wind comes up much more.”

“Gee, it isn’t win

dy.”

“It is if you’re coming down in this thing.” He worked on in silence.

An airplane flew up from the south, circled town, then swung down low over our field. It was Paul Hansen in the Luscombe, flashing overhead at 120 miles per hour, pulling up steep into the blue, swinging back down for another pass. We waved to him.

The Luscombe flew across the field three times, measuring it. I put myself in his cockpit, looking down at the hayfield, flying the heavy-laden sportplane. I squinted my eyes and finally shook my head. I wouldn’t do it; I wouldn’t land. The field was right for the biplane, but the biplane had more than twice the wing area of the Luscombe. The field was too short for Paul’s airplane; he could make it, but just barely, with no margin over the telephone wires. If he landed here, I would make a big thing of how unwise he was.

On the fourth pass, he kicked the rudder back and forth to signal “No,” and flew out to the airport down the road.

The problems of working with a single-wing airplane, I thought. He needs just too much runway. And this is a good field, right in close to town, that saved us when we were broke, and that has lots of passengers yet to fly.

I pulled the covers off the Parks and made her ready to go. Darn. A good hayfield …

When I landed at the airport, Paul was tying down his airplane. He was still wearing his white shirt and tie.

“Halloo,” I said. “’D you get your pictures all took?”