Nothing by Chance

I sat in the cockpit for a moment, thankful that the airplane had been under control every second. Perhaps there was only something minor wrong. A valve, maybe, or a hole in a piston, pumping oil into a cylinder.

I got out of the cockpit and walked to the engine. There was oil streaming from every exhaust port, and when I moved the propeller, oil gurgled inside. This was nothing simple.

I unbolted the carburetor and remembered one of Pop Reid’s adventures. “Supercharger oil seal,” he had said, years ago. “She blew

three gallons of oil in two minutes flat. Had to tear down the whole engine.”

In a few minutes the answer was clear. A bearing in the center of the engine had come to pieces, and oil poured with the fuel into all cylinders’. That’s where we got the smoke, and the oil on my goggles.

The Whirlwind, at the end of summer, was finished.

I accepted a ride from the farmer and rode into Laurel, Iowa, on his tractor. A call to Dick Willetts, and he was on his way with the Cub. Thank God, again, for friends.

I went back to the biplane and covered her for the nights ahead. There was no spare engine. I could come here with a truck and take this engine home for rebuild, or I could take the whole airplane home on a trailer. Either way, it would be a while before she flew again.

The little yellow Cub was a beautiful sight in the sky, and Dick set her down on the hilltop lightly as a feather in a pillow factory. We would leave, and the Parks would stay in her field. I climbed into the back seat of the Cub, and we lifted over the hay and homeward. The plane looked lost and lonely as she dwindled in distance.

All the hour’s flight, I wondered about the meaning of the engine failure, why it stopped the way it did and where it did and when it did. There is no such thing as bad luck. There’s a reason and a lesson behind everything. Still, the lesson may not always be simple to see, and by the time we landed at Ottumwa, I hadn’t seen it. I had only one question about the engine failure: Why?

The only thing to do was to bring the biplane home. The first windstorm could hurt her, the first hailstorm destroy her. She did not belong out in the weather with winter rolling down upon us.

I borrowed a pickup truck and a long flatbed trailer from Merlyn Winn, the man who sold Cessna airplanes at Ottumwa airport, and three of us traveled the 80 miles north; a young college friend named Mike Cloyd, Bette and I. Somehow we had to find a way to take the airplane apart and lash it onto that trailer, and to do it in the five hours left before dark. We wasted no time at the job.

“She looks kind of sad, don’t she?” Mike said, when the wings lay yellow and frail on the hay.

“Yeah.” I agreed only because I didn’t feel like talking. The machine didn’t look sad to me. It looked like a bunch of mechanical parts disconnected across the ground. The thing was no longer alive, was no longer a she, no longer a personality. There was no chance of it flying now, and the only life it knew was when it was flying, or able to fly. Now it was wood and steel and doped cloth. A pile of parts to load on a trailer and take home.

At last it was done and it was just a matter of sitting in the cab and pointing the truck down the road until we reached home. I still couldn’t understand why this was all happening, what important thing I would have missed if the engine had not failed.

We turned onto Interstate 80, all modern and highspeed pavement. “Mike, keep an eye on the trailer, will you, see if anything’s gonna fall off, now and then?”

“Looks all right,” he said.

We accelerated up to 40 miles an hour, glad to be on the fast road home. It would be good to get this game over with.

At 41 miles an hour, very slightly, the trailer began fish-tailing. I looked in the rear-view mirror and touched the brake. “Hang on,” I said, and wondered why I would say that.

The trailer took ten seconds to play its part. From a gentle fishtail, it swerved harder left and right, and then it lashed sudden and wild from one side to another behind us, a whale shaking a hook from its jaw. Tires screamed again and again, and the truck was slammed heavily to the left. We were out of control.

The three of us were interested bystanders, sitting together in the cab of the truck, unable to steer or stop. We slid sideways, then backward, and I looked out the left window to see the trailer smashed against the side of the truck, glued there, while we went off the road. I could have reached out and touched the big red fuselage for a while, but then we slid into the grass valley between the two highways of the Interstate.

The dead body of the airplane lurched up on one wheel, teetered there a second in slow motion and then slowly went crashing upside-down into the ditch. I sat idly and watched the centersection and its struts crush down in no hurry at all, bending, tearing, splintering away under the thousand-pound fuselage. It was all very quiet. How like a paper bag, I thought, the way it folds up.

We came to a stop, all in a neat row: truck, trailer, fuselage; like sea-creatures caught and laid side by side in the grass.

“Everybody OK?” Everybody was fine.

“I can’t open the door on this side, Mike, trailer’s jamming it. Let’s get out on your side.”

I was disgusted. The lesson escaped me entirely. If there is nothing by chance, just what in God’s name was this all supposed to mean?

The fuselage that we had just barely managed to strain onto the trailer through brute force was now upside down, wheels in the air. Gasoline and oil poured from the tanks. The lower wings were trapped between the trailer and the airplane body, holes torn through them. One engine rocker-box was pounded flat, where it had struck concrete. We might as well set the thing on fire, I thought, and drive home alone. It’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead.

“The hitch busted,” Mike said. “Look, it tore right out of the bumper, tore the metal right out.”

It was so. Our trailer hitch was still firmly coupled and lashed, but it had been ripped bodily from the heavy steel of the bumper. It would have taken at least five tons on the hitch to shear it free, and the complete load on the trailer was a little over a tenth of that.

What were the chances of this happening, on the one time I had ever put the biplane on a flatbed trailer, on the only time she had not been able to fly herself out of a field, with a truck and trailer that had been designed for hauling airplanes? A million to one.