Biplane

Sometimes, when you taxi back into Modern, they’re a bit too quick on the service. It takes a minute to get the roar out of your ears and you should be allowed a moment to take off your helmet and enjoy taking it off, and feel the calm and enjoy it, and unstrap the seat belt and the parachute harness knowing that any time you can get out and walk around and have a root beer or stand and warm at a heater in the flight office. You can’t envy the pilots who fly the modern sky. You have to feel sorry for them, if they haven’t tucked somewhere away the joy of taking off a brown leather helmet and unstrapping from an old airplane hot-engined after its return to the earth.

Bright sun. Cold, still; but bright. I am for a moment tempted to seek the warmth of the flight office, and its maps, and its telephone to the great web of information about winds and weather across the country this morning. But aside, temptation, and away, evil thought. One never leaves the needs of an antique for another to fill. A creed among those who fly old airplanes? In part. But more binding, the fact that the pilot is the only one who knows how to service his machine. A simple little thing, to fill a gasoline tank. But one day one pilot was forced to land in a pasture with his propeller standing still and straight in front of him, the pistons of the engine frozen in their cylinders. The one time that he was too cold, and passed the servicing of his old airplane to another, his oil tank was filled with gasoline, for the two tank caps were similar and close together. A stupid mistake, almost an inconceivable one, but the knowledge that it was stupid and that it was inconceivable offered little comfort to him when the propeller ceased to turn.

The truest reason that I stand this day cold, crouching between the wings, threaded through the jungle of struts and wires and holding the black python of a fuel hose to the tank, is not that I obey a creed or fear another’s error. I stand here because I must learn to know my airplane and give her a chance to know me. In flight, hour on hour, it is the airplane that does the work; engine absorbing many thousand detonations each minute, and heats and pressures that I couldn’t absorb for a second. The wires and the struts and the fabric on the wings are holding in the air twenty-three hundred pounds of airplane and fuel and pilot and equipment and

doing it in a hundred-mile-per-hour wind. On each landing the frail landing-gear struts and the old wheels must stand fast with the strain of that twenty-three hundred pounds coming hard down at sixty miles per hour onto the earth, with its mounds and hollows that keep the force from being smooth. I have only to sit within the cockpit and steer, and even this I do while paying only half attention to the job. The other half of the attention is spent ducking forward out of the wind that keeps us in flight, turning imaginary cranks to keep warm, considering other times, other flights, other airplanes.

The least, the very least that I can do in atonement is to see to the needs of my airplane before moving selfishly after my own comfort. Were I not at least to care for her during the time that her wheels are on the ground, I would never have the right to ask a special favor of her, now and then, as she flies. The favor, perhaps, of running on though the rain is in solid walls over her engine, or of wires and struts holding fast in the sudden and furious downdrafts of the mountain winds. And perhaps the ultimate favor of tearing herself to shreds on the rocks of a desert forced landing and allowing her pilot to walk away untouched.

Stopping to think, stopping to analyze as I give her to drink of eighty-octane, I should be able to look with surprise upon myself, and scoff. Asking a favor of an airplane? Letting an airplane get to know you? You feeling all right? But it doesn’t work, I can’t scoff. I’m not living a fantasy; this is quite solid concrete on the quite solid earth of Augusta, Georgia; in my right glove is the hard steel of a fuel-hose nozzle, with gasoline pouring from it down into a very real fuel tank, and the sharp acid vapor of gasoline flooding over me from the tank as I peer past the nozzle to see how much more fuel the tank will hold. Below me the line boy is punching a sharp metal spout into a metal can of engine oil; the cutting scrape of the spout is quick and harsh and it sounds real enough. This doesn’t seem to be a fantasy world, and if it is, it is at least the same familiar fantasy world that I’ve moved through for several years. Strange, that I should not be able to scoff. When I began to fly, I could have scoffed. After flying ten years and two thousand hours, one should be expected to know some of the realities about flying and about airplanes, and not to dwell in fantasy lands.

It comes with a jolt and with a bit of a shock. Perhaps I am beginning to know some of the realities, and those realities include something about getting to know an airplane and letting her get to know you. Perhaps it is true that a pilot’s longevity depends sometimes as much upon his faith in his airplane as upon his knowledge of it, and perhaps sometimes the answer to flight isn’t always found in wingspans and engine horsepower and resultants of forces plotted on engineering graph paper. And perhaps again I’m wrong. But, right or wrong, I stand and I fuel my own airplane for reasons that seem true and good to me. When the propeller stops in flight over a desert, with rocks around as far as I can see, I’ll have the chance to see whether or not I should have scoffed, that morning in Augusta.

6

THERE IS A SIGN by the telephone:

FOR FLIGHT SERVICE, CHECK THE LINE CLEAR, PRESS BLACK BUTTON TWO SHORT RINGS, SAY “FLIGHT SERVICE, AUGUSTA MUNICIPAL AIRPORT.”

There are thousands of these telephones in airports across the country, and each one has its own sign with precise directions for use. It used to be, in aviation, that a pilot could get along without any directions at all. Press black button for two short rings.

“Flight Service.”

“Hi, Flight Service. Going Augusta on out around Columbus, Auburn-Jackson-Vicksburg. What you got for weather?” I remember the advice an airline captain once gave me. Never listen to a weatherman’s forecast. The weather that’s there is the stuff you fly through, and you’ll never know what that’s like till you get there.

“Looks like a good day. Columbus is clear and twelve miles visibility, Jackson is clear and twenty, Vicksburg clear and twenty. Dallas is clear and fifty, if you want that. Forecast will be for scattered cumulus on into the afternoon, maybe some scattered showers or thundershowers.”

“Any winds, surface to five thousand feet?” I wait in interest, consuming a potato-chip breakfast and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola.

“Ah, let’s see. Surface winds light and variable through Columbus, going west at ten by the time you get into Jackson-Vicksburg. Five-thousand-foot winds are three three zero degrees fifteen knots, all the way. Looks like it will be a good day.”

“Good. Thanks for the weather.”

“Can I have your aircraft number?”

“Four nine nine Hotel.”

“OK. You want to file a flight plan?”

“Might be nice, but I’m a no-radio airplane.”

He laughs, as though I had made some sort of mildly funny joke: an airplane with no radio. “Well then, guess there’s not too much we can do for you. . . .”

“Guess not. Thanks for the weather.”

Ten minutes from the moment that the telephone touches the cradle near the black button and its list of directions, a biplane is airborne once again over Georgia, flying west. The chill in the air is now a comfortable chill, and not cold. Even without Flight Service doing anything for me, it is fun to be flying. Winds from the west at altitude; those will be headwinds, and those we can do without.

We stay as low as we can, still keeping within gliding range of fields fit for landing. At times this is not very low, for the fields are scattered, intruders in the kingdom of pines that mat the earth as far as I can see. Here a road cutting through to parallel my railroad track, here a small lake and pasture, then the pines again, all around. They are old green, dark green, and among them the fresh young lime green of the leaved trees turning early to the sun, looking at it still in wonder. So many trees, so very many trees.

Along the side of a dirt road, a weathered house, a tangled yard. The shadow of the biplane flicks over its chimney and the engine noise must be loud and unusual. No door opens, though, no sign of movement. Now it is gone, and lost behind.

Who lives in the house? What memories does it have tucked into its wood; what happiness has it seen, what joys and what defeats? A full world of life, there, and sorrow and pleasure and gain and loss and interest and bright things happening day on day as the sun rises over the same pines to the east and sets over the same pines to the west. A whole world of important things happening, to real people. Perhaps tomorrow night there is a dance in Marysville, and inside the house there are gingham dresses being ironed. Perhaps a decision made to leave the house and seek a better living in Augusta or Clairmont. Perhaps and perhaps and perhaps. Perhaps there is no one in the house, and it is the body of a house, only. Whatever it is, whatever its story, it took the shadow of the biplane something less than half a second to cross it, and leave it dwindling away behind.

Come, now. Let’s stay awake on our navigation. Where are we, by the way? How many miles out from Augusta and how many miles left to go into Auburn? How’s that groundspeed? What’s our estimate over the next checkpoint? What is the next checkpoint? Do I even know our next checkpoint?

Listen to all those old questions. They used to be such important questions, too. Now, in the biplane, they don’t matter at all. The question of finding a destination was solved before we took off; there is three hours flying to Auburn, I have five hours of fuel. I follow a railroad track. End navigation problem. At one time away off in the future it was a great game to compute estimates and groundspeeds and to tell to the second when the wheels would touch at destination. But that was with a different sort of airplane and in a world where answers were important things. Miss the estimate and a host of other airplanes would have to be advised. When fuel was critical, and gallons of it burned in a minute, one kept a close watch upon headwinds and groundspeeds. A headwind too strong meant that there wasn’t enough fuel to reach destination and one had to land short to refuel. Critical, critical, every bit of it.

Now, in 1929, what matter? With headwinds, I’ll arrive a half-hour later, or an hour later, with still an hour’s flying left in the tank. I am not in a hurry, for anyone who flies an old slow biplane cannot afford to be in a hurry. What matter if I do not make it to destination? I’ll land sooner, at a different destination, and in the next flight pass over my first goal, to another beyond. In 1929, without radio or navigation equipment or an anxious agency waiting my arrival, I am on my own. Seeing a smooth pasture, I can land and take time without worry, and perhaps even trade a ten-minute flight for a homecooked meal.