A Gift of Wings

  He laughed. “My friend, you do a lot of flying at night, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. An airplane is for transportation, day and night. What’s that to do with your recklessness?”

  “Do you wear a parachute when you fly at night?”

  “Of course not. What a juvenile thought!”

  “What do you do, then, if your engine stops at night?”

  “I have never had an engine failure in flight, Mr. Drake, and I do not intend to have one.”

  “Isn’t that interesting!” He was silent for a moment, studying the engine diagram woven into the tablecloth. “There is not an outlaw here who would fly an airplane at night without a parachute, unless the moon was so bright that he constantly had a landing place in sight. We don’t believe that engine failures never happen, and if we can’t see to land, and if we can’t carry a parachute, we don’t fly. There’s not a pilot here, except yourself, who would fly over an undercast of fog, or over a ceiling lower than he can shoot a forced landing from.

  “Yet no-parachute night flying is perfectly legal, and flying on top of any amount of fog is FAA-approved. Our rule says that pure safety is pure knowledge and pure control. Whether our airplane has one engine or two is immaterial. If we can’t see to land, and if we can’t carry a parachute, we don’t fly.”

  Naturally, I didn’t listen to a word the man said. The only safety that wildman would ever know would be the safety of a prison cell.

  “Your connecting rod,” he went on “is legal right now. It is FAA-approved and it is all signed off. But it is cracked and it is going to break soon. If you had the choice, would you rather have the crack in the rod or that signature in your log?”

  I could only be firm with him. “Sir, the mechanic and the inspector are responsible for their work. I am entirely within my rights to fly that airplane exactly as it is.”

  He laughed once more, a curiously friendly sound, as though he meant me no harm. At that moment I knew I would escape his lair, and soon.

  “All right,” he said, not knowing my thoughts. “The inspector is responsible, and you are innocent. All you have to do is let your airplane be destroyed in these mountains because you are not required to know how to survive in any land that you fly over. Everyone else is responsible, you are just the guy who does the dying. Is that it?”

  That is it, of course, but again he made it sound foolish and wrong. But who can believe a band of outlaws, living in the badlands, flying and maintaining their airplanes without licenses just because they happen to know how an engine works or how an airplane flies? Radicals and extremists all, and there should be a law against them. Well, of course, there is a law.

  Outlaws is what they are, and when I return to a law-abiding city, I’ll see that the FAA files serious charges against them all, and revokes their … and comes out here and puts them in prison. They think they’re so much better than everyone else, just because they know how to hold a wrench and land without power. But do they know about approach control? What do they do in the traffic pattern if the tower doesn’t give them permission to land? They’d sing a different tune, then, and I’d reach over when they beg me to save them and I’d ask the tower, “Respectfully begging your permission to land,” and then I won’t have to know my airplane or how it flies because the tower has cleared me number one.

  I abruptly took leave of Drake and his unsavory fellows, and neither he nor his men made any move to stop me. They no doubt saw my anger, and thought it much safer to hold their peace in my presence.

  Back in the rock hangar, I found the button that slid the wall away, and since the outlaws were now clearly afraid of a law-abiding man, I took time to write this all down, every word we said, to use as evidence in the FAA hearings that will send these men to prison. Those wonderful, simple hearings, in which the FAA, because it knows what is best for us, can both prosecute us and judge us fairly. Fortunately, these wild ones are surely the only men of their kind in the country.

  Note to myself: Type all notes following, since ruf air makes pencil words hard for prosecutor to read. Wouldn’t have thot wind 20 so ruf. Save this paper, tho, show outlaws they wrong. Can fly out of their mountains with one hand, make notes with other.

  Downdrafts bad. 1500 fpm down, tho full power and climb speed. Must hit updraft soon.

  There. Worst is behind, and outlaws soon to justice. I see Pharisee airport, and I could almost stretch glide from here unless—chance in a million … chance in billion—the engine qui

  School for perfection

  I had flown west for a long time. West through the night, then south, then sort of southwest, I guess, not caring. You don’t care too much about maps and headings when you’ve just lost a student. You go off by yourself, after midnight, and think about it. It had been an unavoidable accident; one of those rare times when fog forms right out of mid-air and in five minutes the visibility goes from ten miles down to zero. There had been no airport nearby; he couldn’t land. Unavoidable. By sunup, the country around me was strange and mountainous. I must have flown quite a bit farther than I thought, and the fuel gage pointers were both bouncing on E. Lost, with the sun barely up, it was pure luck that I saw a green-painted Piper Cub rocking its wings to me, turning to land on a tiny grass strip at the base of a mountain. It touched the ground, rolled for a moment, then abruptly disappeared into a wall of solid rock! The place was empty and still as a frontier wilderness, and for a moment I thought that I had imagined the Cub.

  Still, that little strip was the only possible place to land an airplane. I was glad I had taken one of the 150s, instead of the big Comanche or the Bonanza. I dragged up to the field, full flaps and power, facing right into that granite wall. It was the shortest landing I could make, but it wasn’t short enough. Power off, flaps up, brakes on, we were still rolling at twenty knots when I knew we were going to hit the wall. But there was no impact. The wall disappeared, and the 150 rolled to a stop inside a huge stone cavern. It must have been a mile long, that place, with a great long runway. Airplanes of all types and sizes were parked about, each painted in dappled green camouflage. The Cub that had landed was just shutting down its engine, and a tall, black-clad fellow stepped from the front seat and motioned me to park alongside.

  Under the circumstances, I could only do as he asked. As I stopped, another figure emerged from the back seat of the Cub. That one was dressed in gray; he couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old, and he watched me with mild disapproval.

  When my engine stopped, the man in black spoke in a low, even tone that could only have been the voice of an airline captain. “It must not be much fun, losing a student,” he said, “but it shouldn’t make you forget your own flying. We had to make three passes in front of you before you finally saw us.” He turned to the youth. “Did you watch his landing, Mr. O’Neill?”

  The boy stiffened. “Yes, sir. About four knots fast, touched down seventy feet long, six feet left of centerline …”

  “We’ll analyze later. Meet me in the projection room in an hour.”

  The youngster stiffened again, inclined his head slightly, and left.

  The man escorted me to an elevator and pressed a button marked Level Seven. “Drake’s been wanting to see you for some time,” he said, “but you haven’t been quite ready to meet him until now.”

  “Drake? You mean Drake the …”

  He smiled, in spite of himself. “Of course,” he said, “Drake the Outlaw.”

  In a moment, the door hissed open, and we walked a long, wide passageway, carpeted and quiet, tastefully decorated in detail diagrams and paintings of aircraft in flight.

  So he really exists, I thought. So there really is such a man as the Outlaw. When you operate a flying school, you hear all kinds of strange things, and from here and there, I had heard of this man Drake and his band of flyers. For these people, the story went, flight had become a true and deep religion, and their god was the sky itself. For them, it was said, nothing mattered
but reaching out and touching the perfection that is the sky. But the only evidence of Drake’s existence was a few handwritten pages, an account of meeting the man, found in the wreck of an airplane that did not survive a forced landing. It had been printed once in a magazine, as a curiosity, and then forgotten.

  We entered a wide, paneled room, so simply furnished that it was elegant. There was an original Amendola painting of a C3R Stearman framed on one wall; on the other was a fine-detail cutaway of an A-65 engine. My guide disappeared, and I couldn’t help but examine the C3R. There was no flaw anywhere in it. The fasteners were there on the cowl, the rib-stitching of the wings, the reflections in the polished fabric. The Stearman fairly vibrated on the wall, caught in the instant of flare, just above the grass.

  If only reality could be as perfect as that painting, I thought. I had been to so many seminars, heard so many panel discussions affirm in parrot voices, “We’re only human, after all. We can never be perfect …”

  For a second I wished that this Drake could live up to his legend, say some magic word, tell me …

  “We can be perfect, my friend.”

  He was about six feet tall, dressed in black, with the lean, angled face that independence gives to men. He could have been forty years old or sixty, it was impossible to tell.

  “The Outlaw himself,” I said, surprised. “And you read minds, as well as fly airplanes.”

  “Not at all. But I think you might be tired of excuses for failure. Failure,” he said, “has no excuse.”

  It was as if I had been climbing up through clouds all my life, and in this moment had broken out on top. If he could only back up those words.

  Yet suddenly I was very tired, and threw the full weight of my depression at him. “I’d like to believe in your perfection, Drake. But until you show me the perfect flight school, the perfect staff of instructors, with no failures and no excuses, I can’t believe a word you say.”

  It was my last hope in the world, a test for this leader of these very special outlaws. If he was silent now, if he apologized for his words, I’d sell my flying school cold, take the Super Cub back to Nicaragua for a living.

  Drake’s answer was a half-second smile. “Follow me,” he said.

  He led the way into a long hall, lined in glowing aviation art and pedestals mounting bits and pieces of world-famous airplanes. Then we turned down a narrow corridor and abruptly into cool air and sunlight, at the brink of a steep, grassy slope. The grass fell away some fifty feet, and where it merged with level ground was a huge fluffy square of what looked like feathers, a hundred yards on a side and perhaps ten feet deep.

  A man, gray-haired, dressed in black, stood by the feather pile and called up the slope. “All right, Mister Terrell, whenever you’re ready. No hurry. Take your time.”

  Mister Terrell was a boy of fourteen or so, and he stood to our left, on the edge of the slope. Resting on his shoulders was a great frail set of snow-linen wings, thirty feet from tip to tip and casting a transparent shadow on the grass. He took a breath in readiness, reached forward, and gripped the adhesive-taped bar of the main wing beam. Then all at once he ran forward, tilted the wings upward, and lifted free of the hillside. He flew for perhaps twelve seconds, swinging his body as a gymnast would, in slow feet-together motions that balanced the white wings smoothly down through the air.

  At no time was he more than ten feet above the slope, and he dropped free of the wings a second before his feet touched the feathers. It was all slow and graceful and free, a kind of dream turned into white linen and green grass.

  Voices drifted up, tiny, from the meadow. “Just sit there for a while, Stan. Take your time. Remember what it felt like. Remember it through, and when you’re ready, we’ll take the wings up and fly again.”

  “I’m ready now, sir.”

  “No. Live it through again. You’re at the top of the hill. You reach up to the spar. You run forward three steps …”

  Drake turned and led the way into another long corridor, into a different part of his domain. “You ask about a flight school,” he said. “Young Mister Terrell is just beginning to fly, but he has spent a year and a half studying the wind and the sky, and the dynamics of unpowered flight. He has built forty gliders. Wingspans from eight inches up to the one you just saw—thirty-one feet. He made his own wind tunnel and he has worked with the full-size tunnel on Level Three.”

  “At that rate,” I said, “it’s going to take him a lifetime to learn to fly.”

  Drake looked at me, and raised his eyebrows. “Of course it will,” he said.

  We turned now and then, through a maze of halls and corridors. “Most of the students choose to spend about ten hours a day around the airplanes. The rest of the time they give to other work, their own studies. Terrell is building an engine of his own design, for instance, learning casting and machining down in the shops.”

  “Oh come on,” I said. “This is all very nice, but it’s just not …”

  “Practical?” Drake said. “Were you going to say that it isn’t practical? Think, before you say it. Think that the most practical way to bring a pilot to perfection is to reach him when he is caught with the idea of pure flight, before he decides that a pilot is a systems operator, pushing buttons and pulling levers that keep some strange machine in the air.”

  “But … bird wings …”

  “Without the bird wings, there can be no perfection. Imagine a pilot who has not only studied Otto Lilienthal but who has been Otto Lilienthal, holding his bird wings and leaping from his hill. Then imagine the same pilot, not only studying the Wrights, but building and flying his own powered biplane glider; a pilot who keeps within him the same spark that fired Orville and Wilbur at Kitty Hawk. After a while, he might be a pretty good pilot, don’t you think?”

  “Then you are taking your students, firsthand, through the whole … history …”

  “Exactly,” he said. “And the next step from the Wrights might be …?” he waited for me to fill in the blank.

  “A … a … Jenny?”

  We turned the corridor into the sunlight again, at the edge of a broad, flat field, furrowed with the mark of many tailskids. A JN-4 teetered there, painted olive drab and camouflaged as the airplanes in the main cavern had been. The OX5 engine pushed a big wooden propeller around with the sound of a giant, gentle sewing machine whisking a needle through deep velvet.

  A black-clad instructor stood by the rear cockpit.

  “She’ll fly a little lighter, Mister Blaine,” he said, over the sewing-machine sound, “and she’ll lift off a little quicker, without my weight. Three landings, then bring her back here.”

  In a moment, the Jenny was trundling out into the wind, moving faster, tailskid lifting just clear of the grass and holding there, at last the whole delicate machine rising slowly, so that I could see pure sky under its wheels.

  The instructor joined us, and inclined his head in that curious salute. “Drake,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Drake said. “Young Tom doing all right?”

  “Quite all right. Tom is a good pilot—might even be an instructor, one day.”

  I could restrain myself no longer. “The boy’s a bit young for that old airplane, isn’t he? I mean, what if the engine stops now?”

  The instructor looked at me, puzzled. “Pardon me? I don’t understand your question.”

  “If the engine stops!” I said. “That’s an old engine! It can quit in flight, you know.”

  “Well of course it can quit!” The man looked to Drake, as if he wasn’t sure that I was real.

  The outlaw leader spoke patiently, explaining. “Tom Blaine overhauled that OX5 himself, he machined parts for it. He can diagram the engine blindfolded. He knows where it’s weak, he knows what kind of failures to expect. But most of all, he knows about forced landings. He began to learn forced landings with his first glide down Lilienthal Hill.”

  It was as if a light had been turned on; I was beginning to understand. “And
from here,” I said slowly, “your students go on into barnstorming and racing and military flying, right on through the history of flight.”

  “Exactly. Along the way, they fly gliders, sailplanes, homebuilts, seaplanes, dusters, helicopters, fighters, transports, turboprops, pure jets. When they’re ready, they go out into the world—any kind of flying you can name. Then, when they’ve finished flying on the outside, they can choose to return here as instructors. They take one student, and begin to pass along what they’ve learned.”

  “One student!” I had to laugh. “Drake, it’s clear that you’ve never had to operate a flight school under pressure, where the stakes are high!”

  “In your flying school,” he said mildly, “what are the stakes?”

  “Survival! If I don’t keep turning out pilots and bringing in new students, I’m through, I’m out of business!”

  “Our stakes are a little different,” he said. “It’s up to us to keep flight alive in a world of airplane-drivers—the people who come out of your school, concerned only with moving straight and level from airport to airport. We’re trying to keep a few real pilots left in the air. There’s not too many left who don’t carry that book of excuses, those ‘Twelve Golden Rules,’ next to their heart.”

  I couldn’t have heard him right. Was Drake attacking the Golden Rules, distilled from so much experience?

  “Your Golden Rules are all don’ts and nevers,” he said, knowing my thought. “Ninety percent of the accidents happen in these conditions, so you must avoid the conditions. The one last logical step they didn’t print is ‘One hundred percent of the accidents are caused by flying, so for complete safety, you must stay on the ground.’ It was Golden Rule number eight, by the way, that killed your student.”