When you fly old-time airplanes, you expect to have forced landings now and then. It’s nothing special, it’s part of the game, and no wise pilot flies an antique out of gliding distance of a place to land. In my few years flying, I’d had seventeen forced landings, not one of which I had even thought unfair, for all of which I was more or less prepared.
But this was different. The Luscombe I flew now was hardly an antique; it had higher performance than ultramodern planes of greater horsepower, and had one of the world’s most reliable engines. I flew this time not for fun or for learning, but for a business trip from Nebraska to Los Angeles and return, and I was almost finished with the flight and this was no time for a forced landing. It was more a bother because the engine had never quit. The problem had been a fifty-cent throttle-linkage connection, snapped in two. So when the engine power fell back to idle rpm on the last leg of my business trip—with an appointment waiting in Lincoln—it was the first unfair forced landing I had ever had.
Now, having repaired the linkage, I couldn’t get off the ground again, and it was just an hour till sunset, when dinosaurs must die.
For the first time in my life, I understood the modern-airplane pilots who use airplanes as business tools and don’t want to be bothered with such things as aerobatic training and forced-landing practice. Chances are rare that they’ll ever stop or that a minor little linkage will break in half. It is fair for that sort of thing to happen to a sport pilot, who pays attention to such esoteric trivia and enjoys being ready for it, but not for me in my business plane when I have people waiting for me at the terminal and a dinner planned for six p.m. sharp. Because a forced landing for a businessman is quite honestly unfair, I began to realize that he gets to thinking it can’t possibly happen.
I planned to make one more try to get out of that little field in Kansas before dark. I was already late for my meeting, but the snow didn’t care at all. Nor did the cold, or the field, or the sky. The tarpits hadn’t cared about the dinosaurs, either. Tarpits are tarpits and snow is snow; it’s the dinosaur’s job to get himself free.
The twenty-first try at takeoff, then, the Luscombe, spraying snow, tracking down a rut just long enough, bounced to forty-five, shuddered, wallowed, staggered into the air, touched snow again, shook it off, and at last flew.
I thought about it all as we turned for Lincoln, scudding along over the shadows of dusk. I now had eighteen forced landings in my logbook, and only one of them was unfair.
Not a bad record.
MMRRrrrowCHKkrelchkAUM … and the party at LaGuardia
Do you come suddenly awake, ever, to find yourself standing on the rail of a monster bridge, or the ledge of some hundred-story office building, find yourself swaying, teetering out over empty space, and wonder how it’s happened that you’re there, ready to jump? And in answer, do you get a pushing volley of reasons all poking at you—wars here and hatreds there and dog-eat-dog across the way and the only thing that matters is the lousy buck and the meadows are all junkyards and the rivers are all slag and nobody cares about right instead of wrong and good instead of evil and gentleness instead of wrath, and chances are a mistake was made somewhere and you were in fact born into the wrong world, that this isn’t the earth you applied for at all and the only way to change it is to hop off some high place with the wish that the ground below will be a doorway into other lives, and better ones, with challenge and joy and the chance for getting something worthwhile done?
Well, wait a minute before you jump. Because I have a story to tell you. The story is about a couple who are as crazy as sane folk in Bedlam, who just might be friends of yours. Who decided that instead of jumping they would grab the world and whack it a couple of times and make it turn out the way they want it to turn out.
The man is James Kramer, pilot. The woman is Eleanor Friede, an editor in a book publishing company. What they did to the world was to start an airline.
East Island Airways was founded because Jim Kramer saw a 1941 twin Cessna T-50 Bamboo Bomber going to ruin on an airport tie-down and he wanted to rescue it, he wanted to save it.
East Island Airways was founded because Eleanor Friede wanted a way from New York City to her Long Island beach house that would not strangle her dead in four hours of bumper-locked summer automobiles.
East Island Airways was founded because Mrs. Friede met Mr. Kramer when she learned to fly, and not long after he came running and shouting into her house that he had found a Bomber that had to be saved and he’d put up half the money if she’d put up half and they could do something with it to make it pay its way but just come out now, turn off the stove and come out now and look at this airplane and Eleanor if you don’t think this is the most beautiful thing and maybe let’s not think we’d make a lot of money but there must be other people who hate the traffic too and they could at least be enough, on the tickets, to break even and we could save the Bomber!
So it was that Eleanor Friede saw the old round-engine twin waiting there in the sunlight and she thought it was lovely and she liked it as much as Jim Kramer did, for its majesty and its charm and its style. It had all these things, and it cost seven thousand dollars, at a time when other Bombers sold for four thousand, and five. But other Bombers didn’t need to be rescued from owners who did not love them and seven thousand dollars split is only thirty-five hundred dollars apiece. Then and there, East Island Airways was born.
There were already air taxi lines flying from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to East Hampton, Long Island. So what.
The other air taxis had modern airplanes; they had several modern airplanes each. Imagine that.
The Bomber would have to be completely inspected and most likely rebuilt, and that would be expensive, that could take most of the money the two had saved all life long. Interesting.
There would be papers required, and work to form the company, to qualify for operating certificates, to calculate and buy insurance. Quite so.
Statistics show, logic shows, common sense shows without the smallest flicker of doubt that there would hardly be a dime’s profit and more likely a dollar’s loss, perhaps a many-dollars’ loss. Remarkable.
Mr. Kramer was president and chief pilot.
Mrs. Friede was chairman of the board and secretary-treasurer.
Now this world that we live in, the world that occasionally drives us to our jumping-off places, did not particularly like this event. It did not particularly dislike it, either, but acted in the cold uncaring way that the world usually has, and began to put the screws to East Island Airways, with a certain blind curiosity, to see when it would crack.
“The cost of the airplane was the least of the expense,” said Mrs. Friede, “absolutely nothing. I’ll show you the books if you want to look at the books. I hid them.”
Kramer worked five months over the airplane with a Long Island overhaul company, recovering the fuselage, installing radios, ripping out the old interior and pleating in a new one.
“You know the expression ‘Never throw good money after bad’?” he said. “Well, we had one like it: ‘Always throw good money after bad.’ We had planned to spend some money getting the Bomber in shape, but when we got the bill, it said nine thousand dollars! Nine thousand three hundred dollars. It was unbelievable. We sometimes sat at a table in a stupor, wondering … you know … hm.” His voice trailed off, thinking about that, and the chairman of the board went on.
“Everybody, everybody warned us that we didn’t have enough capital, and one airplane was a disaster for an airline, and it couldn’t work. And they could prove it—they didn’t have to prove it, we knew this. But neither of us was making our living from it, that was one thing. And if we were putting in money that we needed to pay bills or something … ah … well, actually we were putting in money that we needed to pay bills … but the bills waited and we didn’t starve, somehow.”
When the Bomber was at last ready to fly, EIA lettered calmly on its rudder, it had cost the part
ners sixteen thousand five hundred dollars. Split, was only eight thousand two hundred fifty dollars each. But the money wasn’t lost, the savings hadn’t disappeared. East Island Airways had an airplane!
A Parlor Plane service to the Hamptons—
for not too many people.
You are invited to be a charter member of
EAST ISLAND AIRWAYS
East Island Airways is one beautiful, big, leather-lined twin Cessna. Not new. Not even very sleek (see photo). But fully FAA approved and a pampered beauty. Comfortable. The kind of no-climbing-over-passengers spaciousness that makes you think of a well-kept Packard limousine with all those miles of carpet. We depart from LaGuardia and cruise 140 mph to East Hampton in 45 minutes …
The membership fee was one hundred dollars, and the fare was fifteen dollars each way, a hundred-mile flight.
It didn’t work. Nobody joined. The world laid on its pressure curiously, listening for breaking noises.
“A lot of friends of Eleanor’s expected to ride on the airplane for nothing, I’m sure. I think when people get an ad and you’re flying, they think the outfit has a lot of money and what is one more person, more or less? In the beginning we didn’t mind, we just sort of wanted to let them know we existed.”
That was no breaking noise, and it sounded peculiar to a dog-eat-dog competitive world. Not many airlines fly passengers for nothing, just to let them know they exist.
“Business was very slow till the fourth of July, and then suddenly we started carrying a lot of people. We did everything by charter, people would call and charter the airplane. This actually worked out pretty well because we made enough friends at the beginning for that to be a busy three or four days out of the week. And there were charters to New England and Maine and so forth. We kept pretty busy.”
Odd. The steel-eyed no-nonsense practical world laid on the pressure, and the only response sounded strangely like the noise of the world, cracking a bit.
“People were always expecting it to fall down and they wanted it not to work. It’s old and it can’t be, but it does and it keeps going and they don’t know what to think, after a while. They don’t know. They wonder if maybe things that are old are better than things that are new.
“A wooden airplane does not fatigue. They’ll have problems with twin Beeches, they’ll have problems with 310s, they’ll all be in the scrap heap and they’ll be there because of metal problems, when twenty years from now the guy will say, ‘It’s going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars to fix that metal airplane of yours,’ and there’ll be the Bomber sitting next to it, kind of chuckling to itself and saying, ‘Don’t you wish you had wooden spars?’
“We were able to make enough. People would say, ‘Gee, it’s great, you must be making a lot of money,’ and I’d say, ‘Sure, sure,’ because I couldn’t go into the thing that we were in fact not making a lot of money, people wouldn’t understand.
“It was the kind of thing where you were beating the system. Everybody flying was trying to allow the passenger those fast airplanes, planes that had tremendous capability, and all the passengers got was crammed and smashed in and baggage on their noses and everything. Nobody else would think of running an airplane that old, and nobody thought it would last more than a week.
“They knew it at LaGuardia, after a while. In the beginning they couldn’t figure out what it was—it was always, ‘Say again your type aircraft?’ If we were making an IFR approach coming down the localizer at ninety knots they’d say, ‘What’s a twin Cessna doing so slow? You can fly faster than that!’ I’d say, ‘Well, I could, but I couldn’t put the wheels down.’ They couldn’t figure out this was an old old twin Cessna, not … they figured it was an old Cessna 310. ‘No, it’s an old old old twin Cessna,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh. OH! You mean them!’ ”
“Do you remember, Jimmy,” asked the chairman of the board, “we were landing and the tower said, ‘Twin Cessna on final, is that a metal-wing aircraft?’ And you said, ‘Negative. Fabric wings.’ And the guy said, ‘Gee! They sure do shine!’ ”
“Yeah. We’d be talking to a controller and he’d say, ‘Hey, I had an uncle who flew them during the war,’ and he’d say, ‘Boy …’ and at this time United would break in and want to know what time to expect clearance and the guy would be jolted back to reality.”
But money. The biggest hammer the world has to destroy companies with is money. You’ve got to bend, you’ve got to be a little bit vicious and tough if you’re going to compete, a lot vicious and tough if you’re going to be on top of the heap. East Island Airways did not choose to be either. That first summer the airline earned $2148 in passenger fares. It paid out $6529 in operating expenses. It lost, then, $4381.
That is a sign of disaster and despair, if and only if the first purpose of the company is to make money. But the whole outside world, all those business facts of life had to kind of gnash their teeth helplessly. Because East Island Airways is not run on the world’s terms, it is run on its own terms.
“I talked to Maury about it, my lawyer,” said Mrs. Friede, “and he said, ‘You’re not going to—this is a crazy investment and I hope you’re not going into it as an investment for profit.’ But he said, ‘Look. You don’t spend any money in the night clubs, you know, everybody needs his thing and if it’s an airplane, all right. You’re in a position where you can spend some money to have fun, and if this is your way, then go ahead, with my blessing. I envy you.’ ” She smiles a perfect, calm, world-defeating smile. “Profit was never the motive, thank heavens, but fun was, and in that way it was a big success. I really love the Bomber.”
Fun. When your first motive is fun, and money comes second or third, it’s pretty hard for the world to pull you down.
When destruction-through-money didn’t work, the world turned to operating problems. Weather. Maintenance. Traffic delays.
“I remember a time when I was late,” said Kramer. “There was a thunderstorm had closed LaGuardia and everybody else canceled air taxi flying for the night. I was at Republic Field on Long Island, and Eleanor and the passengers were at LaGuardia waiting for me. I was calling LaGuardia every hour, trying to coax the controller into saying there wouldn’t be an hour delay, landing. All I had was one dry cheese cracker, waiting at Republic, and I finally got through and landed at LaGuardia and they were having a party in there! One guy had gone out and bought a whole delicatessen and put it in a box and dragged it over to the airport. I walk in and the guy says, ‘Here, want some roast beef?’ and he gave me a thing of roast beef and I had had that one cheese cracker all that time and I said, ‘We’re leaving, now. The airplane is leaving, now.’ Back with the baggage and in they went, but their little party went right on. I said, ‘Quiet, please,’ I gave Eleanor a dirty look and everybody quieted down.”
“He gave me a lot of dirty looks from time to time,” Mrs. Friede said, “and I knew which ones were for real. He’d put up with a lot of noise and nonsense in that big back cabin, as long as it didn’t interfere with his flying. But if a passenger got careless with a cigarette—well, we had a message going and we’d cool it, then.”
In a way, the curious hard world finally won. When the air taxi insurance rates doubled, from fifteen hundred dollars for a summer to three thousand dollars, it was too much. But the partners don’t sound beaten at all.
“I don’t think we’ll be running the Bomber again this summer as a commuting deal,” Kramer said. “I might have to take a job someplace. But every once in a while it will come flitting into LaGuardia making that bopping and croaking noise that it makes as it taxis around, that the line boys know right away. They say to me things like, I come in at night and they say, ‘My, you know, that—see them flames come out the exhausts!’ And that noise … MMRRrrrowCHKkrelchkAUM … croaking and everything and they say, ‘Boy, that’s nice!’ It seems to make everybody happy, wherever it goes.
“And the future? I think it would do Cessna no harm to promote one of the truly great
airplanes that it built. It would be sort of a thing for them to say, ‘Here is a thirty-year-old Bamboo Bomber that has just flown around the world.’ So I would like to take it around the world. Because the airplane deserves to go around the world.”
One has the strangest feeling that Kramer will somehow do just as he says, although the airline probably won’t make a cent in profit and might even lose money, on the flight.
But that is the story of East Island Airways. You may go ahead and jump from that ledge now, if you wish. I just thought that you should know that these two people discovered that an alternate to jumping is a laugh, and a decision to live by their own values instead of the world’s. They made their own reality, instead of suffering in somebody else’s. According to East Island Airways, the hard earth was not made for leaping into, but for flying around.
And that bopping croaking sound you hear in the night is the Bamboo Bomber, thirty years old, taxiing for another takeoff into its adventures, blue flames from the exhaust, chuckling and chortling, and not particularly caring whether or not the world happens to approve.
A gospel according to Sam
An old guru surely must have said it to a disciple ten thousand years ago. “You know, Sam, there will never live anyone who will ever own anything more than his own thoughts. Not people, not places, not things will we ever keep for possessions through vast times. Walk a little while with them we can, but soon or late we’ll each take our own true possession—what we’ve learned, how we think—and go separately around our lonely turnings.”
“Ah, so,” Sam must have said, and written it all on lotus bark.
What was it then, these thousands of years after that truth was written, that I should feel sad, signing papers to trade away a biplane that had become a part of my life? There was no question that it had to be done. My new home is edged on three sides by water, on the fourth by a high-density area. The airport, without a “control tower,” thanks be, is nevertheless all hard-surface runway, is all buttered glass for the biplane to land upon, concrete strips poured into a jungle of oak trees without a single field for landing should an engine fail on takeoff. I moved nine hundred miles from the place where the biplane was at home, and the longer I left her in the hangar the worse it was; she fell to the mercy of house-hunting sparrows and cord-hungry mice. There was no choice, if I loved that airplane and wished her to live in the sky, but to trade her to someone who would fly her well and often. Why was the moment that I signed the papers such a sad moment?