When it happened to me, there was a continuous dialogue all the way down to the ground, or, more precisely, there were two monologues. One part of me is intent on turning to final approach, holding airspeed just so, shutting off magnetos and fuel, judging the glide, steepening the bank because we are too high … The other part is gabbling in fright. “See? You’re scared, aren’t you? Big deal, you’ve flown all these airplanes and you think you like to fly but now you’re afraid! First you were scared the engine was on fire, now you’re scared you’ll miss the field, aren’t you? YOU’RE A COWARD, YOU’RE ALL BLUFF AND TALK AND YOU’RE NOT HAPPY NOW AND YOU WISH YOU WERE ON THE GROUND AND YOU ARE AFRAID!”
That day we made the landing in fairly fine style, propeller stopped, oil streaking the airplane in the strange beauty of liquids blown by the wind, and I was a proud peacock to set it down without a scratch. But even as I congratulated myself on the landing, I remembered that accusing voice telling me how scared I had been, and was distressed to admit that it had been right. Afraid or not, though, here was the machine safely landed in the oat field.
What Am I Doing Here is not supposed to have an answer. The voice that asks is hoping we’ll reply without thinking, “I shouldn’t be here at all. It is a mistake for man to fly and if I get out of this alive I will never be so foolish as to fly again.” The voice is content only when we do nothing at all, when we are completely idle. It is the voice of paradox, of self-preservation carried to the point of death.
The way to make time pass slowly is to stay absolutely bored. Bored, minutes are months, days take years to pass. The way for us to live the longest possible life is to sit ourselves in a blank gray room, waiting for nothing, through the years. Yet there’s the ideal that the voice asks us to choose—to stay in this body, this room, for as long as we can.
What Am I Doing Here has another answer, however, one we aren’t supposed to find … I Am Living.
Remember, as a child, the challenge of the high board at the swimming pool? There came the time, after days of looking up at that board, when you finally climbed the cold wet steps to the high platform. From there it looked higher than ever, the water looked a thousand feet down. Perhaps you heard it then, What am I doing here? Why did I ever climb to this place? I want to go back where it’s safe. But there were only two ways down: the steps to defeat or a dive to victory. No other choice. Stay on the board as long as you wish, but soon or late you must choose.
You stood on the edge, shivering in the hot sun, deathly afraid. At last you leaned too far forward, it was too late to retreat, and you dived off the edge. Remember that? Remember the joy that fired you back to surface so that you broke clear like a porpoise, streaming water, shouting YEEHOO! The high board was conquered in that instant, and you spent the rest of the day climbing steps and diving down, for fun.
Climbing a thousand high boards, we live. In a thousand dives, demolishing fear, we turn into human beings.
That’s the charm, that’s the siren song of flight: flight is your chance, pilot, to destroy fears on a grand scale, in a high and beautiful country. The answer to every fear, be it of high board or of three-turn spin, is knowing. I know how to hold my body as I leave the board, so the water will not hurt me. I know how the wing stalls and the rudder forces it to spin. I know that the world is going to blur like a runaway green propeller and the controls will fight against my hand. I know the opposite rudder pedal will be hard to push for the recovery, but I know I can push it, and the spin will stop at once. Before too long, knowing, I climb high and do spins for fun.
It is only the unknown that is fearful. As clouds lower about us, for instance, we are unafraid if there’s a runway in sight to land upon. We fear low ceilings only when the unknown lies below … fields or hills or treetops to come down in, when we have never once landed on field or hill or tree. But if we have landed in fields for years, if we know what to look for and how to control our airplane throughout, then landing in grass is no more frightening than landing on a mile of concrete.
All of life, some say, is a chance to conquer fear, and every fear is part of the fear of death. The student who grips the controls in apprehension is apprehensive of dying. His instructor alongside, saying, “Don’t worry. Relax. See? You can take your hands off the wheel and the airplane flies smooth as a feather …” is proving that there is no death nearby.
Every pilot first conquered the fears of a narrow envelope of flight. We first knew our airplane and ourselves well enough only to fly around the pattern on sunny days. Then we knew more and flew into the practice area; then out into the world, then into cloud and rain, over seas and deserts—all without fear, all because we know and control the airplane and ourselves. We grew toward becoming human, and we fear only when we lose control.
We learned to avoid when we could not control, which is to say that we began to overcome stupidity. Don’t Fly Through Thunderstorms is an axiom most pilots accept without testing. Never Trust Your Life To An Engine is a less heeded one, most often ignored by those who have never heard an engine stop in flight. Those pilots who fly without parachutes on black-night cross-countries and over seas of fog have no idea of where they might land if the engine quits, and without knowing haven’t a prayer of controlling the crash.
It is a terrible empty feeling to have a guaranteed certified approved modern engine snap its crankshaft or swallow a valve or run out of gas when the tank reads FULL. The feeling is all the worse when one can’t see to land, worse yet when one can’t bail out, and reaches ultimate despair when one finds he is a trapped and helpless passenger in his own airplane.
Certainly there are hundreds of pilots who fly without fear through black nights and over miles of fog, but their peace comes not from knowing and control, it comes from blind faith in the crate of metal parts that is an engine. Their fear is not overcome, it has simply been masked by the sound of that power plant. When that sound fails in flight, I give you fear, stronger than ever. It is not legality or guarantee that determines our safety, but how well we can fly.
I’ve been called Daredevil for flying passengers from wide clear hayfields, Chicken for refusing to fly them from a narrow runway facing hills and trees. Wild Crazy Irresponsible for picking up handkerchiefs with a wingtip, Overcautious for deciding not to fly at night without a parachute. But still I think that fear is something to be conquered in a fair fight, not ignored or swept under a rug of illusions that engines never fail. Fear, fear—you are a demanding enemy.
The biplane fell down from the sky, wallowing, buffeting. What am I doing here, the voice screamed. It took a second to answer. I’m living. And I bail out if we’re not flying by the time we reach two thousand feet. At two thousand feet I’ll pull the seat belt release and fall free, clear the airplane, and pull the ripcord. A shame to lose it because I can’t fly a simple loop. I’ll never live it down.
Slowly, like a big floating safe, the nose of the biplane eased downward. The terrible throbbing buffet began barely to fade, and the airstream to smooth. Maybe …
We roared through two thousand feet pointing straight down, under control again, and the engine blazed once, coughed, and burst back into action. Oh boy, the voice said. You nearly had it that time and you were scared as a rat. Scared to death. This flying business is not for you, is it?
We climbed back to three thousand feet, put the nose down till the wind shredded itself in a great thundering hundred-mile cry through the flying wires, and this time with a good positive pullup we flew a fine loop, the biplane and I. Then another, and another.
What we are doing here? Overcoming the fear of death, of course. Why are we in the air? We’re practicing, you might say, what it is to be alive.
The thing under the couch
The seat belts in the airplanes are different, for one thing. Instead of an American strap and buckle, there’s a four-way affair that traps you in the cockpit like a fly in a spider web. The parachutes here are different, too. All the harness webs snap into a
single steel block which, turned and hit hard, releases everything at once. Everyone drives about on the wrong side of the aerodrome roads, speaking in Irish brogues of petrol and carburetors, of stall turns and flick rolls instead of hammerheads and snaps, circuits instead of patterns, undercarriage instead of landing gear. It’s not hard, in Ireland, to feel like a lonely foreigner.
The aerodrome is a great green square, three thousand feet on a side, grazing a block of puff-ball sheep that frighten easily but still need to be driven out of the way by a low pass before landing.
On this field one Sunday afternoon appeared a sort of Taylorcraft fitted out with an all-glass cockpit, and a little in-line engine, which I found out was an Auster. The pilot was one Billy Reardon, and the first thing he did after we met was to offer the lonely foreigner a ride in his airplane.
It was one of those parallel-world stories out of science fiction, when life feels the same as normal, but isn’t, quite. The propeller turned clockwise instead of American counterclockwise; the control stick linked not to wires under the cabin floor, but to a strange yoke assembly beneath the instrument panel; the tachometer needle swung not smoothly from low rpm to high, but shuddered in quick whiplash leaps as though caught on stop-motion film.
Still, the Auster lifted up from the ground and sailed over rock walls and emerald hedges into a sky remarkably like the sky of home. We flew for twenty minutes, Billy Reardon showing the character of his airplane as would a pilot, I think, of any country. My two landings were among the worst I’ve ever made, but Billy stood tactfully by with an excuse that he hoped I’d believe. “She takes an hour’s flying to get used to, really. She stalls at only twenty-eight miles per hour—you’ll have her on the ground and along comes a little gust and you’re flying again!” I liked Billy Reardon, for saying that.
Then, days later, I went to dinner at the house of Jon Hutchinson, an Englishman flying BAC-111s for Aer Lingus out of Dublin, owner of a 1930 Morane parasol, just flown after a year’s rebuilding. There were photographs of airplanes on his walls, as there are on mine at home; he had shelves of aviation books, as I have.
We talked, after dinner, and all at once he said, “Let me show you … the most beautiful …” and he was on his hands and knees reaching under the living-room couch, sliding something heavy. What it was, under there, was a black steel cylinder for the two hundred thirty horsepower Salmson engine of the Morane.
“Isn’t that a pretty thing?”
It shone like printer’s ink, the machined cooling-fins catching light, in the room.
To whom, I thought, to how many people could he have said that, would he have admitted that there was indeed a big old engine part under the couch? Perhaps only to another citizen of his own country, of the sky. I was honored.
“Now there’s a beautiful cylinder, Jon. Beautiful. What’s this, here? Three spark-plug holes?”
“No, this one’s for the primer …”
A week later I came to know another Aer Lingus pilot, who kept his Tiger Moth at the same green sheep-meadow field from which I flew. Roger Kelly’s voice, except for the Dublin accent, sounded like voices I’ve heard more and more often in the last few years.
“The fact that you’ve got Air Line Transport Pilot written on your license doesn’t mean you fly any better,” he said. “One day these pilots who fly for the money of the job, they’re going to lose everything, the cockpit’s going to burst or some such thing and they’ll be left with a stick and rudder and they won’t know how to fly.”
He didn’t mean it literally, perhaps, but he did mean that distressing feeling most sport pilots have felt, a moment later: “The day they make me put a radio in the Moth is the day I give up flying.”
It was about that time, I think, that I finally learned that an airman leaving the boundaries of his nation isn’t a foreigner at all. In whatever part of the world he travels, chances are there’s a couch under which lies a cylinder for an airplane engine; chances are there’s another airman, who put it there, and finds it beautiful.
The $71,000 sleeping bag
A ferry flight, that’s all, to take a Cessna Super Skymaster from the factory at Wichita to the distributor at San Francisco. Not much worth note could happen on such a routine flight, and nothing did. It happened on the ground.
The Skymaster and I had landed at Albuquerque late in the evening, taxied to the far end of the field, the west end there, the Cessna dealer. I walked to the new terminal for a bowl of soup and a bunch of crackers, and about midnight walked back to the plane.
I play-act, sometimes, when I fly a kind of airplane that I don’t often fly, and pretend I’m the person I’d expect to see flying that plane. In the Skymaster, I was an executive pilot, walking back across the line to my company machine. Stereotype business pilot, all solemn: facts and figures, little briefcase, black bag full of Jepp charts—you know the kind. This was me, moving through midnight, making a note to check the weather now although I wouldn’t be flying till morning. Cool. Level head. No nonsense.
But as I was going my businesslike way, just stepping up from the street onto the parking ramp, by the low cyclone fence, I happened to notice the silhouette of the Skymaster against a big floodlight … the twin shark tails all still and powder-black against the light. I felt a great surge of affection for the airplane, for that thing.
Just because we had come far together in one afternoon, I guess, and against headwinds.
Affection for an airplane. Somehow, I had never thought that company pilots felt that way. But they do.
That was the first thing.
Mounted on the Cessna hangar is a loudspeaker that is set to the tower frequency, and turned up way loud so the lineman can hear it and be ready to flag the in-bounds in for gas. Nothing but static, at that hour, static very highly amplified in the speaker. But then there was a burst of words, the voice of some guy flying unseen in the night. “Hello Kirtland Tower. Twin Beech niner six Baker Kilo is at the Pass, inbound to land.”
No sound in the sky, just that voice in the speaker, echoing, with the throb of engines in the background.
Then a few minutes later, I heard the faintest little muffled rasp of propellers humming around, and saw the slow streak of navigation lights. The guy had taken a step into reality; he was slowly changing from one dimension into life. “Six Baker Kilo is five out on a straight-in.”
“Baker Kilo cleared to land.” It was a gentle drama, a play on a ten-mile stage, and I was the whole audience.
A few minutes later came the chirk-chirk of wheels touching concrete, the sigh of engines fading back from approach power. Then silence. Then the sound of engines again rumbling around at idle, louder and louder till they gasped suddenly and coasted their propellers around to a stop just fifty feet from where I stood by the Skymaster. The quiet little noises, then, of flight’s end: chock scrapes, door sounds, and the talk of pilot to copilot.
That was the second thing.
When the Beech pilots had left, I put the right seat of the Skymaster to full recline, stretching out on it as best I could. Suit coat for a blanket, padded headrest for a pillow. It wasn’t comfortable at all … not a tenth as pleasant as unrolling one’s sleeping bag under the wing of a Champ and looking up at the stars.
This airplane was different. It was sheet metal instead of cloth and dope, radios and omni and ADF and DME and marker beacon and EGT and autopilot and trim and flaps and prop control and mixture instead of nothing. But the stars were the same stars.
By sunup, I was convinced that the Cessna Super Skymaster, although it is a great twin-engine plane that can never kill a pilot with the terrible yaw of engine loss in the weather at full gross, is a lousy sleeping bag. For $71,000, I thought thay should at least make the airplane a little easier to spend the night in. Then, too, I found that you don’t want to hang your good shirts on the aft propeller, because you’ll get exhaust powder all over them. The front prop is okay, but the man with a $71,000 airplane will certainly hav
e a larger wardrobe than can be hung on one propeller.
That was the third thing.
At dawn we were airborne, the Cessna and I, and before noon we were landing in California. An abysmally poor sleeping bag, but not a bad machine for going places.
Machine? I thought, and saw again the shark-fin silhouette at Albuquerque, the Beech pilots brought alive, the $71,000 sleeping bag. They are all alike, if you look at them at just the right times. Old or new, rag or tin, no airplane’s a machine. And what they are instead is a lot of what makes flying kind of fun.
Death in the afternoon—a story of soaring
He didn’t say anything till the afternoon of that first day. Then, as we lowered ourselves into the team sailplane, strapped ourselves tightly about with webs of parachute and shoulder harness and seat belt, tested the flight controls and spoilers and towline release, he said, “It’s like getting ready to be born. A baby feels this way, strapping into its new body.”
I warn you. He’s wont to say things like that.
“This is no body,” I said, firm but not harsh. “See? Manufacturer’s data plate, right here. Schweizer 1-26, single-seat sailplane. And all these others on the runway are 1-26 sailplanes, too, and this is Harris Hill and this is competition and we’re out to win and don’t you forget that, OK? Let’s stick with the business at hand, if you don’t mind.”
He didn’t answer. Just tugged against the straps, tightened them down, moved the flight controls light and quick, the way a pianist moved his fingers, quickly, in the last moment before the concert begins.
A Super Cub towplane taxied out in front of us, and a couple hundred feet of nylon stretched to join us for the launch. We were ready for takeoff.
“Helpless. Nothing as helpless as a sailplane on the ground.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You ready?”
“Let’s go.”
I fanned the rudder to signal the tow pilot. The Cub crept ahead, the line snaked out, tightened, our awkward beautiful Schweizer eased forward. The towplane pressed full throttle and we were on our way … in seconds we had aileron control, then rudder, and at last, elevators. I touched the stick back and the glider lifted clear of the runway, just a few feet clear, to make the takeoff easier for the Cub. We were flying, with the hard rush of wind about us, with the controls alive in our hand.