A Gift of Wings

  I had heard many a discouraging word about the Seabee’s Franklin engine, which is odd in that it has a special long propeller shaft and in that it is mounted backwards in the airplane, so that the prop is a pusher. In spite of the words, I’ve had only one brief engine problem. I noticed in cruise that the engine said mmmmmmmmmm on the magneto-fired sparkplugs when it said mmm-m-mmmm-mm-mmm-m on the distributor-fired ones. I reached back into the workshop as I flew along, took out the engine troubleshooting guide, and deduced that the cause had to be distributor points gone a bit tacky. Sure enough. Next landing I removed the points, replaced them with a new set (which also fits a ’57 Plymouth) and the engine said mmmmmmmmmm thereafter, on all sets of plugs.

  According to the overhaul manual, the Franklin is good for six hundred hours between overhauls. At two hundred fifty since overhaul, mine burns two-thirds quart of oil per hour at normal cruise. This pleases me because there are Franklins in Seabees which throw that much oil on the vertical stabilizer and are still considered normal.

  It’s said that a Seabee without the wing extensions is occasionally reluctant to fly. The manual admits that the stock Bee, brand new, can take over 13,690 feet to make a high-altitude water takeoff. Not having flown the airplane without long wings I can’t comment, save to say that 68K was flown from Bear Lake, Utah, six thousand feet above sea level, all summer long, with full passenger loads. The long wings and the tips do make a difference.

  One special pleasure for Seabee owners resides in a small lever over the pilot’s head: the reverse-pitch control for the propeller. It was installed because the Bee, unlike pontoon planes, normally approaches a dock head-on, and so has to leave by backing away tail-first. In the hands of a practiced pilot, reverse pitch makes the plane as maneuverable as a large heavy alligator.

  One can use reverse on land, too. The captain taxis into a tight space at the fuel pump, fills up, and then with everybody looking and wondering what happens next, he can yawn, back slowly out of his parking place, and be on his way.

  This is hard to top, yet the plane has other and even better features. Last month I flew some twenty-five hundred miles in the Seabee, most of it over the Inland Waterway. It was the most confident secure flying I’ve done anywhere. Should the engine have failed, I had only to glide straight ahead, or to turn slightly to land on the water. Horizon-wide swamps we flew over, that hadn’t enough firm ground for a Cub to land, yet they were all one vast international airport for the Bee: cleared to land whenever we wished, on any runway, upwind, downwind, crosswind, no traffic reported. The airplane is not equipped for instrument flying, but under these conditions it is the best instrument airplane possible.

  Following the lee shore of Cape Hatteras, the clouds lowered to two hundred feet and visibility to a bit over a mile—weather one would never consider in a land-plane unless he happened to be flying directly above a hundred-mile runway. In the Seabee, I was. I dropped down to fifty feet over the water, kept my thumb on the map, and pressed ahead like next year’s Chris-Craft. When the visibility worsened, I dropped half flaps and slowed. When it worsened still, I decided to land, a matter of easing the throttle back and raising the nose slightly. But just before touchdown, ripples flashing below, I saw a line of light that meant higher ceilings ahead. So we air-taxied along the water for another mile and sure enough, things got better. As I am a chicken in weather, this single feature is my favorite of the Seabee’s qualities.

  The one dangerous aspect of the airplane, and of most amphibious aircraft, is the other face of its ability to land anywhere. I have talked to three pilots who landed Seabees on the water with the wheels down. Two of them had to swim out of the airplane as it sank upside-down, the third merely had to rebuild the nose section of the plane where it was smashed violently by the sea. For this reason I taught myself to say aloud in every traffic pattern, “This is a land landing, therefore the wheels are DOWN,” and, “This is a water landing, therefore the wheels are UP, checked UP, left main UP, right main UP, tailwheel UP. Because this is a WATER landing.” I like to say the water-landing check twice before touchdown. It’s being a little overcautious, but there is something about the picture of thirty-two hundred pounds on top of me, squashing me against a lake bottom, that I don’t mind being overcautious. Then too, aside from being the biggest, the Bee is the most expensive plane I’ve owned. I do not wish to look down from some rowboat, grappling with a hook for nine thousand dollars of my fortune. If it were a normal-priced Seabee, five thousand to seventy-five hundred dollars, maybe I wouldn’t mind.

  By the time I had logged fifty hours in the airplane, I had learned how to land it. Thirty hours were spent to believe that I could actually be so high in the air at the moment the wheels first touched; the other twenty were required to discover that just because the wheels had touched didn’t mean I wasn’t flying the airplane as much as ever. The reason for both learnings was the same—the Seabee has such long oleo shock absorbers that the wheels drop below the place one thinks they ought to be; they roll along the ground a few seconds after the plane is actually flying and for a few seconds before it has actually landed.

  The warning is that the Seabee is a high-maintenance machine. I haven’t noticed this because I enjoy working on airplanes and don’t count the difference between necessary maintenance and work not really required. But here is part of a shopping list made shortly after buying the plane:

  Anchor and chain

  Raft

  Grease gun, grease

  Silicon cement

  Silicon spray

  Weatherstripping

  ADF

  Scissor jack

  Hydraulic fluid

  Brake hose

  Bilge pump

  Bicycle

  Cork

  There’s a story for every item there, even for the cork, which is pressed into the end of the engine compartment oil scupper, to keep black oil from spraying out on the white hull.

  The propeller needs to be greased every twenty hours or so, as do wheel bearings and landing-gear fittings. All this can be fun, climbing around and servicing an Alumigrip mountain.

  Other elements of Bee flying one learns only by experience. It’s a delight, for instance, to taxi up from the water to a lovely virgin beach, but one had best be sure he gets above the high-water line and points the airplane back downhill before he allows it to stop rolling. If not, the captain has an hour’s shoveling and messing around with jacks and old boards before his Seabee is unearthed and back in the water.

  If the wingtip floats are not sealed around the tops with silicon rubber, water pours in during crosswind water-taxiing, when the downwind float is sometimes completely underwater. Mark the trim indicator overhead for takeoff with different loads; the Bee is very much a trim airplane. Once when the trim froze at high altitude, just a little bit nose-up, I had to ease back the power till the plane flew level by itself—I just didn’t have the strength to manually override that trim for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Somebody once said that anything worthwhile is always a little bit scary. I was a little bit scared and a little bit cautious about the Bee—how do you know what happens to a summerhouse in flight until you go up and fly one? But in time the captain learns to know its strengths and its quirks, begins to discover its secrets.

  One secret of the Seabee I found by chance, that I have found on no other airplane. If one happens to be cruising at ninety-five hundred feet at twenty-two rpm with twenty-two hundred inches of manifold pressure, indicating ninety-seven miles per hour with an outside air temperature of minus five degrees Fahrenheit, and if one is alone in the left seat and if one happens to sing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen or another song in that frequency range, one’s single voice becomes four … one becomes a kind of airborne Willie the Whale. The strange acoustics have something to do with the thin air, no doubt, and the resonance of the engine at the rpm, but the result is of more than passing interest for those captains who choose to sing only when there
’s no one else to hear. What other aircraft in the world offers all these features and a full quartet as well, en route to your lake-wilderness hideaway?

  I give you, dear reader, the Seabee.

  Letter from a God-fearing man

  I can keep quiet no longer. Somebody has to tell you people who fly airplanes how tired the rest of us get of your constant talk about flying, about how wonderful it is to fly, and won’t we come out on Sunday afternoon and take a little flight with you just to see what it is like.

  Somebody has to tell you that the answer is no, we won’t come out on the Sabbath, or any other day, to go up in one of your dangerous little crates. The answer is no, we do not think that it is all so wonderful to fly. The answer, as far as we’re concerned, is that the world would be a far better place if the Wright brothers had junked their crazy gliders and never gone to Kitty Hawk.

  A little bit we can take—we’ll forgive anybody for being carried away, when he is just beginning something that he thinks is fun. But this constant day-after-day missionary zeal that you have is just carrying it too far. And that’s the word: missionary. You seem to think that there is something holy about knocking around through the air, but none of you knows how childish it all looks to the rest of us, who have some sense of responsibility left for our families and for our fellow man.

  I wouldn’t be writing this if the situation was getting better. But it is getting worse and worse. I work in a soap factory, which is a fine secure job, with a good union and retirement benefits. The men I work with used to be good responsible men, but now, out of six of us on the Number Three Vat day crew, five have been taken up with this flying madness. I’m the only normal person left. Paul Weaver and Jerry Marcus both quit work a week ago, they quit together, to go into some kind of business where they think they will tow advertising signs with airplanes.

  I pleaded with them, I argued with them, I showed them the financial facts of life … paycheck, seniority, union, retirement … but it was like I was talking to walls. They knew that they’d lose money (“… at first,” they said. “Till you go broke,” I told them). But they just liked the idea of flying so much that it was worth it to them to turn around and walk right out of the soap factory … and they’ve been here fifteen years!

  All I could get out of them in explanation was that they wanted to fly, and a sort of strange look that said I wouldn’t understand why.

  And I do not understand. We had everything in common, we were the best of friends, until this flying business came along—a “flying club” or something like that swept like the plague through the people at the factory. Paul and Jerry dropped out of the bowling league the same day they joined the “flying club.” They haven’t been back, and now I don’t expect they ever will be.

  I took the time yesterday, in the rain, to go out to the miserable little strip of grass they call an airport, and talk to the fellow who runs the “flying club.” I wanted him to know that he is breaking up homes and business all over town and that if he has any sense of responsibility he will take a hint and move along. That’s where I got the word “missionary,” and I don’t mean that in any nice way, either. Missionary of the devil, I say, for what he’s done.

  He was inside a big shed, working on one of the airplanes.

  “Maybe you don’t know what you’re doing,” I said, “but since you came to town and started your ‘flying club,’ you’ve completely changed the lives of more people than I care to name.”

  For a minute I guess he didn’t see how angry I was, because he said, “I just brought the idea. They saw for themselves what flying is like,” almost as if it was a credit that so many lives had been wrecked.

  He looked to be about forty, but I’ll bet he’s older, and he didn’t stop his work to talk to me. The plane he was working on was made out of cloth, plain old thin cloth, with paint over it to make it look like metal.

  “Mister, are you running a business,” I said cuttingly, “or are you running some kind of a church here? You’ve got people running around looking forward to Sunday at this place like they have never looked forward to Sunday at church. You’ve got people talking out loud about ‘being close to God’ that have never said the word ‘God’ as long as I’ve known them and that’s all their lives, most of ’em.”

  At last he seemed to be getting the idea that I wasn’t real happy with him, that I thought he’d better be moving on.

  “I’ll apologize for them, if you’d like,” he said. I could hardly hear him. He twisted himself up under the dashboard of that little airplane, and started taking out one of the dials. “Some of the new students get kind of carried away. Takes them a while to learn not to say what they think out loud, sometimes. But they’re right, of course. And you are, too. It is a lot like a religion, flying.” He untwisted for a minute and ruffled in his toolbox for another screwdriver, with a smaller handle, and he smiled at me, an infuriating confident smile that said plainly that he wasn’t going to be moving on just because responsible people ask him to. “I guess that makes me a missionary.”

  “Now, that’s enough,” I said. “I’ve heard just one time too many this flying-brings-me-near-to-God business. Have you ever seen God on his throne, mister? You ever seen angels flying around your tinker-toy airplane?” I put him a question like that to shake him up, to knock the cockiness out of him.

  “Nope,” he said. “Never seen God-on-a-throne or angels-with-white-wings. Never talked to any pilots who have, either.” He was back under the dashboard again. “Someday when you’ve got the time, my friend, I could tell you why people talk about God when they get to flying airplanes.”

  He fell into my trap without so much as a by-your-leave. I’d give him enough rope now, just hear him out, and he would hang himself on a limb of “… well … er’s” and vague mumblings that would prove he came no closer to being a preacher of the gospel than he came to working a vat at the soap factory.

  “You go right on ahead, Mister Fly-boy,” I said. “Right now. I am all ears.” I didn’t bother to tell him that I had been to every town revival meeting for the last thirty years, or that I knew more about God and the Bible than he would ever learn in a thousand years, with his tinhorn airplanes. I actually felt a little sorry for him, not knowing who he was talking to. But he had brought it on himself with his ridiculous “flying club” business.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s take a minute and define what we’re talking about. Instead of saying ‘God,’ for instance, let’s say ‘sky.’ Now the sky isn’t God, but for the people who love to fly the sky can be a symbol for God, and it’s not a bad symbol at all, when you think about it.

  “When you’re an airplane pilot, you’re very conscious of the sky. The sky is always up there … it can’t be buried, moved away, chained down, blown up. The sky just is, whether we admit it or not, whether we look at it or not, whether we love it or whether we hate it. It is; quiet and big and there. If you don’t understand it, the sky is a very mysterious thing, isn’t it? It’s always moving, but it’s never gone. It takes no notice of anything unlike itself.” He slipped the dial out of its place, but he kept talking, in no real hurry.

  “The sky always has been, it always will be. The sky doesn’t misunderstand, it doesn’t have hurt feelings, it doesn’t demand that we do anything in any particular way, at any particular time. So that’s not a very bad symbol for God, is it?”

  It is like he was talking to himself, disconnecting lines, easing out the dial, all very slowly and carefully.

  “That’s a pretty poor symbol,” I said, “because God demands …”

  “Now wait,” he said, and I thought he was almost laughing at me. “God demands nothing as long as we ask nothing. But as soon as we want to learn about him, then we run into demands, right? Same way with the sky. The sky demands nothing of us until we want to learn about it, until we want to fly. And then there are all kinds of demands on us, and laws that we have to obey.

  “Somebody said once t
hat religion is a way of finding what is true, and that’s not a bad definition. The pilot’s religion is flight … flight is his way of finding out about the sky. And he has to obey those laws. I don’t know what you call the laws of your religion, but the laws of ours are called ‘aerodynamics.’ Follow them, work with them, and you fly. If you don’t follow them, no amount of words or high-sounding phrases means a thing … you’ll never get off the ground.”

  There I had him. “What about faith, Mister Fly-boy? A man has to have faith …”

  “Forget it. The only thing that matters is following the laws. Oh, you have to have faith enough to give it a try, I guess, but ‘faith’ isn’t the right word. ‘Desire’ is a better word. You have to want to know the sky enough to try the laws of aerodynamics, to see if they work. But it’s following those laws that matters, not whether you believe in them or not.

  “There’s a law of the sky, for instance, that says if you taxi this airplane through the wind at forty-five miles an hour, with the tail down, at the proper weight, it is going to fly. It is going to lift right up off the ground and start moving up into the sky. There are lots of other laws that go on from there, but that one is a pretty basic law. You don’t have to believe in it. You just have to try taking the plane to forty-five miles per hour and then you can see for yourself. You try it enough times, and you can see that it works every time. The laws don’t care whether you happen to believe them or not. They just work, every time.

  “You get nowhere on faith, but you get everywhere on knowing, on understanding. If you don’t understand the law, then sooner or later you’re going to break it, and when you break the laws of aerodynamics you leave the sky mighty fast, I tell you.”

  He came out from under the dashboard and he was smiling, as though he had a particular example in mind. But he didn’t tell me what it was.