by Richard Bach
The personality of the biplane filters back to me as we fly. Elevator trim has to be almost full down to keep the nose from climbing when I take my hand from the control stick. Aileron forces are heavy, rudder and elevator forces are light. In a climb, I can push the throttle full forward and get no more than 1750 revolutions per minute from the shining propeller. The horizon is balanced, in level flight, just atop the Number Two and Five cylinder heads. The airplane stalls gently, and before it stalls there is a tapping in the stick, a warning that the nose is about to drop slowly down, even with the control stick pulled back. There’s nothing at all vicious about this airplane. Windy, of course, when you move your head from behind the glass windscreen, and not so quiet as modern airplanes. The wind goes quiet when the airplane is near its stalling speed; it shrieks warnings if it flies too fast. There is a great deal of airplane flying out ahead of the pilot. The forward windscreen clouds over with oil film and rocker-box grease after an hour in the air. When the throttle has been back for a moment, the engine misfires and chokes as it comes forward again. Certainly not a difficult airplane to fly. Certainly not a vicious one.
A circle over the airport now, with its great runways lying white ribbons in the grass. The most difficult time, they say, is the landing. I must look over the field carefully and make sure the runway is clear. When I am ready to land, that big nose will block the view ahead and I can only trust that nothing will wander into my path until I can slow down and begin S-turning to see. There, the field that I will land upon, the grass next to the runway. Away over to the left, the gasoline pumps and a little cluster of people watching.
We slide down a long invisible ramp in the sky, down past two giant poplar trees guarding the approach to the runway. The biplane flies so slowly that there is time to watch the poplars and see how their leaves flutter silver in the wind. Then I look out to the side as the runway appears below, look out to the side and judge the height, gage the height of tall wheels above the grass, and with a shudder the stall and the airplane is down and rolling left-rudder right-rudder keep it straight beside the runway don’t let it get away from you right-rudder now, just a touch of right rudder. And that’s all there is to it. Simple as can be.
Another takeoff, another landing, another bit of knowing tucked away. Somehow, taxiing to the hangar, I’m surprised that it should be so easy to demolish the stories and the grim warnings.
“Evander Britt, you just made a deal.”
The trade is completed in a day, with only an occasional rustle in the forest that shows where a misgiving lurks.
I am owner of a 1929 Detroit-Ryan Speedster, model Parks P-2A.
Goodbye, Fairchild. We have flown many hours and learned many things together. Of instruments humming and the things that happen when they cease to hum, of riding invisible radio beams over Pennsylvania and Illinois and Nebraska and Utah and California, of landings at international airports with jetliners close behind and on beaches with only a gull or a sandpiper to hurry us along. But now there is more to learn, and different problems.
The hangar doors that had opened on a new way of life close now on an old one. Into the front cockpit of the Parks go the sleeping bag and sandwiches and the jug of water, cans of sixty-weight oil and cockpit covers and C-26 spark plugs, tools and tape and a coil of soft wire.
Fill the gas tank to its five-hour brim; a last handshake from Evander Britt. From those who stand near and know where I plan to fly, a few faint words.
“Good luck.”
“Take it easy, now.”
“You be careful, hear?”
A newspaper reporter is interested to find that the biplane is seven years older than its pilot.
Engine started, muttering softly at the bottom of its drum, I buckle into the unfamiliar parachute harness, fasten the safety belt, and jounce slowly over the grass, fanning it back behind me, moving into position for takeoff.
It is one of those times when there is no doubt that a moment is an important moment, one that will be remembered. In that moment, the old throttle goes forward under my glove and the first second of a journey begins. The technical details are here, and crowding about: rpm at 1750, oil pressure at 70 psi, oil temperature at 100 degrees F. The other details are here too, and I am ready to learn again: I can’t see a thing ahead of this airplane when it is on the ground; look how far forward the throttle will move without gaining another revolution from the engine; this is going to be a long and windy journey; note the grassblades growing at the edge of the runway; how quickly the tail is flying and we can skim the ground on the main wheels only. And we’re off. A constant thunder and beating twisting wind about me, but I can hear it all as they are hearing it, on the ground: a tiny hum increasing, for a quick second loud and powerful overhead, then dwindling on down the scale to end in a tiny old biplane quiet against the sky.
2
AS LONG as I’m so few miles from the Atlantic, I’ll fly east to the ocean. Make it a more fitting triumph to have flown literally from one coast to the other; from sea, as it were, to shining sea.
We are aloft, and heading east as the sun grows into a cool setting fireball behind. The shine is gone from the railroad tracks, and shadows have washed together into a dark protecting coat for the ground. I am in daylight still, but that is night seeping up out of the ground and my new old airplane has no lights. Barely airborne, it is time to land.
Five minutes away, down and to our right, a field. A pasture. It is a quarter mile long, with only a single row of trees to make the landing approach an interesting problem. We circle the field three times, the biplane and I, watching closely for ruts and holes and tree stumps and hidden ditches. And in the circling and the watching, the quarter mile of land changes from anonymous old pasture to my pasture; my field, my home for the night, my airport. A few minutes ago this land was nothing, now it is my home. I know that I shall have to land well to the left, paralleling the dirt road, avoiding a jackstraw pile of pine logs near the forest.
For the briefest of moments, a frightened voice. What the devil am I doing here, sitting in a wild old biplane with the sun gone down, circling a pasture with intent to land and a good chance of overlooking one felled tree in the dark grass and adding another twenty-three hundred pounds of kindling to the pile of jackstraws? One last cautious pass. The field looks short, and it looks wet, too. But I am committed to land, short or not, wet or not, kindling or not.
Eighty miles per hour and whistling down over the row of trees. One brief sideslip to lose the last of my altitude, black grass blurring by, the pile of giant logs that were jackstraws a moment ago, and in the last second the world forward is blanked in the long wide nose of my new airplane. For better or . . . for . . . worse. The wheels . . . SLAM down. Instant geysers of high-pressure mud swallow the airplane in flying spray and I fight, I just hang on and fight to keep her straight it takes forever to stop we should be stopped by now and we’re just barely beginning to slow and the mud is still roaring up from the wheels and I can feel it wet on my face and the world goes dim as it sprays my goggles and we should be stopped by n . . . BAM! what was that the tail, something has snapped in the tail and HANG ON! We finish our mud-landing with a hard wrench to the right, with a great sheet of liquid brown thrown in a tenth second to be a solid storm of mud over airplane and grass for a hundred feet around. We slide to a stop with our tall wheels four inches down in the sodden ground. Switches off and the engine stops and we are forlorn and unmoving, wrapped in a blanket of deepest silence.
Across the field, a bird chirps, one time.
What a landing. Something is broken, for the Parks is twisted, her nose high in the air. So this is what it was like in the old days of flying. A pilot was on his own. If I would live the old days, I must be on my own.
It is clear, in a moment, that nothing will happen and nothing will move unless I make it happen and unless I make it move. We will sit together, the biplane and I, to freeze into mud and all eternity unless I break this si
lence and move around and find out what damage I have done.
So, while night oozes up out of the mud, I stir and climb over the side of my cockpit to step squishing down and look fearfully upon the tailwheel. It does not look good. Only the tip of the wheel shows round beneath the fuselage, and I am certain that the axle has been smashed and twisted beyond any hope of repair.
But, lying in the mud, pointing a flashlight, I discover that it is not so, that only a small shock cord has broken, allowing the wheel to fold backward. The cord replaced by a length of nylon rope from my front-cockpit supply depot, the wheel rotates down once again into position, ready for other fields to conquer. The work takes ten minutes.
So this is how it was. A pilot handled his own problems as they came, and he went without help wherever he felt like going.
In modern aviation there is a runway for every man, and scores of people earn their living by helping the pilot in need. And mind your conduct, pilot, when the control tower is watching.
What would they have thought, those pilots who barnstormed alone in the Parks and her sisters across the meadows and the early years of flight? Perhaps they would have seen how wonderful it all is today, at the big airports. But perhaps, too, they would have shaken their heads a bit sadly and flown back into the days when they are free and on their own.
Here, in my muddy pasture, I have followed them. This is a barnstormer’s field. No control tower or runway here, no fuel-and-oil service, no follow-me truck to tell me where to park. There is not a trace of the present, there is not a hint of time in the air. If I wish, I can find reference in the papers and cards I carry to years labeled 1936 and 1945 and 1954 and May, 1964. And I can burn them all. I can burn them and squash their ashes down into this black mud and press more mud over them, and there I would be, all alone, way out in the middle of now.
Darkness gathers full about us, and I spread my waterproof cockpit cover on the ground beneath the left wing, and the sleeping bag upon the cover, where it will be dry. The only sounds in the whole field, quarter mile long and rimmed in uncut forest, are the sound of a sleeping bag straightened over a canvas cockpit cover and a sound of cold chicken sandwiches unwrapped.
Stretched out beneath the wing of my airplane, I sleep, but wake later in the cold of the night. Above me the sky is moving its fresh cold dark silent way to its own secret horizons. I have watched the sky for hours uncounted and followed it, and crossed horizons with it, and still have not begun to tire. The everchanging, fascinating sky. The airplane, of course, is the key. It makes the sky accessible. As astronomy without a telescope can be uninteresting, so the sky without an airplane. One can watch only so much before he is sated, but when he can participate, when he can move himself through the halls of cloud in the day and travel from star to star in the night, then he can watch with knowing, and does not have to imagine what it would be like to walk those halls and those stars. With an airplane, he can learn to know the sky as an old friend, and to smile when he sees it. No prodding the memory nor need to keep reminders. A glance through a window, a walk along a crowded or along a secluded street, at noon or at midnight. The sky of now is always here, moving; and we, watching, share a part of its secret.
I rest, tonight, partly beneath a white-flour moon and partly beneath a wing of wooden ribs that carries struts and wires to support another wing of wooden ribs above it. This is not happening years ago, I rest here now. The barnstormers? They live with the same moon and the same stars. Their time has not gone, it is still about us.
I wonder about my new biplane. She has spent many calendars safe in a silent hangar, and has been cared for patiently, and rarely flown. The rain did not touch her, nor the sun, nor the wind. And here she is in the mud of a cold night field, sheathed in dirt and water mixed, with dew beading on her wings. Around her no black hangar air, but the sky and stars. Knowing where she is, Evander Britt would wince and turn away. The last remaining Detroit-Parks P-2A flying, the very last, priceless; and tonight, you say, in the MUD?
I have to smile. For I truly think, with no need for guile, that she is happier here. For fields and mud she was built, with fields and mud and nights under the stars in mind she was set from designer’s pen to paper. Designed to make her living flying passengers on joyrides from pastures and crossroads, from green-summer county fairs and in rainbow air circuses traveling, traveling. She was designed to be flown.
The pages of the aircraft logbook, buried now under tool kit and tiedown ropes, are a document of flight, a memory in ruled paper.
“DATE: May 14, ’32, DURATION OF FLIGHT: 10 min. NUMBER OF PASSENGERS: 2.” Page after page of five-minute and ten-minute flights, just time for one takeoff, one circle of the field, one landing. Occasionally, in the REMARKS column: “Total passengers carried to date—810.” A few pages further; “Total passengers—975.” Between these, the column makes minor reference that all landings were not smooth. “Propeller removed and straightened.” “Wingtip repaired.” “Tailwheel replaced.” In September, 1939: “Passengers—1,233,” and the next entry: “Aircraft prepared for storage.”
If he had not been able to sell the airplane soon, Evander Britt had said, he was going to give her to the National Air Museum, the last aircraft of her type, and a symbol of her time.
Which would you choose, airplane, polished linoleum floors and a life secure behind purple-velvet rope, or the insecurities of mud and moonlight, of bent propellers and wingtips for repair?
A good question for the pilot, too. There can be the security of polished floors and velvet ropes for him, too. No need to be thundering about the countryside, to be tackling highly improbable odds, when he can be forever safe behind a desk. There is only one sacrifice to be made for that security. To be safe he has only to sacrifice living. In safety there are no fears to conquer, no obstacles to overcome, no wild screaming dangers stalking behind the fence of our mistakes. If we wish, velvet ropes, and a single word on the wall: “Silence.”
A mist has risen from the damp earth of the field, and under the moon it is a field of spun glass glowing. What is this like? To what does it compare? I consider for a long time, to discover that it compares to nothing I have ever known. An airplane teaches many things, but always before I have learned in the air, while flying. When the airplane was on the ground, the lesson was over. But tonight, in a nameless field in North Carolina, the airplane huge above me, casting a quiet black shadow across my sleeping bag, I am still learning. Will I never stop learning from airplanes? How can there be room in tomorrow for still another lesson?
The biplane stands serene and unmoving. She seems very sure that there will be room for a lesson tomorrow.
3
ADVENTURES BEGIN with the sun. By the time the mist is gone, and the mud dry on the wings, the biplane and I begin our first full day together. The only sounds in the field are the unusual ones of cylinders 1–3–5–2–4 slowly, over and again while the bright blade flickers around.
I pace the field in front of the plane, moving blown tree branches and occasional stones aside, marking the holes that could give difficulty. This first part of the takeoff is critical, before the weight has gone from the wheels into the wings.
The 1–3–5–2–4 comes fainter and fainter as I pace, a soft sewing machine stitching quietly away to itself. If someone wanted, he could dash to the biplane, push the throttle forward, and be gone. I know that the field is deserted, but still I am glad to return and work closer to the biplane.
Sleeping bag stowed in its tight fluffy cylinder and strapped in the front cockpit, giant fan-wind whirring past once again to establish a pattern of familiar, we are ready to say goodbye to a field that has been friend and tutor.
The thought flag comes down, checkered, and a single word: Go. Center of a roaring hemisphere of 1-3-5-2-4 round and round 1750 times a minute, moving slowly at first on heavy wheels, jouncing. Then faster. Then skipping from peak to tiny peak. Splashing mud in the first second, then spattering it, then spraying
it hard, then skimming it, then leaving it smooth and untouched, casting down a shuddering black shadow.
Goodbye, field.
A railroad track points east, and so does the nose of the Parks. For the decision to fly from coast to coast, for the poor human frailty of wanting to tie things in neat packages with colorful bows just so, we fly east on our journey west. Because of an intangible unseen whim, a most seen and quite tangible old biplane whirs and thrashes through the sky, above a railroad track, reaching for the Atlantic Ocean.
Ahead, the sun rises from a golden sea. I need railroad tracks no longer, and shift my navigation from dull rails to a blinding star.
Sometimes there are so many symbols about me in the air that it is surprising I can see to fly. I become a symbol, myself. Which is a glorious sort of feeling, for there are so many meanings for me that I can inspect the meaning-bin and carefully select the one that looks best and feels best for this day and this hour. And all good meanings, and real.
What shall I be, this moment? For that part of me that keeps a cautious and uneasy distance from meanings, I am the holder of Commercial Airman’s Certificate 1393604, with the privileges of flight instructor, rated for instrument flying and to control single- and multi-engine land airplanes through the air and along the ground as necessary to accomplish the mission of flight. For that part of me, I am 5.27 miles from the Wilmington Omnirange, on the 263-degree radial, at 2,176 feet pressure altitude at 1118 hours Greenwich Mean Time on the 27th day of April in the 1,964th year of the Gregorian Calendar, New Style.
The fuselage of the airplane I fly is painted Stearman Vermilion, Randolph stock number 1918, the wings and tail are Champion Yellow, Randolph stock number unknown but very definitely and precisely listed somewhere in the dusty records of a forgotten drawer in a lost attic away over the horizon. A very precise airplane, every bolt and joint and stitch of it. Not only Detroit-Ryan Speedster, Model Parks P-2A, but serial number 101, registration number N499H, built December, 1929, and licensed January, 1930, under Aircraft Type Certificate 276.