Biplane

by Richard Bach

“Clear!”

  Pull the starter knob to send the propeller into a faltering blurred arc. Press the primer knob. And from the exhaust stacks a cloud of blue and a storm of sound. Inspect the cloud under a microscope and you would find tiny drops of oil unburned. Inspect the sound on an oscilloscope and trace a quickchanging world of harsh pointed lines under the reference grid. In neither instrument can the essence of engine start be caught. That essence is unseen, in the thought of the one who controls the bank of switches that bid an engine to life. Get the prop turning, check the oil pressure, let the engine warm up. About 900 rpm for a minute or two. Forward on the throttle until the wheels begin to roll. Taxi to the waiting runway.

  How many times in the history of flight has the routine been followed? From the earliest days, when engine start was the signal for ground crew to throw themselves on the stabilizer, holding a brakeless airplane until the wave of the pilot’s hand. Through the days in the sun of war when engine start was the crashing roaring climax to “Run One . . . mesh One . . .” and the steepfalling whine of the inertia starter. To the days when now and then along the line of the crew’s checklist there is the softest of purring rumbles, and the only visible sign of an engine alive is the quick-rising needle of the tailpipe temperature gage, and the first ripples of heat drifting back from smooth-cowled turbines;

  But for every one, for every single one, engine start is journey start. If you would seek some of the romance of flight, watch when the engines first begin to turn. Pick any place in aviation history, in any kind of airplane, and there is a shard or a massive block of romance, of glory and glamour. The pilot, in the cockpit, readies himself and his airplane. In scores of languages, in a hundred different terms, there comes the moment when one word or one sign means: Go.

  “CLEAR!”

  “CONTACT! “.

  “. . . mesh One.”

  “. . . OK. Start One.”

  “Clear left.”

  “Lightoff.”

  A green flare in the sky.

  A flight leader’s finger, drawing a quick circle in the air.

  “PILOTS. START YOUR ENGINES.”

  “Hit it.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Great black massive propellers slam suddenly around. External power carts stagger and nearly die under instant load of high amperage. The explosion of shotgun starters. Hiss and ground-shaking concussion of compressed-air starters. Rattle and clatter and labored moan of hand-cranked inertia flywheels. The snap and clack of impulse magnetos. Roar of external air to the air-driven turbine starters. Slow soft acceleration of squaretipped turboprop blades.

  From stillness into motion. From death into life. From silence into rising thunder. And each a part of the journey, for every man in every cockpit.

  There is sound and glory, blue smoke and thunder, for anyone who wishes. Descendants of pioneers need not mourn the passing of an untouched frontier; it waits quiet above their heads. Little difference makes the look of the machine that becomes soon a part of the pioneer. He can be on flight orders, with a military commission signed by the president of the nation, riding forty thousand pounds of thrust at twice the speed of sound, protected by inch-thick glass and an artificial atmosphere within his cockpit. Despite the restrictions of the military, he has still his taste of freedom, his sight of the sky. Or he can be on the orders of desire and conscience alone, with an airplane bought instead of a second automobile, traveling a hundred miles per hour and protected from the wind by an eighth inch of plexiglass or by a leather helmet and a pair of goggles.

  The journey has been traveled tens of thousands of times, a trail blazed by Montgolfier and Montgomery and Wright, hewn and cleared by Lincoln Beachy and Glenn Curtiss and Earle Ovington and Jack Knight, paved and smoothed and widened by every man that guided an airplane away from the earth or who spent an hour in the dream of flight. Yet, in the billions of hours that men have been aloft, not one has left a mark in the sky. Into the smooth sky we pull a tiny wake of rippled air. When our airplane is gone, the sky smooths, carefully covering every sign of our passing, and becomes the quiet wilderness that it has always been.

  So call the clear! and starter engaged. Breathe blue smoke and set the wheels to rolling. Oil pressure and temperature and valve the fuel and set the flaps for takeoff. Set propeller revolutions to tremble at the redline, submerge in a sea of sound and bright glory. And go the way along the path, take up the journey in solitude.

  * * *

  Today our task is to cross the land in giant steps, to move as far as we can westward before the sun again wins its race.

  A quick engine runup, feeling again the goodness of being a long way from home and having an engine check out precisely as it should.

  Throttle forward, a cloud of early dust, and we are airborne once again. Splashing green fountains of spring trees roll below as we settle into cruising flight, to share the joy of other machines and other people who are only happy when they are moving.

  The hand on the control stick, testing elevators and rudder, the fingers on the magneto switch, the voice, “Contact!,” each a part of one who seeks horizons lost a thousand years ago. “This time,” the thought. “Maybe this time.” The search, always the search. On a routine trip, over lands crossed daily on Flight 388, from the crowded flight deck of a jet airliner and from the cockpit of a sport airplane, the eyes of the wanderer look down, seeking the hidden; Elysium overlooked, the happy valley undiscovered. Now and again, the wanderer stiffens quickly in his cockpit, points down for the co-pilot to see, banks a wing for a clearer view. But the grass is never quite green enough; those are weeds at the water’s edge, a strip of barren ground between the meadow and the river. Every once in a while the ideal is mirrored in the sky. Every once in a while there is a moment’s perfection: the cloud, hard and brilliant against a hard and brilliant sky. Wind and cloud and sky; common denominators in perfection, eternals. The ground you can change. Rip out the grass, level the hill, pour a city over it all. But rip out the wind? Bury a cloud in concrete? Twist the sky to the image in one man’s mind? Never.

  We search for one goal and find another. We search the visible, holding the polished memory of perfection that was, and in the tens and hundreds and thousands of hours that we drift through the sky we discover a much different perfection. We journey toward a land of joy, and in our search we find the way that other, earlier pilots have scouted before us. They spoke of solitude in the high places, and we find the solitude. They spoke of storms; the storms are there, glowering still. They spoke of high sun and dark skies and stars clearer than ground ever saw; all of them remain.

  If I could talk now to a barnstormer or read his words on the yellowed pages of 1929, he would tell me of flying the south, on the route from Columbia, South Carolina, to Augusta, Georgia. It’s the easiest thing in the world to follow a railroad, but out of Columbia there’s such a twist and tangle of railroad it takes a good eye to sort the tracks that lead to Augusta from the ones that lead to Chattahoochee, to Mirabel, to Oak Hollow. Follow the wrong one, he would say, and you find yourself off in the middle of nowhere, and not much of an idea how to get back.

  And it’s true. Look at the mass of railroads down there! Maybe there’s an air molecule or two around that remembers the flash of his propeller, that might chuckle at my concern, coming along so much later, over precisely the same problem that caused his concern before me. We both must find our way out of the maze, and find it by ourselves. I don’t know what he did, but I look ahead to pick the sharp arrowhead of a lake on course, and fly to that and pick the railroad then, when there is clearly only one choice to make. Perhaps he had a better way. I wish he were around still; I wish that I could look out and see his Jenny or his J-1 Standard smoothing along above the twin rails. But this morning I continue alone, or at least as far as my eyes can see, alone. The history and the tradition and the old molecules are here about me every second. The barnstorming pilots said that the sky was cold and that they froze in their
cockpits. I know now that they kept warm for some time by simply not believing that it could possibly be so cold over the south, where, after all, people come to flee the ice of northern winters. But at last there is no fighting left to be done; the lesson is learned. It gets terribly cold; hard, ice-freezing cold over South Carolina in the morning of a spring day. I used to smile when I heard of the early pilots huddling forward under what little shelter they could get from the windscreen, and shuffling their feet quickly back and forth in odd strange movements just for the sake of moving and keeping the cold at bay.

  I am not smiling now. Instead I discover a technique on my own, over South Carolina. I won’t be so brash as to think that it hasn’t been discovered scores of times before, in the same air, in fact, by scores of early pilots. There is a huge imaginary crank on a shaft thrust through the center of the instrument panel. Turn it. Turn it faster and faster with the right glove, reverse it and turn it faster still with the left glove. If you turn that crank long enough and fast enough, it just barely keeps you from going numb and blue in the cold. And it makes you so tired you can hardly muster strength to look over the icy side and down to check where the winds are drifting you now.

  The sun in South Carolina is timed to begin to warm the air precisely one second before the frost-covered pilot decides to call a halt to all this nonsense and land and start a gasoline fire to warm himself. Fleece-lined leather jacket, woolen flight suits and shirts and rabbit-fur gloves don’t make a bit of difference. The only thing that steps in at that last second is the sun, throwing a billion BTU’s into the earth, and gradually, very gradually, beginning to warm the air. Old pilots, wherever you are now, I can report that the mornings of the South Carolina spring are exactly as you left them.

  Always they looked for places to land should the engine suddenly stop, and always do I. That is one of the old habits that has disappeared. The odds against a modern engine failing during any one flight are astronomical. The odds against it failing during any one moment of any one flight, while the pilot happens to be considering a place to land, is out of the realm of ordinary mathematics. So, beyond a bit of lip service, forced landings in modern airplanes are no longer practiced. Why bother, if an engine will never fail? Spins and spin recoveries have not been taught for years. We have horns and lights that warn against the conditions under which an unknowing pilot can manhandle an airplane into a spin. And if an airplane will never be spun, why bother to teach spin recoveries? Why bother to teach aerobatics? The chance that a pilot could save his life by knowing how to control an airplane when it is in a vertical bank or when it has been tossed upside down are rather remote, because unless one flies into extreme turbulence or crosses the wake of a jet transport, the chances are remote that the airplane will ever know more than a shallow bank. Besides, most modern airplanes are not licensed for aerobatics.

  Gone the old skills. Don’t listen to the wind to tell your airspeed, watch the airspeed indicator and hope that it is correct. Don’t look over the side to gage your altitude, trust the altimeter, and don’t forget to set it properly before each flight. Make the proper numbers appear in the proper dials at the proper time, and you have a first-class automobile with wings.

  But no need for bitterness, for when I say gone the old skills, I don’t speak true. The old skills and the old days are there for those who would seek them out.

  * * *

  One hour, the end of the railroad track, and the town of Augusta. Lower into the warming air, and left-rudder-left-stick in a wide sweeping turn about the airport. There the windsock, saying the winds are almost calm this morning. There a pattern of runways, which I disregard, and rows of grass between, to which I pay very close attention. There the red fuel pumps, with no customer so early in the morning.

  No customers in the sky this morning, either. I am alone. A little more aileron, to bank the wings up vertically and drop quickly toward the grass. Grass isn’t often landed upon at airports, and one must be careful to look at it closely for traces of rabbit holes hidden and gullies crossing. The biplane skims the grasstops and there is not far down to look to see the ground. It looks good for landing.

  Forward on the throttle for a burst of power, a long climbing turn to the left, in a pattern that will bring us lined once again on the grass, this time to land.

  In three minutes I fly the last turn to line up with the grass and have one last chance to look at it. Then, look out, rabbits. All there is ahead is a wide expanse of cherry-lemon fabric, braces and crossbraces humming, a shining aluminum cowl, an oil-sprayed front windscreen, black engine cylinders, the blur of a propeller idling around, here and there a little triangle of sky peeking, to the sides a slow blur of grass flowing, and sudden hard rolling of the wheels on the cold ground and the brittle cold grassblades by the thousands splintering underwheel and this is the time we really go to work on the rudder pedals to keep it straight keep it straight and right about here is where we lost it in the crosswind and remember the way she just started to go around and there was nothing you could do about it left-rudder-right-rudder-left but we just about got this one wired and my gosh it sure didn’t take us long to get stopped and it’s a nice feeling to be under control again and able to S-turn and see ahead and move slowly along.

  An easy turn around, grassblades splintering now only by the scores and if I wanted I could get out right here and walk on the grass. The biplane is no longer an airplane, but a big awkward three-wheeled teetery vehicle pulled along by the most inefficient expedient of a fan turning around on its nose.

  We roll onto the concrete of a taxiway and the bumps and rills of the grass are gone. From traveling through the air of 1929, I have moved, through the process called “landing,” back into the world of new concrete taxiways and will the gasoline, sir, be cash or credit?

  Sometimes, when you taxi back into Modern, they’re a bit too quick on the service. It takes a minute to get the roar out of your ears and you should be allowed a moment to take off your helmet and enjoy taking it off, and feel the calm and enjoy it, and unstrap the seat belt and the parachute harness knowing that any time you can get out and walk around and have a root beer or stand and warm at a heater in the flight office. You can’t envy the pilots who fly the modern sky. You have to feel sorry for them, if they haven’t tucked somewhere away the joy of taking off a brown leather helmet and unstrapping from an old airplane hot-engined after its return to the earth.

  Bright sun. Cold, still; but bright. I am for a moment tempted to seek the warmth of the flight office, and its maps, and its telephone to the great web of information about winds and weather across the country this morning. But aside, temptation, and away, evil thought. One never leaves the needs of an antique for another to fill. A creed among those who fly old airplanes? In part. But more binding, the fact that the pilot is the only one who knows how to service his machine. A simple little thing, to fill a gasoline tank. But one day one pilot was forced to land in a pasture with his propeller standing still and straight in front of him, the pistons of the engine frozen in their cylinders. The one time that he was too cold, and passed the servicing of his old airplane to another, his oil tank was filled with gasoline, for the two tank caps were similar and close together. A stupid mistake, almost an inconceivable one, but the knowledge that it was stupid and that it was inconceivable offered little comfort to him when the propeller ceased to turn.

  The truest reason that I stand this day cold, crouching between the wings, threaded through the jungle of struts and wires and holding the black python of a fuel hose to the tank, is not that I obey a creed or fear another’s error. I stand here because I must learn to know my airplane and give her a chance to know me. In flight, hour on hour, it is the airplane that does the work; engine absorbing many thousand detonations each minute, and heats and pressures that I couldn’t absorb for a second. The wires and the struts and the fabric on the wings are holding in the air twenty-three hundred pounds of airplane and fuel and pilot and equipment and
doing it in a hundred-mile-per-hour wind. On each landing the frail landing-gear struts and the old wheels must stand fast with the strain of that twenty-three hundred pounds coming hard down at sixty miles per hour onto the earth, with its mounds and hollows that keep the force from being smooth. I have only to sit within the cockpit and steer, and even this I do while paying only half attention to the job. The other half of the attention is spent ducking forward out of the wind that keeps us in flight, turning imaginary cranks to keep warm, considering other times, other flights, other airplanes.

  The least, the very least that I can do in atonement is to see to the needs of my airplane before moving selfishly after my own comfort. Were I not at least to care for her during the time that her wheels are on the ground, I would never have the right to ask a special favor of her, now and then, as she flies. The favor, perhaps, of running on though the rain is in solid walls over her engine, or of wires and struts holding fast in the sudden and furious downdrafts of the mountain winds. And perhaps the ultimate favor of tearing herself to shreds on the rocks of a desert forced landing and allowing her pilot to walk away untouched.

  Stopping to think, stopping to analyze as I give her to drink of eighty-octane, I should be able to look with surprise upon myself, and scoff. Asking a favor of an airplane? Letting an airplane get to know you? You feeling all right? But it doesn’t work, I can’t scoff. I’m not living a fantasy; this is quite solid concrete on the quite solid earth of Augusta, Georgia; in my right glove is the hard steel of a fuel-hose nozzle, with gasoline pouring from it down into a very real fuel tank, and the sharp acid vapor of gasoline flooding over me from the tank as I peer past the nozzle to see how much more fuel the tank will hold. Below me the line boy is punching a sharp metal spout into a metal can of engine oil; the cutting scrape of the spout is quick and harsh and it sounds real enough. This doesn’t seem to be a fantasy world, and if it is, it is at least the same familiar fantasy world that I’ve moved through for several years. Strange, that I should not be able to scoff. When I began to fly, I could have scoffed. After flying ten years and two thousand hours, one should be expected to know some of the realities about flying and about airplanes, and not to dwell in fantasy lands.