by Max Hennessy
‘Everything stowed?’ he asked.
‘Everything stowed, Ira. Earth inductor on course.’
He paused. ‘I’d have been happier with the Viking pump,’ he said, ‘and our old compass. You might as well get that on record in the log just in case.’
Woolff had joined Sammy and Collins alongside the machine. He seemed to guess what Ira was worrying about. ‘It’s a new pump,’ he yelled. ‘It was built specially for us. I told ’em about the cams and the spindles and they strengthened ’em.’
‘They said they’d had one like it working for sixty-five hours without trouble,’ Sammy added.
‘I hope we can trust ’em.’ Ira said. He paused, still concerned with the shortage of revs.
‘Let’s listen to the engine again.’ He gestured to Collins and Woolff and revved the engine, staring narrow-eyed through the circle of light where the propeller revolved. The sound of the engine was smooth and powerful, and he cut the throttle.
‘You won’t get better,’ Collins yelled up to him. Behind him, Woolff gave him a nervous smile. He seemed more worried than Ira. Ortese nodded.
‘She sounds perfect,’ he said.
‘Sammy?’
‘Ira, you’ll never have a better engine under you.’
Ira grinned and buckled his safety belt. ‘That’s what I thought.’
Ahead of him, he could see the first streaks of day showing in the east, a low bar of light along the horizon. Houses were taking shape around him in the distance now, and the low outline of the tree-fringed hill by the golf course. Somewhere out there, unseen still, were the telegraph wires he had to clear. He could see the poles now, faint sticks against the first light of the sky.
Sammy waved and pointed. ‘Lindbergh,’ he said.
Ira glanced in the direction he was pointing and saw headlights moving towards them down the field, and the faint outlines of an aeroplane’s wings.
‘They’ve still to fuel up,’ Sammy shouted. ‘It’ll be eight o’clock before he gets off.’
Ira glanced across the cabin at Alix. She was not wearing gloves and he could see her knuckles were white and the map of New York and Long Island was creased where she gripped it.
She caught his eye on her and her mouth jerked in a small smile, and Ira signalled to the men standing beside the plane and pulled down his goggles.
‘Let’s go,’ he shouted, and they stepped back to where Loerner was waiting with Boyle and the parson and the small group of newspapermen.
Sammy took up his position alongside Mae and Ira saw her grab for his bandaged hand nervously. Sammy turned his head towards her, startled, as though surprised that she should be at all doubtful about the outcome, then he waved at Ira.
‘Keep ’em flying, Ira,’ he yelled in a high cracked voice.
Ira waved back and he saw the chocks jerked away from the wheels, then, crouching forward in his seat, as though he were urging the machine forward, he grasped the control column and thrust the throttle wide open.
* * *
For a moment, it seemed as though the thunderous roar of the engine were merely an illusion and that the circle of light where the propeller revolved were not part of the machine. For a while there appeared to be no sign of movement forward, then, glancing down at the wheel alongside him, Ira saw the tyre was moving slowly over the grass, the water oozing out of the ground under its weight.
It seemed strange and unreal, as did Loerner struggling beyond the wing tip with an arguing reporter. As the plane edged forward, Loerner gave the reporter a shove, snatched off his hat, and his blank suspicious face broke into a wide grin as he began to wave it hysterically. Alongside him, the reporter stared indignantly at him for a second, then he, too, snatched off his hat and began to wave.
Woolff and the Wright engineers and a couple of officials had laid their weight behind the struts and began to push, their clothes blown flat against their bodies by the propeller blast, their skin plastered by the muddy water that was blown into their faces, and, lifting his gaze, Ira saw Sammy staring enviously at him as he slipped slowly out of sight. Beside him, Boyle watched. He had been waving his battered hat but he was grasping it now in both hands, twisting it with apprehension, leaning towards his right as though he might urge the heavy machine forward with his own will; and, as though on a screen and detached, Ira saw the crowd cheer and the reporters lift their pencils and make a note on their newspapers of the time of departure.
The wheel alongside began to move faster, though it was still desperately sluggish, anchored to the ground by the soft earth and the rain. His eyes flickering over the dials, Ira wondered suddenly if the engine were failing him at the last moment, then he realised the crowd had slid away behind him at last and that the machine was beginning to pick up speed. Woolff was running alongside the wing tip now, and Ira could see him shouting, urging the machine forward, then, as the speed increased, he, too, fell away behind, panting.
Pushing the stick forward, trying to get the tail up, well aware that with that enormous tank in the fuselage behind him the machine was tail-heavy to a dangerous degree, Ira could see that the sky was already fractionally lighter ahead of him and the band of light on the horizon broader. Feeling the stick quivering in his hand, he was aware of Alix leaning forward, too, as though she also were trying to urge her weight to the nose to ease the load on the tail.
‘Tail’s up, Ira.’
The machine still felt sluggish, sullen and even unstable as the weight of the petrol shifted. Unless they could get up sufficient speed, unless it accepted its burden, they were in danger of stalling on take-off, held down by their own tremendous weight. The sound of the engine sounded thin and insufficient and, with none of the feeling of urgency in the aircraft that it had given before, it was as though Ira were trying to lift off the ground something that was dragging anchors across the turf.
He glanced quickly down alongside him and saw the spinning tyre and the shuddering landing gear. This was where Fonck had failed. If he once allowed the Dixie to change course, all the tremendous weight would be thrown across the axis of the wheels, and the undercarriage would collapse. A wing tip would touch as they slewed round, and the result would be a fiery death like Cluff’s.
He thrust the thought from his mind and concentrated on what he was doing. Beside him, he was aware of Alix sitting rigidly, her thoughts the same as his, her mind as aware as his of the dangers.
He eased back on the stick now, trying to raise the nose from the ground, trying to judge the exact spot where the machine would lift, and he felt the controls grow more taut and knew that the speed had built up sufficiently for the wings to bite at the air. With the load they were carrying, all the accepted positions for the tachometer needle were pointless. It depended entirely on his own skill and whether he had enough experience to judge when and how to lift the Dixie from the ground.
They were approaching the halfway mark now and the speed was approaching sixty-five miles an hour and he could feel the wings finally beginning to support the weight of the machine. But the runway seemed as though it would never be long enough. The halfway mark blurred past in a flash of white and, as the machine lurched a little on a patch of uneven ground, Ira’s heart thumped heavily in his chest as he waited for the dangerous swing that might collapse the strained undercarriage or burst the overweighted tyres.
The grass was a green blur now and there was a surging power in the engine at last, a feel that told him that the machine was beginning to ride on the air instead of the wheels. His eyes were glued to the runway now and he could no longer take them away to glance at the instruments. From this point on, it was the sense of his hands and ‘the seat of his pants’ – the feeling an experienced pilot had for his machine, the sure knowledge that he was safe – that would tell him when to make the final decision.
The machine bounced and everything rattled and creaked as it came down heavily. If he didn’t get off now, it would be almost too late, because they were beyond th
e point when they could still stop in the length of the runway. If he left it too late, the plane would smash over the perimeter of the field, ploughing ahead still at full speed with all its tremendous weight to give it a momentum that could only result in disaster because behind them were one and a half tons of fuel poised to crash down on the hot engine and explode into flames.
The wheels were off the ground at last and the rumbling beneath them ceased abruptly, but the sluggish machine settled again, canted over at a dangerous angle, and he saw spray shoot over the wing as the wheels brushed the surface of a puddle. Then they were lifting again, the end of the field rushing towards them, and he could see the narrow sticks of the telegraph poles growing swiftly larger. The machine bounced again, lurched, one wing low, dipped and straightened as he corrected with the stick, and he sensed, rather than saw, Alix’s fingers tense on the edge of the chart.
They were climbing now, still lopsided, but climbing, poised in the rush of air past the surface of the wings. It was now when they were most vulnerable. He had to lift them over the telephone wires, yet he dared not try too soon or too quickly or they would lose forward movement and stall. The machine had only just reached flying speed and was still labouring and now was the moment when he had to exercise the greatest care.
There was no longer any stopping, though. He could only go on now, trying to hold the machine up, careful not to climb an inch too much, praying they’d have acquired sufficient of those precious feet in height before they reached the wires.
A tractor flashed below him to his right, then the wires were immediately ahead of him, looping in long arcs across his path. His heart thumping, he saw them slide beneath them, with a matter of a dozen feet to spare, and saw pale uplifted faces watching them from the fringes of the golf course. The hill lay just ahead and he turned to the right slightly to avoid it, putting on only the shallowest bank in the knowledge that too much would cause them to lose speed and slide off the turn into the ground.
He hardly dared use the controls, so fine was the point on which they were balanced, but the machine was beginning to climb faster now and the trees on the hill slid away behind them so that his chest heaved in what he felt was the first breath he’d drawn since he’d opened the throttle.
They were a bare 200 feet from the ground still, by no means sufficient for safety, especially with that tremendous weight of fuel behind them, then he saw Alix glance at him and realised that, except for the tightening of her fingers on the maps, she had hardly moved since they’d started their run.
He looked cautiously at the tachometer. It was still reading short but the revs hadn’t fallen any further, and levelling off slightly he eased the throttle back gently. Trimming the aircraft a little with the stabiliser, he felt it become easier under his hand and for the first time he realised how tightly he was gripping the stick.
He throttled back again, sensing that the machine was safe at last, that they were riding on the air with taut controls.
‘Sixty-three degrees, Ira,’ Alix called out above the roar of the engine, and he moved the stick to bank cautiously on to course.
‘Sixty-three,’ he repeated. ‘On course.’
He turned his head towards her at last and his stiff face slowly relaxed in a smile. She was watching him with large eyes that were scared and proud at the same time.
‘I wouldn’t like to do that again in a hurry,’ he said.
Chapter 7
You never your life your own can make
Unless you’re willing that life to stake.
The old jingle his father had been fond of quoting to his mother when she had complained about the risks he took in the fragile machines he’d built with their always dubious motors came back to Ira now as the Dixie laboured upwards above the estates and truck farms of Long Island. Though in the end his father had paid with his life for his desire to master the air, there must have been moments like this one, Ira knew – as one of his frail constructions had lifted off the ground – when he’d felt like a god, moments no earthbound creature could ever know or understand. Sitting alone in a fragile machine of metal, wood and fabric, supported by the pull of a single uncertain propeller, he had been a man in command of his own destiny, staking all he possessed, even to the final sacrifice, in the belief that it had to be staked for the sake of knowledge and truth and all the things that made a life worth living – just as his son and his passenger were doing now, fourteen years later.
They too were alone now, achingly alone with their own poor courage, beyond the reach of any help if anything went wrong, beyond help and alone from the moment Ira had opened the throttle at the end of Roosevelt Field.
There had been better aviators than he was, Ira knew, but a lot of them were dead because their luck had run out when they hadn’t expected it to. Men had been lost in combat or in peacetime cross-country flying simply because fortune had turned its back on them. Harry Hawker, who’d tried to fly the Atlantic in 1919, had known all there was to know about aircraft. He’d designed them himself, had built them and test-flown them, but he’d had to ditch his plane, nevertheless, because some trivial obstruction had caused his radiator to boil. His luck hadn’t been entirely out on that day, however, and he’d been rescued, only for it to vanish two years later when his machine had blown up in the air. John Alcock, who’d been first across the neck of the North Atlantic, had not lasted more than six months after his flight before he’d hit a tree trying to land in fog. Aviation had never been a profession for people who feared death.
* * *
The map alongside him rattled and he saw Alix glance at him. She had hardly spoken since they’d climbed into the machine, but the tension had gone from her now and he saw she was relaxed, sufficiently a pilot to know that the first worst hazard had passed. The engine had done all they’d asked of it and the Dixie had proved that all Hal Woolff’s calculations had been right. She was no longer just a question mark, a guess despite all the figures.
Danger wasn’t behind them, however, and wouldn’t be for another thirty-six hours – longer if weather or luck were against them – but they had to face their obstacles in stages, and the first stage was safely in the shadows. The second obstacle was getting themselves on course, because without a correct beginning they would be wrong all the way and, since a great part of their flight would be in darkness, they had to be accurate. From now on, they could only put their faith in the knowledge of other men that was written into the testimony of their maps and charts. They could not afford to doubt the printed sheets they held in their hands because without them they were blind. With those sheets they held the earth spread before them, all its routes and turnings clear before their eyes.
Almost as though she sensed his thoughts, he saw Alix was looking for landmarks below to check against the map, watching for the bays and buildings and the curves of land that corresponded to the symbols under the ink line they’d drawn across the paper.
Now that they’d cleared the field and were nearing the sea, they had run into mist again – the grey haze off the Atlantic moving down from the north, which had just cleared sufficiently over Long Island to allow them to become airborne. They were still flying low because it was possible at that altitude to pick up their landmarks through the murk. Ahead of them they could see the broken shoreline and beyond it the steely grey of Long Island Sound with its little indentations, villages and farms and the groups of big holiday homes.
‘Looks better ahead,’ Alix observed. ‘Mist’s thinner and the clouds are higher, too.’
They were suddenly at ease together after the days and weeks of strain, and Ira settled himself in his seat, watching the dashboard, while Alix watched the ground. Oil pressure, oil temperature, fuel pressure – all normal. Tachometer building up a little as it should. Speed 103. Compass reading 63. Altitude 500 feet. He moved the rudder a little to bring the machine’s nose on to course.
‘Let’s work round the tanks,’ he said above the engine. ‘We don’t
want fuel slopping through the vents if we hit bumpy weather. Put her on to nose tank first.’
Alix’s hand moved to the cocks and Ira nodded. ‘Centre, nose, right wing, left wing, main,’ he said. ‘Let’s work round them for a while, then we’ll go on to main and get rid of the nose heaviness, and then back on to rotation. Note ’em in the log.’
They were flying over the mouth of the Nissequogue River now, under a layer of grey stratus, and, ahead of them, about two miles away, distinct through the clearing haze, Crane Neck Point stuck out into Long Island Sound in a narrow curve of land marked by circling sea birds.
‘You’ll see New Haven on your left,’ Alix said.
Now that they were away from the land and above the haze, the light was that full crystal light that only aviators knew and the cabin was flooded with a glow.
‘Aeroplane on your left.’ Alix tapped his arm and pointed and, glancing across the cabin, Ira saw a Jenny approach, looking like an insect at first, sidling towards them, then growing larger as it turned in front and took up a position alongside. A man was standing in the rear cockpit, a camera levelled at them. The pilot waved and Alix lifted her hand. It would make a good picture: The Dixie’s farewell to New York.
‘I bet they were disappointed we didn’t do a Fonck,’ she commented.
Outrun by the more powerful Dixie, the Jenny soon fell behind, and as they left the land behind them the machine lurched in the rougher air above the junction of land and water, and Ira glanced quickly at the wings. They were lifting far more weight than they ought and were moving enough to worry him.
‘Let’s hope we don’t get much of this,’ he said.
They had reached a height of a thousand feet now, and as they left the shore behind them the turbulence subsided and the Dixie rode easily on the air again as they began to head across Long Island Sound. In the distance in the increasing light through a patch of clearing haze, they could already see the faint shadow of the Connecticut coastline.