by Paul Lally
Final score? Fascists: 1 -- World: 0.
In the middle of all this crap, here’s what caught my attention. For some odd reason, Pan American Airlines was still flying airplanes, which surprised many people, but not me. I figured its president Juan Trippe had cut some kind of secret deal with the Germans that allowed his big silver birds to keep making money for his airline. That’s how Trippe was.
‘War? What war? Let’s get down to business, boys.’
By contrast, American Airlines and United Airlines had had their wings clipped on all their coastal operations. Me? I had my wings taken away literally. But don’t blame Pan Am. They prefer sober pilots in the cockpit and I had turned up drunk. Twice, actually. If I had been Trippe, I’d have pulled my wings too. But in my case, I handed them over before they lowered the boom. Regardless of what had happened to me to create this situation, no matter how justifiable my behavior, company rules were company rules and I had broken them.
On purpose.
‘New York’s coming up to starboard,’ I shouted back to Orlando.
‘Keep clear of it, you hear? It’s still glowing.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing there now but a big hole in the ground.’
‘Better safe than sorry.’
He had a point. It had cost me five hundred dollars to bribe Air Compliance Control for our extended flight plan to Key West. I wasn’t about to lose it by violating their precious airspace. I patted the polished oak control yoke. How many times in the past had my sweaty hands gripped this very wheel under very different circumstances?
This particular S-38, NC-6000, had a previous life before becoming a hangar queen for the Providence charter outfit, where I had bought her and changed her call sign to ‘Carter Air 45.’ She had once been the star performer of Pan American’s fledgling airline service from Miami to Havana in the early 1930s. In her heyday, she had flown fun-seeking passengers, pockets full of gambling money, from Pan Am’s Key West seaplane base down to swinging and swaying Havana for a fun-and-sex-filled weekend.
I know, because I was flying in the right hand seat and Captain Fatt, my mentor, the left.
Together we’d skim across the smooth waters, lift off and begun that familiar, slow, lazy climb to twenty-five hundred feet where we would weave in and out of the puffy cumulous clouds and make our way south across the Florida Straits. Weather permitting we could cover the ninety miles separating our two nations in less than an hour and deliver our passengers safe and sound to the Havana’s Prohibition-free, bar-filled streets.
I glanced over at the empty co-pilot’s seat and remembered a younger, happier Sam Carter sitting in that very same spot ten years earlier, hands in his lap, patiently waiting for Fatt to swing the wheel over to his side and say in his gravelly voice, ‘You have the aircraft, kid.’
‘I have the aircraft, sir.’
‘Maintain your heading, I’m going back to mingle.’
And with that, he would heave up his bulk from the left-seat and ease back into the passenger compartment. Already snug quarters with seating for twelve, Fatt’s presence made it burst at the seams. But happily so.
As I flew along, I would do my best to eavesdrop on his smooth banter, trying to learn his secret of mixing drinks for the passengers using the small bar built into the back of the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the paying customers. The plane’s original plans had called for isolating these two areas. But Juan Trippe understood the value of a captain mingling with his customers and modified it. Captain Fatt’s dominating physical presence not only reassured them to the safety of aviation, it also guaranteed future flights would be booked on our small airline, not some rival.
Pan Am was tiny back in 1929 when I first started working there. Trippe had opened service out of Key West using under-powered Fokker Tri-planes, lots of prayer, and miles of baling wire. I joined them a few months later as an eager nineteen year-old radio operator, after lying that I knew all about it. But after studying my head off the night before my final interview, I managed to bluff my way through the tests the next day, and kept at it until I actually did learn Morse code and communicated with the Pan Am planes flying back and forth across the Straits carrying passengers and mail.
But I didn’t want to pound a Morse Key the rest of my life. I wanted to fly. I already had my license. Against my father and mother’s wishes, I had run away from Key West at seventeen to help build runways for the airmail routes. Along the way I got flying lessons here and there from airmail pilots who took my hard-earned money, stuffed me in the front seat of a beat-up Jenny J-4 biplane and showed me the difference between a slip and a crab, a bank and a turn until I finally got the idea and soloed.
Don’t get me wrong. Saying you’ve soloed an airplane is like saying ‘I took my first step.’ There’s a lot more to walking than that. And don’t forget running, leaping, jumping and twisting. Flying’s the same way; everything’s new and different and scary, then you do it over and over again until it becomes second nature, and then disappears completely and your hands and feet and head and heart become one with the stick and rudder pedals and ailerons and elevator and you’re no longer flying an airplane, you’re just flying.
A big BANG from the back.
‘Try it now,’ Orlando shouted,
I cranked the landing gear handle. Something clicked, and the drawbars on both wings rose, lifting the wheel struts in turn, and the tires pivoted smoothly into the ‘up’ position.
‘Perfect!’
‘Now the other way.’
‘You sure?’
‘Trust in the Lord.’
I did as I ordered. They worked perfectly.
Orlando dropped down into the right seat. He stroked the chipped and battered instrument panel.
‘Poor girl’s been through a lot.’
I pointed down. ‘So has New York.’
We were still well outside the ‘No-Fly’ zone, but even so, any minute I imagined Me-109’s swooping down on us like greyhounds toying with a groundhog. I leveled off at two thousand feet. From here difficult to see much of the atomic bomb damage. The summer ground haze didn’t make it any easier. But what I could see matched up with the devastating photographs and newsreels that had flashed across the nation during that terrible week. That had been in black-and-white. This was full color.
Right around 82nd street, you could see a radical change in the skyline. From the beginning of the Manhattan Island down to that spot, the shapes of various apartments and office buildings and skyscrapers reached upwards like so many different fingers and thumbs. But from 82nd street down to the Battery, like a giant foot had crushed everything flat. In a white-hot, shattering instant, the nuclear blast formed a crater a half-mile across and destroyed a full third of the island. Final casualty counts were over eight-five thousand dead and wounded. New Yorkers never saw it coming. Neither did Washingtonians. How could they?
Afterward the Nazis bragged how their two-stage A9-10 intercontinental rockets had performed flawlessly on their four-thousand mile, pre-emptive strikes. Newsreels showed simulated animation footage of the two-stage beasts lifting off their launch pads at Peenemünde. At sixty-thousand feet, the first stage burnt out and fell to the ground by parachute, while the second stage accelerated to over three thousand miles-an-hour and became a silent, nuclear-tipped poison dart.
‘Time to be good citizens,’ I said, and turned on the radio. For a moment I forgot the assigned frequency. Then it came to me, and with it a flash of anger at what I had to do. I let it pass before I keyed the microphone.
‘New York Control, Carter Air four-five is with you at two thousand feet, heading two-ten degrees.’
Hiss, crackle; lousy radios. Then a German-accented voice, clipped and precise: ‘Carter Air four-five, why are you not at your assigned altitude of three thousand meters?’
‘In-flight emergency.’
A long hissing wait. ‘You are declaring an emergency?’
‘Roger, maintain proper separation from no-fly zone, according to procedures.’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Be advised your approved flight plan closes at--’ the voice paused. I could almost hear the chromium steel gears meshing in his Nazi brain as he performed the calculation. ‘Zero-two hundred hours tomorrow.’
I felt like somebody had punched me. ‘My flight plan was approved for twenty-four hours. You cut it in half.’
‘That is the plan I have before me.’
‘With all due respect, there’s been a mistake. I can’t fly non-stop to Key West, Florida. That’s over sixteen hundred miles from here. I have to refuel, I have to sleep.’
‘You will land your aircraft on or before zero-two hours hundred tomorrow morning. If you wish, you may re-apply for an additional flight plan to continue your journey. New York Control, out.’
I stared at my microphone as if the Nazi was going to climb out of it, give me a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute and click his heels to seal the deal.
Orlando said, ‘If it’s any help, I can fly while you sleep.’
‘You’ll have to. Those lobsters go out at noon tomorrow.’
‘Want me to take over?’
I thought about his earlier handling of the controls. ‘Not yet. Let me think this through.’
The first lesson I learned from Captain Fatt when he taught me to fly the S-38 was that if I got myself back on the ground safely, the passengers behind me would too - which meant I didn’t have to over-think about being responsible for their lives.
‘We’re in this together, kid,’ he said. ‘And it’ll all come out right in the end if you keep your eye on the runway ahead, not the runway behind.’
Our current ‘runway’ was in Key West, Florida, and I had to get there practically non-stop before my flight plan expired. If we were still in the air when it happened, an escort of Messerschmitt’s would be sitting on our tail within minutes; their cannons armed and gun sights hot. That’s how organized these people were in their so-called ‘compliance’ duties. It made me mad, but it also made me scared.
What kind of world were we living in?
I re-worked the numbers: our plane’s range was roughly seven hundred miles a leg, but since we had easily lost a third of our fuel because of that crappy compression joint, we would have to make the hop in three jumps, starting with a re-fueling stop somewhere north of Baltimore. Then on to Savannah, Miami, and finally home.
It would take thirteen hours of steady flying. Not impossible. My time as a first officer in Pan American’s four-engine China Clippers involved Pacific Ocean over-water flights much longer than that on a regular basis. But we had relief crews to spell us every four hours like they do on ocean liners.
Not this time.
Just me and the control wheel and a ham-fisted mechanic who could hold the plane at altitude if I fell out of my seat from exhaustion. But no way was that going to happen. Not on my watch.
‘Where’s that coffee?
Two sips later, the caffeine jolt rippled through my system and my lips literally tingled. ‘Tell me again where you learned how to make this stuff.’
‘Mama’s recipe.’
‘Which is?’
‘A secret.’
‘C’mon.’
Orlando rubbed his heavy jaw and smiled. ‘Let’s just say there’s a little something extra in it.’ He raised his cup, which looked like an acorn in his enormous hand. ‘Here’s to Carter Aviation. Long may it prosper.’
‘Amen to that.’
We both sipped.
I raised my cup in return. ‘Death to the Nazis.’
‘Hallelujah to that.’
The weather forecast called for CAVU - ceiling and visibility unlimited - from Providence south as far as Washington, D.C. But after that things got iffy. Two days ago a low pressure system had shouldered its way across the plains and bucked up flat against a high pressure system stretching from Louisiana to Ohio. The resulting clusters of thunderstorm cells were now marching their way southeast. My original flight plan would have let me slide past unscathed as they worked their way off the North Carolina coast and out to sea. But with the Nazis cutting my flight plan in two, it would be a race against bad weather that I knew we couldn’t win.
If worse came to worse, we could always put down on either water or land, now that Orlando had the gear working. But just to be sure, I cycled it up and down.
Orlando grinned and patted instrument panel. ‘What’s it like to fly this old bird again?’
‘Same tricks, just older, that’s all.’
‘Was this the very plane where...’ he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. I knew what he was driving at, and for some ridiculous reason I felt myself blushing. ‘As a matter of fact it was.’
‘So, the newlyweds really…?’
‘I don’t know. We pulled the curtains.’
It had been a last minute, weekend charter job, just two months after I got Pan Am pilot’s wings. A wealthy real estate speculator had married a chorus girl half his age. She wanted a honeymoon in Havana. He bought up all twelve seats on the plane, had four of them removed and a divan installed, plus a champagne bucket, a cooler filled with hors de oeuvres that, after we landed, I noticed hadn’t been touched. But the bride sure had, because halfway to Cuba, Captain Fatt and I thought we had hit a rough patch air turbulence that made our plane buck and swerve. A quick peek through the curtains confirmed that the disturbance was coming from the busy newlyweds in the back blissfully consummating their vows at four thousand feet and climbing.
Orlando said with a wink, ‘Maybe we could build us a little side business.’
‘How could a man of God say such a thing?’
‘I’m a part-time preacher but a full-time businessman. We could make us some good money while we’re at it. In fact, I know some folks might be interested.’
‘Forget it. We’re staying on this side of the law.’
He saluted me. ‘Aye, aye, Captain Sam. You’re the boss. Me? I’m just the worker bee.’
‘Like hell you are. You own a third of this company, like me and Rosie.’
‘Your mother is a fine woman.’
‘She is that.’
‘And bless her heart for taking care of Abby the way she does.’
Eight months ago, I had stood on the porch of my mother’s house, hand poised over the door, not wanting to knock. The awful news about my wife and baby was still on my side. My mother and my ten year-old daughter Abby were on the other. And then I knocked.
Orlando’s meaty hand blocked my forward view. ‘Baltimore Harbor Airport at your ten o’clock.’ His thick finger tapped the fuel gauge. ‘Just in time. We’re sitting on empty.’
I throttled back and began our descent. The ‘Flying Slipper’ was easy to fly, but not so easy to land. Her long, duckbill-shaped nose obscured forward vision and I smiled, thinking about my dad leaning out his locomotive cab window, trying to see past the engine’s long boiler to the track ahead. Same deal, different kind of ‘train.’
But by applying opposite rudder to my ailerons and skewing the plane into a sideways slip I could catch quick glances of the approaching water surface, adjust accordingly, and then swing her nose back to center.
‘There’s our mighty clipper fleet,’ Orland said.
‘Not ours anymore.’ I snapped.
It broke my heart to see Pan American’s big beautiful Boeing 314 flying boats gleaming in the late morning sunshine. Had things turned out differently, I would have been down there flying one, instead of up here like a kid looking through the window of the candy store.
Orlando said, ‘Mighty pretty birds. How do they handle?’
‘How would I know?’
He snapped his fingers. ‘That’s right, you were going to fly them but never did. I forgot that part of your sad story.’
‘The hell you forgot, you know all about it
.’
One of the clippers was moored alongside the boarding dock, waiting for her outbound passengers for Europe. While Pan Am’s Orient operations had been cut short by Pearl Harbor, Trippe’s other routes were still working, and the big Boeings were making two and three trips a week to Lisbon, Portugal, and from there to points north, south and east via Lufthansa, the Nazi’s civilian airline.
The flying boat’s broad upper wing surfaces had been painted orange-red to aid search aircraft in case she came down in the ocean - which would never happen, of course. The plane could fly on two of her four big, beautiful sixteen hundred horsepower Wright radial engines without missing a beat.
The recently-arrived inbound Clipper from Europe, now perched on a beaching cradle, was slowly being winched up onto dry land for a lightning-fast, twenty-four hour turnaround. A swarm of mechanics climbed over and around her like ants on a sugar cube. The triple-rudder tail of yet a third Clipper peeked out of the immense hangar built to accommodate these brand-new giants of the sky.
‘Carburetor heat on,’ I called out.
Orlando just sat there.
I nudged him. ‘Pull out those two red knobs up there.’
‘Sorry.’ He yanked out the knobs.’ Affirmative, carb heat on.’
‘You’re one hell of a co-pilot.’
‘After today, the Lord is your co-pilot. I’m spending the rest of my life on the ground fixing things like He intended.’
I throttled back to twenty-three hundred RPM and began a slow right turn to enter the downwind leg.
‘Get on the horn and announce our arrival.’
Orlando dialed in the correct frequency and keyed the microphone. ‘Baltimore Harbor Tower, Carter Air four-five requests landing permission, water.’
An American voice answered in a rich, Baltimore accent that warmed my heart. ‘Carter Air four-five you are cleared to land sea lane one. Wind zero-two-eight degrees at five. Caution, military traffic your three-o’clock, taking off to the south.’