by Richard Bach
As you stand on the broad paved field, you have at your feet the record of hundreds of landings, made in all kinds of airplanes by all kinds of pilots. The long, smooth, tapered streaks of heavy black rubber came from wheels under a man who was looking far down the runway, yet knew that beneath him the tires still had another inch and a half to descend before they touched the ground. That man has flown airplanes to ten thousand landings, and he knows many things about many places where runways lie.
Short, sudden lines of thin black abound on the asphalt surface, for on the edges of the field is a school that teaches people how to fly airplanes. These lines were made by people whose minds were crowded with the mechanics of landings, concentration on just the right amount of wing-down to offset the drift, on the stick coming back and back to hold the wheels off the ground, ready on the rudders, don’t forget the carb heat on the go-around.
There is a hard set of urgent black streaks halfway down the runway, and seconds after those appeared, the air a few inches above the pavement heated in the smoke of brake discs held hard against spinning steel. There are grooves in the overrun dirt that change to hard black where they meet the runway. Just beyond the halfway mark is one curving streak that ends abruptly where the asphalt stops; the grass growing in line beyond it looks as if it has been growing there just as long as the other grass by the side of the runway, but of course it hasn’t. It was once bare churned dirt beneath a cloud of grass and dust and rubber that led to the ragged tire of a war-surplus fighter.
The runway holds all this in its patient memory, along with memories of brilliant landing lights slashing the night’s low clouds to throw grass shadows on the first inch of hard surface, and the sharp picture of a Waco biplane inverted at the top of a loop, its propeller an unmoving blade above the eyes of a silent watching crowd. In the memory of that runway is the cartwheeling cloud of splinters where an antique trainer landed on a broken gear.
From this place more than one boy has flown to fulfill his dream of looking down on the clouds. Beneath the dark blanket of rubber on the runway are choppy streaks from the first landing made by a gold-braided fellow who flies now as senior captain on the New York-Paris run. Out there are still the grooved stripes left long ago from the tires of a home-town boy who was last seen diving alone into combat against six enemy fighters. Whether those fighters were Spitfires or Thunderbolts or Focke-Wulf 190s makes no difference to the field of asphalt. It holds impartially the record of a brave man.
That is the runway. Without it there would be no flight school at the edge of the field, no rows of airplanes, no VHF whipping back and forth above the grass, no landing lights in the dark sky, no 140s with windshield covers neatly tied over plexiglass.
Student pilots and professionals; training planes and airliners and war planes. Men who made their mark in the air and some who made it on a hidden mountaintop. Their spirit is reflected in the beacon’s majestic sweep, in the black streaks on the runway, in the roar of engines at takeoff. The spirit is held within airport boundaries from Adak to Buenos Aires and from Abbeville all the way around to Portsmouth. That spirit is the feeling about an airport that no other piece of ground can have.
Let’s not practice
Practice, for her, was boring. Why, it is such grand fun just to be in the air! Look at this sky! This day! The fields all warm velvet, and the ocean … that’s my ocean! Let’s just fly for a while, and not practice slow-flying, and … look at that ocean!
What can you say to a student like that? It was her own airplane, her own new Aircoupe and the sky was as clear as air washed all night in rain. What can you say? I wanted to tell her, Look, you’ll like a day’s flying so much better, as soon as you can control your airplane with skill. Study the aircraft now, learn it well, and you won’t have to think about it; later … it will feel like you’re a pure puff of cloud, relaxed and at home in the sky.
But I could no more convince her over the sound of the engine than I could the many times I’d tried in the quiet of the ground. She was so eager to jump ahead, to plunge into the giant majesty of flight, that it was chains and hobbles for her to take one step at a time, to think about stalls and steep turns and forced-landing practice. So we flew around for a while, and I looked out at the fields and the sea and that dream-clear sky and worried about what would happen to her in this pretty day if her engine stopped.
“OK,” I said at last. “Before we land, let’s practice one thing. Let’s pretend we’re climbing out after takeoff and the engine quits, right there. Let’s find out how much altitude it takes for you to turn the airplane around, correct back to the runway, and flare out for a downwind landing. OK?”
“OK,” she said, but she wasn’t really interested.
I demonstrated one engine-failed turn, and took one hundred fifty feet to do it, from quit to flare.
“Your turn.” She botched the first one, lost four hundred feet. The second one took three hundred. The third went well, matching my one hundred fifty. But her heart wasn’t in practicing engine failures, and a few minutes later we were landed and she was still talking about the lovely beautiful day.
“If you want to enjoy flying,” I said, “you’ve got to be good at it.”
“I’ll be good. You know how careful I am about preflight checks. I drain all the water from all the tanks—my motor won’t quit me on takeoff.”
“But it can! It’s happened! To me!”
“You fly those old airplanes and their motors are always stopping anyway. I have a new motor …” She looked at my face. “Oh, all right. Next time we’ll practice some more. But wasn’t this the most beautiful day of the year?”
Three weeks later she was solo in the Aircoupe and I was in the Swift, camera on the seat beside me as our two airplanes rolled into position for takeoff, toward the trees. It was another Tiffany day, and I had promised I’d take pictures of her airplane cruising along over the fields.
She took off first, and by the time her Aircoupe was lifting into the air, the Swift and I were rolling to follow, full throttle.
I was just breaking ground, retracting the landing gear, when I noticed that the Aircoupe was turning right, instead of left, two hundred feet in the air.
What’s she doing? I thought.
The Aircoupe was no longer climbing. It was coming down, banking over the trees, the propeller a slow windmill. Without any warning, after a perfect run-up, her engine had failed on takeoff.
I was stunned, watching, helpless. She’s a student pilot! It’s not fair! It should have happened to me!
There had been no place ahead or to the side for her to land; it was all a forest of oak. Lower, she would have had no choice but the trees, but now she was turning back, trying for the airport.
She didn’t have a prayer of making it all the way back to the main runway, but the cross runway might be wide enough …
I was a hundred feet in the air when the Aircoupe glided past in the opposite direction, wings gently banked, wheels clearing the last of the trees by a man’s height. She looked straight ahead, concentrating on her landing.
The Swift pivoted hard around beneath me as I swung to land at once on the cross runway. I saw the Aircoupe touch the dirt at the side of the pavement, roll across the hundred feet of it and on into the cleared dirt on the other side. It took three seconds for the weak little nosegear to collapse, pitching the airplane into a spray of yellow dust, throwing the tail steep into the air, shuddering. Why couldn’t it have been me?
As I rolled up, brakes smoking, the canopy of the Aircoupe slid back and she stood up in the cockpit, frowning.
I forgot to think of a fitting understatement. “Are you OK?”
“I’m all right.” Her voice was calm. “But look at my poor airplane. The rpms went down and then there was just nothing. Do you think it’s hurt too much?”
The propeller, cowl, and firewall were bent. “We can rebuild it.” I helped her down the sloping wing from the cockpit. “That was not a bad p
iece of flying, by the way. You were good and slow over the last of the trees, you used every inch you had. If it wasn’t for that toothpick nosegear …”
“Was it really all right?” The only effect of the crash was that she wanted to explain. Usually she didn’t care what I knew or thought. “I wanted to turn around and land down the length of the runway, but I just wasn’t high enough. When I got low, I thought I’d better level the wings and land it.”
The more I stood there and looked at the space in which she had landed that airplane, the more I felt uneasy. After a minute, or two looking, I began to wonder if I could have done as well, and the more I wondered, the more I doubted that I could; with all my old engines failing and off-airport landings and short-field tricks, I doubted that I could have brought that Aircoupe down any better than this student who wasted her practice time flying straight and level, looking down through the air at the fields and the sea.
“You know,” I told her later, with a little more respect in my tone than I wanted to show, “that landing … it wasn’t a bad piece of flying, at all.”
“Thank you,” she said.
The engine had quit from a vapor lock in the fuel line, and when we rebuilt the airplane we changed the line so that it couldn’t happen again. But I kept thinking about the way she had flown that landing. Did the practice help her, the day that we flew the three simulated engine-failures-on-takeoff? It was hard to believe that they had—she had done them only as a favor to me. I began to believe that she had the skill she needed within her all along, and the cool thinking, waiting the moment she’d want it. I thought about that, about how I had nothing at all to do with her ability to fly. Finally I came to think that maybe everything we need to know, ever, about anything, is already within us, waiting till we call for it.
I had told her so, and now she believed it: even new engines can fail on takeoff.
But I still think, now, that there are times when a flight instructor is nothing more than pleasant company when a girl wants to go flying on a pretty day.
Journey to a perfect place
The field was grass and square, a half mile through, set out in the middle of Missouri, and that’s about all it was. Some hills poufed up in trees, and a pond for swimming in; way off in the distance, a dirt road and a farm, but most of all it was a soft square of green, and the color came from the dye in the cool, deep grass.
We had landed there in two airplanes, small ones, to build a fire by the pond, untie bedrolls, and cook a supper over the fire while the sun ran out.
“Hey, John,” I said, “this is not too bad a place, is it?”
He was watching the final shreds of sunset, and the way that the light moved in the water.
“This is a good place,” he said at last.
But strange: though this was indeed a good place to fly, we had no wish to camp more than overnight. In that short time, the field went familiar and vaguely boring. By morning, we were quite ready to take off and leave the pond and the grass and the hills to the horses.
An hour after sunrise, we were two hundred feet in the air, droning along together in loose formation over fields the color of young cornstalk and old forest and deep-plowed earth.
Bette flew the airplane for a while, concentrating on the demands of formation, and I looked down over the side and wondered if there was such a place in all the world as perfect. Maybe that’s what we’re really looking for, I thought, with all this flying around and gazing down from our moving mountaintops of steel and wood and cloth—maybe we are all looking for one, single, perfect place down there on the ground, and when we find it, we will glide down to land and we will never need to fly anywhere again. Maybe pilots are just people who aren’t quite happy with the places that they’ve found so far, and as soon as they can locate that one spot where they can be as happy on the ground as other people are, they will sell their airplanes and not go seeking any more across the sky.
Our talk about the fun of flying must be talk about the fun of escaping. Even the word “flight,” after all, is a synonym for escape. Why, if I were to see, over this next little line of trees, my own perfect place, I would have no more wish to fly.
It was an uncomfortable thought, and I looked at Bette, who paid me no attention other than to smile without looking at me because she was still flying her formation.
I looked out again, and the land below changed for a moment to all the most perfect places I had seen. Instead of farmland beneath us, suddenly there was the sea, and we were turning to land on a strip cut on the edge of an ocean cliff, all lonely lost and still. Instead of farmland there was Meigs Field, ten minutes walking from the unexplored jungles of Chicago, Illinois. Instead of farmland there was Truckee-Tahoe, surrounded in razor-peak Sierra. Instead of farmland there was Canada and the Bahamas and Connecticut and Baja California, day and night, dusk and dawn, storm and calm. All of them interesting, most of them pretty, some of them beautiful. But not one perfect.
Then the farmlands were back below us and the engine power was coming in and Bette was pushing throttle to follow John and Joan Edgren’s Aeronca up above the level of the first summer clouds. She turned the plane back over to me, and for a while, I nearly forgot about escape and flight and perfect places.
But not quite. Is there such a place that, found, will bring an end to a pilot’s need to fly?
“Pretty clouds,” Bette said, over the sound of the engine.
“Yeah.”
By now, the clouds were all over the sky, puffing tall and pure up toward the sun. They had hard, clean edges, the kind you can drag a wingtip through without getting mist on your windscreen, and there were shifting, flowing snow shelves and giant cliffs and chasms all around us.
It was about that time that the answer reached out and grabbed me by the neck. Why, the sky itself is the land to which we are escaping, to which we fly!
No beer cans and empty cigarette packs strewn around a cloud, no street signs or stoplights, no bulldozers changing air to concrete. No room for anxiety, because it is always the same. No room for boredom because it is always different.
What do you know about that! I thought. Our one perfect place is the sky itself! And I looked across at the Aeronca and I laughed.
Loops, voices, and the fear of death
It was supposed to have been a simple inside loop, out off the airways, way up high, just for fun. With the wind shredding itself in a great thundering hundred-mile cry through the flying wires, I lifted the biplane’s nose through a steep climb, through straight up, through an inverted climb … then stalled there, hanging from the seat belt upside down over thirty-two hundred feet of clear and empty air. The control stick went dead in my glove, the airplane wallowed lazily this way and that, and fell flat, like a giant slow-motion pancake, out of the sky. Dust and hay from the cockpit floor poured up past my goggles and the wind changed from clean thunder to a strange loud buffeting hum, a thirty-foot bumblebee in agony.
The nose made no particular effort to point down, the engine stopped in zero G, and for the first time in my life I was pilot of an airplane that was falling … just as if it had been derricked off the ground and cut loose.
I was annoyed at first, then apprehensive at the way the controls didn’t respond, then I was quite suddenly afraid. Thoughts flicked through me like tracers: this thing is out of control there’s altitude to bail out but my airplane will be killed this is the lousiest loop I am the worst pilot what’s this falling, airplanes don’t fall like this c’mon get that nose down …
Through it all, the observer behind my eyes watched with interest, not caring whether I lived or died. Another part of me was scared to panic, and cried this is not fun I don’t like this at all WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
What Am I Doing Here? The question has fired itself, I’ll bet, at every pilot who ever lived. When John Montgomery set himself to cut his glider loose from the balloon that carried it aloft, he must have thought, What am I doing here? When Wilbur Wright knew that he
couldn’t get the wings level before the Flyer hit the ground; when the test pilots discovered that the Eaglerock Bullet or the Salmson Sky-Car, after fifteen turns of a spin, would not recover; when the mail pilots, lost above a sea of fog, heard the engine die on the last of its fuel—they all heard that question from the terrified voice within them, though they may not have taken time to answer.
“Any pilot who says he’s never been scared,” goes the saying, “is either stupid or a liar.” There are exceptions, perhaps, but not many.
For me it was spins, as I learned to fly. Bob Keech would sit calmly over there in the right seat of the Luscombe and say, “Give me a three-turn spin to the right.” I’d hate him for it and go tense as steel and dread the moments ahead and bring the stick full back and force right rudder, my face dead as old soap. I’d hang on, eyes squinted to count the turns, recover at last. I’d think in pain as I leveled, I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to say, Now give me three turns left. And Keech would sit over there, arms folded, and say, “Now give me three turns left.”
Yet that hour would fly past and we’d come skimming into the pattern and land and I’d barely set foot on the ground when my fear was forgotten and I was desperate to fly again.
What Am I Doing Here? The student on cross-country hears the question while he searches the checkpoint thirty seconds overdue. Many other pilots hear it when the weather around them turns from good to not-so-good, or when the engine misses a beat or the oil temperature turns a shade too high and the oil pressure a shade too low.
It is one thing to lean back in flight-office chairs and talk about how great it is to fly, it is another thing entirely when you are up in the air and the engine blows up and the windshield goes liquid gold in oil and the only place to land is that little tiny oat field down there, along the crest of the hill, with the fence at the end.