The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  That is the feeling I want again. Flying is the only skill in life that I have ever mastered to that degree of proficiency. Some musicians have that level of skill, as do champion race car drivers, motorcycle riders, golfers, tennis players, and so on. It can be acquired if one works hard enough and has a little bit of talent.

  Forbes Field in Topeka is a former military base with three or four long, wide runways and a huge parking mat with weeds growing up through the cracks in the concrete. The Kansas Air National Guard flies KC-135 tankers from one end of the field. One was busy making approaches as we taxied in.

  It’s a long taxi, about halfway across Kansas, so I added power and raised the tail and steered with the rudder. Occasionally the prop whacked off a tall weed.

  David and I got a motel room at an establishment on South Topeka Avenue that I often stayed in when I was in the Naval Reserve and commanded a reserve unit here. I like Topeka. Although it’s the capital of Kansas, it’s really just a small town on the eastern plains. It has lots of neat little houses owned by working Americans and lots of older cars and comfortable, tree-lined streets. There are also a couple of good barbecue places where the prices are very reasonable.

  The following morning at 8 A.M. the clouds were low and dark. A thunderstorm loomed to the northwest. And this was the day a professional photographer would take our picture. We had arranged to meet at a small, private grass field to the north of town, so David and I prepared the Stearman for flight and took off. As we flew north over the west side of the city the clouds ahead looked nasty.

  “Rain,” David announced.

  “Terrific.”

  We go into it at a thousand feet. Visibility drops somewhat but not too much. And we stay relatively dry in the cockpit, which is nicer.

  The field is right where the sectional has it spotted, so I drop down for a low pass to look it over. A mudhole with standing water is about 500 feet from the approach end, and there is another at midfield. The taxi areas in front of the one tee-hangar look like quagmires. I make another pass then head southeast for Billard Field.

  Billard belongs to the city of Topeka and has a non-federal control tower. It is small in comparison to the faded grandeur of Forbes and has a really neat little terminal that houses the FBO and a restaurant that serves decent coffee and hamburgers, although the person who wrote the menu gave the sandwiches cutesy names like Baron Burger and Cherokee Favorite. We order breakfast in the restaurant and settle in to wait. I suspect the photographer will go out to the grass field and then come here when he discovers we aren’t there. And that is what happens.

  Luckily the storm bypasses Billard. The photographer, David Zlotky, snaps away. Soon David and I are back in the airplane while Zlotky waits with his camera beside the runway. I plan for a dozen landings unless he waves me in sooner.

  The landings are fun. I come in high and slip the plane some, do some wheel landings, some full stall, really work at flying the Queen. Like a fine horse, she responds to every twitch of the controls, absolutely obedient, seemingly trying to please the man with the reins. This quality is what made the Stearman such a fine trainer.

  If only I were better at it. But I guess if competence came too easily it wouldn’t be worth much.

  Here we come on base leg, intentionally high and five miles-per-hour fast, carrying a smidgen too much power. Wind off the left side, with maybe five knots crosswind component. On final, still high and fast, I crank in a ton of right rudder and apply left stick. She comes down like a brick in the slip.

  Now! Straighten her out, little right rudder for the crosswind, power just so, glide angle okay … coming down nicely …begin the flare by reducing power and pulling the stick back while the rudder is adjusted and more left aileron is applied. Correct for the burbling air and shifting wind, increase the backstick, watch the nose … and she touches down slightly tail first. The mains fall a good six inches. Darn!

  I let her slow while working the rudder to hold her straight.

  “He wasn’t waving,” David tells me, so I smoothly advance the throttle and mixture and lift the tail. 50 … 60 … 65, and we’re off to do it again!

  I like flying. I like getting up early in the morning and looking out the window at the sky, the feeling of the breeze on my face as I preflight the airplane, the look and smell and feel of the airplane. I like anticipating the flight to come and imagining how it will be. I like thinking about it afterward. I like everything about flying.

  The next morning we fly south from Topeka through a sunny sky dotted with scattered puffy clouds. As soon as David takes over the controls he tells me, “The airspeed’s a hundred miles an hour.”

  “We’re in an updraft. The aircraft is actually descending in a column of rising air, so it goes faster. We’ll be out of it in a bit.”

  We soon are. Now we enter a downdraft. Our airspeed decays and we start a descent. I tell David to pull back more on the stick. He does and our airspeed falls to 80. A little thermal activity has a big effect on your airspeed when you don’t have much to play with.

  David tells me from the front cockpit, “This is the only way to travel.” This comment draws a wide grin from his old man. The boy feels the magic too.

  He is following the highway. And today he is using the rudder to keep the plane in balanced flight. We talked about it last night and today he is working at it. I sit in the back cockpit studying the sectional. Hmm, Yates Center has a grass field southwest of town.

  “You wanta land at a grass field?” I ask my chauffeur.

  “Sure.” He is agreeable to most of my suggestions, so I try to reciprocate by being agreeable when he advances his. We get along very well, I think, for father and teenage son.

  He has no brothers but he has two teenage sisters, both older. Lara is eighteen and Rachael nineteen. They include him in most of their activities, so in many ways David seems older than he is. He knows what’s cool and what isn’t—he avoids what isn’t like a Pentecostal avoiding sin.

  Lara paid him the ultimate compliment one day in my presence while talking to a boy her own age who wanted to take her somewhere. Lara wanted David to go along. I didn’t hear what her male friend said to that, but I heard Lara’s reply: “My brother is the coolest guy I know.”

  I have high hopes that the three of them will remain close friends all their lives. I won’t have a say, of course, but like all parents I have hopes. And like all parents I worry about each of them too much. They will grow up and do just fine as they find their own way in life. I know this and fret anyway.

  I am still musing along these lines when Yates Center looms into view. The grass airport is easy to spot—the grass appears short and there is an ag sprayer parked at one end. No hangars or other buildings though.

  I make a pass over the field and study the wind sock. Now a left downwind and power back, airspeed at 80. We touch down in as nice a landing as I have made in a while and taxi to the end of the field, up a gentle incline, to where the ag plane is parked.

  The ag pilot is pumping chemicals into his plane from two big tanks mounted on a trailer. We get acquainted and study the wind sock. The wind is out of the southwest, about eight knots. “We’ve been waiting to see if this wind is gonna hold,” he tells me. “Been trying to spray the weeds in this pasture west of here for two days.”

  After a bit he decides to give it a try. He climbs up into the Cessna Ag Truck and straps in. The engine comes to life with a rumble and he taxis away without preliminaries, his prop blast raising a cloud of clippings from the fairway-short grass.

  In a few moments the Ag Truck comes over the swell in the runway at full throttle climbing gently. He’s got a load on that plane. He levels at 50 feet or so above the ground and lays the plane into a right turn, then levels the wings heading west. He is soon out of sight.

  I sit on a rail and talk to the pilot’s son, a boy of sixteen or seventeen. “Nice plane you got there,” he says, nodding at the Queen. In a moment he continues, “We got
a plane, an Aeronca. Rebuilt her last year. Painted her three colors.” He looks me in the eye and grins shyly. “That’s hard to do, you know, putting on three colors. We had a heck of a time getting it right. But she looks real good now.”

  The sun on my back is very pleasant, as is the smell of cut grass carried on the warm Kansas breeze under this blue June sky. I sit soaking it in as the young man tells us of his Aeronca and how she flies. The wind sock is steady. The smoke from my pipe rides away upon it.

  Sitting in the grass, caressed by the sun and wind, the Queen patiently waits. The sun gleams on her polished prop.

  It is difficult for us today to imagine the excitment that our grandparents and great-grandparents felt the first time they saw an airplane fly, actually saw the miracle performed.

  That this insubstantial stuff we call air would actually support the weight of a heavy machine—well, the thing defied reason.

  You read about the flights and the daredevil flyers in the newspapers and magazines, but when your chance came to see the miracle with your own eyes, it was probably at a field much like this—a pasture on the edge of town. And the plane was much like the Queen, an open-cockpit affair with two wooden wings and canvas stretched taut. If you were lucky you got a chance to touch it, which didn’t strengthen your faith. Canvas? Stretched over a framework of wooden ribs?

  And then it happened. For every person there was that moment when the wheels of the double-decked canvas contraption lifted out of the grass. The spokes spun slower and slower as the machine continued to accelerate and climb.

  It flies—my God, it flies! And I have lived to see it!

  I have never tired of it. Airplanes taking off have fascinated me ever since I can remember.

  With David in the front cockpit and me in the rear, the Cannibal Queen performs the miracle yet again. She lifts her wheels from the grass and soars on the prairie wind.

  We eat lunch at the Coffeyville, Kansas, airport, also an ex-military airfield. Next to the FBO is a short-order lunch counter that has a table full of back issues of Sport Aviation, the Experimental Aviation Association’s publication. I peruse an issue from 1972 while we eat hamburgers.

  This issue has a story about a fellow who flew a home-built single-seat aerobatic plane to all of the lower-48 states to promote the EAA. A map depicts his route, which is filled with right angles. It looks as if he hit most states on the corners. What would be the fun in that? The article doesn’t say much about fun. Maybe that’s implicit.

  Perhaps I should hit every state. It would give my publisher something to put in the press kit they send the reviewers and it would give the reviewers something to write about. As it is the book reviewers may merely dismiss my scribbles as “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” by Stephen Coonts, who is old enough to know better but obviously doesn’t.

  I started in Colorado and now I’m in Kansas. Only 46 states to go.

  I look at the nifty pictures in the magazine as I mull over the idea. This guy flew his home-built around the country in 1972, when the Vietnam War was in full swing. I spent seven months that year flying A-6s in combat. That December Rachael had her first birthday, but I missed it. I was on Yankee Station, the same place I had been when she was born.

  The hamburger is good. As for the route, I’ll have to think about it. If I manage to land in all of the contiguous 48 states, I could brag about this summer for the rest of my life.

  Only one other plane, a Cessna, takes off in the hour we spend on the ground. The big empty airfield with its dilapidated hangars and cracked asphalt is all ours when we taxi out and give the Queen full throttle.

  3

  SKID HENLEY IS A TALL, LEAN MAN WITH A LITTLE WHITE MUSTACHE on his upper lip. His face is tan and weathered, as befits a man who has spent his life flying airplanes. He admits to seventy-seven years of age and 15,000 hours in the cockpits of Stearmans. I goggle.

  David and I landed in McAlester, Oklahoma, after flying down from Coffeyville. Now we are standing on the ramp at the airport looking at the Cannibal Queen. Skid Henley restored her. He started in the fall of 1987 and finished a year later. “Did two of them, one right after the other. They’re a little different. Yours has the headliner behind the rear cockpit.”

  “Why’d you do that?” I ask. The headliner was not stock. In fact, mine is the only Stearman I have ever seen with a headliner.

  “Well, I’ll tell you.” He grins and walks over to the plane. “See these wing leading edges? They’re one-piece metal. I bought five of them ’cause I usually mess one up. But I didn’t this time. Had one left over and was looking at the plane and thought why not? So I turned it down some and spread it a little and fixed it on top of the fuselage behind the rear cockpit. Looks pretty good, I think. Of course, then I had to alter the door to the baggage compartment. Sawed it in half and moved the hinge to accommodate the headliner.”

  He spoke quickly, the words and thoughts tumbling out. “This plane was a PT-27, made for the Canadians. When I first saw it, it was trashed out, no engine, wings two feet longer than they are now. The tail was torn off in a tornado or something, and Frank Dear got it and worked on one wing, but it was too big a project. He sold it to me, then I sold it to an engine shop. They let it sit for three years; then Frank Dear got it again. Then my boy Robert decided he had to have a biplane, and he called Frank and made a deal and it ended up over in my workshop.

  “Got the engine up in Indianapolis. It was off an AT-10— they weren’t much of an airplane—and the ring cowl was with it, right off an AT-10. Went up to Indianapolis and brought it down on a pickup truck.”

  Finally I steered Mr. Henley to his life in aviation. “First airplane I ever saw to get to know was a Heath Parasol. Then I got to flying a Gypsy Moth. Finally a fellow signed me off for solo in it even though I’d been flying it without papers since I was fourteen. Got my license as an airplane mechanic after I had an eye injury, but my eye finally healed up and it’s the best one I got now.”

  He went on, detailing an aviation career that included ten years as an airline pilot, test pilot flying SBD Dauntless dive bombers for Douglas Aircraft, civilian flight instructor for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, and after that, owner of an agricultural applicator service headquartered in Alice, Texas, that operated Stearmans from New Brunswick to Nicaragua. He even flew rice in the Philippines.

  “Only time I ever crashed a Stearman was on the side of a volcano in Nicaragua. Had a 450 Pratt in it [that’s the 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-985 engine], and I slowed that thing until she was hanging on the prop and mushing down onto a grove of trees. Had to put her there because just beyond the trees the side of the volcano went straight up. Just mushed her down and pulled the mixture off right before I hit. That Stearman is still up in those trees on the side of that volcano.

  “But a Stearman will take anything. Boeing tested an airframe to seventeen Gs without any deformation. If you hit the ground at anything less than thirty degrees of dive, you’ll walk away. Guaranteed.”

  The sky was clearing as Mr. Henley talked and occasional shafts of sunlight made the yellow Stearman glow. Beyond it on the east side of the airport rose a low wooded ridge. McAles-ter lies on the edge of the eastern Oklahoma hill country. Mr. Henley saw me looking at the tree-covered ridge, the first relief from flat country I’d seen since leaving Colorado. “Sprayed all over that country east of here. Know it pretty well. Nowadays this southeast corner of Oklahoma produces more marijuana than anyplace else in the world.”

  I nod, somehow saddened. Mr. Henley changes the subject. I ask him if he wants to go for a ride in the Queen, but he declines. He tells me that he has no medical certificate, which is really no excuse since I am a licensed pilot, but I know he has had medical problems the last few years and accept his excuse without protest, though not without regret. I would have really liked to sit in the front seat and let the pro show me how it should be done from the captain’s chair back aft. But he probably knew that.
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br />   Finally it is time to go. We shake hands and say good-bye in the terminal as I pay for my gas. David and I man up and taxi out without an audience. I know Mr. Henley is still in the terminal, perhaps watching through the window, so as we lift off I wave at the terminal with my left hand.

  As we climb out to the north I finger the lump of the wallet that contains my Second Class medical certificate. Hell, Skid Henley is only 33 years older than I am. He rejuvenated the Queen—made her better than new. Why can’t they do that to a man?

  We spend the night at the Fountainhead Lodge on Lake Eufala, thirty or so nautical miles north of McAlester. We had passed it on the way south and noted that the parking lots were relatively empty. The lodge has a spiffy asphalt runway and tie-down mat on the hill above it. We tie down the plane and use the phone mounted on a post to call the lodge. They send a car.

  The young woman at the desk speaks with a crisp British accent. I wonder how in the world she ended up at the reception desk of a lodge on Lake Eufala in the Indian Nations. Probably married a Yank. Or perhaps she’s an adventurer working her way around the world and it has taken her three years to get this far. That would be a very British thing to do. I don’t ask. She probably gets asked that question ten times a day. I like to think she is an original adventurer.

  Dave and I don swimming suits and head for the pool with me lugging the laptop computer along. After five minutes I am ready to get out and type, but he wants me to “play.” I linger in the water for a few more minutes, then get out and turn on the computer. After five minutes he comes over to the edge. “See the fountain? The water comes out of it through two outlets. I’ll plug up one and you plug up the other and we’ll see if we can make it overflow.”

  How would Hemingway have handled this? Steinbeck? Tom Clancy? Unfortunately I refuse, then watch him try to raise the water level by using his forearm to plug just one outlet. An hour later I wish I had accepted the invitation.