The next morning as we taxi out I tell David to follow me through on the controls as we take off. I talk him through the takeoff, explaining what I am doing as I do it. When I get the plane level at 2,000 feet I turn it over to him. We are heading 120 degrees magnetic, a course that will take us right across the Ouachita Mountains, the rugged southeast corner of Oklahoma that Skid Henley said produces a lot of marijuana. With David flying I scan the hills and ravines below, trying to spot a pot field amid the trees and brush. No luck. As if I would know one if I saw it.
David sees the ridges coming at us and we consult. Under my direction he pushes the prop lever to full increase RPM, then adds throttle. When we reach 3,000 feet we level off. As he readjusts the controls and trim, we creep up another 200 feet. I let him fly. The heading wanders as much as twenty degrees. The wet compass swings backward, as all wet compasses do, but in the Stearman it’s the only directional indicator we have. Until one gets accustomed to it, it is disorienting to see that the course one wants lies to the right on the instrument, but one must turn left to get to it. David does fine for a neophyte.
Puffy little cumulus clouds float a hundred feet above us. The visibility is excellent, maybe 12 or 15 miles, and the sun is quite pleasant. The saturated air is relatively smooth this morning.
After 45 minutes or so David tires of flying and turns the stick over to me. We are just about out of the mountains, yet the clouds are increasing. The bases seem a little lower so I slowly descend to 2,500 feet. Since we flew for a half hour the day before and could not get gas at the lodge airport, I decide to land at Mena, Arkansas, which our route will take us directly over.
Par for the course, no one answers on Unicom, 122.8 for this airport. After three tries I give up. The attendant is probably out fueling an airplane, or in the restroom, or whatever. Unicom isn’t a tower, and I like that.
The haze is getting thicker and now the clouds above us cover about fifty percent of the sky. When the airport comes into view at about eight miles, I swing around to come across the runway. David and I search for the wind sock without success.
“The wind should be out of the south,” I tell him, and make a left downwind turn for runway 18. I have Dave put his hands and feet on the controls and talk him through the landing. I misjudge the flare and fall the last twelve or eighteen inches. An arrival. Ah me …
Taxiing in we finally find the wind sock, a faded little rag hanging limp from the airport beacon tower. We pull up in front of the Fixed Base Operator who sports a Phillips 66 sign. Parked south of the building is a C-130 Hercules with an engine missing. The fuselage looks to be in good shape.
After fueling I make an intersection takeoff, level at 2,500 feet, and turn the controls over to David. He flies for five minutes, then says, “You take it.”
“You feeling alright?” I ask.
“Yeah. Just sleepy.”
And he wedges his helmeted head into the right rear corner of the cockpit and falls asleep as the plane jounces and bounces in light chop. Amazing! This may be a first—the first guy to fall asleep in a Stearman!
For the first time this trip I have no one to talk to. I turn off the intercom so as not to disturb him and concentrate on the flying. We are over southern Arkansas crossing a section of low hills, wild, rugged terrain with few roads and no houses or farms that I can readily see. One forgets that there are still places like this in the United States. In the future as the nation urbanizes, the marginal farms will probably go to the counties for unpaid taxes and most of them will be reclaimed by nature. In West Virginia such places are often acquired for pennies by investors and eventually sold to major corporations, which are content to pay the pitifully low property taxes and use the land as tree farms. So the rural counties lose population and get ever poorer in a vicious cycle of budget cutting and decline.
We are making 93 MPH on the airspeed indicator, but I am running 2,050 RPM and 22 inches of manifold pressure to get it. The thicker the air, the more power it takes to fly through it.
Or is this an engine problem? I must consider that possibility. Is the engine making its usual power? Once again I scan the oil temp, oil pressure and cylinder head temp gauges, the only engine gauges I have. By nature I fret, a personality quirk that my military flight instructors honed and polished into a personality defect. Flying is composed of a myriad of small details; those people who seem to do best at it pay strict attention to each and every one of them.
I listen carefully to the beat of the engine.
I have not been paying a lot of attention to navigation, and now I get the payback. With the clouds looming higher and the air so saturated that there is a rainbow around the sun—when I can see it—I start looking for the town of Gurdon, Arkansas. We hit the reservoir a while back right on the money and the town should be coming up any time. I expect to see Interstate 30, which crosses from southwest to northeast at a 90-degree angle to my course, which is still 120.
The minutes tick by. No town. I know we have a headwind from the south, but how much?
Heck, I should have timed the leg. I search the sectional chart for another landmark. Nothing looks obvious. I look below. Featureless flat, wooded country, little wandering roads and occasional houses. Maybe I’ve overflown it.
How do you miss a four-lane interstate highway from less than a half mile above it?
Well, maybe you were busy listening to the engine.
I should have timed the leg. Dang! I remember the time Billy Wagner and I didn’t time the legs on our first night low-level strike over North Vietnam in an A-6 Intruder and got lost. Bill couldn’t recognize the turn points on radar so we motored around over the Red River delta at 420 knots, 400 feet above the mud and water with a load of bombs. We almost hit a hill. We spent 45 minutes over the beach that night and never did find the target.
And I have just repeated that little mistake. Where in hell is that damn interstate?
Visibility less than eight miles, I guess. Clouds are pretty solid above. No more sunlight and shadow.
David rearranges his head against the left side of the cockpit and goes back to sleep.
How many minutes has it been? Well, maybe I’ve overflown it. I must have. So what is the next checkpoint? El Dorado. More relatively flat, featureless terrain between Gurdon and El Dorado, but there’s a road from Gurdon down that way.
So if I’ve overflown Gurdon, where is this little highway going southeast to Camden and El Dorado? I crane my head right and left, scanning the ground below. Maybe I’ve drifted off course and the highway is too far left or right to be seen in this haze. That’s certainly possible.
Just when I decide that I have overflown the interstate and Gurdon and am slightly lost, the four-lane highway looms into view. How did Ernest Gann say it in Fate Is the Hunter? “Here a fool found salvation.”
Okay, where’s the town? Is it right or left? Let’s see, the airport is northeast of the town, the runway oriented east and west. … Heck, there it is at 11:30, right where it should be. Visibility five or six miles. I carefully check my watch and swing to the new heading, 150. This should take me to Camden or thereabouts; then I’ll just truck down the four-lane to El Dorado.
And it works out that way. Why in the world was I sweating finding Gurdon? After all, who could miss an interstate highway from 2,000 feet over it?
I decide to land at the downtown airport at El Dorado, so I tune in the Unicom frequency and give them a call.
Nothing.
I try El Dorado Radio on 123.6. Still nothing. Maybe the radio’s broken.
What the heck, Dave’s still asleep; we’ve still got half a tank of gas; Monroe, Louisiana, is only 50 miles away. New course 135. Onward. Through the goo. Visibility is getting worse, but it’s still way above legal minimums and Monroe approach can give me a steer if necessary. If the radio really works. Better find out.
The Monroe Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) broadcast is garbled at first but it clears as I fly along. I
get the altimeter setting and wind, 210 at five knots. I can hack it. Onward.
Monroe Approach is also garbled. They answer me but I can’t understand them—too low and too far out. I tell them I will call back when I’m closer.
I fly on with David still asleep. Maybe he’s sick. Never heard of a kid sleeping like that in an open cockpit.
Heading 135. That’s the heading on the chart for the Victor airway from El Dorado to Monroe, so literally tens of thousands of people have successfully reached Monroe, Louisiana, from El Dorado, Arkansas, by flying that course. I will be the first that fails to do so. The weather is really getting gooey and this big lake or reservoir—Bayou D’Arbonne—remains hidden from my sight. I finally get Approach and they give me a discrete IFF squawk and cheerfully tell me to report the field in sight. Roger that.
Where is that dang lake? We’re talking square miles here, folks, not acres. This thing is too big to miss. The problem is that I am used to flying out west, where the visibility is 90 miles plus. You can see things in Colorado. And I am used to flying a Cessna T-210 cross-country at a ground speed of three nautical miles per minute. I am making less than half that. Ninety-three statute miles per hour indicated is about 82 knots—nautical miles per hour—a little more when converted to true airspeed, so I am covering just a smidgen more than one and a quarter nautical miles every minute. I need to learn patience, which God knows was never my long suit. I will hop from foot to foot at the Pearly Gate waiting for St. Peter to check the list.
I could ask Approach for a steer.
Naw. I’ll wait. More minutes tick by.
I fidget in the cockpit and listen to Approach talk to an airliner climbing out of Monroe. Some severe weather to the south of town, he says.
There! Way over on the right, isn’t that water? Yep. Well, I’m way left of course. I alter heading twenty degrees right.
How did I get this far left? Wind?
We fly for a while and the lake becomes distinct in the haze. Near the south end I come back to a course of 135. I watch the clock. Seven minutes later Approach informs me that the field is at my 12 o’clock and ten miles. I ease the nose left and peer into the murk. Nothing.
Keep flying. David stirs, then sags back. Boy, that kid can sleep.
Now Approach gives me a vector, 090 for traffic.
The sensation is like flying in an inverted bowl. Only a circle of land and brown water is visible below me, and the airport and town are not within the circle.
New vector 080. Two more minutes pass. I am watching the clock carefully now.
“Stearman Seven Zero Zero, come right to One Eight Zero.” I swing the plane. “The airport is at your twelve o’clock, four miles.”
I look. Nothing. Is the visibility really this bad? Maybe … yes, that’s the end of a runway. Okay, there it is. “Got it in sight,” I announce on the radio. Visibility is down to about 3 miles.
“Squawk VFR and contact the tower,” the controller tells me.
As I drift down toward runway 18, David wakes up and sits erect in the cockpit. I flip on the intercom. “We’re here.”
“Umm.”
A large black cloud sits just southeast of the field. That is a thunderstorm if I’ve ever seen one. The runway and mat are wet as we taxi in and shut down.
Later I look at the chart and try to figure out why I had so much trouble finding Bayou D’Arbonne. Ah ha, the airway goes almost over the El Dorado downtown airport and I turned to the 135 heading when I was three or four miles to the northeast. So I was flying parallel to the airway but offset to the left, the north, in poor visibility. If the visibility had been just a little worse I would have completely missed seeing D’Arbonne.
I am learning. I tell myself it’s just a matter of shifting gears, getting used to 82 knots and all this haze. And timing the legs.
Oh well, it’s an adventure. And that’s why I came.
4
THURSDAY MORNING AT THE HOLIDAY INN IN WEST MONROE, Louisiana, I stand looking at thick fog. Just to the southwest of the motel is a television tower that the chart says is 518 feet tall. The top is obscured. When I went to the restaurant at seven it was thicker than it is now, at 8:30 A.M., so the fog is slowly lifting. That is cheering.
David folded last night at 9 P.M. and is still sleeping eleven and a half hours later. The night before at Fountainhead Lodge in Oklahoma he watched Dances With Wolves until 9:30, then sat and watched me write until 11. Then he read what I had written and went cheerfully to bed at 11:30.
With the lights out the fun began. He crept from the bed and jumped me. Tickle, tickle, tickle. The horseplay subsided at midnight, but I got him up at 7. Even with his naps in the Stearman, he crashed last night at 9 after watching a half-hour television special and indulging in a short tickle session.
I have this sneaking suspicion that he isn’t really as ticklish as he wants me to believe. His feet aren’t ticklish at all. He doesn’t even wiggle when you work on the soles of his feet with a finger; never has.
He is fourteen years old, five feet six and a half inches tall, 120 pounds. He shaves now about once a week. Very mature in many ways, but he still likes to roughhouse. He is a natural gentleman, always considerate of others, and has an inquiring mind. I suspect that he is the smartest person in the family. I know he is brighter than I am.
He grins a lot, unashamedly displaying his braces and their green rubber bands. I asked him, Why green? Because the last ones were black and he felt like a different color.
When he wakes up I will phone Flight Service and get a weather brief. I suspect this fog won’t lift enough to be flyable until noon at the earliest. So we are in no hurry. Last night we decided to fly down to New Orleans today and spend at least a full day sightseeing—maybe ride a riverboat on the Mississippi and wander around in the French Quarter, America’s tackiest tourist trap.
The quirk in the American psyche that draws people to places like the French Quarter also makes them pull off 1-70 in Oakley, Kansas, and pay real money to see the world’s largest prairie dog and a cow with five legs. Not that I have yet visited the hottest tourist draw in Oakley, Kansas, but I’ll admit, I am curious. I have never seen a 250-pound prairie dog and the sight just might be worth five dollars.
David is waking up now. He looks around, then burrows back under the covers. Now he is examining the sheet situation. His lower one got pulled down and wadded up. He gives up. He flops back and closes his eyes. Another half hour of morning snoozing seems to be in the works. Nope, his eyes are open. He has just logged twelve straight hours of Zs.
I go outside and check the TV tower. The clouds are just above the top of it. Here and there patches of blue are visible. In a little while we can fly.
It is just 11:10 A.M. on my watch when I add power and push the stick forward to lift the tail. The field elevation here at Monroe, Louisiana, is only 79 feet above sea level but I am still surprised when the manifold pressure needle steadies at 29 inches. We are only losing one inch of pressure in the manifold system, which strikes me as excellent for a normally aspirated engine. That thought is worth a smile, and one spreads across my face.
The plane accelerates well with the tail up and I pull her off and let her climb at 80 MPH, which is still a nice angle in this thick air. I level at 1,000 feet and turn to the southeast.
The bases of the broken clouds are another thousand or so feet above and the visibility is about a dozen miles. The low flat country spreads away in all directions.
When Monroe Departure turns us loose, I climb to 1,500 feet and flip on the intercom. David has his head resting on the right side of the cockpit. “Sleeping already?”
“Playing a game.” He brought his Nintendo Game Boy along on this trip. What did I do to entertain myself at age fourteen, back in the dark ages before electronic games?
I address myself to the chore of holding 135 degrees on the wet compass. It flops around as usual and I remind myself it rotates backward. The airspeed is more or less st
eady at 95 indicated.
Today I annotate the chart with the time as we pass prominent villages and road intersections. Back to basics. There will be no repeat of yesterday.
After 40 minutes of flying we strike the Mississippi River between Chamblee and Waterproof. I carefully annotate the chart and mark the time, 11:50.
I turn the flying over to David and tell him to keep us over the river heading south. “Where are all the boats and barges?” he asks.
“We’ll see some.”
In less than a minute we do, a group of fifteen barges pushed by one tug heading upriver. And another barge-tug combination a half mile behind the first.
David peers out one side of the cockpit, then the other. Ahead of us dark clouds are building. The forecast was for thunderstorms after one o’clock. They’re early. Low, flat, wet terrain in every direction, a varying mixture of mud and water that would be tempting fate to try an emergency landing on. I survey the levees. Maybe on a levee if the engine quits.
The town of Natchez, Mississippi, comes into view ahead. I search off to the left for the airport and find it. We swing over the northern edge of town and I tell David to follow the four-lane going east. We had planned to go 30 miles east following this highway to a little grass field called Dixie, but now the clouds ahead loom a dark gray, almost black. It still looks pretty good to the south, down the river toward Baton Rouge.
“I think we better land here at Natchez and get some gas. Look at those clouds.”
A woman answers our call on Unicom. I fly a left downwind and land on runway 18. We have been airborne only 1.2 hours, but when the weather gets crummy a fellow can’t have too much gas.
Three black men help us fuel the Queen: a heavyset man in his late fifties, a young man in his twenties, and a teenage boy. The young man laughs when he sees the artwork on the right side of the plane. “Come look at this,” he tells the older man. “She’s all right,” he assures me with a broad grin.
“Snack bar upstairs,” the older man informs me after a look at David, the bottomless pit. He had breakfast just two and a half hours ago, but he is indeed hungry again. The snack bar is a short-order grill manned by a large black woman with a friendly smile. The odor of grease is heavy in the air. David orders a hamburger and fries and gets a coke from the pop machine.
The Cannibal Queen Page 4