As this summer draws to a close the Soviet Union is in meltdown. Only one thing is certain—the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are emerging from darkness into light. What will come next no one knows. Perhaps anarchy, perhaps chaos, starvation, civil war or even a new political system that rests, in Jefferson’s immortal words, “on the consent of the governed.”
We free people wish the Soviets and Eastern Europeans well. We wish for them and all the people of the earth the life, liberty and freedom to pursue their concept of happiness that we ourselves enjoy.
And I wish the same for you.
I catch my first glimpse of the Front Range while I am still over Cheyenne. Thunderstorms are drifting east off the Rockies. One with a base of solid, opaque rain lit by strobes of lightning rests over the Cache la Poudre. In the next half hour or so it will drift down on Fort Collins.
And one is just east of Boulder. I point the right wing of the Cannibal Queen at the ground and corkscrew down at three Gs. Then I roll and pull some to the left. I right her and chop the throttle for a stall. She shudders and pitches forward and I smartly give her forward stick. Now roll and pull as the speed increases.
She responds crisply. The stick and rudder bring instant responses as the sunlight highlights the dancing yellow wings against the gray vagueness of the storm.
She has been on a long flight, visited every state. She has delighted people from coast to coast and carried many aloft on flights they aren’t likely to forget.
Now it’s over.
I’m tired of living out of a soft bag and sleeping in motel beds, so in a way I’m glad. But there will be no more strange airports or fog in mountain valleys, no more unanswered calls asking the direction of the wind, no more low passes searching for wind socks, no more inviting grass runways.
Still, I have lived it. For that I am truly thankful.
Maybe when he is my age and remembers how it was, my son, David, will grin and be thankful too. Good memories, those are the best things you can give a kid.
After a few minutes of whifferdills I cut the power and point the Cannibal Queen toward home, down there under the trailing edge of that storm.
The wind is out of the southwest at four or five knots and a gentle rain is falling. I make a fair landing.
If only I had a little more practice I could get good at landings. Really. All I need is some confidence, and a little practice would give me some. I need to get out to the airport and do a couple dozen landings. Maybe this Saturday.
I shut her down by the hangar and am wiping the oil off her nose and belly when the mechanics come out and welcome me home. Together we look the Queen over and poke this and prod that.
She’s in good shape. I think she’ll fly another 49 years, at least. Perhaps someday one of my grandchildren will use the Cannibal Queen for a Stearman summer. That’s certainly one of the infinite number of possibilities.
After I get my gear unloaded and we get the Queen inside, out of the misting rain, I take the time to inspect the little plane I acquired in April, a Breezy.
The Breezy is a homebuilt yet it doesn’t look like you expect an airplane to look. Most airplanes you sit in, this one you sit on. It has no fuselage, merely a triangular-cross-section framework of welded tubular steel. On this framework hang conventional wings and a tail. Power is provided by a 140-HP pusher engine. The pilot and passenger sit in tandem in front of the wings and engine, out there in front of everything, on seats bolted to the framework. There is no canopy, no windshield, no fuselage, no cockpit. But it flies!
The Breezy looks like what you might get if an ultralight had carnal knowledge of the Cannibal Queen.
This one was constructed in 1972 by a high school welding teacher, probably with the help of his students. It was never flown enough, however—a mere two hundred hours in nineteen years—and neglect and corrosion have taken their toll. We’re restoring it—overhauling the engine, replacing corroded tubing, re-covering the wings with new fabric, and so on. When it’s finished in a month or two it’ll be better than new.
And I’ll get to fly it first!
It’ll be a kick. I’ll be sitting on that chair out in front of the whole shebang with a stick and throttle and rudder and darn near nothing else, my nose splitting the breeze. I’ll be grinning so much my teeth will get splattered with bugs.
I’m going to need a name for it, something catchy.
Maybe next summer I’ll fly it around the country. Or to Oshkosh. Or West Virginia. Or …
But that will be another story.
A Biography of Stephen Coonts
Stephen Coonts is a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-eight thriller, suspense, and nonfiction titles, including the blockbuster techno-thriller The Intruders (1994).
Born in 1946, Coonts grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coalmining town in the western foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. His father, Gilbert, was a lawyer and his mother, Violet, was a schoolteacher and painter. He attended college at West Virginia University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1968. Following graduation, he joined the Navy and moved to Pensacola, Florida, to begin flight training at the age of twenty-two. He was stationed on the USS Enterprise for two combat cruises in the final years of the Vietnam War and flew an A-6 Intruder attack plane, an aircraft featured in many of his early novels. After completing a tour aboard the USS Nimitz, Coonts left active duty with an honorable discharge in 1977, having achieved the rank of lieutenant.
Coonts then moved to Colorado and worked as a taxi driver and police officer before enrolling in law school at the University of Colorado. He practiced law throughout his thirties while still enjoying his greatest hobby: aviation. In 1986, he published his highly successful debut, The Flight of the Intruder, which spent twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Coonts’s debut borrows heavily from his own experiences as a combat pilot, and the novel is rich in the technical details of aviation and warfare. Nine of Coonts’s subsequent thrillers star pilot Jake Grafton, the hero of The Flight of the Intruder, beginning with Final Flight (1988). Many of them have also appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Through the course of the books Jake Grafton flies combat missions in the Gulf War and later becomes a CIA agent. He matches up against Soviet spies, terrorists, and, in Under Siege (1990), Colombian drug lords. In The Intruders (1994), Coonts delivers a sequel to his wildly popular debut, returning to Grafton’s last missions as a pilot in the Vietnam War.
Aside from the Jake Grafton books, Coonts has penned a number of successful series and stand-alone titles. Many of his recent novels feature Tommy Carmellini, a Jake Grafton protégé. Coonts has also branched out into science fiction with Saucer (2002), and has cowritten a series of high-tech espionage thrillers starting with Deep Black (2003). His nonfiction writing includes The Cannibal Queen (1992), a travelogue of Coonts’s summer spent crisscrossing the continental U.S. in a WWII-era biplane, often with his teenage son David as a companion.
Coonts currently lives in Colorado. He has four children: Rachel, his oldest child, works as a paralegal; Lara, his second oldest, is married and has two kids of her own; David, a software engineer with Lockheed Martin, is now married with three children; and Tyler, Coonts’s youngest son, who works for a marketing firm in Las Vegas. Coonts still resides part-time in West Virginia on Deer Creek Farm, where he does much of his writing.
Stephen Paul Coonts around one year old, in his hometown of Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coalmining town in the western foothills of the Allegheny Mountains.
Gilbert (“Gib”) and Violet Coonts with a nine-month-old Stephen. Violet, a school teacher and artist, is five months pregnant with Coonts’s brother John.
Coonts and his brother John, sitting on their grandparents’ stoop in Elkins, West Virginia, about 1952.
Coonts’ school photo from age nine or ten. The photo was taken at a profile because he had a black eye from fighting on th
e playground.
Coonts sitting atop Mount Evans in Colorado, June 1985.
Coonts in front of his hangar in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993.
Coonts flying his Breezy in Boulder, Colorado, in 1992. An experimental plane, this Breezy was constructed in 1971 in Nebraska. Steve purchased it in 1991 and spent a year rebuilding it from the frame out.
Coonts with his son Tyler, posing in front of the Cannibal Queen in June of 1995. The plane had been a World War II primary fight trainer.
Coonts with the Cannibal Queen. His nonfiction book of the same name covered the months he spent touring the continental U.S. from the cockpit of that plane. He sold the Cannibal Queen after nine years of ownership.
Taken in 1993, this photo shows Coonts and his brother John with their father, Gilbert, who was recovering from a recent stroke. [where was this taken?]
Coonts and his girlfriend, Deborah Jean, at the Mayan ruins in Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico, in October 2010.
The author today.
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copyright © 1992 by Stephen P. Coonts
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0557-0
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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