My daughter Rachael has a phrase and gesture for moments like this, and I indulge myself. “All right!” I roar exultantly and jab my fist aloft into the prop blast. “All right.!”
After another thirty minutes of painstakingly looking for landmarks amid the North Carolina small farms, it occurs to me that I could go higher. After all, the view will be so much better up there. Why am I crawling across the earth at little more than the height at which robins fly?
Prop to full increase, a little more gas to the engine, then throttle forward to the stop. Up we go into the open sky. I level at 3,500 feet and look around carefully. Oh yes, there’s that town fifteen miles to the north, that lake off to the southeast, that large tower that the map says is right there.
But it’s cool over North Carolina at 3,500 feet. Clad only in jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, I feel a little chilly. It’s a great feeling for the 27th day of June in the South.
After a fuel stop in Kinston, my route takes me northeast toward Albemarle Sound. I need to get around the big restricted area that is the Navy’s Dare County bombing range, so I fly eastward on the north side of it, parallel to the southern shore of Albemarle.
At one point I glance off to my right and pick up a jet coming out of the restricted area toward me at my altitude of 3,500 feet. An A-6 Intruder, like I used to fly. This one passes behind me climbing northward toward Elizabeth City, doing maybe 250 knots. His low-visibility paint scheme is quite evident. I look left and watch the Intruder disappear into the vastness of the sky, still climbing. I wonder if he saw this bright yellow biplane?
The FBO at Dare County Airport in Manteo, North Carolina, has the nicest FBO office I have ever visited. The building is wood frame with big windows, obviously not the cheapest shack the proprietor could erect. The ceiling of the interior is two stories up, and everything is painted white. The cheery surroundings and comfortable furniture invite you to give your bottom a treat and linger awhile.
But I have places to go. A six-minute hop across the water is First Flight Airport on the Outer Banks, adjacent to the Wright Brothers Monument and Museum at Kill Devil Hill. The complex is administered by the National Park Service.
The first shock occurs when I get a squint at the airport, a single strip of asphalt in a woodlot of large, mature trees that seemingly come right to the edge of the runway on both sides. Descending on final to runway 2 is like sinking into a canyon.
I make an acceptable landing in front of what I know will be onlookers, then taxi to the parking area just off the south end of the strip. There is no FBO, no fuel available, no snack bar or pop machines, just a ramp full of little airplanes and an entrepreneur giving joyrides to park pilgrims.
I shoot the breeze a little with him, then set off afoot for the monument atop Kill Devil Hill. Another shock. In all the photos and paintings of the Wrights’ flight experiments, Kill Devil Hill is as bald as Don Rickles’ head. The Wrights went there because the hill and adjacent dunes were devoid of vegetation and the sea wind blew unobstructed. And there were no trees. A wise man who plans to venture skyward in a homemade flying machine should do it in a place without any bothersome trees nearby that would attract his craft like a magnet attracts iron filings. Every person who has ever watched a tree lure and devour kites is familiar with this principle.
Yet today Kill Devil Hill is covered with vegetation that holds the sand in place. The sandy plain to the north of the hill where the Wrights flew the first successful airplane is similarly covered. Huge trees stand to the west on both sides of the asphalt runway, to the north beyond the marker that shows where the Wrights’ fourth flight ended that fateful December 17, 1903, and to the east toward the park entrance.
It seems ironic to me—to protect the area from erosion and preserve it for future generations, the Park Service has so altered the place that the Wrights would reject it today if they were looking for a place to fly.
In the little museum you will get the flavor of what the place used to be—a windswept dune by the Atlantic, two brothers toiling with bits of wood and fabric and wire, trying to coax a twelve-horsepower four-cylinder engine to work reliably while the salt wind blew sand into everything. In the old photographs you will see a few of the locals from Manteo. No tourists, of course: the great American vacation at the seashore had not yet become the annual religious pilgrimage that it is today.
The Wrights first came to this place in 1900 to work with a glider. They returned in 1901 and 1902 with other gliders, the last big enough to carry a man. Here they analyzed and solved the problem of control. Here they verified the data from their Dayton experiments on the proper shape of a wing. Here they taught themselves to fly. That was their other great insight, which followed as soon as they understood the realities of control—flying would have to be learned.
When they returned to Kill Devil Hill in 1903 their glider had an engine they had designed and built themselves. Commercial manufacturers had not yet produced a lightweight engine with sufficient power for their purposes. These two dreamers were the eternal Yankee tinkerers—if they couldn’t buy what they needed at a reasonable price, they made it themselves. They were always willing to experiment and try until they found something that worked.
Finally they were ready. They had learned all that they could from gliders, their engine worked after a fashion, the airplane was as ready as two very careful men could make it.
On December 17 Orville went first. The first flight was a mere 120 feet. Today a white stone painted with a big “1” marks the place where he landed. Wilbur went next, a flight of 175 feet. Orville flew the third one, about 250 feet.
Wilbur made the fourth flight that day, and the “4” stone stands far away with the tall trees behind it. There is no doubt. As you stand beside the commemorative stone at the launch point and stare at that fourth marker 852 feet away, you comprehend the full enormity of the Wrights’ achievement. Here man first rose from the earth in a heavier-than-air machine and flew in powered, controlled flight. They had truly flown.
Inside the museum you will find a replica of the Wrights’ 1903 Flyer. And you will find a replica of one of their gliders.
Stare at the photographs and paintings: try to get inside the minds of those two bicycle mechanics who were convinced that man could fly and they were the men who could do it. Then go back outside and stand at the launch point and contemplate that fourth stone. That is the yardstick to measure your dreams against.
Back at the airstrip I was smoking my pipe and feasting my eyes upon the
Cannibal Queen
when the joyride entrepreneur asked if I would like to share cookies and potato chips. I begged off. Although it was after 1 o’clock and I hadn’t eaten, the thought of all that sugar and carbohydrates killed my appetite.
The man’s name is Jay Mankedick, and he and his pilots and airplanes are based at Manteo. They commute to work by air. Jay has a concession from the Park Service to offer rides here. He said he still enjoys the flying and the pilots and seeing the kick people get out of taking their first airplane ride.
“I first came here with five hundred bucks in my pocket and no job. I leased a plane and slept out in the woods for the first month.”
We shook hands and I wished him well. As tough as it is to make a living flying planes, Jay seems to have found a niche. And a whole lot of people who go flying with him and his pilots get a taste of real flying, not the airline passenger stuff, which is to flying what masturbation is to sex, merely a pale imitation of the real thing.
I preflight and strap into the Queen. “Let’s rock and roll,” John Weisbart used to say. I used that line once with David, and he used it a couple times after that when we climbed into the plane.
Hearing it from the boy surprised me somehow, and pleased me. Yeah, let’s rock and roll.
I take off on runway 2 and climb out over the beach northbound. The
Cannibal Queen
is flying well. If only Orville and Wilbur were here to go flying with me.
I wonder if Orville ever met Lloyd Stearman? Wilbur died young, of course, but Orville lived until 1948. No doubt he saw Stearmans flying.
I don’t know much about Lloyd Stearman, but he was a contemporary of Walter Beech and Clyde Cessna, all three of whom worked for the Travel Air Company in the 1920s.
Travel Air is remembered for a magnificent sport biplane of the same name that Lloyd Stearman designed and the company manufactured and sold to wealthy sportsmen in the late 1920s. Travel Air didn’t sell many. The plane was expensive and sport aviation was but a dream in a nation that had almost no airports worthy of the name. Anyone traveling took a train. Barnstormers—those itinerant aerial gypsies—were still alighting in cow pastures and buying gasoline by the bucketful from farmers. Anyone with an irresistible urge to aviate could still buy an old Jenny for a few hundred dollars, so the thousands that a new Travel Air commanded meant the company sold very few of them. And of those they sold, still fewer survive today, treasured by their proud owners and only occasionally rolled from their hangars on pristine, perfect mornings to take to the sky.
Stearman, Beech and Cessna all went their own ways and founded their own companies. As was the innocent custom, they all named their new enterprises after themselves.
Stearman’s first proprietary design was the 1927 C-1, the first of thirty different models that he produced between 1926 and 1930. After a series of corporate mergers, Lloyd Stearman left the company in 1931. New management decided to try for an Army contract, thinking that there was an opportunity in the Army’s specification for a new biplane trainer. They set engineers Harold Zipp and Jack Clark to modifying Stearman’s basic design. Legend has it these two completed the job in sixty days.
Although any knowledgeable observer could see that the future of aviation was in monoplanes that offered less drag and more performance for the same horsepower, the U.S. Army was even more conservative then than it is today. The generals were still insisting on open-cockpit bombers and biplane fighters. And they wanted an open-cockpit, tandem-seat biplane trainer to replace the Jenny.
Stearman’s prototype trainer was ready in late 1933 and the military tested it in March 1934. The Army declined to buy any, but the Navy ordered sixty-one of them. Stearman was on its way.
The Army continued to test slightly improved models of Stearman’s trainer, but continued to defer purchases. Finally, in 1936, the Army began to buy.
But apparently the coffers of the tiny Stearman company were empty. Boeing took over lock, stock and Stearmans on April 1, 1938. Boeing expanded the Wichita plant during the war, hired thousands of workers and sold every biplane trainer it could produce to the Army and Navy. Some, like mine, went to the Canadians. The British got some too. All the Stearmans were manufactured in Wichita. It’s ironic, in a way, that Boeing, the company that was manufacturing B-17s and B-29s as fast as they could crank them out, also made the vast bulk of the 8,584 Stearman biplanes, an obsolete design from a bygone era. Spare parts manufactured raised the equivalent total to 10,346 planes, more than any other biplane produced prior to that time.
The most numerous biplane ever built, the Antonov An-2 Colt, didn’t even fly until 1947. The Soviets made 5,000 of them and the Poles made 8,200. With single 1,000-HP radial engines, they were used as ag sprayers, transports, you name it. What does an An-2 look like? A great big Stearman.
Several hundred Stearmans were still on back order in 1945 when the Army canceled production. Skid Henley told me that the Army told Boeing it would pay for the airplanes on the assembly line, but Boeing didn’t have to actually assemble them. Boeing didn’t work that way—they assembled all the aircraft anyway. Henley said he went to Wichita and paid $600 for one of those brand-new, just-off-the-assembly-line, government-surplus instant antiques. He flew it home.
Today it is easy to see that the Stearman trainer embodied everything aircraft designers had learned about biplanes since the Wright brothers. It had all of the inherent virtues of biplanes—strong, simple to build, cheap and easy to maintain, easy to fly—and the biplane’s inevitable vices—slow, thirsty for gasoline, difficult to land in a crosswind. The Army got exactly what the generals wanted—the ultimate biplane with just enough engine to get it off the ground and force the student to learn to fly the wing, not the engine.
To be fair to the generals, the fact that the aircraft was slow didn’t matter. As a primary trainer it always took off and landed at the same place. And the generals didn’t give a fig about the fuel burn—the government was buying gasoline for a few cents a gallon. The Stearman’s crosswind landing characteristics were of equally small concern: in the mid-1930s U.S. Army airfields were huge, mile-square grass fields with a wind sock in the middle and hangars on one side. No less an authority than the visionary Jimmy Doolittle argued in those days that the airfields of the future should all be vast, open meadows without runways. What crosswind?
Norfolk, Virginia, lay spread below the Stearman’s nose from Virginia Beach to Portsmouth, clear and pristine in the excellent visibility. Approach let me fly up from the south at 3,500 feet, then begin my descent toward Norfolk International at my leisure. I pulled the throttle back to 20 inches of manifold pressure and pushed the trim lever forward. Soon I was indicating 115 MPH, screaming down from the blue like a big yellow bird. Off to my right I could see an F-14 Tomcat in the pattern at NAS Oceana.
I sat around the FBO executive terminal for two hours trying to reach some people I knew by telephone, but no one was home. The candy machine was out of order. Two business jets came and went, one a Lear that deposited a girl about eight years old and a woman I took to be her mother. Talk about a first-class trip to visit Grandmom!
After three cups of coffee, I gave up on my friends and took off across the Chesapeake for Cape Charles. Below, several ships were passing through the channel outward bound.