“I feel more comfortable in back,” John explained.
“Umm,” Steve Hall said, ever the diplomat.
“Well, I guess maybe it’s time.” John looked me over for telltale signs of hangover or decrepitude. Seemingly satisfied, he sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll sit in the front.”
He slowly climbed up onto the wing and made his way forward as I wondered if I was up to flying this yellow bird from the aft office, the captain’s seat. Now I wished I hadn’t been so hasty. I strapped in and sat there staring at the switches while John talked me through an engine start. With my stomach fluttering we taxied out, S-turning as usual, but from back here I could see better around the fuselage and engine.
Once in the air I discovered the rear cockpit is more wind-blown than the front. Here you are completely behind the wings and farther from the center of gravity, so any movement of the aircraft in pitch feels more pronounced. The look is different too. Although it is more difficult to see straight forward—especially with John’s head in the way—the view to the sides is better when you flare. I decided it is also easier to detect any lateral movement of the nose in the landing flare, movement that you must use rudder to counter—the nose must go straight regardless of the crosswind.
Eventually John let me take her around the patch by myself, and one gorgeous, windless Colorado morning he signed me off as safe for solo. I haven’t felt such a sense of accomplishment since my first solo in a U.S. Navy T-34 at Saufley Field in 1968.
And John told me again, “You’ve got to fly this thing every second in the landing pattern or she’ll bite you on the ass.”
In October I found out how right he was. Which is why I named the old gal
Cannibal Queen
and had a woman of appropriate demeanor and endowments painted on the right side, right above her name.
Today, thirteen months after I bought the Queen, David and I are aloft and on our way. I watch the engine instruments and refer to the sectional chart occasionally. We are flying true east, right down a section line over high plains still green from a wet spring. We have talked ourselves out and David is looking around, watching occasional puffy clouds floating over our heads. Then he looks out the right side of the plane awhile, then the left.
The first hour has barely passed when he announces, “I’m bored.”
I sit silently pondering the amusement quotient of fourteen-year-olds. Was I like that when I was fourteen? My God, was it really thirty years ago?
More cumulo-puffballs are building in a layer above us. David is still reclining his head to watch them pass overhead. With St. Francis in sight dead ahead, I start to climb. At 8,200 feet we are even with the bottoms.
“You’re not going to go through those, are you?” the bored one asks with a tinge of concern in his voice.
“Just between,” I assure him.
Up another hundred feet and we slice through a narrow canyon between two puffballs. Damp gray wisps of nothingness off each wing. Then we are through and the small town of St. Francis, Kansas, lies before us.
I cut the power and let the Stearman descend as I call on the radio. No one answers on Unicom, 122.8. I listen. The altimeter setting would be nice, but I really want to know the wind. I learn from the radio calls that another Stearman is in the landing pattern. Finally I figure out he is using the grass runway that parallels runway 13, the only paved runway. I cross above the field and turn left downwind, only to be cut out of the pattern by a Cessna 182. Around again, only this time on base leg the sky is full of parachutists. I veer off to the right and add power for another trip around the circuit. Now the Unicom guy gets on the radio—wind about 20 knots from 120 degrees—the wind socks are standing straight out.
This time I plant the
Queen
in a mediocre three-point landing that the grass actually makes look good. Grass is like that. It is so forgiving that most tail-dragger pilots prefer it. On asphalt the large main tires of the Stearman stick and track without any sideways give, yet on grass both tires can slip sideways while the aircraft remains pointed straight. And sod has more give, more absorbency than asphalt. Occasionally after a too-enthusiastic arrival on asphalt or concrete the bird will return to the air with an unsightly and embarrassing bounce, propelled aloft in spite of the pilot’s wishes by the action of the shock absorbers in the landing gear struts. Grass absorbs some of this shock absorber thrust, so the plane seems more willing to stay planted.
There are nine other Stearmans in St. Francis and the
Cannibal Queen
makes ten. A new record for the fly-in, we are told by the official greeter as he fills out my name and address. He takes a photo of David and me and points out a place to tie down the Queen.
With three grass runways, St. Francis is one of the finest fields in the country for tail-wheel airplanes. And the place is jumping. Ten Stearmans, all painted brightly with whatever color scheme struck the owner’s fancy, another fifteen or twenty light planes, skydivers, three or four balloons, and a crowd of a hundred or so local spectators still lingering after a long day in the early summer sun. When you are tired of watching the noisy biplanes or scanning the sky for parachutes you can amuse yourself by inspecting sunburns, your own included. This is the great American airshow at a little town in the heartland. There are no paid aerobatic acts; the Blue Angels haven’t been invited because they wouldn’t come. This is just a bunch of old airplane enthusiasts, balloonists, jumpers, and their families, and the spectators who came to watch it all. This fly-in is put together every year by Robert Grace of Grace Flying Service, the local fixed-base operator (FBO).
David and I wander and look. I recall attending a local, do-it-yourself airshow at the grass field in my hometown of Buckhannon, West Virginia, when I was just a small boy. I remember the big acts were a guy who did aerobatics in a yellow J-3 Cub and two guys who leaped out of an airplane and floated earthward in surplus military chutes. That is about all I recall of that day, except for the fact my brother and I spent most of it running through the crowd playing hide-and-seek with each other. I must have been five or six then, maybe 1951 or ’52. Strange that I should remember it so well.
To get to the cotton-candy stand we pass three farmers in identical bib overalls sitting on a bench smoking corncob pipes, not a one of them under the age of seventy. They sit without smiles, the smoke wisping from their pipes, their eyes focused on the airplanes from the past.
And we meet the people who belong to the biplanes. After we have the
Queen
fueled and tied down out in the grass between two of her sisters, a fellow named Kirk and his wife offer to drive us the three blocks to the motel in the twenty-year-old Cadillac courtesy car the motel provided. We agree, then wait for half an hour while Kirk does something or other at the other end of the flight line.
We sit in the grass in the shade under the wing and watch a white-and-blue Stearman arcing above us in the blue sky. Two Stearman pilots near us are giving rides—$30 for 15 minutes—so there are the usual squeals and trepidation as the neophytes are strapped into the front cockpits. One of the planes lacks an electrical system, so we watch the aviator hand-prop the engine. It starts easily on the first mighty swing of the big polished-metal prop. Another planeload of skydivers leaps into the arms of Jesus and floats earthward as the throb of radial engines surrounds and engulfs us.
At last Kirk is ready, and we climb into the ancient Cad for the three-block jaunt to the motel where we have a room reserved.
An hour later David and I walk the six blocks to the St. Francis City Park. The residential streets are lined with modest homes with huge trees in the yards. This is the Madison Avenue version of America, the stable, middle-class dream America of contented married couples with two kids and a friendly mongrel dog and a Chevy in the driveway. This myth pulls on our heartstrings even though we well know that small-town America is already an anachronism, even though we know that these farming communities on the prairie are dying as the families leave one by one for better jobs and better schools in the big cities, even though we know life here is as hard as it is anyplace else, or even a little harder.
The houses have porches and people sitting on them visiting with their neighbors on this gorgeous early-summer evening. When was the last time a developer in California or Colorado built a house with a porch on it?
So we walk along, this fourteen-year-old boy and I, looking at the houses and talking of what these people do to earn a living. David is curious about what kids his age do in a town this size “for fun” on a Saturday night.
I tell him they get in the family car or pickup and drag Main Street, like they did in Longmont, Colorado, in the summer of 1977 when I was on the police force there. And as they still do in every town in Colorado, including Denver. The kids drive up and down the street all evening, seeing who is in the other cars, occasionally stopping in a parking lot and sitting on the hood as the parade goes by. And they throw beer and pop cans. The whole scene infuriates the merchants, who still complain to the police as vigorously now as they did in 1977, and 1967, and 1957. Why the merchants get no wiser I don’t know.
In the park a wheat farmer who barbecues commercially is cleaning up. He is finished cooking—all the meat is in large pots ready for serving. As he cleans his grill—a large boilerlike contraption that he tows behind a pickup—he tells a story about a woman in a bikini (from out of town, probably wicked Denver) who attended the fly-in two years ago. Right before his very eyes there on the sidewalk in the heart of St. Francis she skinned out of the bikini she had worn all day and quickly donned shorts and tank top. “That recharged my batteries,” he tells his listeners as he stones the grill clean of grease.
At last we line up to heap disposable plates full of barbecued beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, and home-style green beans. It is a feast. The evening sun is still above the horizon when the master of ceremonies thanks everyone for coming to the ninth fly-in and promises a bigger whing-ding for the tenth fly-in next year.
Then we are entertained by a barbershop quartet from Sterling, Colorado, a town on the high plains very similar to this one. The baritone is the Stearman owner who organized the first St. Francis fly-in, so he gets a round of applause. And when the singing is over we applaud the couple who got engaged today when a Stearman flew by towing a banner with the proposal
LUELLEN MARRY ME JOHN
. After we applaud the couple who were married at last year’s fly-in, David and I walk the perfect streets back to our motel.
It has been a great day. We are on our way. The whole country is out there, the
Cannibal Queen
is ready and willing.
I am still glowing when David attacks me in the motel for our usual evening roughhouse. It’s a congenital defect; he has to be tickled before he can sleep. I conk before he does. Later I wake up and find he has turned out the lights and is in bed asleep.
It’s going to be a good summer.
W
E LIFT OFF THE GRASS RUNWAY AT
S
T.
F
RANCIS ON SUNDAY
morning with more roar and vigor than I thought the Lycoming R-680 engine capable of. I glance at the gauges. Glory hallelujah, the manifold pressure reads 26 inches. Aha, St. Francis is 3,000 feet above sea level, and I have been flying out of Boulder, Colorado, which is at 5,300 feet. So this is what happens when you get a little closer to sea level.
A 70-mile-per-hour climb speed works out to about 12 degrees nose up. We soar skyward. Yee-haaa!
After we level out I turn the stick over to David. He ignores the rudders, as he has done on flights in the past when he tried this piloting gig. I keep him generally headed in the right direction, southeast toward Colby.
We are on our way again, probably the first Stearman to leave the fly-in. We had breakfast with an interesting group of flyers from Colorado and the pilot who had flown his plane the longest distance to reach the fly-in—from Florida. He flies to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, every year for the biplane fly-in, then comes to St. Francis the following weekend. After breakfast David and I walked the three blocks to the airport carrying our bags. After an hour or so of loafing and watching other Stearmans give rides, David was ready to go. He was bored. Then two skydivers in full regalia mounted their trusty Cessna 182 to be transported aloft. David wanted to wait to see them come down.
We sat on the grass in front of the plane leaning back against the main wheels, me on the left, David on the right. The weather is fantastic here again today—severe clear—although it is supposed to be foggy toward the east. The FAA Flight Service Station briefer assured me the fog would burn off by the time we managed to arrive. I ran my fingers through the grass and looked at the Queen’s wings arranged like pieces of sculpture above me against the blue.
Now we are a part of that sky. After a while the interstate highway that runs from Denver to Kansas City, 1-70, becomes distinctive. We motor on and cross it just west of Colby, Kansas. We keep heading southeast to cross the highway again when it zigs south to Oakley, Kansas, then intercept it for the third time east of Oakley. I tell David to follow it.
This he can do well. Following a highway is much easier than flying a compass course and more fun since you get to look outside most of the time. Finally David gets tired and I take over.
We are not talking much today, just sitting silently watching the Kansas wheat fields and pastures roll by below. I break the silence occasionally to tell him the name of a town or village. My knowledge comes from the sectional chart that I use for navigation. The Queen’s only navigation instrument is a wet compass: she has no VOR, no ADF, no Loran, no nothing. The gadget masters who spend thousands on the latest gizmo for their aerial pride and joy would have a stroke if they saw the Queen.
We will cross the country the same way the barnstormers flew their Jennys—with a map and a compass. We will follow highways, railroad lines, rivers, use the compass to go from one prominent landmark to another. This is the most basic navigation skill and goes by the name of pilotage. Add a watch and the method becomes dead reckoning. Amazingly enough, with nothing but a compass, watch and chart Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris.