Joe Mabee and the other colonel-generals will have their hands full in the next few years keeping this organization going. I suspect that as the years go by more and more of these planes will have to be retired to permanent static-display status as money and manpower dry up.
In Sweetwater the FBO had a Texas magazine lying on the table. The cover touted a story inside listing the hundred richest Texans. You needed net assets of $130 million to get on the list. I looked to see if Connie Edwards or Joe Mabee made it. Nope. Probably squandered their piles on airplanes.
Just like me.
But then, I wouldn’t have made a list of the ten thousand richest Texans, even if I lived here and didn’t own anything with an engine except a motorcycle.
M
Y WAKE-UP CALL CAME AT
5:30,
BEFORE DAWN.
S
WEETWATER
, Texas, is on the western edge of the Central Time Zone, so the sun rises late here. It’s up but hidden by clouds on the eastern horizon when I complete my preflight and strap into the Queen. I’m going to do some flying today, a lot I hope, and go all the way to Savannah, Tennessee, 80 miles east of Memphis. If the weather cooperates.
Avenger Field in Sweetwater lies 2,385 feet above sea level. Built in 1929, during World War II this field was home to the WASPs, women pilots who ferried fighters and bombers around the country for the military. Today it’s home to Bob Sears Air-shows, an outfit that puts on aerial acts at airshows a la Earl Cherry.
But this morning I am the only person moving at the airport. The shabby old Beech 18 that was dripping oil beside the gas pump when I landed last night is gone. Only the stains on the asphalt remain. The owner and pilot of that antique was lying on his back under the airplane when we talked. He was a college instructor in Hawaii and had owned the twin-Beech for three years. He worked on it all summer and was trying to get the FAA to sign it off for a flight across the Pacific to Hawaii. He installed racks of 55-gallon drums in the cabin and plumbed them to deliver extra fuel, and he rigged up a system to oil the engines in flight.
I stood there staring at the Beech. It badly needed the attention of someone like Ken Shugart. I thanked my stars that I wasn’t going to fly across 2,300 nautical miles of open ocean in this clapped-out twin-engine prop, one that cruised at 150 knots indicated and had no autopilot.
“What are you going to do with it when you get it to Hawaii?” I asked.
“Haul skydivers.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Had our problems getting started. An aux fuel tank ruptured yesterday when we climbed to eighty-five hundred feet for a test. Sand daubers had plugged up the vent line. Found the rupture this morning when we tried to fill the tank and it ran out all over.” He gestured to the great stain on the asphalt and sighed. “I’ll put in one more drum and go without the aux tank. If I can just get the FAA to sign off the fuel mods. I keep telling them I can just disconnect the lines and call the drums cargo, but they may want to inspect the whole rig. I been talking to them all day.”
“Long way to Hawaii.”
“Oh, we’ll make it. Got to be there Monday when classes start.”
That was yesterday afternoon. Now he’s gone. Maybe up to Lubbock to have the FAA inspect the plane, or on to San Diego.
This morning the temperature is in the low 70s and my leather jacket feels good, but yesterday evening when I landed the temperature was 101 degrees. I am gradually coming down off the spine of the continent as I go east. So the temperature and humidity increase as I descend.
There is a stiff southwest wind blowing about 12 to 15 knots, but one of the runways points dead into it. I taxi out thinking about college teachers flying worn-out twin-Beeches across the ocean.
Sand daubers!
With no wind he will need a minimum of 16 hours to make the hop. Allowing for adverse winds and a little reserve, he should have fuel for 20 hours. Two Pratt & Whitney R-985s at 20 gallons an hour each—absolute minimum—40 times 20. He needs 800 gallons of fuel, and God only knows how much oil. That’s 4,800 pounds of fuel alone.
If he loses an engine before he burns off part of that load, he’s history. Or if his homemade plumbing rig springs a leak, or the plane fills with fumes, or the oil filler system craps out.
I line up the
Cannibal Queen
with the runway and run up the engine. The prop cycles properly and the mags check out. Trim set. Controls free. Okay, here we go. Throttle forward and feed in right rudder, now a touch of left. Tail up … and almost. … yes, she’s flying.
But the college instructor and his twin-Beech—that’s what aviation is all about, isn’t it? If he wants to risk his life flying an old airplane across the Pacific so that he can earn a few dollars hauling skydivers aloft, who are we to say that is foolish? Who are we to deny him permission to go? It’s his life and his plane. After all, Lindbergh made it and he didn’t have an FAA inspector sign off his fuel system.
I level at 3,500 feet and pull the power back. Soon I have stabilized at 97 MPH at 2,000 RPM and 21.5 inches. That is very good! And I have a crisp quartering tailwind out of the southwest and smooth air. My cup is full.
Thank God I need no one’s permission to fly. If I kill myself the world will keep on turning. They’ll have a memorial service, the lawyers will divide my worldly possessions, such as they are, and the people who care about me will miss me. That’s all any of us ever get. And it will happen for every one of us sooner or later no matter how the cards fall. If I crash the only real effect on the cosmos will be the loss of one irreplaceable Stearman, but this rock will keep spinning on its axis and the sun will rise tomorrow, as usual.
In the meantime …
East of Abilene the land below is dotted with ponds and little lakes, all full. A cool, wet summer … I suspect this coming winter will be a real dilly. That Philippine volcano blew a lot of dust into the atmosphere and the sunsets have been spectacular lately. That dust should have a cooling effect.
There are clouds ahead, a high layer. By the time I cross Eastland and strike off east-southeast away from the highway shafts of sunlight are illumining the haze underneath. The air here is moist. Already the land is a thousand feet lower than it was in Sweetwater.
The land has trees on it now in woodlots and odd abandoned places. Over Stephenville I decide the sunlight shafts look like the pillars of heaven, and I scrawl that phrase on the chart. But soon the pillars disappear as the sky above solidifies. It’s gloomy to the northeast toward Dallas-Fort Worth. I came south to avoid the TCA, that sprawling toadstool of controlled airspace, and now I can see I avoided bad weather. Well, the forecast was for showers and isolated thunderstorms today in east Texas, which was one reason I started so early.
I once spent four months in Texas, May through August 1969. I was a flight student at Naval Air Station Kingsville flying F-9 Cougars, midfifties-vintage swept-wing jet fighters. The engines had centrifugal compressors instead of axial ones so they were nothing to brag about even before the Navy de-rated them, taking a percent or two RPM off the top end, to make them last. And the final indignity, the Navy painted the fighters white and red to minimize the possibility of midair collisions. Still, they were jet fighters, some of them single-seat. For most of us these were the only single-seat jet fighters we would ever be fortunate enough to get our grubby hands on.
Looking back you can see how crazy it was: Uncle Sam provided hundreds of twenty-three-year-old boy-men just out of college with real, genuine, honest-to-god jet fighters armed with four 20-mm cannons and real bullets and ordered them to fly these machines all over south Texas and have the time of their lives. And picked up the tab for everything. And paid these kids for doing it.
The coin had a slimy side, of course—there was a truly shitty little war going on in Southeast Asia and later on we would be expected to go do our bit to win the thing for our side. You may remember that one—we lost it. The war killed some of these kids and cost others, the ones shot down and imprisoned as POWs, a price higher than any human should have to pay.
All that lay in a hazy future during my F-9 Texas summer.
I remember the heat. We manned airplanes baking on the concrete in the south Texas sun and humidity and almost melted before we got into the air. The planes had to be coaxed off the runway—climb-outs were long, leisurely affairs. The air conditioning in the cockpit merely delayed the onset of heat exhaustion. But the flying! Strafing with real ammo, air-to-air gunnery, dropping bombs, dogfighting, carrier qualifying, formation, low-level navigation, aerobatics—the flying was as good as flying can be.
Everyone said an F-9 would not go supersonic. I had to try. I climbed to about 30,000 feet and with the throttle cobbed, rolled her on her back and pointed the nose straight down. She smacked into the Mach buffet and would not cut through it. At 10,000 feet I glumly retarded the throttle and pulled out. For once everyone was right.
In Vietnam I missed those F-9s with their four 20-mm cannons in the nose. At night we would fly our A-6s at 400 feet over the Red River delta of North Vietnam and attack targets we located by radar. The North Vietnamese liked to line up antiaircraft guns along roads and dikes and open fire when they heard the sound of our engines. As the muzzle-flashes strobed and the tracers poured skyward, I wished the A-6 had a couple of those 20s. If we had been able to occasionally lower the nose and put a burst or two into an antiaircraft gun position, we might have had a lot less flak to fly through. Maybe fewer guys killed. Alas, guns were too low-tech for the A-6.
And maybe that’s good. If A-6s had had guns, I was young enough and foolish enough to have tried to duel the guns at night at 400 feet over the delta. I wanted to. The gunners were trying to kill me and I desperately wanted to kill them.
That’s what you remember most vividly about war—that urge to kill.
Vietnam was long ago. So was my F-9 summer. Back when I was very young.
On days off I drove around, visited little Texas towns like Beeville, Alice, Uvalde. … Small towns in Texas are like oysters, you either develop a taste for them or you don’t. I liked them. I liked the shady streets and the old cars and the soda-pop machines with glass bottles and the girls with the go-to-hell looks. It’s still there—all of it. Texas is still Texas.
Passing Lake Whitney today the land below confuses me. Throughout the Midwest and Great Plains the land is surveyed into east-west, north-south tracts. Here the boundaries run about 240-060 magnetic. All the cultivated fields and fences and farm roads are skewed 30 degrees. Flying by the compass, it’s disconcerting to look out and see the land out of kilter. Wonder why they did that?
Two hours after leaving Sweetwater I see Corsicana, Texas, looming ahead. I locate the field without difficulty and announce that I am making a straight-in to runway 16. The wind is out of the west, about 90 degrees cross, at about 12. I look at the chart and double-check the field elevation. Yep, only 448 feet.
The Unicom freq, 122.8, is relatively busy with people announcing their location in the pattern and the runways they are going to use, but it seems few of them ever state what airport they are at. There are only three or four Unicom freqs, so in congested areas it is not uncommon to hear traffic from five or six airports on one frequency. Some of these pilots remember to state the airport but they mumble it, and the Queen’s radio is not very good.
On final I spot a twin about to take off in the opposite direction on the runway I am landing on. He announces with disgust in his voice that he will hold for the Stearman. Sorry, Jack, but if you had said you were at Corsicana, I would have gladly gotten out of your way. Now you can wait for this kite to float in.
Ray Rodgers runs the FBO at Corsicana. A tall, lean Texan, he plunks his feet on his desk and sighs as he looks out the window at the
Queen
sitting by the pump.
“God, I learned to fly in one of those things,” he said with a wistful look on his face. “It was out at Charlie Wyche’s ranch. I was friends with his son. We got to flying Charlie’s brandnew Taylorcraft and he about had a fit. We hadn’t taken any lessons or anything and it was all illegal, but Charlie didn’t care about that. He was upset because he had paid $1,875 for that Taylorcraft and he didn’t want it wrecked. So he said if we wanted to fly, to go fly one of those $75 Stearmans. So we did. Taught ourselves to fly it.”
“Seventy-five bucks?”
“Yep. He went over to Pyote and bid on a lot of Stearmans. Got 250 of them for $75 each. They hauled in planes from all over and auctioned them off there at Pyote. Now Charlie brought those Stearmans back to his ranch and took the engines off and stored them in a barn. He stored the wings in another barn and stacked the fuselages on their noses down the fence rows. He bought ’em on speculation. Figured all the fliers returning from the war would buy ’em. So me and his boy had our very own $75 Stearman and we flew it all over Charlie’s ranch that summer.”
“How old were you then?”
“Sixteen. I was sixteen. Of course, nowadays nobody in his right mind would let a sixteen-year-old kid fly a Stearman. Worth too much.” He sighed again and glanced out the window at the
Cannibal Queen
.
“Whatever happened to all those planes?”
“Well, Charlie finally sold the fuselages and wings to some outfit up in Tulsa. They were making dusters out of ’em. They didn’t want the engines but Charlie made them take ’em. He didn’t want the engines either.”
By the time I reach Tyler at least half the land below is covered by trees. East of Shreveport the land is all trees, with only here and there a pasture, roads like ribbons, towns hidden by the trees on their streets.
East of Shreveport I encounter my first clouds at 3,500 feet, so I descend to 1,500. Visibility is ten to twelve miles, a clear day in this part of the world.
Descending into Ruston, Louisiana, 30 miles west of Monroe, I get my first good whiff of the sticky-sweet odor from the pulp mills. Welcome back to the South!