No one knows the answers. Mooney seems to be the only healthy company manufacturing single-engine planes. You will pay at least $150,000 for a Mooney, so they are bought mainly by up-scale professional people. Cessna today builds only business jets. At this writing Piper is in bankruptcy and not making anything. A few planes still trickle from the Beechcraft factory, and a few little companies build specialty planes—mainly new production of forty or fifty-year old designs—but only Aerospatiale, a French firm, has even attempted to design and manufacture new airframes using the latest technology. There have been no new engines for thirty years.
The Beech Bonanza, considered by many as the best aerial carriage available to middle-class Americans, has been manufactured essentially unchanged since 1947. Depending on the model you select, you will pay between $178,000 and $300,000 for a new one today. Over $400,000 if you want the top-of-the-line model with all the electronic goodies. Middle-class? Okay, if you can afford one of these you are at least dusty rich. Yet all that money doesn’t change the fact you are getting the technological equivalent of a 1947 Buick.
Imagine an automobile industry in which innovation ceased in the 1950s and most major production lines halted in 1986. The general aviation industry is dying—federal regulation and the legal system have driven it to the lip of the grave where it is waiting to expire and fall in. Soon it will be extinct. Like the dodo bird.
Behind the main EAA museum is Pioneer Airport, three regular hangars full of antiques from the 1920s and ’30s facing a grass runway. On days when the crosswind is not too bad you can get a ride here in a genuine Ford Tri-motor. The only other Tri-motor that I know about still flying passengers is one owned by Scenic Airlines at Grand Canyon Airport, Arizona.
In these hangars are some truly rare airplanes. The one that froze me in my tracks was a Ford Flivver, only two of which were ever built. Henry Ford wanted to follow up the Tri-motor with a cheap aerial Model T that Everyman could own and fly, and this was his attempt. One of them crashed in Florida, killing the test pilot, and the project was abandoned in 1928. This is the other one, the only one left. It’s a fabric-covered, low-wing monoplane with an open cockpit that holds just one person, the pilot. It’s small.
I stared at it, trying as Henry Ford must have done to envision a sky filled with tens of thousands of these aerial Flivvers. The vision was beyond my power of imagination, just as it was Henry’s.
The hangars hold several Stinsons, some rare Fairchilds, a Jenny, and lots of other neat stuff. Most of these planes have a tag dangling from the prop that warns you not to turn it—the engine is “pickled.” To preserve the engine, they drain out the oil and squirt it full of something like Cosmoline.
These airplanes don’t fly. This isn’t a flying museum. The EAA doesn’t have the money or manpower to fly and maintain most of these airplanes. The planes reminded me of steam locomotives in railroad museums, the fireboxes eternally cold, the steam whistles never to sound again, the great driving wheels welded in place. Somehow it’s a little sad.
Inside one of the hangars I got into a conversation with a volunteer who had spent the summer mocking up Stearman wing ribs and explaining the process to visitors.
He had an idea, he said, for selling Stearman wing ribs arranged around a U.S. eagle or shield. He thought people would buy something like that and wanted my opinion. Not really. He wanted me to nod, so I did.
The wing ribs were built of cheap wood and kid’s school glue to save money, yet to my untrained eye they looked workmanlike and carefully done. This gentleman was one of the builders.
And he found a great place to spend the summer, here in a hangar amid these beautiful old airplanes, talking to people interested in aviation, watching the Tri-motor come and go with loads of joyriders. Don’t you envy him a little?
Outside sitting on the grass in the sun was the most beautiful biplane I’ve ever seen, a blue Lincoln-Page wearing a 100-HP Kinner five-cylinder radial. The lines are just so perfect. Rare? This is the only Lincoln-Page I ever laid eyes on, and maybe the only one left. Period.
I walked back across the grass strip and went through the museum, stopping to commune for a moment with the EAA’s Stearman. This monster was donated or loaned to the EAA by Joe C. Hughes, an airshow stunt pilot. She wears a brute of an engine, a Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp with a governor that limits it to 650 horsepower.
I saw Hughes and his wingwalking partner, Gordon McCollam, do their act with this plane at the Canadian National Air-show in 1974 or ’75. At the climax of their show Hughes would make an inverted pass down the runway and McCollam on the top wing would grab a ribbon stretched between two poles. Then one summer turbulence or wind shear caught the plane during one of these performances and McCollam was killed. The FAA now forbids inverted passes at low altitudes with wingwalkers.
McCollam’s death was a tragedy, of course, one that was probably extraordinarily difficult for Hughes to learn to live with. Yet his magnificent Stearman still reeks of that airshow magic that has inspired Americans since barnstormers performed in Jennys on summer weekends in a pasture on the edge of town. Bands playing, balloons and smoke trails aloft in a blue summer sky, the throb of unmuffled exhausts as planes sweep by overhead—these images still stir us deeply.
Flight is the promise of vigorous life, a life in which infinite possibilities are within the grasp of determined men and women of vision.
If we pickle the engines and relegate it all to museums in the name of the great safety pooh-bah, we will be a poorer people.
F
ROM THE WINDOW OF MY HOTEL ROOM
I
COULD SEE THE HAZE.
Thick.
I ate breakfast watching the flags on the sidewalk on the banks of the Fox River whip in the wind. A wind out of the southwest.
The Flight Service briefer summed it up: “Three miles visibility in haze in Oshkosh but improving as you go north. Winds ten to twelve out of the southwest at Oshkosh and getting stronger farther north. Thirty percent chance of thunderstorms across your route of flight today.”
Winds aloft?
“At three thousand, southwest at twenty-five, then thirty near Lake Superior.”
The wind whips my hair as I go through the preflight ritual on the parking mat at the airport. Aviation is full of rituals, even more so than formal religion, which gives it a flavor that is timeless. You begin each morning with sacramental coffee, usually at the same time you are chanting the liturgy with the FAA weather priest.
Out on the mat, at the altar of flight, you approach your airplane, this mechanical steed that will transport you into the heavens. Every morning you check everything you can see, inspect this, touch that, peer here, look there. You examine the oil level on the dipstick, you swing the prop through to ensure that an oil lock has not developed in a cylinder, you arrange the charts in the cockpit just so, you put every switch in its proper position, you start the engine and listen to the predictable, familiar sound, you examine every instrument for any deviation from the norm, you waggle the controls in the same way you do every time.
The rituals assure you that the machine and you are both ready. They ensure you are in control, that the flight will go as planned, that this is not your last day of life, that you will sleep in a bed tonight with your health and your hopes and your petty vices safely intact. Ancient mariners used to burn thighbones on the headland and spill wine before they cast off. I perform my solemn rites for exactly the same reasons.
This morning, with the gods satisfied and my soul prepared, I mumble the holy words to the ground controller and the tower controller in turn and stroke the throttle. The miracle occurs. I fly.
The air is like soup. I climb to 3,500 feet and point the
Queen
northeast. The wind squirts me along faster than a politician’s promise.
The first problem is the airport traffic area at Menasha, just north of Oshkosh. I give the tower a call. “Stay clear of the traffic area. The field is IFR with a partial obscuration.”
Oh, great!
I could climb, but in this goo I risk losing sight of the ground if I go much higher. I can barely see it now. I’ll circle the Menasha airport to the east, over the edge of Lake Winnebago. I glance east. There’s nothing there. The haze merges with the water and there is no horizon. Nor, looking down, is there much of a surface. Quickly I look left at the land to reestablish my spatial orientation.
Okay, no over-water stuff today.
I sneak along the shoreline, a fast sneak with the wind behind me, and then pick up the four-lane toward Green Bay as I talk to Green Bay Approach. They clear me through their airspace.
The four-lane squeezes down to two lanes north of Green Bay. I have a ten degree crab in and still I’m bucketing along, but the poor visibility keeps me busy trying to stay found. Abrams, Stiles, Lena, Coleman, I tick them off one by one. I also use my pencil to try to measure the distances. It appears I’ve done about 76 miles from Oshkosh to Coleman in 43 minutes. How many knots is that? More than a hundred.
I’m going under a cloud layer. The gauzy sun disappears and the haze turns gloomy. I decide to go lower. At 2,500 feet I am bouncing in the cockpit. I can see better but the ride is definitely worse.
Approaching Iron Mountain, Michigan, the clouds are behind and the visibility has improved to about six miles. The wind is fierce out of the southwest at about 15 or 20.
Runway 18 is as close to the wind as they have, so I get to practice my crosswind landing technique. I get the
Queen
onto the runway without altering her appearance, but the landing is nothing to brag about. Upon shutdown I check the time—1.4 hours from engine start in Oshkosh. Then I stand up in the cockpit and strip off the jacket. This place is hotter than Mississippi was.
Well, it was a nice tailwind. While it lasted. Westward from here it’s a headwind.
Life’s like that.
Ten minutes after I landed at Iron Mountain I had two spectators photographing the plane. The first man to arrive said he was out in his yard when he heard the Queen. “I knew it was a radial the minute I heard it. Sure enough, a yellow biplane. So I grabbed the camera and came on out to the airport.”
The second man to arrive had a passenger as well as his camera. He had just finished mowing the lawn of an apartment house when he saw the
Queen
go over. “I try to take photos of all the interesting planes that land here. This is the only Stearman this summer besides the Red Baron Pizza plane that gave rides to all the grocers.”
“No,” the first man said. “There was that fellow from Illinois that brought up a Stearman for the airshow.”
“Yes, that’s right. Good airshow too. Weather was a little crummy but they flew away. The P-51 was the best act, I thought. Boy, I liked the sound of that engine.”
If ever three guys deserved Stearman rides, here they stood. I watched the wind sock whipping through twenty or thirty degrees and decided not to tempt my luck. Rockford was a sobering lesson. So I paid for the gas and oil, shook hands all around, and taxied the
Queen
out.
The three were still on the mat as I lifted off. I turned the
Queen
to go over them and waved like a man possessed. They waved back with every arm.
The FAA says the
Cannibal Queen
is mine. She must be, since everyone sends me the bills. Yet in a larger sense, she isn’t. She’s just mine to fly for a while, for as long as my turn lasts. Like every wonderful old airplane she really belongs to everyone who sees her. Everyone who hears the engine and looks up and catches the sun glinting on yellow wings. Everyone who feels somehow richer, more alive because he saw her in the sky.
I fly westward at 2,500 feet in a bobbing, corkscrewing airplane that has to be pointed at least twenty degrees south of the desired course. The hot, gusty, malevolent wind is out of character this far north, amid this great hardwood forest that is already showing tinges of fall color.
The hills roll gently and the forest covers everything. Cold creeks and streams meander through the wilderness. Ernest Hemingway loved these forests and wrote a series of short stories set here for
Boy’s Life
magazine. These stories were among the first he managed to get published. They’ve been republished in collections and are worth your time, even if you’re politically correct and think you don’t like Ernest Hemingway. The Nick Adams stories will surprise you.
I’ve always wondered why the environmentalists and conservationists haven’t latched onto Hemingway’s work. No writer I know of in this century had a more profound love for the outdoors or expressed it better then Hemingway. I guess he played the writer role too macho and that image still gets in the way of what he wrote. Which is a shame.
After an hour and a half of flying I am feeling the first twinges of airsickness. Not nausea, just a general malaise that will progress to nausea if I don’t get this bucking pig on the ground so that I can give my inner ear a break.
The first airport ahead is Ironwood, Michigan, but the runway is oriented east and west. I give them a call. Winds 200 degrees at 11 gusting to 21.
Now that is a cross wind! Fifty degrees off, 11 to 21.
I set myself up for a straight-in, then decide to overfly the field and get a good look.
The wind sock is flopping from south to southwest, standing straight out. There is a taxiway pointed straight south that I could use, yet it’s narrow and if I landed on it someone might have a cow unless I claimed I had an emergency. Most of the folks at these little airports wouldn’t care, but you never know.
I circle for a left downwind and set the
Queen
up. Coming down final I have in almost full right rudder and left stick. Still I’m drifting right. I lower the left wing. That stops the drift, yet now the wing is down too far. I add power to flatten the glide angle and work on holding her stable.