Flight of Passage: A True Story (6 page)

“Dad, no,” Kern said. “It’s too dangerous. There must be a 90-degree crosswind over there today. We can wait until tomorrow.”

“Bull,” my father said. “Tomorrow there might be snow. I can put the Cub down at Barclay’s. It’ll be fun for you, watching the old fart do it.”

Little shivers of fear and pride trembled through me whenever my father gave himself a challenge like that. My father was good, very good at flying. There wasn’t a pilot around who had quite his touch. He probably could put the Cub down at Barclay’s. But it would be hazardous, and there wasn’t much point to it. We could always break the plane down at the airport and haul it home from there.

But Kern and I knew that it was useless to challenge my father when he was in a mood to prove himself. In his repertoire of barnstorming blarney tales, precarious landings were his favorite. It was a matter of self-esteem for him. He could shoehorn a plane into places that other pilots wouldn’t even look at.

After breakfast, Kern gypsied around the barn for his tools, and then we all piled into the chalky warmth of our battered Willys pickup and drove out to the airport in Basking Ridge.

At the airport, nobody was flying. There were reports of severe turbulence and a cold front with snow moving down the east coast. My father wiggled into his old sheepskin flying suit and sat by the gas stove in the pilots’ shack to stay warm. Kern and I walked down the flight line, preflighted and started the Cub, and taxied it up to the shack. We tied it down near the shack with the engine still idling. My father told us to leave right away for Barclay’s. The wind was blowing so hard he thought he might need us to hold down the wings once he landed.

When we got over to the Morrison place, Barclay walked down to his grass strip with his Irish wolfhounds. He was an elegant, quiet man, immaculately dressed in wool trousers, polished shoes, and a tweed cap. He sat with us on the warm hood of the Jeep waiting for my father and the Cub to show up. His own ship, a Helio Courier bush plane, sat nearby, its tiedown chains snapping and banging in the fierce wind.

Barclay glanced at his windsock up on the hill. It was rifled straight out, indicating a strong crosswind directly across the grass runway.

“That’s quite a wind,” Barclay said.

Kern felt defensive about it.

“Barclay,” he said. “If he doesn’t like the look of it he won’t land. He’ll wiggle the wings for us to pick him back up at the airport.”

“That’s all right son,” Barclay said. “I know your father. He’ll at least try to put the plane down.”

Under normal wind conditions, landing a plane is a relatively straightforward business, no more difficult than docking a boat. Pilots land by pointing the plane directly into the wind, to retain lift and slow down the groundspeed before the wings are stalled just above the ground. Landing into the wind also helps avoid the dangerous crosswinds that can sweep the plane off the runway as it becomes vulnerable at slow speeds.

In a light crosswind, there’s an accepted procedure for landing. Lining the plane up with the runway, the pilot banks one wing into the wind to correct for drift. The tail rudder is pushed the opposite way to correct for the wing being down and to keep the plane straight. Thus cross-controlled, the plane crabs into the wind toward the runway. The crab is corrected and the wings leveled just before touchdown. There are all kinds of variations—side slips; approaching the runway at a slight angle; touching down on one wheel—for every pilot has his own “crosswind technique.”

One thing a pilot is never supposed to do, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rule book, is exceed a plane’s published “crosswind component.” Generally, that means winds deflecting more than 45 degrees to the runway, blowing above ten or twelve knots. According to the laws of aerodynamics, a plane simply can’t be put down in such conditions. Most pilots learn the lesson for good by trial and error. Some of the finest flyers I’ve known have taken out trees and gas trucks before establishing their personal “crosswind limit.”

Barclay’s strip that day was so far beyond any known crosswind component that it was an FAA violation just looking at it.

My father had a distinct personality in the air. Whereas on the ground he was all bravado and blarney, inside a cockpit he had a jaunty, old-fashioned grace. He was strictly seat of the pants, a throwback to the barnstormers of the 1930s. When landing he approached high and fast, insurance against an engine failure, and then he spilled off the extra height and speed on final approach with a dramatic sideslip. Flying somewhere, he dreamily meandered off course to follow rivers and other landmarks.

There was no mistaking the Cub we saw darting around the low clouds that morning at Barclay’s. We could see the wings rocking as my father fought the turbulence and the nose dipped down in level flight from running the prop too fast, which was the way that he flew. As he turned in toward the field he banked the wings over sharply, kicking out some top rudder to slip off the extra altitude.

My father was too gifted a hand to even consider fighting a crosswind as strong as the one he faced that morning. He didn’t linger either like most pilots would, circling carefully to check the wind and the field.

Instead, a quarter mile out, he simply turned perpendicular to the runway and pointed the nose of the Cub at the tip of the windsock, flying directly upwind. He ran the engine at half-power to penetrate the strong wind and held the nose high so the Cub dropped like a elevator. He threw open the side windows and stuck his head out into the air for better visibility. The long white scarf he liked to wear when he was flying fluttered out into the slipstream like the tail of a kite.

That’s how he flew it, all the way down. Perpendicular to the runway, directly into the wind. It was the ultimate crosswind technique. At 30 feet, dropping down below the trees, the nose was still pegged on the windsock.

It was all one graceful and unified motion, what he did next.

At the edge of the runway, right over our heads, my father gunned the engine. Then he made a sharp 90-degree turn to line up with the runway, banking so low and so hard that the wingtip looked as if it was pivoting against the ground.

When he was lined up with the runway he snapped the wings in the other direction back past the level point and planted the windward tire on the grass. He was still carrying a lot of power and he was fast, very fast, nowhere near a stall, but it was a brilliant stroke because he needed all that power and speed to keep air moving over the controls so he could fight the wind drift. Very few pilots would think of handling it this way, but then there very few pilots like him. He knew—actually, he was betting—that the motion of rocking the wheels back and forth on the grass to fight the plane onto the ground, and fish-tailing the fuselage to fight the wind, would load up enough drag to slow the plane in time.

The end of the runway and the ravine below were racing up quickly to swallow the plane. But there was nothing my father could do about that now because he was committed, and his only choice was to fight the wind all the way down the strip and keep the plane running straight and in one piece.

It was a hauntingly beautiful moment, those three or four seconds while my father and the Cub darted past. Plane and pilot and the elements they faced were locked in perfect combat, so evenly matched, so near disaster, that it was impossible to determine where skill left off and luck, or fate, or the divine protection extended to the truly foolhardy took over. The risk my father was taking, and the grace he handled it with, seemed transmitted from him and the plane into me. And he was really exerting himself now, working that plane for every last ounce of effectiveness. Through the windows of the Cub I could see him leaning into the controls and pumping his arms back and forth on the stick, beating the four-point arc all the way to the stops, and he was furiously walking the rudders to keep the plane tracking straight and to get the other wheel down, and all of these bodily movements were visible in the rapid deflections of the controls on the wings and the tail. The power and swiftness and peril of it all was entrancing, and there was something in the vision of that plane straining to get on the ground that transcended each of these things individually and became, whole, an act of supreme competence. As he skittered past us on one wheel my father had this grim half-smile of determination on his face.

Weather-cocking in the gusts, bouncing from wheel to wheel, the Cub jackassed all the way down Barclay’s strip.

When he got to the end of the field, my father stood on the right brake. The Cub careened around on one wheel for a ground-loop. Ordinarily this was a maneuver to be avoided but my father didn’t have a choice in this case, and he knew how to ground-loop a plane. He allowed the tail to sway up high before he corrected with down stick, so there would be enough air blowing over the tail controls for them to respond. He did one other thing at that moment that I’ve never heard of or seen since. Halfway through the ground loop, he firewalled the throttle and the prop roared, yanking him the rest of the way around the ground loop. It was an extremely dangerous thing to do, but stylish too, and he was so skilled and dumbass-lucky that it worked for him.

Coming around, the right wingtip almost touched the ground and the locked tire threw up a spray of grass divots.

All of this occupied just a few seconds and it wasn’t very elegant. But the plane was down and stopped and nobody cares about elegance when the crosswind component has just been exceeded by 100 percent. The little Cub stood alone on the grass, framed by the sky and the low clouds behind it so that it looked like it was still flying, because the ground all around it fell off steeply and buffets of wind were still catching the wings and lifting them slightly. My father gave the propeller one last blast and taxied up to gain the protection of the tree line. The Cub was splattered all over with mud, but it didn’t have a scratch.

Kern and I ran down and hung off the wing struts to steady the plane. In the cockpit, my father was shivering and his face was bright red from taking all that slipstream with his head out the side. He looked over to Kern and shrugged with that gleeful, boyish smirk he always had when he’d done something insane in a plane and gotten away with it again. The prop shaft went click-click-click as he shut the engine down.

As I hung from the wing strut, my heart pounded like a ball-peen and tears stung the corner of my eyes. I never knew whether to love or detest my father at such moments. I was annoyed by not being able to control my emotions and even more by their frustrating lack of certainty. In just a few seconds, I had passed from certainty that my father was going to crash to the elation of watching him getting the plane stopped. Yet right now, I knew, I could just as easily be down at the bottom of the hill, pulling him out of an overturned plane.

These anguished feelings always passed quickly, though. Then suddenly the arresting beauty of the landing—the steep sideslip down over the trees, the turn low to the ground, then the wheels meeting the grass and the ground-loop—would go by as a blur and merge with another, dominant feeling. I forgot everything else I felt about my father and knew only pride. Maybe he lived too dangerously and was always frightening us by testing himself, but that was the father I had. He was a great old flyer and nobody could out-barnstorm the man.

Barclay walked down with his wolfhounds. He stepped underneath the wing and helped my father out, disentangling his legs from the rudder cables than ran along the floor of the cockpit.

Barclay was relieved and amazed, but he was too polite and understated a man to say the wrong thing.

“Well, that’s a crosswind landing, Tom.”

“Yeah. Thanks for letting us use your strip.”

Then Barclay walked back up the hill with his dogs.

We could usually take apart a plane in less than an hour. It was more or less just a matter of removing the wings from the fuselage. The bolts holding the main beams of the wing, the spars, come out just above the cockpit. The strut supports that hold the wings up by triangulating down to the landing gear are also disconnected by removing bolts. Secondary parts such as the control cables and fuel lines are detached. Once lifted off the fuselage, the wings of a Piper Cub aren’t that much heavier than a metal canoe, and Kern and I mounted them on the wooden cradles bolted to the fenders of our pickup.

We secured the wings on the cradles with hay-rope. Removing the propeller from the engine shaft, we wrapped it in a blanket and laid it on the bed of the pickup. Then we chained the Cub’s tailwheel to the Jeep’s rear-hitch and bounced off across Barclay’s field toward home.

I always felt embarrassed in that leafy, plush community of winding country lanes and quaint horsefarms, riding home in our shitrigged pickup and plane. Our truck was an old beam-chassis Willys, blue and rusting out on the sides, with exhaust and smoke from the burning clutch wafting up through the floorboards. The muffler had blown a hole years ago and we’d never bothered to replace it. As we belched along Blue Mill Road, traffic backed up behind us and people stared. Barclay’s place sat right in between the big Kirby and McGraw estates. Beyond that we had to pass the Colgate and Francis homes, and then Congressman Freylinghuysen’s vast spread. Most of our neighbors were quiet Protestant bluebloods, or rich Catholics aping Protestant bluebloods, projecting a veneer of effortless social perfection. They glided by in polished Jaguars or new Chevy Suburbans towing matching horse vans, and spent the Thanksgiving weekend riding with Jackie Kennedy in the local fox hunts. We were the neighborhood Joads, dragging home a 1946 Piper Cub behind our dilapidated Jeep.

But I could get over my social embarrassment, because my father was always revived by our annual rite of bringing home a plane. It reminded him of his salad days in the 1930s and 1940s, when he began every winter by stashing a plane in a barn somewhere. He was giddy and red-faced, laughing all the way home as the traffic clogged up behind us.

My father was particularly pleased with himself that day. He hadn’t flown in quite a while and he was glad to have acquitted himself so well in front of us at Barclay’s. But he was still shivering and cold when we pulled into our place. We left him at the porte cochere, so he could go inside and warm up in the bath. Kern and I could stow the plane in the barn ourselves.