Look! The horizon! I can see beyond the horizon! I can see to the end of the world!
We fly! By God, we fly!
My friend watches me and he is smiling.
* * *
The wind stirs the flap of my sleeping bag and the sun is already above the horizon. It is 6:15 and time to get up and get moving. The wind is not just cool; the wind is cold. Cold! And I thought spring in the South was a languid time of liquid warm from dawn to dawn. Into the chilled flight suit and pull on the frozen boots and the icy leather jacket. The airport is flat and closed about me and the runway lights are still on. Breakfast at the next stop, then, and time now to get the engine started and warming. One must always let the old engines warm themselves well before flight. They need ten minutes running on the ground to get the cold out of their oil and life into their controls.
Despite the cold, engine start is a beautiful time of day. The routine: pull the propeller through five times, fuel valve on, mixture rich, seven shots of priming fuel, pull the prop through two more times, magneto switch on, pump the throttle, crank the inertia starter, run back to the cockpit, engage the starter and swallow exhaust and engine thunder unfiltered and loud and frozen sharp, shattering again the silence of a little airport.
How many times have I started an airplane engine, even in the few years that I have been flying? In how many airplanes? So many different ways, so many different sounds, but beneath them all the same river; they are symbols of one meaning.
“Clear!”
Pull the starter knob to send the propeller into a faltering blurred arc. Press the primer knob. And from the exhaust stacks a cloud of blue and a storm of sound. Inspect the cloud under a microscope and you would find tiny drops of oil unburned. Inspect the sound on an oscilloscope and trace a quickchanging world of harsh pointed lines under the reference grid. In neither instrument can the essence of engine start be caught. That essence is unseen, in the thought of the one who controls the bank of switches that bid an engine to life. Get the prop turning, check the oil pressure, let the engine warm up. About 900 rpm for a minute or two. Forward on the throttle until the wheels begin to roll. Taxi to the waiting runway.
How many times in the history of flight has the routine been followed? From the earliest days, when engine start was the signal for ground crew to throw themselves on the stabilizer, holding a brakeless airplane until the wave of the pilot’s hand. Through the days in the sun of war when engine start was the crashing roaring climax to “Run One. mesh One. ” and the steepfalling whine of the inertia starter. To the days when now and then along the line of the crew’s checklist there is the softest of purring rumbles, and the only visible sign of an engine alive is the quick-rising needle of the tailpipe temperature gage, and the first ripples of heat drifting back from smooth-cowled turbines;
But for every one, for every single one, engine start is journey start. If you would seek some of the romance of flight, watch when the engines first begin to turn. Pick any place in aviation history, in any kind of airplane, and there is a shard or a massive block of romance, of glory and glamour. The pilot, in the cockpit, readies himself and his airplane. In scores of languages, in a hundred different terms, there comes the moment when one word or one sign means: Go.
“C LEAR!”
“C ONTACT! “.
“. mesh One.”
“. OK. Start One.”
“Clear left.”
“Lightoff.”
A green flare in the sky.
A flight leader’s finger, drawing a quick circle in the air.
“P ILOTS. S TART YOUR ENGINES.”
“Hit it.”
“Let’s go.”
Great black massive propellers slam suddenly around. External power carts stagger and nearly die under instant load of high amperage. The explosion of shotgun starters. Hiss and ground-shaking concussion of compressed-air starters. Rattle and clatter and labored moan of hand-cranked inertia flywheels. The snap and clack of impulse magnetos. Roar of external air to the air-driven turbine starters. Slow soft acceleration of squaretipped turboprop blades.
From stillness into motion. From death into life. From silence into rising thunder. And each a part of the journey, for every man in every cockpit.
There is sound and glory, blue smoke and thunder, for anyone who wishes. Descendants of pioneers need not mourn the passing of an untouched frontier; it waits quiet above their heads. Little difference makes the look of the machine that becomes soon a part of the pioneer. He can be on flight orders, with a military commission signed by the president of the nation, riding forty thousand pounds of thrust at twice the speed of sound, protected by inch-thick glass and an artificial atmosphere within his cockpit. Despite the restrictions of the military, he has still his taste of freedom, his sight of the sky. Or he can be on the orders of desire and conscience alone, with an airplane bought instead of a second automobile, traveling a hundred miles per hour and protected from the wind by an eighth inch of plexiglass or by a leather helmet and a pair of goggles.
The journey has been traveled tens of thousands of times, a trail blazed by Montgolfier and Montgomery and Wright, hewn and cleared by Lincoln Beachy and Glenn Curtiss and Earle Ovington and Jack Knight, paved and smoothed and widened by every man that guided an airplane away from the earth or who spent an hour in the dream of flight. Yet, in the billions of hours that men have been aloft, not one has left a mark in the sky. Into the smooth sky we pull a tiny wake of rippled air. When our airplane is gone, the sky smooths, carefully covering every sign of our passing, and becomes the quiet wilderness that it has always been.
So call the clear! and starter engaged. Breathe blue smoke and set the wheels to rolling. Oil pressure and temperature and valve the fuel and set the flaps for takeoff. Set propeller revolutions to tremble at the redline, submerge in a sea of sound and bright glory. And go the way along the path, take up the journey in solitude.
* * *
Today our task is to cross the land in giant steps, to move as far as we can westward before the sun again wins its race.
A quick engine runup, feeling again the goodness of being a long way from home and having an engine check out precisely as it should.
Throttle forward, a cloud of early dust, and we are airborne once again. Splashing green fountains of spring trees roll below as we settle into cruising flight, to share the joy of other machines and other people who are only happy when they are moving.
The hand on the control stick, testing elevators and rudder, the fingers on the magneto switch, the voice, “Contact!,” each a part of one who seeks horizons lost a thousand years ago. “This time,” the thought. “Maybe this time.” The search, always the search. On a routine trip, over lands crossed daily on Flight 388, from the crowded flight deck of a jet airliner and from the cockpit of a sport airplane, the eyes of the wanderer look down, seeking the hidden; Elysium overlooked, the happy valley undiscovered. Now and again, the wanderer stiffens quickly in his cockpit, points down for the co-pilot to see, banks a wing for a clearer view. But the grass is never quite green enough; those are weeds at the water’s edge, a strip of barren ground between the meadow and the river. Every once in a while the ideal is mirrored in the sky. Every once in a while there is a moment’s perfection: the cloud, hard and brilliant against a hard and brilliant sky. Wind and cloud and sky; common denominators in perfection, eternals. The ground you can change. Rip out the grass, level the hill, pour a city over it all. But rip out the wind? Bury a cloud in concrete? Twist the sky to the image in one man’s mind? Never.
We search for one goal and find another. We search the visible, holding the polished memory of perfection that was, and in the tens and hundreds and thousands of hours that we drift through the sky we discover a much different perfection. We journey toward a land of joy, and in our search we find the way that other, earlier pilots have scouted before us. They spoke of solitude in the high places, and we find the solitude. They spoke of storms; the storms are there, glowering still. They spoke of high sun and dark skies and stars clearer than ground ever saw; all of them remain.