If I could talk now to a barnstormer or read his words on the yellowed pages of 1929, he would tell me of flying the south, on the route from Columbia, South Carolina, to Augusta, Georgia. It’s the easiest thing in the world to follow a railroad, but out of Columbia there’s such a twist and tangle of railroad it takes a good eye to sort the tracks that lead to Augusta from the ones that lead to Chattahoochee, to Mirabel, to Oak Hollow. Follow the wrong one, he would say, and you find yourself off in the middle of nowhere, and not much of an idea how to get back.
And it’s true. Look at the mass of railroads down there! Maybe there’s an air molecule or two around that remembers the flash of his propeller, that might chuckle at my concern, coming along so much later, over precisely the same problem that caused his concern before me. We both must find our way out of the maze, and find it by ourselves. I don’t know what he did, but I look ahead to pick the sharp arrowhead of a lake on course, and fly to that and pick the railroad then, when there is clearly only one choice to make. Perhaps he had a better way. I wish he were around still; I wish that I could look out and see his Jenny or his J-1 Standard smoothing along above the twin rails. But this morning I continue alone, or at least as far as my eyes can see, alone. The history and the tradition and the old molecules are here about me every second. The barnstorming pilots said that the sky was cold and that they froze in their cockpits. I know now that they kept warm for some time by simply not believing that it could possibly be so cold over the south, where, after all, people come to flee the ice of northern winters. But at last there is no fighting left to be done; the lesson is learned. It gets terribly cold; hard, ice-freezing cold over South Carolina in the morning of a spring day. I used to smile when I heard of the early pilots huddling forward under what little shelter they could get from the windscreen, and shuffling their feet quickly back and forth in odd strange movements just for the sake of moving and keeping the cold at bay.
I am not smiling now. Instead I discover a technique on my own, over South Carolina. I won’t be so brash as to think that it hasn’t been discovered scores of times before, in the same air, in fact, by scores of early pilots. There is a huge imaginary crank on a shaft thrust through the center of the instrument panel. Turn it. Turn it faster and faster with the right glove, reverse it and turn it faster still with the left glove. If you turn that crank long enough and fast enough, it just barely keeps you from going numb and blue in the cold. And it makes you so tired you can hardly muster strength to look over the icy side and down to check where the winds are drifting you now.
The sun in South Carolina is timed to begin to warm the air precisely one second before the frost-covered pilot decides to call a halt to all this nonsense and land and start a gasoline fire to warm himself. Fleece-lined leather jacket, woolen flight suits and shirts and rabbit-fur gloves don’t make a bit of difference. The only thing that steps in at that last second is the sun, throwing a billion BTU’s into the earth, and gradually, very gradually, beginning to warm the air. Old pilots, wherever you are now, I can report that the mornings of the South Carolina spring are exactly as you left them.
Always they looked for places to land should the engine suddenly stop, and always do I. That is one of the old habits that has disappeared. The odds against a modern engine failing during any one flight are astronomical. The odds against it failing during any one moment of any one flight, while the pilot happens to be considering a place to land, is out of the realm of ordinary mathematics. So, beyond a bit of lip service, forced landings in modern airplanes are no longer practiced. Why bother, if an engine will never fail? Spins and spin recoveries have not been taught for years. We have horns and lights that warn against the conditions under which an unknowing pilot can manhandle an airplane into a spin. And if an airplane will never be spun, why bother to teach spin recoveries? Why bother to teach aerobatics? The chance that a pilot could save his life by knowing how to control an airplane when it is in a vertical bank or when it has been tossed upside down are rather remote, because unless one flies into extreme turbulence or crosses the wake of a jet transport, the chances are remote that the airplane will ever know more than a shallow bank. Besides, most modern airplanes are not licensed for aerobatics.
Gone the old skills. Don’t listen to the wind to tell your airspeed, watch the airspeed indicator and hope that it is correct. Don’t look over the side to gage your altitude, trust the altimeter, and don’t forget to set it properly before each flight. Make the proper numbers appear in the proper dials at the proper time, and you have a first-class automobile with wings.
But no need for bitterness, for when I say gone the old skills, I don’t speak true. The old skills and the old days are there for those who would seek them out.
* * *
One hour, the end of the railroad track, and the town of Augusta. Lower into the warming air, and left-rudder-left-stick in a wide sweeping turn about the airport. There the windsock, saying the winds are almost calm this morning. There a pattern of runways, which I disregard, and rows of grass between, to which I pay very close attention. There the red fuel pumps, with no customer so early in the morning.
No customers in the sky this morning, either. I am alone. A little more aileron, to bank the wings up vertically and drop quickly toward the grass. Grass isn’t often landed upon at airports, and one must be careful to look at it closely for traces of rabbit holes hidden and gullies crossing. The biplane skims the grasstops and there is not far down to look to see the ground. It looks good for landing.
Forward on the throttle for a burst of power, a long climbing turn to the left, in a pattern that will bring us lined once again on the grass, this time to land.
In three minutes I fly the last turn to line up with the grass and have one last chance to look at it. Then, look out, rabbits. All there is ahead is a wide expanse of cherry-lemon fabric, braces and crossbraces humming, a shining aluminum cowl, an oil-sprayed front windscreen, black engine cylinders, the blur of a propeller idling around, here and there a little triangle of sky peeking, to the sides a slow blur of grass flowing, and sudden hard rolling of the wheels on the cold ground and the brittle cold grassblades by the thousands splintering underwheel and this is the time we really go to work on the rudder pedals to keep it straight keep it straight and right about here is where we lost it in the crosswind and remember the way she just started to go around and there was nothing you could do about it left-rudder-right-rudder-left but we just about got this one wired and my gosh it sure didn’t take us long to get stopped and it’s a nice feeling to be under control again and able to S-turn and see ahead and move slowly along.
An easy turn around, grassblades splintering now only by the scores and if I wanted I could get out right here and walk on the grass. The biplane is no longer an airplane, but a big awkward three-wheeled teetery vehicle pulled along by the most inefficient expedient of a fan turning around on its nose.
We roll onto the concrete of a taxiway and the bumps and rills of the grass are gone. From traveling through the air of 1929, I have moved, through the process called “landing,” back into the world of new concrete taxiways and will the gasoline, sir, be cash or credit?