And there it is ahead, suddenly, as in the motion pictures of the sailing boats when the lookout shouts land ho and the camera turns to find land only a hundred yards away. There, a silver gleam in the air, an airplane flying. It is a transport making his landing approach to Tucson International. A transport. He looks as foreign in the sky as though he were an oil painting of an airplane, sliding on invisible tracks toward the runway.
To the right is the giant that is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, with a runway nearly three miles long. I could land on the width of that runway with room to spare, but the mountain-heavy airplanes that fly from the base sometimes need every foot of the length to get off the ground. What a way to fly.
Right there, by the corner where the parking ramp turns, I stood on a weekend alone, with a fighter plane that would not start. Something wrong with the ignition. I could get all kinds of fuel into the burner cans and the tailpipe, but it wouldn’t light. I couldn’t make it burn. I gravely considered throwing a newspaper afire up that tailpipe, then running around to the cockpit and opening the throttle to spray it with fuel. But a mechanic happened along and fixed the ignition system before I found a newspaper and a match. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened.
One other airplane, a little one, in the sky below me, and I rock my wings to him. He doesn’t notice. Or he may have noticed, but is one who doesn’t believe in wing-rocked greetings between airplanes. That is a custom going out of style, I think, wing-rocking to say hello and doesn’t-worry-I-see-you. Well, I’ll give it a chance to live on, anyway. Sort of a comradely thing to do, I think, and I might be able to set the custom going again; have everyone rocking their wings to everyone else. Jet transports, bombers, lightplanes, business planes. Hm. That might be carrying it a little far. Perhaps it’s best that only a few keep the custom going.
One mountain north of Tucson and it is time to land once more, at an ex-Army field. Marana Air Park, they call it now. Like planting flowers in a hand grenade. Hard surface here, and straight into the wind. I should be getting used to the biplane by now, but there is that strange wall of hurry between us. We land without incident, and stop. Yet there is a moment in which I know that I could not control the airplane if it veered to left or right, as though we were sliding on buttered glass. Something is gone. My rushing, my placing California before learning has breached the trust between us, and the biplane has not stopped to teach or even to imply a lesson since before the thunderstorm. She has been cold and void of life, she has been a machine only. Watching the familiar fuel pour into the familiar tank, I wish that I could slow down, could take my time. But the closer I come to home, the harder I drive the biplane and myself. I am helpless, I am swept up in a windstorm of hurry and nothing matters except getting home tomorrow.
13
THE MAGNETO AGAIN. Only ten minutes after takeoff, the left mag is misfiring. Clearly it is not Automatic Rough at work, for below is Casa Grande and an airport into the wind. It is just that the engine is misfiring and backfiring whenever the left magneto is called upon to spark the cylinders by itself. The right mag works well, with only an occasional single missing of a single beat. Decision time once again, and more difficult. Land now at a field that has some limited repair facilities and find the trouble, or continue on, using the right mag alone?
No answer from the airplane, as if she is sitting back and watching me dispassionately, not caring whether the decision I make here means safety or destruction. If only I were not in a hurry to be home. It would be prudent to stop. Prudence and I haven’t been getting along too well these last days, but after all, one should sometimes follow its leadings.
All the while, Casa Grande drifts slowly behind. I don’t have much money, and it would cost money even if the little hangar there would have the parts the engine needs. If I go ahead, I’m gambling that the good magneto will stay good across the next three hundred miles of desert. If I lose, I’ll land on the highway and seek the help of my fellow man. That’s not too bad a fate, or a very high penalty to pay. What does an airplane engine have two magnetos for, anyway? So that it can run all day on one magneto, it can run all its life on one magneto. Decision made. We go on.
With the decision, a wind rising out of the west. A time for patience has once again arrived, and at altitude, in the midst of the wind, I am slowed so that a lone automobile, towing a house trailer, keeps in perfect pace with me. The cost of my decision to fly with an ailing ignition system is that I fly at altitude and do not allow myself the trick of flying close to the ground in avoidance of the wind. My only negotiable asset now is altitude and I cannot afford to squander it for a few miles per hour. At least I am moving westward.
I’m not concerned, and engine failure is an academic sort of problem from Casa Grande to Yuma, for this is land that I know well and that I have seen day after day and month after month. Just on the other side of those same Santan Mountains off my right wing lies Williams Air Force Base. Just after I had finally earned the right to wear the wings of an Air Force pilot, I came to this land, and to the magnificent swift airplane that was numbered F-86F and that was coded Sabrejet. From those runways we flew, nervous at first in a single-seat airplane in which the first time we flew, we flew alone. And it was such a simple airplane to fly that we would finish our short before-takeoff checklist there on the concrete and stop and wait and shake our heads and mutter, certain that we had forgotten something. You mean all you do is push this little handle forward and let go of the brakes and then fly? That’s what they meant, and following that opening routine we came up from those runways to cross this same desert.
To my left are a few hundred square miles marked Restricted Area on my map, and that are indeed restricted, as far as biplanes are concerned. But then Restricted meant Our Very Own, where we flew to find the strafing targets set in cleared squares of desert and the bull’s-eye rings of the bomb circles. But best of all for us was the desolate land called the Applied Tactics Range. Applied Tactics gives the student the feel of what close air support really is. There on the desert are convoys of old rusting automobiles and trucks, are tanks waiting in the sage and yucca, are roundhouses and artillery emplacements. Once in a while we would be allowed to practice combat tactics on these, learning such basic tenets as Never Strafe a Convoy Lengthwise; Never Attack Twice from the Same Direction; Concentrate Your Fire.
Maybe they’re out there today. If I could make it very quiet, maybe I could hear the sound of the engines and the thud of the practice rockets hitting the sand and the popcorn sound of the fifty-caliber machine guns firing. This is happy country, from a time of good days, filled with that rare sort of friend that one only finds when adventure is shared, and when one trusts one’s life to another.
Where are they in this twist of now? Those other pilots are no longer about me every day, briefing for the first flight before the sun has risen. Some who flew this land with me are still flying, some are not. Some are the same, some have changed. One a purchasing agent now for a giant corporation, one a warehouse manager, one an airline pilot, one in the Air Force, a career man. The friend within them is driven hard in a corner, by trivial things. Talk not to him of rent or taxes or how the home team is doing. The friend within is found in action, in the important things of flying smoothly in the weather, in calling the fuel check, the oxygen check, and in trying to put more bulletholes in the target than any other friend can do.