Unshaven, oil-covered, disheveled with the worst of the barnstormers, I gather my sleeping bag and race for shelter in the luxurious office and waiting room of the general-aviation terminal. Would a good barnstormer have gotten wet? I wonder as I run through the rain. No. A good barnstormer would have climbed into the cockpit, under the waterproof cover, and have been asleep again in an instant. Ah, well. It takes time to learn.
Against one wall of the deserted room is a telephone, a direct line to the weather bureau. It is a strange feeling to hold a telephone in my hand again. A voice comes from the thing, with an offer of general aid.
“I’m at Palm Springs. Want to get across into Long Beach /Los Angeles. How does it look through the pass?” I should have said The Pass. Almost every pilot who flies to Southern California has flown through the gigantic slot cut between the mountains San Jacinto and San Gorgonio. On a windy day, one can count on being tossed about in the pass, but so many new pilots have exaggerated its rigors that even old pilots are beginning to believe that it is a dangerous place.
“The pass is closed.”
Why is it that weathermen are so smug when the weather is bad? At last they can put the pilots in their places? The arrogant devils need to be set back a notch, now and then? “Banning has a two-hundred-foot overcast with one-mile visibility in rain; probably won’t get much better all day long.”
The devil it won’t. The chances of that weather staying so bad all day are about the same as the chances of Palm Springs being flooded in the next half hour.
“How about the pass at Borego or Julian, or San Diego?”
“We don’t have any weather for the passes themselves. San Diego is calling three thousand overcast and light rain.”
I’ll just have to try them and see.
“How’s the Los Angeles weather?”
“Los Angeles. let’s see. Los Angeles is calling fifteen hundred broken to overcast, light rain. Forecast to remain the same all day. A pilot report has the pass closed, by the way, and severe turbulence,”
“Thanks.”
He catches me before I hang up, with a request for my airplane number. Always the entries to make in his logs, and no doubt for a very good reason.
Once I get on the other side of the mountains, there will be no problem. The weather is not quite clear, but it is good enough for finding one’s way about. Banning is in the middle of the pass, and the weather it is reporting is not good. But the report may be hours old. I can’t expect much so early in the morning, but I might as well give Banning a try before I run down along the mountain chain, poking my nose into every pass for a hundred miles. One of them is sure to be open.
Twenty minutes later the biplane and I round the corner of San Jacinto and head into the pass. It certainly does not look good. As if someone has made a temporary bedroom out of Southern California, and has hung a dirty grey blanket between it and the desert, for privacy. If I can make it to Banning, I can stop and wait for the weather to lift.
Below, the highway traffic goes unconcernedly ahead, although the road is slick and shiny in rain. A few drops of rain smear the front windscreen of the biplane, a few more. I have my spot all picked to land if the engine stops in the rain, but it doesn’t falter. Perhaps the biplane, too, is in a hurry. The rain pours down and I discover that one doesn’t get wet flying rainstorms in an open cockpit airplane. The last rainstorm I flew into, I hadn’t noticed. The rain doesn’t really fall, but blows at me head on, and the windscreen kicks it up and over my head. If I want to get wet, I have to stick my head around to one side of the glass panels.
Funny. It doesn’t feel as if I’m getting wet at all. The rain feels like rice, good and dry, thrown a hundred miles an hour into my face. It is only when my head is back in the cockpit and when I feel my helmet with an ungloved hand that I find it wet. The rain gets goggles sparkling clean.
After a few minutes of rain, the first turbulence hits. Often I have heard turbulence described as a giant fist smashing down upon an airplane. I have never really felt it that way in a small airplane until this second. The fist is just the size of a biplane, and it is swinging down at the end of a very long arm. It strikes the airplane so hard that I am thrown against the safety belt and have to hold tightly to the control stick to keep my hand from being jerked away. Strange air, this. Not the constant slamming of the twisted roiled air that one expects from winds across rocky places, but smooth. smooth, and BAM! Then smooth. smooth. BAM! The rain grows heavier, in great weeping veils sorrowing down to the ground. The sky is solid water ahead. We can’t get through.
We turn away, not really discouraged, for we hadn’t expected to get through the first thing in the morning.
Whenever I turn away from bad weather in an airplane not equipped to fly by instruments, I feel very self-righteous. The proper thing to do. The number one cause of fatal accidents in light aircraft, the statistics say, is the pilot who tries to push the weather, to slip through without going on instruments. I’ll push the weather with the best of ’em, I say sanctimoniously, but I’ll always do it with a path open behind me. The biplane, with its instruments that give only a rough approximation of altitude and a misty vague idea of heading, on a wobbly compass, is not built to fly through any weather. Any weather at all. If I absolutely had to, I might be able to get it down through an overcast, flying with my hands off the stick and holding perhaps the W in the compass by rudder alone. But that’s a last-ditch effort, taken only where the land below is flat and I know for sure that the ceiling is at least one thousand feet.
There are those who say that you can spin down through an overcast, and I’d agree with them; a good procedure. But I have heard that with a few of the old airplanes the spin turns into a flat spin after three or four revolutions, and from a flat spin there is no recourse save the parachute. This may be one of the rumors, and untrue. But the danger therein is my thought, I do not know. Not the flat spin, but the fear of the flat spin keeps me from an otherwise practical and effective emergency procedure. It is much easier to stay away from the weather.
The first round goes to San Jacinto, and taking its strange knocking about, we fly, filled with righteousness, back out of the pass. What a fine example we are setting for all the younger pilots. Here is a pilot who has flown instruments before and often, for hours and in thick cloud, turning back from a bit of mist that obscures the ground. What a fine example am I. How much the prudent pilot. I shall live to be very old. Unfortunately, no one is watching.
We turn south along the eastern edge of the mountains, over the bright green squares in the sand that irrigation has wrought. And we climb. It takes a long time to gain altitude. Playing the thermals and the upslope winds as hard as I can, I rise only to the level of the lower peaks; a little more than eight thousand feet, where it is freezing once again. At least here, when I can no longer stand the cold, I have only to come down a little to be warm once again.
We won’t even try Borego Pass. A long narrow gorge running diagonally through the mountains, it is walled only a short way down its length by the same blanket of grey that covers the pass at San Jacinto.
South some more and third time must be the charm. More rough, high country, but at least the cloud is not so bad. I turn at Julian toward a narrow gap in the mountain, and follow a winding road.
The wind through the gap is a direct headwind as I fly west. It flattens the grass along the roadside and the road’s white line creeps reluctantly past my wing. It must be blowing fifty miles an hour at this altitude. There is an awesomeness about it, an uneasy feeling that I am not wanted here, as if I am being lured into the gap in order that some hungry dragon within can have his fill of warm engine and crushed wingspars. We fly and fly and struggle and fly against the wind, and finally the gap is ours. We are through, to a land of high valleys and peaceful green farms in mountain meadows. But look down there. The grass, even the short grass, is being flattened silver by the wind, it is being ironed onto the ground by it. That wind must be fifty miles per hour now at the surface!