****
"It's ready," said Herr Krause with an intensity that Darius had seldom heard from him . . . or anyone else, for that matter.
Naturally, that night the snows came. Not for the first time that winter, but a major blizzard. All that could be done was steam tests and engine tests. So, steam tests and engine tests they did. The prop spun up with incredible speed starting at full torque, and simply adjusting a lever not only stopped the prop but reversed it. Which Willem found marvelous. The plane moved with ease and panache, and they got good reads on how much fuel they needed for how much flight time. The delay caused by the weather was irritating, not dangerous. The one thing that bothered Willem about the Arrow's power plant was that it took over five minutes to build up a head of steam. There would be no jumping into this plane and being in flight less than a minute later.
****
The day finally came. They had done tests. The Arrow was as ready as they could make it. Willem sat in the cockpit, reclined not for comfort but to save space. He watched the steam gauge with care and waited with impatience for the pressure to reach the levels needed for sustained flight. When all was ready he dialed the throttle up to take off power then released the brakes. The Arrow was heavier than he would have preferred, especially with the weight of the boiler and condenser. But still, according to all their calculations, it should lift off about halfway down the runway. It started quickly and picked up speed slower than he would have liked, but it did pick up the speed. He wasn't quite sure how fast he was going when he reached halfway point on the runway. The Arrow wasn't equipped with a speedometer. It was a matter of estimation and he figured he was going fast enough.
He pulled back on the stick and nothing happened. The wheels stayed glued to the ground. He put the stick back to neutral and waited for more speed to build. It was harder to build up speed when the stick was back. He also dialed the throttle as high as it would go, full emergency power, as it were.
Two-thirds of the way down the field he was going faster and tried again. Something was wrong. He was going faster than he had ever gone before at take off in any plane, and he was still glued to the ground. He should be getting something by now.
He wondered if he should shut down and try again another day. He'd give it another few seconds. After all, he could reverse thrust to slow rapidly
Seconds later he tried again. Now he was scared and angry. Too close to the end of the runway for comfort. Stick still back, he reversed thrust. The gearing took the strain, the prop and the shaft did not snap, and the prop bit into the air-backwards.
Suddenly, with no warning, he was airborne, the nose was coming up fast. And his mind was behind the plane still trying to slow it down. He pulled back on the stick and the nose lifted faster.
Willem had only a few hours of flight time. He had soloed once, for all of five minutes. Just enough to get his solo permit stamped. He had never been in a plane that moved like this one. No one had ever been in a plane that moved like this one. It wasn't that it was especially maneuverable, but it maneuvered differently than a more traditional airframe would. More of the lift, but also more of the weight, was toward the back of the aircraft. With the elevons flipped up and the prop reversed while still in the ground effect range, it acted like a take off ramp made out of concrete. The nose flipped up like it was giving the world the finger and the Arrow shot into the sky at something over two gs change of vee.
It shot into the sky with its propeller spinning madly backwards. Momentum and air pressure got it into the sky, but there was nothing to keep it there. Still, it got almost fifty feet into the air. And all the way up-and all the way back down-it was flipping over backwards. For at the top of the arc, Willem pushed the stick all the way forward, just as his limited experience as a pilot told him to do. The tail hit the ground first but by then the Arrow was angled at forty-five degrees back toward the start of the field.
Willem had a few seconds, two, maybe three, to wonder what the fuck had happened before the canopy cracked into the runway and ended his capacity for questioning forever.
****
Hal Smith didn't need to be called in. First flights out of GrantvilleAirport weren't so common that he had to miss many of them, and first flights of delta-wing aircraft were even rarer. He had seen the take off run. He had seen the leap into the air. He had seen the crash.
And he knew exactly what had happened. Knew that he had told Willem Krause the right thing, but for the wrong reason. That he had never thought of the true reason that the centered prop was such a bad idea. Hal had never been a great fan of deltas. He'd never designed one and never flown one, so he had never thought about what would happen if you put a prop at the back of a delta wing with half its sucking power contained by the ground and the body of the plane.
To make a plane go forward, you push air backward. When you push air in one direction, you're pulling it in from all the other available directions. That mostly doesn't matter because it is all the other directions. There is no restriction on where the air comes from to replace the air your prop displaces. Not, however, when that flow of air is blocked by the body of the airplane above it and the ground below it. When that happens you get a vacuum.
Well, calling it a vacuum is overstating the case. The low pressure zone produced is to a vacuum cleaner what a vacuum cleaner is to a vacuum tube. Not even in the same range. The pressure deferential is only a few ounces per square inch, less even. But there are a lot of square inches on the under-surface of a delta wing thirty feet wide by thirty feet long.
The pressure deferential is the same thing that lets planes fly, but in this case it glued the plane to the ground as long as the prop was pulling air out from between the wing and the ground. Hal Smith knew all that the moment the Arrow lifted off. He prayed in those moments that Willem Krause would push the thrust back to full forward. It hadn't happened and he couldn't blame Herr Krause for not realizing what had happened in time. The only person that Hal found to blame for the death of Willem Krause was Hal Smith. He fell back into his chair by the tower and felt the cold wind and every day of his seventy-one years.
There were too many gaps in the knowledge brought back, too many errors. Not from lack of knowledge but from lack of understanding of the knowledge they did have. He wanted to quit then as he had wanted to quit at each of the deaths that had, over the last year and more, followed the introduction of flight into this century. He knew he couldn't quit, for his quitting wouldn't prevent a single death. The young men and women who dreamed of flight and dared turn their dreams into reality wouldn't stop. Not if God Himself came down and told them to leave the heavens to him. They couldn't . . . and Hal couldn't blame them for that.
Epilogue
Darius stood next to Gemma as they watched the ceremony. Willem Krause had been buried three days before. This was different. A small plaque made of bronze with the name Willem Krause engraved on it. Above the name were the wings of a pilot and a compass and a square on the right and left to symbolize an airplane designer. It looked like a Masonic symbol to Darius and he almost smiled at the thought that someday this would be taken as proof that the Masons, even in the seventeenth century, were secretly trying to introduce a new world order. Herr Krause would have laughed his ass off at that, Darius was sure.