by Max Hennessy
‘I guess you can take her up, Ira,’ he said unemotionally.
The sun had gone behind a small puff of cloud and the hangar suddenly seemed a dark and brooding place. Ira noticed as he stepped forward under the wing that Courtney and the others moved to one side, so they could watch what happened. He stared up at the machine as Woolff climbed down, his plump face moist with sweat in the humid heat of midday.
‘You’ll like her, Ira,’ Woolff said, adjusting his cap.
Ira nodded, aware that this first junction of himself and this brand-new machine could change the whole world and affect his own destiny and the future of the Courtney works. If he were successful in what they were proposing, he could be wealthy and a man of some note, and Courtney aircraft, proved for their endurance by a non-stop flight of 3,600 miles, would be wanted by every airline in America and perhaps the whole world. If he failed… He pushed the thought abruptly out of his mind, and stared up at the Courtney, his mind full of unexpected thoughts and emotions.
The war had carried aeroplanes from dubious constructions of string and wire to sound machines that could fly at a hundred miles an hour, and they were now cautiously moving out of this stage into the technological era when manufacturers no longer built by rule of thumb. Many young men – the brave and the skilful as well as the careless and over-enthusiastic – had died to push them this far and there would have to be still more before flying was so normal that men would no longer stop their cars to watch a stunting machine or rush from their houses to watch a frail biplane pass overhead.
In the achievement, however, he and Sammy were going to be achingly alone for a while, beyond all reach of help; and their courage, even though they accepted what they were doing, would be called on to prove itself perhaps in some screeching ten minutes of madness or in a slow draining over the hours, only their confidence in themselves and their machine, only their own strength of character, standing up to the steady ticking away of the long minutes of darkness. It was the thought of this aloneness, rather than the physical danger, that haunted Ira. By the time they’d finished working on her, the machine ought to have as good a chance as any, but after everything was considered it still depended on luck, and it would be then that they would find what they were made of.
Ira had no doubts about his skill or even his nerve. His scarred chin and broken nose were badges of his courage, but this flight he was planning was going to make demands on him he’d never experienced before. He’d flown in combat, he’d flown through storms, had flown aged, sad machines which ought never to have left the ground, and traversed long distances to the last drop of his petrol over vast countries where distant airfields never seemed to grow any nearer. But he’d never flown the distance he was proposing to fly now, a distance at which three or four years back he would have boggled, and he’d never flown non-stop through several hours of darkness when he would have only his instruments to help him. In spite of the time he and Sammy had put in at blind flying, he knew there were airmail pilots in America who had vastly more experience at it than he had.
With luck, however, he knew that with this machine he could achieve a modicum of glory for himself and the men who’d built her. But they must still stick to the tight set of rules built up by airmen over the years to hold their luck together. There could be no letting up on care.
While Woolff held the door open for him, he stepped forward and tapped his hand against the fuselage, listening to the drumming of the taut fabric, then he walked slowly towards the tail, letting his hand slide along skin that was as smooth and silky as a girl’s.
Courtney watched him impatiently and gestured with his dead cigar. He was already dressed to go north again and only the imminent first flight of the Dixie held him back.
‘Ira,’ he begged. ‘For God’s sake, let’s see her roll!’
Ira didn’t even bother to turn his head and went on fingering the tail surfaces, moving the elevators slowly, checking the split pins and looking for stones, then he passed to the other side of the machine, touching the fin, looking for imperfections or damage, because it was easy enough to harm the fragile surface of an aeroplane.
‘For God’s sake, Ira…!’ He heard Courtney’s irritated outburst and Alix’s sharp reply.
‘Shut up, Pa! Leave it to Ira.’
Pausing for a while on the port side, Ira looked towards the curving line of exhausts, black against the red snout of the plane. The Courtney was a beautiful machine, more beautiful than any he’d ever seen so far, the harsh ugly lines of the old biplanes he’d previously flown gone in a sleekness that was moulded for one end only – to carry him a distance of 3,600 miles without failing him, all its imperfections smoothed out to let the air flow freely past, to reduce the drag of friction and to increase and facilitate his passage through the sky. Standing under the port wing tip, he looked up at it, one hand on the single streamlined strut that passed from the strengthened base of the fuselage, where the undercarriage was married to the framework, to a point just over halfway out on the wing. He studied the aileron, then he moved past the wheel, placing his foot against the tyre to feel its solidity. As he passed in front of the machine, he caught the odour of oil and hot metal.
He stared up at the engine. Only the cylinder heads and exhausts projected from the cowling. The two-bladed wooden propeller had been painted a dull black so that the light on it wouldn’t dazzle him as it swung through its circle against the sun, and he studied the gentle symmetry of the blade’s twist and stared at the rocker boxes and the way the exhaust manifolds joined the circle of power and flowed backwards, short sharp stabbing metal tubes hugging the fuselage.
Woolff was watching him carefully as he appeared under the starboard wing and stood beside the open door, trying to read the thoughts behind his expression.
‘She’s OK, Ira,’ he said, almost as though he were afraid Ira might deny it.
Ira nodded and a smile spread across his face. ‘Yes, Hal,’ he said. ‘She’s a beauty.’
Woolff’s solemn plump face split into a relieved grin, and Ira climbed into the cockpit and wriggled into the seat. Putting his feet on the rudder pedals, he moved his knees slowly once or twice, feeling the pressure of the cables under the soles of his feet and glancing over his shoulder to see the rudder move. Taking the control column between his fingers, he moved it backwards and forwards, watching the elevators rise and fall; then from side to side, his eyes on the ailerons.
Woolff was still standing by the door, his eyes on Ira’s face.
‘Get Sammy,’ Ira said, but before Woolff could turn, Sammy was there alongside them, his keen face and eager eyes belying the ridiculous image the hideous plus-fours gave him.
‘Better get in, Sammy,’ Ira said.
Sammy grinned and climbed into the second seat, and together they studied the instruments.
‘More’n I’ve ever seen before, Ira,’ Sammy observed solemnly, almost as though he were about to worship in some holy place.
Ira’s eyes moved over the turn-and-bank indicator that was to supplement their senses in the dark or in cloud where instinct might cause the muscles to make faulty responses. With the rate of climb and descent clear on the altimeter alongside, they would know, even in the thickest darkness, the altitude and position of the machine in the air and could fly without sight of the earth below or the sky above. There was an air-speed indicator, a tachometer, an oil-pressure gauge and a fuel gauge, luxuries they’d never known on the old machines they’d previously been obliged to fly, and he turned to Sammy and gave him a wide confident smile.
‘Let’s go, Sammy,’ he said.
Woolff grinned and, closing the door, stepped back and joined the others. Ira locked the door from inside and braced himself against the seat, taking a second feel at the rudder pedals and control stick and familiarising himself once more with the switches. In an emergency he’d need to put his hands on them instinctively. On what happened this morning would depend the reputation of the company and pr
obably himself, Woolff and every single man who’d had a part in the building of the plane.
Woolff was still watching him, his round good-natured face anxious. Behind him, his hair on end, Courtney was chewing at the dead cigar stub, his eyes feverish with excitement, itching for action but having to contain his impatience. Alongside him, Alix watched, her hands deep in the pockets of her coat, the black smoky eyes on Ira’s face, and, as he glanced at her, settling himself in the seat, she gave him a nervous unsure smile.
A paragraph about the first flight had appeared in the Medway Examiner and the news had obviously got around the town; the perimeter of the field was crowded with children, and along the road were parked groups of cars and trucks, and even a few horse-drawn vehicles. In the tension of the wait, one of the overalled farmers in the parked flivvers along the fringe of the field had grown so excited he had pulled the trigger of a gun and the report had set all heads turning and there had been a lot of laughter and sheepish grinning before they had lost interest and turned again to the small red aeroplane.
At that moment, however, neither the farmers nor the group by the hangar concerned Ira. His attention was entirely on what he was doing, professional, cold and intelligent, absorbed in the details of his task.
‘OK, Hal,’ he said, and Woolff nodded and, moving to the propeller, stood with one hand on the blade.
‘Switches off?’
‘Switches off!’
‘Contact?’
‘Contact!’
Ira lifted his thumb and Woolff leaned backwards, throwing the weight of his body against the propeller. Immediately, the warm engine caught and roared as Ira moved the throttle forward, jumping to 850 revolutions a minute at once. The pressures and temperatures were normal and the crackling roar filled the hangar. He could see spurts of flame pounding from the exhausts in front of him. He glanced round at the big fuel tank behind him, knowing that, full, it would be heavy enough to crush them both and the hot engine into the ground. He thrust the thought aside. So far no one had come up with an alternative position.
When they took off for Paris they would be nothing more than a huge flying petrol can, surrounded by petrol and breathing petrol fumes. They’d talked for hours about how to get the tank in front of them where it would be safer but, unless they were to fly blind, there was no other place for it except where it was now.
He glanced through the windscreen at the idling propeller. Its tip had been painted red like the plane and he could see a narrow circle of crimson through which the light sparkled. On the cowling, a thin streak of oil that had not been wiped off was now edging backwards under the blast along the trunk of the engine, a black trickle quivering with the throb of the pistons.
Opening the throttle slowly until the rev counter was reading 1,400, Ira felt the machine shuddering with its own power and surging against the chocks. He switched off first one magneto then the other but the engine didn’t falter. Every gauge was reading correctly, and he waved away the chocks. Woolff nodded to the mechanics hanging on to the ropes, and the machine rolled from in front of the hangar and across the tarmacadam, lurching slightly as it reached the turf. Glancing at the windsock, Ira saw there was little wind, and as the mechanic on the wing tip threw his weight backwards, the nose of the machine swung.
For a while, Ira taxied about the field, getting the measure of the controls and opening the throttle in short blasts to feel the reaction of the aeroplane. The fragile machine, nothing more than fabric stretched over steel tubing, had a tendency to waltz in the wind, so that he had to keep jabbing with his feet at the rudder pedals to hold her straight. With the huge main tank behind him full, however, he knew she’d be so heavy it would require the efforts of several men to swing her, and he didn’t trouble about her behaviour but turned her swiftly round outside the hangar to face down the field.
As he opened the throttle, the machine seemed to surge forward, the seats thrusting against their backs. The speed built up in seconds and Ira lifted the tail quickly and pulled back on the stick. They felt the plane rise at once, soaring swiftly into the air.
‘Hundred yards, Ira,’ Sammy crowed. ‘No more than a hundred yards before the wheels were off the ground! They’ve built us a good bus.’
Ira nodded and, glancing at the instruments, put the machine into a climb. The tremendous thrust of the Whirlwind gave them an enormous amount of power, and the aeroplane was lifting rapidly. At 3,000 feet, he straightened out, watching the instruments, then climbed, turned, descended in a slow dive, and climbed again. Everything seemed to be working perfectly. Over the hangars, with the word Medway painted in bold white letters on the roofs, he saw the line of foreshortened figures on the apron, staring up at him, and the line of cars with their own hired Ford on the end.
Those men below were probably as excited as he was. Though he was in the air, what they’d put together, designed and worked on, was carrying him and Sammy towards the sun.
Over Charleston and staring down at the twin rivers that surrounded the spit of land which pointed like an arrowhead into the Atlantic, he saw ships along the docks and wondered if Ziegler were still there, looking up at him, knowing that the small machine up in the brassy incandescent sky with the sun behind it was what was going to carry his chart workings across the Atlantic. Down there, on that point of land where the oaks shadowed the White Point gardens, heavy guns had started a bitter civil war sixty-six years before, and it seemed incredible that they’d come in sixty-six, short years – one lifetime – from the days when the horse was the main method of transportation to machines that were proposing to fly from New York to Paris in one hop. He stared down at Morris and James Islands, at Castle Pinckney and Fort Sumter where it had all started, and at the railway line running almost due north along the east side of the point, alongside the docks and hugging the Cooper River where the oil installations stood.
Pale grey shapes of naval ships edged the land, bright in the sun, and a flying boat lay at anchor on the water, wide-winged and ungainly, not very far from the yacht club with its slender white hulls. Inland, to east and west, he could see swampland, and further inland the gleam of Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie.
He brought his mind back to the job in hand. The aeroplane was so good it was easy to forget why he was there.
‘Watch the dials, Sammy,’ he shouted. ‘The fin pulls us round a little and she’s a bit nose-heavy.’
‘That’ll be balanced with the full tank,’ Sammy shouted back, and Ira nodded and pushed across the clipboard and pencil he carried. Sammy took it and jotted down his comments, as Ira moved the control column.
‘Slow on the turn,’ he shouted. ‘But that doesn’t matter. We’re not going to do much turning. She’s all right for long-range flying. Let’s see what she’ll do.’
He thrust the throttle wide open and the indicator seemed to leap across the dial. They reached 125 miles an hour in no time, the machine bucking a little in the turbulent air as they flew over the shoreline.
‘My God, Ira, she’s fast,’ Sammy yelled. ‘And she’ll work up higher than this when we’ve had another go at her. We ought to get over a hundred and thirty, easy.’
With the bright surfaces of Moultrie and Marion growing larger, Ira turned south again, climbing to 4,000 feet, then, throttling back, he held the nose up. Immediately, the machine fell over into a stall and showed a tendency to go into a spin. He pulled her out and climbed again, feeling her stability.
‘She’s fine, Sammy,’ he called out. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her that can’t easily be put right. Let’s go down and tell ’em.’
* * *
Woolff was lumbering across the grass towards them long before they had swung the machine to a stop and switched off the engine.
‘Eight seconds off the ground, Ira,’ he said as they jumped down. ‘Eight seconds, that’s all. What was she like in the air?’
‘Fine. She’ll have to be watched on take-off, but she’s stable and solid. She climbs magnif
icently.’
‘She’ll be slower,’ Woolff warned, ‘with the wing tanks full and a ton of gas right behind your seat.’
Alix Courtney arrived at a run, her eyes alight with excitement. ‘She went up like a homesick angel,’ she said gaily. ‘Ira, for God’s sake, take me up and let me fly her!’
Courtney appeared behind her shoulder, smiling like a Cheshire cat. ‘She’s going to make the name of Courtney famous on both sides of the Atlantic,’ he said.
Alix turned indignantly. ‘For God’s sake, Pa,’ she said furiously. ‘What about Hal Woolff? And Sammy Shapiro and Ira Penaluna and a few more? What the hell have Courtneys done except big-shot around, snapping their suspenders like a backwoods politician. All we’ve done is put up a few dollars.’
While they were talking, none of them noticed the hired car that had crept quietly on to the field, and as they turned away from the aeroplane, they saw Boyle walking towards them, a bitter look on his wrinkled walnut face.
Courtney stared at him, his smile gone at once. ‘I’m coming, Lave,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake, let me see my plane!’
Boyle gave him an acid smile. ‘I’ve got something I thought you’d like to hear. The Medway Examiner just rang the house.’
Courtney scowled. ‘What does that fat toad Nestor want now?’
‘He thought we’d like to know. Byrd’s crashed his plane.’
‘Crashed!’
Immediately they all crowded round the old man.
‘Fokker turned it over, landing,’ he said. ‘At Teterboro on the sixteenth. He put her down on soft ground, and she was too much weighted forward and turned over. Out of trim, they say. They were all injured except Fokker. Byrd got a broken wrist and they say he was so mad bawling out Fokker he never even noticed till later.’
‘He won’t get away this spring,’ Woolff observed.
‘Up in Boston,’ Courtney said, ‘they reckon he doesn’t intend to go this spring anyway.’
