by Richard Bach
Once, on a flight through Ohio, I saw him long enough to be sure that the man who controlled his body was not the same man who had flown my wing that day toward the mountain. He was polite enough to recognize my name, to wish me good day, but he heard without interest any talk of airplanes, wondered why I looked at him strangely. He insisted that he was indeed Bo Beaven and quite happy as an executive for a company that made wringer washers and plastic products. “There’s a great demand for wringer washers,” he said, “a lot more than you might think.”
Way far down in his eyes I fancied I saw a faint little signal of despair from my friend trapped within, fancied I heard the smallest cry for help. But it was gone in a second, quickly masked by the businessman at the desk, behind the nameplate Frank N. Beaven. Frank!
It used to be, when we were flying, anybody who called Bo by the name “Frank” advertised he was no friend at all. Now the clumsy business executive had made the same mistake; he had nothing in common with the man he had sealed up to die.
“Of course I’m happy,” he said. “Oh, sure, it was fun to fly around in the ’100, but that couldn’t go on forever, could it?”
So I flew away and Frank N. Beaven went back to work at his desk, and we didn’t hear from each other again. Maybe Bo had saved my life with his cool question in the desert, but when he needed me to save his, I didn’t know what to say.
It was ten years from the day we had left the Air Force, then, that I got a note from Jane Beaven. “Thought you’d be pleased to know that Bo made his move and is at last returning to number one love, the flying business. With American Aviation in Cleveland—is like a new man …”
My friend Bo, I thought, forgive me. Sealed away for ten years and now you come crashing through the wall. You’re a tough one to kill, aren’t you?
Two months later I landed at Cuyahoga County Airport, Cleveland, and taxied to the American Aviation factory, with its pond of bright-painted Yankees awaiting delivery. And out across the ramp came Bo Beaven to meet me. He wore white shirt and tie, to be sure, but it was not the businessman Frank, it was my friend. There were just bits of the Frank-mask left about him, bits that Bo had allowed to remain because they served a purpose in his job. But the man who had been walled away from the sky was now alive and well and in full charge of the body.
“You wouldn’t have any of these planes to deliver east, would you?” I said. “Maybe you and I could ferry one out.”
“Who’s to say? We just might have one to go.” He said it with a perfectly straight face.
His office now is the office of the Director of Purchasing, a mildly cluttered place with a window overlooking the factory floor. There on a filing cabinet stands a scratched and battered company model of an F-100, pitot boom missing, decal shredded, but proud and there, banking into the indoor sky. On the wall is a photograph of a pair of Yankees in formation over the Nevada desert. “That look familiar?” he asked shortly. I didn’t know whether he meant the desert or the formation. They were both familiar, to me and to Bo; the businessman Frank had never seen either one.
He showed me around the Yankee plant, at ease in this place where the seamless sport plane comes to life out of metal as he had come to life out of grounded flesh. He talked about the way the Yankee is bonded together instead of riveted, about the strength of the honeycomb cabin section, about problems in sheet planning and the shape of a control wheel. Technical business talk, for sure, but the business now was airplanes.
“All right, fella. What was it like, what has it really been like for you, the last ten years?” I said, relaxing in the car while he watched the road home carefully, not looking at me.
“I used to think about it,” he said slowly, “the first year out of flying, wandering to work in the morning when there was a bit of cloudiness. I’d think of the sun, up on top. It was awfully hard.” He took the turns fast, keeping his eyes on the road. “The first year was bad. But by the end of the second year, I almost never thought about it; but occasionally I would maybe in the corner of my ear hear an airplane above an overcast or something, and give some thought. Or maybe for business reasons I’d take a commercial flight to Chicago and have occasion to go on top, and then I’d remember all these things. ‘Yes, I used to do this frequently, that was fun, that was enjoyable, that made you feel clean and all that sort of stuff.’ But then I’d land, get to the business of the day, and maybe sleep on the way back, and I wouldn’t have that thought, I wouldn’t think of it tomorrow, or the next day.”
Tree-shadows flickered over the car. “I was unhappy, with that company. It had no relation to a product that I knew about or was interested in. I didn’t care if they ever sold another wringer washer or another ton of reclaimed rubber or another carload of diaper pails. I didn’t care at all.”
We stopped at his house, a white-painted lawn-surrounded picket-fence place in the shade of Maple Street, Chagrin Falls, Ohio. It was a moment before he left the car.
“Don’t get me wrong, now. I don’t think that at any time, other than just flying alone, tooling around, did I ever give any thought to things like breaking through the overcast. When I saw the sun, it was what I expected to see. It was very nice, pleasant to see all the clean tops-of-clouds where underneath there were all the dirty bottoms-of-clouds. But I don’t think I had any lofty godly-type thoughts when I was flying, that sort of thing.
“It might have been very casual, I might have broken out and said mentally, ‘Well, God, here I am up here looking at it the way you’re looking at it.’ And God would say, ‘Roj,’ and that’d be all there was to that. Or he’d click his mike button to acknowledge that I had spoken.
“I was always awe-stricken at how much there was of the top of clouds. And the fact that I was up there, tooling around with the bigness of it all, skirting a big thunderhead or something like that, when people on the ground were merely deciding whether they should take their umbrella. I’d think of these things, wandering to work …”
We walked to the house, and I tried to remember, No, he had never talked that way he had never said that kind of thing out loud, as long as I had known him.
“And now,” he said after supper, “well, very few people know of American Aviation. They either don’t know it, or they screw it up and say, ‘Oh, that’s the operation that’s going broke, or went broke.’ That’s good, because then I can give them my speech: ‘No, this isn’t going broke, this is American Aviation. We’ve got people who are pros …’ and all this sort of thing. And they are pros. This is one of the other things I wanted to do when I quit the wringer-washer job—I didn’t want to work with a bunch of … well I wanted to work with a more professional organization.”
We checked the Yankee for its ferry flight to Philadelphia, and I remembered what Jane Beaven had said the day before. “I don’t know him and I never will. But Bo was a changed man, when he went completely away from flying. It got to him, he was understimulated, he was bored. He doesn’t talk a great deal about what he feels, he doesn’t go on and on about anything. But when he quit at last, he had two choices of excellent jobs. One was with a big metals company and he would be there forever, and the other was with American Aviation which could, as far as we really knew, fold the next day. But after one interview I knew where we were going.” She had laughed out loud. “He kept saying, of course, ‘The metals company would be marvelous, and much more secure,’ and all that, and to me it was the biggest line of hogwash … I knew where we were going.”
The Yankee rolled out onto the runway, one of Beaven’s first flights after his years on the ground. “You’ve got it. Bo,” I said. “Your airplane.”
He pressed full throttle, tracked the centerline, and we found that the Yankee, over grass, on a hot day, is not a short-field airplane. We left the ground a good way down the runway, angling long and shallow up into the air.
The ten years absence showed, even in a man who at one time had been a better pilot than I could hope to be. He wasn’t thinking ahead
of the airplane, he was rough on the controls, and the sensitive little Yankee pitched and rolled under his hands.
But oddly, he was perfectly confident. He was rough and he knew it, he was behind the plane and he knew it, but he also knew that all this was normal as he got used to flying again, and that he’d catch up before many minutes had gone by.
He flew the Yankee the way he last remembered to fly; he flew it like a North American F-100D. Our turn on course wasn’t a gentle sweeping general-aviation turn, it was WHAM! the wing slammed into a steep bank, dug into the air, turned, then flew back to wings-level in a furious hard whiplash.
I had to laugh. For the first time I could see what another human being saw, I could look inside his mind. And I saw not a little civilian Yankee slicing along at one hundred twenty-five miles per hour with a hundred horsepower spinning a fixed-pitch propeller up front, but a D-model F-100 single-seat day fighter streaking ahead of fifteen thousand pounds of thrust blasting diamond lights out the afterburner and the ground blurring by beneath us and that button-studded control stick under his hand, that magic grip that one need only touch to spin the world, or turn it upside-down or make the sky go black.
The Yankee didn’t mind the game, for its flight controls very nearly match the ’100’s. The wheel is light and positive as a racing Ferrari’s, so that one is tempted to fly hard fast eight-point rolls, just for fun.
Bo discovered the sky he had once known so well. “Will we ever own an airplane?” Jane had said. “I hope so. Because he’d fly. I can’t explain to you why, because the inner workings of his mind are always his own, but I think he feels better, I think he feels more like living … this sounds very corny, but I think his life means more to him when he can fly.” It didn’t sound corny to me at all.
Bo squinted into the horizon. “Looks like the clouds are going broken, here. What do you say, over or under?”
“You’re flying the airplane.”
“Under.”
He chose that for the fun of coming down. Carb heat and throttle, the Yankee snapped its wings up like a daylight bat, and we flashed down toward the trees. Bo was thinking ahead of the airplane now, and happy, though of course he didn’t smile. The wings lashed level and we shot above the Pennsylvania Turnpike, heading eastward.
“He’s a little bit afraid to let loose and commit himself completely,” Jane had guessed about him. “He’s a little bit leery to become again so totally involved as he was with airplanes before. He won’t let himself go. But there’s one thing about Bo. He doesn’t have to use a lot of words. He can communicate with flying.”
Right you are, Jane. It was there all around as he flew, ten years of standing on the ground wanting to shout, now that the time had come to fly again, and his pain that our mission was just to deliver this airplane straight and level to Philadelphia, instead of taking it there in loops and slow rolls. He didn’t have to say a word.
“What do you remember about instrument flying?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“OK, then, you’re on the gages. I’ll be approach control. ‘Four niner Lima in radar contact, climb to and maintain three thousand five hundred feet, turn right heading one two zero degrees, report crossing the one six zero degree radial Pottstown VOR.’ ” I had meant to bury him in instructions, but it didn’t work. All I had given him was a target to shoot for, and he aimed and shot, offering no excuses. The Yankee climbed and turned smoothly now under his hand, it leveled, and he remembered out loud.
“A radial is always outbound from the station, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
He called, crossing the radial.
So I was around to watch my friend learn again, to watch the sky blast dust and cobwebs from a man who had been a magnificent pilot and who just might be one again.
“I’m joining the Yankee flying club,” he had told me. And another time, “It wouldn’t be too expensive, would it, to get a Cub or a Champ, just to fly around in? And as an investment, of course; the way prices are going up it would probably be a good investment.”
We dropped into the pattern at the 3M airport, and there it was again, I was watching through his eyes, and there was the smooth silver nose in front of us, and the arrow of the pitot boom, and we were smoking down final approach at one hundred sixty-five knots plus two knots for every thousand pounds of fuel over a thousand and speed brakes out and gear down and flaps down and trim …
The J-57 of the F-100 thundered soft in our ears, eighty-five percent rpm on final, hold the sink rate, antiskid on, stand by to deploy the drag chute. We touched, the two of us, in a 1959/1969 F-100/Yankee in Nevada/Pennsylvania, USA.
Then he pulled the nose up, after touchdown, way too high up, so that we nearly scraped the tailskid. “Bo, what are you doing?” I had forgotten. We pulled the nose up high, in those days, for aerodynamic braking, to slow the plane and save a drag chute. Of course he had forgotten, too, why anybody would want to pull the nose of an airplane up after touchdown.
“What a lousy landing,” he said.
“Yeah, that was pretty grim. I don’t know whether there’s hope for you or not, Bo.”
But I did have hope. Because my friend, who had saved my life, and then been dead himself for so long, was flying. He was alive again.
Words
We were fifty miles northwest from Cheyenne, level at twelve thousand five hundred feet. The Swift’s engine hushed along up front as it had for three hours since takeoff and as I hoped it would for another thirty hours of cross-country flying. The instruments were relaxed and content on the panel, touching pressures and temperatures and metals and airs and telling me that all was well. Visibility was unlimited. I had not filed a flight plan.
I was just up there flying along, thinking about semantics, without the faintest premonition of what was to happen in four and a half minutes. Looking around at the mountains and the high desert and the altitude and the oil pressure and the ammeter and the first few scattered clouds of the day, and thinking about some of the words of aviation, and what they mean to the rest of the world.
About flight plan, for instance. To thinking people a flight plan, obviously, is a plan for a flight. A flight plan is a certain order, a discipline, a responsibility to move with purpose through the sky. Flying without a flight plan, to any rational person, is flying without order, discipline, responsibility, or purpose.
Oil temperature seventy-five degrees Centigrade … it’s a good feeling, to have that forward-mounted oil cooler, on a Swift.
But to the Federal Aviation Administration, I thought, a flight plan isn’t a plan for flying at all. It is an FAA Form 7233-1. A flight plan is a five-by-eight-inch piece of paper which is filed to alert search and rescue when an airplane is overdue at its destination. To those who know, a flight plan is a piece of paper. Those who do not know believe that a flight plan is a plan for a flight.
I considered that, cruising west of Cheyenne. I remembered the news reports that I had read: “Today an airline jet transport taxied over a light Cessna training plane, parked and tied down at the airport. The Cessna, which was squashed flat, and had not filed a flight plan …”
Had not filed a flight plan, in news parlance, means. Guilty. Cause of accident. Deserved everything he got.
Why has the FAA never defined flight plan for news reporters? Is it because the Administration wants them to believe that anyone who has not requested search and rescue service on Form 7233-1 is guilty, and the cause of any accident? Strange how convenient it is, at the moment of any incident, to mention to reporters that the light aircraft was not on a flight plan. Or better, when they ask, “Did the little plane have a flight plan?” to reply reluctantly, with pain, “Well, gentlemen, no. Much as we hate to say it, the light aircraft had not filed a flight plan.”
It was not just two minutes till the event-of-which-there-were-no-premonitions was to happen. Engine instruments steady. Heading 289 degrees. Altitude 12,460 feet. But I kept thinking about words. Th
ere are so many of them, so many labels and terms so carefully chosen by officials that suspicious pilots might almost think they were cunningly set snares for the private citizen who has learned to fly.
Control tower. Air traffic controller. Where did those names come from? They control nothing at all. The people in that tower talk to airplane pilots, advise them of conditions. The pilots do every bit of controlling that’s done. A semantic detail, that, and of no importance? How many times have you heard nonfliers say, “Your airport has no control tower? Isn’t that dangerous?” Imagine how they feel when they find that the official terminology for a no-tower field is uncontrolled airport! Try explaining that to a news reporter! The words alone show an accident waiting to happen, airplanes trembling to fall out of the sky onto schools and orphanages. Here is a description of millions and millions of takeoffs, the kind of takeoff made every day, every minute: The light aircraft took off from an uncontrolled air port, without radio control, without a flight plan. Wow.
Airway sounds like highway, a smooth place on the ground where automobiles move swiftly and efficiently. In fact, an airway is a channel forcing airplanes to fly as closely to each other as possible in what would otherwise be a limitless sky.
Quadrantal altitude. A very technical authorized term to describe a system that at its very best assures that every mid-air collision will occur at an angle of less than 179 degrees.
Look around for other airplanes. It’s just too simple. In any society that refuses to trust a human being, in any civilization that requires guaranteed safety from infallible tin boxes instead of individual care, look around is embarrassingly undignified. Why, it’s unsophisticated, that’s what it is.
My time was up. I flew at exactly 12,470 feet, thirty feet below prescribed quadrantal altitude for westbound flights. I was on Victor 138, the airway from Cheyenne to Medicine Bow, Wyoming.
