by Richard Bach
I was thunderstruck. “It was an unavoidable accident! The temperature-dewpoint came together without being forecast, the fog just formed around him in five minutes. He couldn’t reach an airport!”
“And rule eight told him never to land away from an airport. In his last five minutes of visibility, he flew over eight hundred thirty-seven landing places—smooth fields and level pastures—but they were not ‘designated airports, with known current runway maintenance’ so he didn’t even think about landing, did he?”
It was quiet for a long time. “No,” I said, “he didn’t.”
We were back in his office before he spoke again.
“We have two things here that you don’t have in your school. We have perfection. We have time.”
“And machine shops. And bird wings …”
“All the effects of time, my friend. The live history, the motivated students, the instructors … they’re all here because we decided to take time to give a pilot skill and understanding, instead of listing rules.
“You talk about your ‘crisis in flight instructing’ on the outside, you’re going through a frenzy of renewing all your instructors’ licenses. But every bit of it is wasted unless the instructor is given time with his student. A man learns to fly on the ground, remember. He just puts that learning into practice when he steps into an airplane.”
“But the tricks, the bits of experience …”
“Certainly. Prop-stopped forced landings, downwind takeoffs, control-jam flying, zero-G stalls, full-blackout night landings, off-airport landings, low-level cross-countries, formation flying, pride, instrument flying and no-instrument flying, low-altitude turn-arounds, flat turns, spins, skill. None of it taught. Not because your instructors don’t know how to fly, but because they don’t have time to teach it all. You think it’s more important to have that scrap of paper, that flying license, than it is to know your airplane. We don’t agree.”
I threw the last of my resistance at him, as hard as I could. “Drake, you live in a cave, you’ve got nothing to do with reality. I can only pay my instructors for the hours they fly, and they can’t afford to spend nonflying time talking with their students on the ground. If I’m going to survive, I’ve got to keep my planes and instructors in the air. We’ve got to put the students right through, give ’em forty hours and a copy of the ‘Twelve Golden Rules,’ get ’em ready for the flight check, and then start all over again with the next bunch. In a system like this, you’re bound to have accidents now and then!”
I listened to myself, and all at once I was filled with loathing. It wasn’t somebody else saying those words, fighting to defend failures, that was me, that was my own voice. My student’s death wasn’t unavoidable; I had murdered him.
Drake said not a word. It was as if he had refused to hear me. He lifted a tiny glider from his desk and launched it carefully into the air. It turned one full circle to the left and slid to a stop precisely in the center of a small white X painted on the floor.
“You might be just about ready to admit,” he said at last, “that if your system involves accidents, then the solution is not to find excuses for the accidents. The solution.” he said, “is to change the system.”
I stayed a week at the cave, and I saw that Drake had not missed a single avenue that would bring perfection in flight. Instructors and students held a very formal relation, on the ground, in the air, in the shops and special-study areas. An incredible respect for the men and women who were instructors, almost a worship of them, filled Drake’s domain. Drake himself called his instructors “sir,” and the flying records of each one of them was printed and open to the students.
Sunday afternoon was a four-hour air show, with formation flying demonstrations of student-built airplanes, and a low-level aerobatic show by one of the best-known air-show pilots in the Southwest. Drake’s influence and ideas ran deeper than I had dreamed … I began to wonder about a few other excellent pilots I knew; ag pilots, mountain pilots, airline captains who flew sport planes in their spare time. Could it be that they had some tie with Drake, with this school?
I asked, but Drake was enigmatic. “When you believe in something as true as the sky,” he said, “you’re bound to find a few friends.”
The man operates an incredible flying school, and when it was time to leave, I frankly told him so. But one thought persisted. “How can you afford it, Drake? This didn’t all come out of thin air. Where do you get your money?”
“The students pay for their training,” he said, as if that explained everything.
I must have stared at him rather dumbly.
“Oh. Not at the start. Not one student ever had a penny to his name, at the start. They just wanted to fly, more than anything else in the world. But every student pays what he thinks his training has been worth. Most give about ten percent of their income to the school, as long as they live. Some give more, some less. It averages about ten percent.
“And ten percent from a thousand bush pilots, a thousand military pilots, a thousand airline captains … it keeps us in gas and oil.” Again, that half-second smile flashed across his face. “And it keeps them in the knowledge that there will be other pilots coming along that know more about flying than how to steer an airplane.”
Heading north and east, flying back onto my map, I couldn’t get his words out of my mind. To teach more about flying than how to steer an airplane; to take time with the students; to offer them the priceless thing that is the ability to fly.
I can change my school, I thought. I can choose my students carefully, instead of taking everyone that walks in the door. I can ask them to pay what the instruction is worth. I can pay my instructors four times what I’m paying them now; make instruction a profession instead of an odd job. Some extra training aids, perhaps—an engine dismantled, a cutaway airframe. My instructors’ experience written for their students to read. Pride. Some firsthand history, some aerobatics, some soaring. Skill. Not the scrap of paper, but understanding.
I shut down the engine at the gas pump, still thinking. Choose the student, and give him time.
My chief instructor caught me before I was out of the airplane.
“You’re back! We searched a solid week, looking for you from here to Cheyenne! We thought you were dead!”
“Not dead. Not dead at all. Just coming alive,” I said. And beginning a tradition, I added, “Sir.”
South to Toronto
The reason that a lot of adventures begin in this world is that the adventurers sit by the fire in comfortable living rooms and they haven’t the faintest mist of an idea of what they are letting themselves in for. They stretch out in that easy chair and there is no such thing as cold or wet or wind or storm and they say well it’s about time somebody discovered the North Pole and they lapse into a dream of glories and an hour later, dreaming still, they set wheels turning, maps unfolding, cogging other warm adventurers’ lives to changing, to saying “Why not?” and “Jove! It should be done! Count me in!”—themselves tranced in a fantasy where hardship and trouble are only words that faint hearts look up in dictionaries.
Poke the fire, then, sit here in this warm chair, and let me spin you an adventure.
BARNSTORM WINTER CANADA!
What a sight, all those little towns snowed north of America, huddling through a white-quartz winter waiting for somebody to drop down from the sky and bring them colors and thrills in ten-minute hops to see their town from the air, three dollars the ride! And what a sound—that soft virgin February sighing to the touch of our skis! None of the problems of summer barnstorming here, no endless searching for pastures and hayfields smooth enough and long enough and close enough to town … why, all the world will be a place to land! Lakes are frozen flat, bigger than a hundred Kennedy Airports; every field that’s rough in summer, or planted in tender crops, is a smooth perfect runway for our Cubs. Let’s prove there’s still room in the world for man individual, man challenging Canada winter to do its worst to keep him f
rom bringing the gift of flight into the lives of those who have never been off the ground! How about it? The Canadians, after all, are frontiersmen, up there, with red-checked mackinaws and blue wool caps; axe in one hand, canoe in other, laughing all the time at danger—no hesitating there to buy our tickets! We’ll fly up there for February, be home by March with the wilderness a part of our soul, the frontier alive again within us, the way it used to be!
That was all I had to spin to myself to be convinced. That, and letters from Glenn Norman and Robin Lawless, Canadians, woodsmen turned airplane pilots, no doubt, inviting me to stop by Toronto, someday.
Toronto! What a sound! A real Canadian outpost in the snowfields, Utopia for barnstormers! I stirred from the fire and got out the maps.
Toronto looks a little larger than one expects a wilderness outpost to look, but beyond it there are thousands of much smaller wilderness outposts, for miles around. Fenelon Falls, Barrie, Orillia, Owen Sound, Pentanguinishe. There are a dozen towns on the shores of Lake Simcoe alone, thirty miles from Toronto, and they are mere doorways to the teeming villages north and east and west. Imagine waking in the dawn, looking out from your warm sleeping bag under the wing, and finding the sign there in the ice:
PENTANGUINISHE!
My reply to the Canadians went out by return mail … would they be interested in joining the Winter Wonderland Flying Circus as wilderness guides? The wheels of adventure had begun to turn.
I sent letters the same day to American pilots with light planes and skis, mentioning that space was available in Canada for February.
Russell Munson signed on, with his Super Cub, the moment he got the news. All at once we had a starting date; on January 29th our two planes would touch their skis in Toronto, on January 30th we’d be off north, into high adventure.
We prepared all through January. I found a pair of used Cub skis in a hangar on Long Island, Munson found a pair of new ones in a factory in Alaska. We went through the flight over and again in his New York office—what must we be sure to take along?
Warm clothes, of course, and before a week was by we were clomping around the airfield in parkas and multilayer wools and insulated snowboots. Wing and engine covers, and we were enveloped in yards of sheet plastic and burlap, sewing them together just so. Hand-warmers for us, engine-warmers for the Cubs, inflatable tents, space blankets, survival kits, maps, spare parts, tools, cans of oil, sleigh bells for the skis. It is remarkable how much equipment one needs for a simple Canadian wilderness barnstorming tour.
My airplane was painted in enamel milk, which would never do; what customer would notice a white Cub parked on a snowbank? For the next three days I laid masking tape in candy stripes across the top of the wings and tail while Ed Kalish sprayed bright red over it all and remembered his days mechanicking at God’s Cape, north of Hudson Bay.
“Got there one day,” he said from a scarlet cloud of Dulux, “and it was seventy degrees below zero!”
My parka, the warmest garment I owned, was rated to fifty below.
“Had to start the engines with blowtorches up the exhaust stacks, turning the props backwards and getting the cylinders warm through the valves.”
I went out that day and bought a propane blowtorch. And figured if I had to, I could stuff my parka with leaves.
Of the two other pilots I had invited, one wrote to say that he felt that Canada in February might be a little chilly … hadn’t I meant we’d barnstorm Nassau?
When I finally replied that this flying circus was heading north, he wished me luck. I remember thinking that there was a strange reason to cancel adventure, because it would be cold. He had advised me to recall that the Cub had no cabin heater at all, but somehow that bounced off me like moose off ice.
The other pilot, Ken Smith, would meet us in Toronto on January 29th.
That gave us three Cubs, three pilots, and a pair of wilderness guides. We needed one more airplane, a Canadian, to join us so that we could be a true international circus, but I had no doubt that there would be dozens of CF aircraft ready to go along when we arrived in their country.
By mid-January the lakes were turning to ice all over Canada. New England ski resorts had opened for business and a few large snowflakes fell on Long Island.
On the night of the 20th I practiced sleeping among those flakes. It was only twenty degrees Fahrenheit outside, quite a bit warmer than we’d be having in Canada, but any test was better than none. Twenty degrees, I discovered, is actually quite cold. This was discovered some time around three in the morning. It wasn’t that the tent had failed, or the space blanket wasn’t working, but that the cold, after waiting that long, comes around and attacks the sleeper through the ground. I could think warm, all right, and fight it, but it took such a concentrated effort conjuring Saharas and bonfires that there was no time left for sleeping. At four I gave up and dragged tent and all back into the house. It was then that I began to think that while this was a lark for us, chasing this adventure, it was no game for winter. We were pointed dead-on into what the Air Force used to call a “survival situation” … men froze to death in warmer climates than February Canada! I packed an extra blanket at once.
Norman and Lawless flew to check out Lake Simcoe. The lake was frozen solid, the day they did, and the temperature was thirty below.
On January 27th, Toronto had its worst blizzard of the century. Towns were buried under snow, rescue operations were underway.
We were glad for this news; the deeper the snow, the closer we could land to town. When you are barnstorming, you might as well go home if you can’t land close to town.
Extremely early on the morning of the 29th, Munson and I started engines under the dim place in the night that would be dawn … our engine exhausts were blue in the terrible stillness. It is around sunrise that adventurers reach that point at last where they begin to understand that they are out of their minds, just like everybody says.
“Russ, do you realize that this whole trip is folly? Do you realize what we are getting ourselves into? Look, I’m sorry I brought this whole idea up …” I wanted to say it, but didn’t have the courage. Adventurers are cowardly about things like that.
Munson wasn’t saying anything either, as the sky lightened and our engines warmed, and at last we climbed without words into our airplanes, taxied over the deserted concrete, and took off north, across Long Island Sound, across Connecticut. The outside air temperature at five thousand feet was eighteen degrees below zero, though I must admit that in the unheated cockpit it didn’t feel any colder than ten or fifteen below. In the first place, I couldn’t believe that I was going to spend a month in that temperature; in the second, I was thinking about summer, when the roads get so hot you can’t walk without shoes and butter turns into yellow pools if you leave it out.
At our first stop, our very first stop, I noticed that my engine seemed to be blowing a little oil out the breather pipe. It always lost some oil, but this was more than usual. I unhooked the extension and let the pipe breathe in the warm engine compartment.
Since his airplane had a gyro compass, VOR and ADF radios, Munson was the flight leader to Toronto. My one magnetic compass was as sensitive to direction as a bench anvil, so I merely flew along as wingman and enjoyed the scenery, which was white and soft. Why this strange feeling, then, an hour after our second takeoff, that this was not the way to Canada at all? Those mountains to the right, weren’t those the Catskills? And shouldn’t the Hudson River be to our left? I moved into close formation and pointed to my map, looking a question at the flight leader. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“Russ!” I shouted, “Aren’t we heading south? We’re heading SOUTH!” He couldn’t understand what I was yelling, so at last I fell back and followed uncomplaining, as a wingman should, to see where he was going. He’s been flying for ten years, I thought, so it must be me that’s wrong. We’re just following a different river. I noticed that he was checking his map, and this was reassuring to me. He
didn’t change course. We must be headed north … it’s me that’s lost, not for the first time.
But after a while it began getting warmer. There was less snow, down there on the ground.
The Super Cub realized, with a jolt, that somehow there had been a terrible mistake. It banked sharply right, changed course one hundred sixty degrees, and then drifted down to land at a little airport by the river. It was the Hudson, all right. For once in my life I was lost and it wasn’t my fault!
“You may live this down,” I told him gently, when we had landed, “but believe me, it is going to take a long time …”
I was sorry at once, for he was deeply upset.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me! I was following the highway and I noticed that the compass was a little off and the VOR wasn’t quite right, but I was sure it was the highway! I just sat there and didn’t pay any attention. I saw the compass, but I didn’t pay any attention!”
It was not hard to change the subject. There was oil all over the belly of my airplane, blown out in the last hour. The landing gear and cowling were covered with it, congealed and frozen everywhere. A broken ring, perhaps, a cracked piston? We talked about turning back to check it over, but it sounded like the quitter’s way.
“Let’s press on,” I said. “It’s probably just suction there at the end of the breather pipe, taking out more than it should.”
Munson nailed the course north on the Hudson, turned left at Albany, drove dead-on toward Toronto. An hour past Albany my oil pressure dropped one psi, then two. I have never had the oil pressure drop in any airplane engine without something bad happening soon … I pointed “down” to my flight leader and we landed at the next airport, five minutes away.
Another quart gone. The prospect of forty hours flying over the Canadian wilderness with an engine spraying its lifeblood into the sky was not the adventure I had chosen to play. It is one thing to be ready for engine failure, barnstorming, but quite another, and not so wise, I thought, to be convinced of it. Proceed or return, I was going to be a quitter; but better to be a warm quitter than a cold one perched in some Pentanguinishe treetop. Besides, the weather people told us, there’s a fresh blizzard at the border.
