A Gift of Wings

by Richard Bach

  For more of us than care to admit, I’ll bet, the ideal of flight lies beyond even a Pitts Special. Some of us just might nourish a secret thought that the very best kind of flying would be to get rid of the airplane altogether, to find a principle, somehow, that would turn us loose all alone in the sky. The skydivers, who have come closest to the secret, also come right straight down, which doesn’t quite qualify as flying.

  With the mechanical things, the lifting platforms, the rocket belts, the dream is gone—without the tin you’re dead, run out of fuel and down you go.

  I propose that one day we find a way to fly without airplanes. I propose that right now a principle exists that makes this not only possible, but simple. There are those who say that now and then through history it’s already been done. I don’t know about that, but I think that the answer lies in somehow harnessing the power that put the whole unseen universe together, that power of which the law of aerodynamics is only an expression in a way that we can see with our eyes, measure with our dials, and touch with the clumsy crude iron of our flying machines.

  If the answer to harnessing this power lies beyond machinery, then it must lie within our thought. The researchers in extrasensory perception and telekinesis, as well as those who practice philosophies suggesting man as an unlimited idea of primal power, are on an interesting path. Maybe there are people flying all over laboratories this moment. I refuse to say it’s impossible, though for the moment it would look supernatural. In just the same way that our first glider would have looked scary-weird to the Egyptians standing all heavy and small in the valley.

  For the time being, while we work on the problem, the old rough fabric-steel substitute called “airplane” will have to stand between us and the air. But sooner or later—I can’t help but believe it—all us Egyptians are somehow going to fly.

  Paradise is a personal thing

  Whether I saw them sauntering out across an acre of concrete to their aircraft, black-leather cubes of flight bags in hand, or silver-flashing at the point of a four-streak contrail way on up at forty thousand feet, I always thought airline pilots the most professional aviators in the world. And “most professional” means highest-paid and that means best. I could never lay a claim to becoming the best pilot alive if I did not fly an airline transport, and besides, the money … It is a logically painted portrait into which many a man has walked.

  After holding out for years against what I feared would be an exercise in aerial bus driving, boring as sin, I decided that perhaps I was unnaturally prejudiced against airlines. If I am truly excellent in my knowing of flight and sky, I thought, the only proper place for me is on some Boeing flight deck, and the sooner the better. I applied at once to United Air Lines. Gave them all my lists of flying time and certificate numbers and types of aircraft flown, and gave them in full confidence, because I know that if I can do anything at all, I can fly an airplane. I planned to buy the Beech Staggerwing and the Spitfire and the Midget Mustang and the Libelle sailplane all fairly quickly, on an airline captain’s pay.

  The examinations for the job included one that tested my personality.

  Answer yes or no, please: Is there only one true God?

  Yes or no: Are details very important?

  Yes or no: Should one always tell the truth?

  Yes or no. Hm. I puzzled a long time over that test to become an airline pilot. And I failed it.

  A United-pilot friend chuckled when I numbly told him what had happened.

  “Dick, you take a course for that test! You go down to a school and pay them a hundred dollars and they tell you the answers that the airlines want, and you give the answers that way and you get hired. You didn’t answer those questions on your own, did you? ‘True or false: Blue is prettier than red?’ You answered that by yourself?”

  So I planned ways to get around that test. There was not the faintest doubt that I would be a magnificent airline captain, but the test was a tripping stone laid in my way. Just before I paid my money for the answers, though, I idly asked about the life of an airline pilot.

  Not a bad life at all. You feel guilty, after a couple of years, taking home a paycheck that size for doing something you consider the best-possible fun. Naturally, you should be a good company man, that’s only right. Your shoes are shined and your tie is tied. You follow all regulations, of course, and you join the union, and you keep your hair cut per company policy, and it is not wise to suggest improvements in flying technique to pilots longer employed than yourself.

  The list went on, but about that time I began to feel strange little gnawings from within, from the inner man. Why, I could have the greatest attitude in the world for learning the airplane and its systems, I thought, could strive harder than anybody to train uncanny abilities in controlling the machine, could fly it with absolute precision. But if my hair wasn’t policy-short, then I wouldn’t be quite the perfect man for the job. And if I refused to carry the union card, oddly enough, I wouldn’t be a good company man. And if I ever told the captain how to fly …

  The more I listened, the more I found that United had been right. There was more to it than stick and rudder, instruments and systems. I wouldn’t make a good airline pilot, after all, and with a born suspicion of all company policies, I would most likely be a terrible airline pilot.

  The airlines had always been a misty sort of Valhalla to me, a land that would always need pilots, that would always yield that diamond paycheck for taking a few hours each month to fly an elegantly-equipped-perfectly-maintained jet transport. And now my little paradise was out the window. They aren’t the best, after all. They are company pilots.

  So I returned to my little biplane and I changed the oil and started the engine and taxied out to fly, collar unbuttoned, shoes all scuffed, hair two weeks uncut. And up there, perched on the edge of a summer cloud looking out from my cockpit over a peace-green countryside all sparkled with sunlight and washed with limitless cool sky, I had to admit that if I couldn’t have an airline pilot’s paradise, this one would do till something better came along.

  Home on another planet

  I had been up in the Clip-Wing, practicing a little sequence: loop to roll to hammerhead to Immelmann, for fun. I was pleased, that day, not to have fallen out of the Immelmann. The trick is full forward stick at the top of the thing, an awkward cross-controlled rudder and aileron for the first half of the rollout, finally reversing rudder to finish. It is not a comfortable figure to fly, but after a while one draws comfort from a good-looking maneuver instead of a pleasant ride. In times past people who have seen my Immelmanns have said, “Gee, you make an awful rollout.” I’ve had to explain that the Air Force never taught any negative-G maneuvers and so I’ve picked them up by myself and since my learning rate drags without some fanged instructor sitting back there I’m doing good to get the machine right-side-up by the time it’s ready to land.

  I finished that, a reasonably good sequence with a fair Immelmann, flew around for a while looking out the open side of the cabin at the people down there at work and at school or driving about in tin-shell automobiles along roads barely wide enough to fit. Then landing, and in a moment the engine was as quiet as it had been fifty minutes earlier; a normal end to a normal flight. I got out of the airplane, tied the stick back, the ropes to the lift struts and tail, slid the rudder lock into place.

  But then, right in the midst of all that everyday normalcy all at once I had the oddest feeling. The airplane, the sunlight, the grass, the hangars, the distant green trees, the rudder lock in my hands, the ground under my feet … they were foreign, strange, alien, distant.

  This is not my planet. This is not my home.

  It was one of the creepiest moments of my life, that happened for the first time as my hands fell awkward from the rudder lock.

  This world seems strange because it is strange. I have only been here for a little while. My deep-secret memories are of other times and other worlds.

  What an eerie way to think, I
told myself, let’s snap out of this, son. But I wouldn’t snap. In fact, I remembered mists of this feeling, fragments of it after every flight I’ve made—the odd thought, returning to the ground, the buried conviction that this planet may be vacation or school or lesson or test, but it is not home.

  I have come from another place, and to another place I shall one day return.

  It was so absorbing, this odd thing, that I forgot to chock the tires before I left, and so earned a curse from me the next time I went to fly. The vacant numb who forgets to chock his tires, what good can he ever come to?

  Yet the ghostly feeling has settled over me time and again since that flight in the Cub. I don’t know what to make of it, except that it might be true. And if it is true, if we are all passing through this planet for reasons of experience or learning or tests to pass, what does that mean, anyway?

  If it’s true, it probably means don’t worry. It probably means I can pick up the things I’m so solemn and concerned about in this life and look at them with the eye of a visitor on the planet, and say, these don’t really touch me at all. And somehow, for me, that makes a difference.

  I didn’t think I was the only visitor who has been stopped, rudder lock in hand or rolling through the top of an Immelmann turn, with this kind of harp-jingling shiver that there is a lot more going on than making an aircraft secure or full rudder against the aileron. I knew everyone who flies might have had this knowing, every once in a while, seen strangeness in a world that should by every press of logic be familiar and home.

  Right I was. For one day, after a formation flight up over the summer clouds, which was admittedly a handsome sight, a friend said it himself.

  “All this talk about going out to space—times like now I get the feeling I’m just coming in. Weird, you know, like I’m a Venusian or something. You know what I mean? That ever happen to you? You ever think that?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes. Yeah, I’ve thought that.” So I’m not crazy, I thought. I’m not alone.

  It happens more and more often to me now, and I must admit that it is not unpleasant to have roots in another time.

  I wonder what the flying’s like at home.

  Adventures aboard a flying summerhouse

  He was selling his airplane to me because he needed the money, but still there were three years of his life in the thing and he liked it and he wanted to hope that I might like it too, as if the plane were alive and he wanted it happy in the world. So it was that after he saw I could fly it safely, and after I had handed him a check, and after waiting for as long as he could stand it, Brent Brown turned to me and asked, “Well, what do you think? How do you like her?”

  I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what to tell him. Had the plane been a Pitts or a Champ or a fiberglass motor glider I could have said, “Great! Wow! What a lovely airplane!” But the plane was a 1947 Republic Seabee, and the beauty in a Seabee is like the beauty way down in the eyes of a woman who is not a covergirl moviestar—before you see her beautiful, you must begin to know who she is.

  “I can’t tell, Brent. The airplane flies all right, but I’m still way behind it, it’s still pretty big and strange.”

  Even when the weather cleared and I flew away at last from the snows of Logan, Utah, I couldn’t honestly tell Brent Brown that I would ever love his airplane.

  Now, nearly a hundred flying hours later, having flown the Seabee across winter America, down the coast to Florida and the Bahamas and back into spring, I can begin to answer his question. We’ve flown together thirteen thousand feet over mountains sharp as broken steel, where her engine failure would have meant some cool discomfort; we’ve survived some rough-water ocean takeoffs where my slow beginner’s ways in seaplanes could have sent us in large pieces to the bottom. Through these hours I’ve come to find that the Seabee is generally worthy of trust; perhaps she’s found the same is true of me. And perhaps, back in Logan, Utah, Brent Brown could call this the beginning of any real love.

  Trust comes not without difficulty overcome. The Bee, for instance, is the largest airplane I’ve ever owned. With extended wings and droop tips its span is nearly fifty feet. The vertical stabilizer is so high that I can’t even wash the tail of the plane without a ladder to climb. Its all-up weight is just over a ton and a half … I can’t push it alone even across the taxiway, and two men together can’t lift the tailwheel clear of the ground.

  Take this huge machine to Rock Springs, Wyoming, let’s say, take it there and land in a fifty-degree crosswind twenty gusting thirty (thanking God that the rumors about crosswind landings in Seabees aren’t true), struggle it to the parking ramp (cursing the devil that the rumors about crosswind taxiings are), freeze it overnight so the oil is tar and the brakes are stone. Then try to get it flying, come dawn, by yourself. It’s like coaxing a frozen mammoth to fly. A Cub or a Champ, you don’t need help to get it going, but a Seabee sometimes you do.

  After hurling my body like a fevered desperate snowflake against the smooth aluminum mountain of the Bee, hurling it twice and again, I was trembling on collapse and hadn’t moved it a fraction of an inch. Then out of the wind came Frank Garnick, airport manager, wondering if he could help. We hitched his snowplow to the mammoth, towed it in compound low till the wheels shattered ice and turned, set a preheater in her engine compartment and a charger on her battery. Half an hour and the mammoth was a fawn, engine purring as though Rock Springs was Miami. You can’t always do everything alone; a hard lesson eased by a fellow who didn’t mind helping.

  With a big airplane one learns too about systems, and how they work. Take the landing gear and the flaps. They all move up and down under the calm physics of the hydraulic system, which is so reliable that it requires no mechanical backup or emergency mode. So that if you squeeze the landing gear down with forty strokes or so of the hydraulic handpump on a night landing to runway 22 at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and touch down with the gear not quite locked, you hear this loud sound—ZAM!—and then a moment later comes a screeching crunching roaring sound wild as freight cars slid sideways on rock.

  After you shut the engine down in utter disgust, it gets quiet in the cabin, there in the middle of runway 22, and into that quiet comes a voice, from the tower.

  “Do you have a problem, Seabee six eight Kilo?”

  “Yeah. I have a problem. The gear collapsed out here.”

  “Roger, six eight Kilo,” comes the voice, pleasant as America itself, “contact ground control on one two one point nine.”

  You listen to that, and you start to laugh.

  Sure enough, just as the factory said, a wheels-up landing on concrete only shaves a sixteenth of an inch from the keel of your new Seabee. Fort Wayne Air Service was there to extend the lesson on help with big airplanes. A clevis had broken in the gear system and a mechanic there hunted me a new one.

  “What do I owe you for this?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Free? You’re an airplane mechanic and you’re giving me a stranger this clevis free?”

  He smiled, thinking of a price. “You’re parked at our competitor’s place. Next time park here.”

  Then Maury Miller drove me for nothing all the way back across Baer Field, where John Knight at Consolidated Airways helped me run a gear retraction test, also free of charge. It was either something about the Seabee, or about these people, or about that particular sunrise, but Fort Wayne couldn’t do enough to help me out.

  “Don’t think of a Seabee as an airplane that can land on water,” Don Kyte had told me years before. “Think of it as a boat that can fly.” A boat that can fly, if you don’t care if it’s not as fast as, say, a cross-country minie-ball. The Bee trues out at around ninety miles per hour at low cruise, one hundred fifteen at high; this and patience will get you anywhere. At low cruise, the seventy-five-gallon tank holds nearly eight hours flying, at high cruise it’s just over five.

  Flying his boat over Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the captain has time to look down and notice
tens and scores of little towns right on the edge of blue quiet lakes and wide rivers, and in time he thinks of a way to make a Seabee pay for itself.

  “A boat that can fly, folks, just three dollars buys you ten full minutes aloft! It’s perfectly safe, your government-licensed pilot, Captain Bach, the air ace, thousands of flights without a mishap, former Clipper pilot on the Hong Kong–Honolulu run, himself at the controls!”

  Towns, lakes, breathed away below. Sure enough. It could be done.

  After twenty hours in the Bee, I began to feel gingerly at home. Every day the airplane seemed a little smaller, a bit more maneuverable, more a controllable creature than a houseboat in the sky, although the latter is the literal truth. The cabin inside is something over nine feet long, and that before opening the door into the hollow tower under the engine, which adds another three or four feet. The seats recline to make a full double bed. The Seabee Hilton, in fact, is the first flying hotel in which I’ve been able to stretch out full length and sleep soundly all night … a point not to miss in a machine built to spend its nights anchored in wilderness lakes.

  The Seabee is fitted with three enormous doors, one right, one left, and then one bow door, set four feet forward of the copilot’s seat. According to the owner’s manual, this door is for “docking and fishing”; it is also an excellent ventilation door for noons in Bahama waters, when otherwise the cabin overheats in direct sun.

  If he’s landed by a coast of rocks, or just doesn’t feel like leaving his ship, the captain can leave the cabin by any door and stretch out in the sun on a towel or on the warm aluminum along the wingspar, writing or thinking or listening to the waves lap down the length of the hull.

  With an alcohol stove, he can prepare hot meals on the cabin top or within, on a galley set on the right half of the flight deck.