On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  “School?” inquired Tom. “What do you teach?”

  “Oh, gas and bombs and such things.”

  Tom glanced at the padre, but saw no doubt in his face. The man of God and the men of gas; by a supreme act of tolerance, was it, that they fraternized? Not so. Neither of them really meant what they taught. Their real selves were compartmented from their professions; they were all good fellows together steering by Current Usage. Not exactly hypocrites, Tom thought, for fingent simul credunique, they believed in their own simulations.

  The padre was a charming man to talk to. The time passed quickly, and it was half past twelve.

  “Come back with me and have some lunch. We can send a guard for your aeroplane, and you can telephone your squadron from there, and wait in some comfort.”

  “Thanks very much. I’d like to. But I must get one of these men to do guard until you can send a proper guard.”

  That done, they set off. A little way along the road they met an R.F.C. tender, which stopped when the driver saw Tom.

  “Do you know where an aeroplane has landed near here, sir?”

  “I landed a little way along the road.”

  “Oh well, sir, we’re from 72 Squadron. The Aircraft Park rang up and asked us to send someone along to start you up.”

  “They’re crazy. I turned over. I told them it was a crash. You can wash out.”

  Tom held on his way lunchwards indignantly. These non-combatant R.F.C. people must be quite mad.

  “Never mind,” said the padre, “whose things happen in wartime.”

  The immense reverberations of gunfire supported his statement.

  The Corps School was a restful place, undisturbed by hurly-burlies and war, except for noises incidental to courses in bombing. And the staff mess was the most peaceful spot in the happy valley. The C.O. was a colonel and his adjutant a major. Besides the padre, there were two captains and two lieutenants in charge of courses of instruction. The actual instructing was done by sergeant-instructors, so that they had little to do but put in an occasional modest appearance in the background of a class, and fill in a few daily returns. The adjutant also prepared daily returns, or supervised their preparation by the orderly sergeant, and the colonel signed them. The colonel also took part occasionally in instructing a class, probably with the object of infusing the right atmosphere of kindliness. He was very well seconded in the kindliness department by the padre, who was in himself a tower of good will. It was impossible to be in his presence and not receive the illusion of the fundamental goodness of things, let the guns rumble in the distance how they might. Such, Tom thought, was the triumphant power of professional training allied with good natural ability.

  Being introduced into this mess was, to one used to the R.F.C. atmosphere, something like finding oneself in the holy calm of a Pall Mall club miraculously endowed with faint but persistent Moral Purpose, after a New Year hullaballo in a Regent Street bar. Conversation was leisurely, prolonged, and decorous, and alcohol was used only in such small quantities as stimulated the larynx to this sort of talk. No one swore or discussed women. The profound purity of the mature English gentleman away from his womenfolk reigned.

  They were pleased to have a flying man to talk to, being all quite ignorant of flying and having the impression that there was something specially daring and heroic about it. At luncheon, Tom, being plied with questions, yarned away about the war in the air; how whacked (the word was tolerated) the Huns were, and how the R.F.C. was keeping them whacked. Then he was taken to the office to telephone, and was able to get through to the squadron and had a rather indistinct conversation with James. If he was comfortable he might as well stay where he was, and transport would be sent for him as soon as possible, but it would not be till to-morrow. The rest of the flight had got back before the mist covered the aerodrome. Glad he was all right. . . .

  Tom felt very foolish; if only someone else as well as he had been caught by the fog so would he have been kept in countenance. But to be caught by the fog foolishly and unnecessarily, and then to crash his bus forty miles from home just at the time when it was most needed, that was not the sort of thing to do whether the war was his concern or not. It was a failure, and it hurt his pride to fail ridiculously. He had taken on a job that offically assumed that he possessed all sorts of fine qualities of head and heart, and even if it was pure bluff, he hated his bluff to be seen through. Nothing hurts pride, he reflected, like being found out. But was he “found out?” Suppose someone else, Williamson for instance, had done what he had done, what would he have thought of him? None the worse; he would have congratulated him on getting away with it unharmed. There was nothing extraordinary in turning over landing on soft ploughed stuff, rather it was to be expected; Camels were notorious for that sort of thing. And he would probably have congratulated him for having got a day’s rest from the war by the crash.

  While this debate was going on inside him, he had reported the substance of his conversation to the adjutant, who at once placed a cubicle at his disposal for the night and put him in charge of his own batman. The batman borrowed pyjamas and toilet apparatus for him and told him the history of everyone in the mess; they were all gentlemen, if ever there were gentlemen, he said. The batman also talked about himself. He was by trade a dental mechanic, and he strongly advised Tom to have all his teeth out at the earliest opportunity, as it would save him a lot of bother in the long run, and false teeth were far easier to keep properly clean. Tom thanked him and went to sleep for two hours and the batman brought him a cup of tea and some cake. The colonel thought he might prefer tea in his room, as he must be tired after his adventures. Dinner would be at seven, and would he care to borrow a pair of slacks? Tom would, and some note-paper too. He had found the right spot for a forced landing.

  At dinner the subject of conversation was flying. The usual questions were asked: why had he taken it up? what did he feel like the first time he went up? had he ever looped the loop? had he shot down any Huns? did he know McCudden or Micky Mannock or the Mad Major?

  Tom told them that he had transferred to the R.F.C. because he needed a change from the infantry. He had been assured at the time that the average life of a pilot was six weeks. That was ten months ago. He was very glad he had made the change, for it meant a great deal to live in comfort and cleanliness all the time. And in winter the life was not so very trying, days being short and the weather often too bad for flying. Sometimes it was impossible to leave the ground for three or four days at a time. No doubt with summer coming on life would be a great deal harder, but the war might be over quite soon now, didn’t they think?

  This suggestion split the conversation up. The balance of opinion was against the probability of an early finish. The summer campaigns would have to work themselves out, and if nothing decisive happened, such as the capture of Paris and the Channel Ports, or on the other hand a German reverse ending in demoralization, then the war might be prolonged into next year. The colonel did not think the war would be won in the field at all, as a real break through had been proved impossible. It was a matter of which population was starved to breaking point first. One of the junior officers suggested that the American invasion must lead eventually to victory on the western front, but the colonel smiled. For him there were only two real nations on earth, English and French. And even the French had their faults, being pig-headed and rather too French.

  Then they got back to flying, and Tom told them the first time he went up was in a Rumpty, that was to say, a Maurice Farman Shorthorn, a queer sort of bus like an assemblage of birdcages. You climbed with great difficulty through a network of wires into the nacelle, and sat perked up there, adorned with a crash helmet, very much exposed to the wondering gaze of men. There did not seem to be any a priori reason why this structure should leave the ground, but after dashing across the aerodrome at forty miles an hour for some time the thing did imperceptibly and gradually climb into the air. It was very like a ride on top of an omnibus. A Rump
ty was no aeroplane for stunting. The flight was a quiet trip up to three hundred feet and down again. A few daring spirits who had tried stunting were dead. The C.O. of that squadron, a pompous and bossy penguin, Major Beak, maintained that Rumpties were good buses when you knew how to fly them. He had been on active service on them, in Mesopotamia, where he had contended valiantly with the heat bumps engendered by the fierce sun until the heat made him so bad tempered that he was invalided home to get rid of him. On the home front he was sufficiently senior to be able to avoid flying, and work off his bad temper on junior people who did fly. According to him Rumpties were fine, and it was only damned junior stupidity that jeered at them. They had to be used, for hundreds of them existed, a big order having been placed; and as they were of no use for any practical purpose, the only thing to do with them was to use them for training. The trainees would have to unlearn later all that they learnt then, but young pilots must begin at the beginning, and a Rumpty certainly was only just beginning to be an aeroplane. Flying with their antiquated controls was a mixture of playing a harmonium, working the village pump, and sculling a boat.

  However, Tom became habituated to staggering through the atmosphere in these soaring cat’s-cradles, and in the fullness of time he took one up by himself, and stayed up for an hour and a half, reaching in this time the eagle-baffling height of three thousand feet, whence he gazed down on the still sleeping western suburbs of London and felt himself to be a pilot. This flight was so successful that after breakfast he was sent up again in another machine.

  By this time a fairly strong breeze was blowing from the southwest, and there was a ceiling of cloud at about seven hundred feet; not the weather in which a novice in a Rumpty was likely to enjoy himself. He flew round and round the aerodrome at five hundred feet, being bumped about irksomely by the choppy air. It was a great change from the still clear atmosphere of dawn . . . but an hour passed, and he might soon land. Then the engine spluttered and stopped. Tom knew one thing, that he must not stall, and immediately put the nose down into gliding position to maintain speed. The engine did not pick up. This was a forced landing, and by the time he realized the alarming truth he did not seem to have enough height to glide on to the aerodrome so as to land into the wind. There was a field in front that he must make for. The engine gave a splutter but subsided again. The field was rushing up at him. He was going down much too steeply. He was almost in the field. He was doing seventy; he would never get in. Trees were in front. The engine spluttered again. He had left the throttle open. He looked down and pulled it off, and then there was a shock and he was out of the aeroplane, lying on the ground a dozen yards from the remains of it. He had been thrown on his head, but the crash helmet had saved him. He must have flown into the ground; he didn’t really know exactly what had happened; he found himself on the ground and the Rumpty smashed. He might have been unconscious for a little while. The nacelle was upside down on the ground with a pile of wreckage on it. He had been strapped in, but the safety belt had given; otherwise his neck must have been broken. But what a mess the old Rumpty was! One more write off. It was an achievement to smash up a Rumpty like that and not be hurt. He shook himself. Yes, he was quite uninjured; one shoe was missing, and the ankle felt a little bit wrenched. He walked over to the wreck and found his shoe wedged upside down under the nacelle with the toe projecting. He pulled at it, but it was fixed firmly. He got both hands to it and tugged and wriggled it, and suddenly it came away and he rolled over on his back.

  Someone flew overhead as he was putting on his shoe, leaning over to look at him. He walked round the wreck, his own wreck. It was a good one. He ought to be dead. Was he, by the way? He couldn’t see his dead body about, but it might be under the nacelle. The motor ambulance came jolting over the field towards him, and it was a relief when the orderly spoke to him, and he knew he was not a spirit. The matter ended with a fortnight’s sick leave and a few words with Major Beak about his incompetence.

  Since then he had had a number of minor crashes, mere landing accidents, but nothing to compare with that destruction of the Rumpty. Probably he had done the right thing in keeping straight on when his engine had conked. It was very easy for an inexperienced pilot to stall when he was doing turns with his engine off to try to reach a landing place, and that meant a dive or spin into the ground, which killed in nine cases out of ten. On a Rumpty, with the engine behind you, there was no hope at all. It would pulp you. How many fellows, some that could fly too, had been killed through trying to turn back to the aerodrome when their engine had cut out after taking off! Engines had a way of cutting out just then, and the instinct was to turn back, when really there wasn’t room to do it, and the pilot inevitably held the nose up too much in trying to keep height and in a jiffy he was spinning with no chance whatever of getting out of it, and that was the end of him. Tom had only seen one case where the fellow got away with it. He had spun a Camel from a hundred and fifty feet right into the arms of a sturdy oak which caught him. He climbed down to earth none the worse and went into a pub across the road and celebrated his escape with an admiring audience which stood him so much whisky that he had to go back on the ambulance after all.

  Tom yarned away. After Rumpties he had gone on to Avros which really were aeroplanes, and quite different to fly. A number of people were killed on their first solos through doing a flat turn after taking off, and getting into a spin near the ground; but there was no hope for flat turn merchants. They just hadn’t flying sense, and might as well kill themselves quickly.

  Apart from flat turns an Avro would do anything you wanted, and when it had got used to you would even do a flat turn just for fun if you kicked the rudder with decision. Touch was the thing in flying; though not so much in war flying, in which the heavy-handed pilot was more likely to survive, because he yanked his bus about and sideslipped so much that he was a difficult target. On the other hand, the fine pilot gained more height on turns, and perhaps turned in less radius. But Tom put his faith in sideslipping for getting out of trouble. No sights could allow for movement sideways.

  You soon got used to doing steep turns and spins on Avros. To do a vertical turn you just pushed the stick hard over and then pulled it back and held it like that for as long as you wanted to go on turning. There was not much sensation about it unless you hung over the side and watched the earth. You were sitting parallel to, as it were, an earth that was swinging round like a huge wheel that was painted as a large scale map. A spin was much better, and more difficult to get used to. Some Avros were so stable that it was difficult to make them spin. You shut off the engine and pulled her nose up until she stalled. As she fell into a vertical dive you kicked on full rudder and held the stick as far back as it would come on the same side, and you should spin. But sometimes, especially if you tried to spin to the left, you fell into a steep spiral, which gave a very different sensation. In a spiral you were on the inside of the turn, with centrifugal force pressing you into your seat, whereas, with the machine rotating about its longitudinal axis in a spin, its tendency was rather to throw you out. A spinning machine was really out of control, but you could quickly regain control by pushing the joystick forwards, when the spin changed into a dive. Once he had been spun when doing dual with Baker, before he was used to aerobatics. Instructors as a rule had no time for anything but circuits and landings and a few turns; everything else the pupil had to find out for himself. But once Baker had wanted to get down from three thousand feet in a hurry. The engine stopped, the nose went nearly vertically upwards and the Avro hung like that for a second and then fell over to the right. He clung to the sides of the cockpit as he was thrown out of the seat on to the loose safety belt. The earth vanished and there was nothing but dizzying sky until the sheer catastrophic flop brought the world leaping at him, rushing to swallow up the sky, and there was no heaven but only the titubating earth. He had never been able to recapture the breathless horror of that first spin, when he had clung terrified to a bucking aeroplane
that seemed trying to throw him, and the world had jerked past as though a giant were spinning it with a whip. It was always the first time that was memorable: moreover it was more shocking to be stunted than to stunt, just as one couldn’t tickle one’s own ribs effectively.

  But he had never been looped and didn’t know quite what to expect when he made his first attempt. It was on a day of westerly wind and patches of nimbus clouds between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet that he took off with his mind made up that he was going to loop. He had had to screw his courage to the sticking place before he had been able to make the resolution. It was always an effort for him to do a new stunt; he was nervous. He flew steadily up through a space in the clouds into the bright upper air, from where, looking down, the patches and rifts between the clouds were dark and sombre, and it was difficult to distinguish features of the dun world of shadowed fields and pale roads against the brilliant cloud-floor.

  He flew until he was some five hundred feet above the clouds and had a definite horizon to steer by. He was invigorated by the pure sparkling air above the cloud belt, and happy enough to try anything. He held the joystick forwards to put his nose down for speed. There was nothing dangerous about looping at that height, but there was a certain blind physical repugnance and timidity of earth-bound habit to be overcome. The pilot soon showed a speed of eighty miles an hour, then eighty-five, and as soon as it touched ninety he brought the joystick slightly back. The cloud-horizon dropped away at once, and he was heading into blank space. He felt himself pressed tightly and more tightly into his seat as he shot upwards, till it seemed he would be forced through it. He was doing a bad loop. He had jerked the stick ever so slightly and pulled the aeroplane upwards too abruptly, creating excessive centrifugal pressure. For perhaps two seconds he felt crushed against the seat and then the pressure suddenly ceased and he was hanging uncomfortably in the belt. Petrol spurted in his face from the pressure gauge, the engine spluttered, and the whole aeroplane shook. The controls were limp. He pulled the stick further back with the intention of getting over the top of the loop, but the machine would not respond, and fell out of its stall with a great lurch. The clouds leapt from beyond the limits of vision and occupied the whole of space. He realized that he was diving vertically, and quickly shut off petrol from the spluttering engine and let the stick go forwards until he could ease out of the dive; and when he was in a normal glide, he pumped up pressure in the petrol tank vigorously and relieved his feelings by shouting. He had stalled on top of the loop because friction against the air had caused loss of speed, had hung upside down, and fallen out sideways; a thoroughly unsatisfactory attempt. He must do better than that.