The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  When they returned to Kill Devil Hill in 1903 their glider had an engine they had designed and built themselves. Commercial manufacturers had not yet produced a lightweight engine with sufficient power for their purposes. These two dreamers were the eternal Yankee tinkerers—if they couldn’t buy what they needed at a reasonable price, they made it themselves. They were always willing to experiment and try until they found something that worked.

  Finally they were ready. They had learned all that they could from gliders, their engine worked after a fashion, the airplane was as ready as two very careful men could make it.

  On December 17 Orville went first. The first flight was a mere 120 feet. Today a white stone painted with a big “1” marks the place where he landed. Wilbur went next, a flight of 175 feet. Orville flew the third one, about 250 feet.

  Wilbur made the fourth flight that day, and the “4” stone stands far away with the tall trees behind it. There is no doubt. As you stand beside the commemorative stone at the launch point and stare at that fourth marker 852 feet away, you comprehend the full enormity of the Wrights’ achievement. Here man first rose from the earth in a heavier-than-air machine and flew in powered, controlled flight. They had truly flown.

  Inside the museum you will find a replica of the Wrights’ 1903 Flyer. And you will find a replica of one of their gliders.

  Stare at the photographs and paintings: try to get inside the minds of those two bicycle mechanics who were convinced that man could fly and they were the men who could do it. Then go back outside and stand at the launch point and contemplate that fourth stone. That is the yardstick to measure your dreams against.

  Back at the airstrip I was smoking my pipe and feasting my eyes upon the Cannibal Queen when the joyride entrepreneur asked if I would like to share cookies and potato chips. I begged off. Although it was after 1 o’clock and I hadn’t eaten, the thought of all that sugar and carbohydrates killed my appetite.

  The man’s name is Jay Mankedick, and he and his pilots and airplanes are based at Manteo. They commute to work by air. Jay has a concession from the Park Service to offer rides here. He said he still enjoys the flying and the pilots and seeing the kick people get out of taking their first airplane ride.

  “I first came here with five hundred bucks in my pocket and no job. I leased a plane and slept out in the woods for the first month.”

  We shook hands and I wished him well. As tough as it is to make a living flying planes, Jay seems to have found a niche. And a whole lot of people who go flying with him and his pilots get a taste of real flying, not the airline passenger stuff, which is to flying what masturbation is to sex, merely a pale imitation of the real thing.

  I preflight and strap into the Queen. “Let’s rock and roll,” John Weisbart used to say. I used that line once with David, and he used it a couple times after that when we climbed into the plane.

  Hearing it from the boy surprised me somehow, and pleased me. Yeah, let’s rock and roll.

  I take off on runway 2 and climb out over the beach northbound. The Cannibal Queen is flying well. If only Orville and Wilbur were here to go flying with me.

  I wonder if Orville ever met Lloyd Stearman? Wilbur died young, of course, but Orville lived until 1948. No doubt he saw Stearmans flying.

  I don’t know much about Lloyd Stearman, but he was a contemporary of Walter Beech and Clyde Cessna, all three of whom worked for the Travel Air Company in the 1920s.

  Travel Air is remembered for a magnificent sport biplane of the same name that Lloyd Stearman designed and the company manufactured and sold to wealthy sportsmen in the late 1920s. Travel Air didn’t sell many. The plane was expensive and sport aviation was but a dream in a nation that had almost no airports worthy of the name. Anyone traveling took a train. Barnstormers—those itinerant aerial gypsies—were still alighting in cow pastures and buying gasoline by the bucketful from farmers. Anyone with an irresistible urge to aviate could still buy an old Jenny for a few hundred dollars, so the thousands that a new Travel Air commanded meant the company sold very few of them. And of those they sold, still fewer survive today, treasured by their proud owners and only occasionally rolled from their hangars on pristine, perfect mornings to take to the sky.

  Stearman, Beech and Cessna all went their own ways and founded their own companies. As was the innocent custom, they all named their new enterprises after themselves.

  Stearman’s first proprietary design was the 1927 C-1, the first of thirty different models that he produced between 1926 and 1930. After a series of corporate mergers, Lloyd Stearman left the company in 1931. New management decided to try for an Army contract, thinking that there was an opportunity in the Army’s specification for a new biplane trainer. They set engineers Harold Zipp and Jack Clark to modifying Stearman’s basic design. Legend has it these two completed the job in sixty days.

  Although any knowledgeable observer could see that the future of aviation was in monoplanes that offered less drag and more performance for the same horsepower, the U.S. Army was even more conservative then than it is today. The generals were still insisting on open-cockpit bombers and biplane fighters. And they wanted an open-cockpit, tandem-seat biplane trainer to replace the Jenny.

  Stearman’s prototype trainer was ready in late 1933 and the military tested it in March 1934. The Army declined to buy any, but the Navy ordered sixty-one of them. Stearman was on its way.

  The Army continued to test slightly improved models of Stearman’s trainer, but continued to defer purchases. Finally, in 1936, the Army began to buy.

  But apparently the coffers of the tiny Stearman company were empty. Boeing took over lock, stock and Stearmans on April 1, 1938. Boeing expanded the Wichita plant during the war, hired thousands of workers and sold every biplane trainer it could produce to the Army and Navy. Some, like mine, went to the Canadians. The British got some too. All the Stearmans were manufactured in Wichita. It’s ironic, in a way, that Boeing, the company that was manufacturing B-17s and B-29s as fast as they could crank them out, also made the vast bulk of the 8,584 Stearman biplanes, an obsolete design from a bygone era. Spare parts manufactured raised the equivalent total to 10,346 planes, more than any other biplane produced prior to that time.

  The most numerous biplane ever built, the Antonov An-2 Colt, didn’t even fly until 1947. The Soviets made 5,000 of them and the Poles made 8,200. With single 1,000-HP radial engines, they were used as ag sprayers, transports, you name it. What does an An-2 look like? A great big Stearman.

  Several hundred Stearmans were still on back order in 1945 when the Army canceled production. Skid Henley told me that the Army told Boeing it would pay for the airplanes on the assembly line, but Boeing didn’t have to actually assemble them. Boeing didn’t work that way—they assembled all the aircraft anyway. Henley said he went to Wichita and paid $600 for one of those brand-new, just-off-the-assembly-line, government-surplus instant antiques. He flew it home.

  Today it is easy to see that the Stearman trainer embodied everything aircraft designers had learned about biplanes since the Wright brothers. It had all of the inherent virtues of biplanes—strong, simple to build, cheap and easy to maintain, easy to fly—and the biplane’s inevitable vices—slow, thirsty for gasoline, difficult to land in a crosswind. The Army got exactly what the generals wanted—the ultimate biplane with just enough engine to get it off the ground and force the student to learn to fly the wing, not the engine.

  To be fair to the generals, the fact that the aircraft was slow didn’t matter. As a primary trainer it always took off and landed at the same place. And the generals didn’t give a fig about the fuel burn—the government was buying gasoline for a few cents a gallon. The Stearman’s crosswind landing characteristics were of equally small concern: in the mid-1930s U.S. Army airfields were huge, mile-square grass fields with a wind sock in the middle and hangars on one side. No less an authority than the visionary Jimmy Doolittle argued in those days that the airfields of the future should all
be vast, open meadows without runways. What crosswind?

  Norfolk, Virginia, lay spread below the Stearman’s nose from Virginia Beach to Portsmouth, clear and pristine in the excellent visibility. Approach let me fly up from the south at 3,500 feet, then begin my descent toward Norfolk International at my leisure. I pulled the throttle back to 20 inches of manifold pressure and pushed the trim lever forward. Soon I was indicating 115 MPH, screaming down from the blue like a big yellow bird. Off to my right I could see an F-14 Tomcat in the pattern at NAS Oceana.

  I sat around the FBO executive terminal for two hours trying to reach some people I knew by telephone, but no one was home. The candy machine was out of order. Two business jets came and went, one a Lear that deposited a girl about eight years old and a woman I took to be her mother. Talk about a first-class trip to visit Grandmom!

  After three cups of coffee, I gave up on my friends and took off across the Chesapeake for Cape Charles. Below, several ships were passing through the channel outward bound.

  What the heck, the Cannibal Queen is as first class as you can get. This is how Queen Elizabeth would travel if she only knew how to tweak the rudder in a crosswind.

  What was David’s comment as we flew south over Kansas bound for McAlester, Oklahoma? “This is the only way to fly.” I know that he tired quickly of the wind and noise and vibration, and I suspect he said that only because he thought the comment would please me, which it did. He is a fine fellow— always trying to please his mother and father if he can. As I fly along this afternoon over Cape Charles, with the Atlantic on my right and the Chesapeake on my left, I think again of David and wish his head were sticking up out of the front cockpit. He could even sleep if he wanted to.

  Something directly above me catches my eye. I look up. Holy jeepers … three Hueys in formation, going in my direction, passing a couple hundred feet above me. One by one they cross over my upper wing and go on by.

  Helicopters aren’t real flying—they’re just a crude form of levitation.

  I’ve used that line a hundred times on helicopter pilot friends, and now I feel another twinge of regret that the Queen is so slow. Those choppers are levitating faster than I can aviate.

  The Hueys spread out into a loose three-ship-abreast formation and alter course to the left. Gradually they disappear into the haze.

  The haze is getting worse the farther I go north. Down to ten or twelve miles visibility, I estimate.

  Over Salisbury, Maryland, I pick up the road heading north and begin to look for the grass airport at Laurel, Delaware. My airport book says they sell fuel, but even if they don’t I’ll land just for the heck of it. An all-grass airport! Not many of those still around.

  I spot it and swing across the runways to study the wind sock. The Unicom man says the wind is out of the southwest at twelve knots, and he recommends runway 14. That’s a 90-degree crosswind perhaps twice as strong as any I have yet landed the Stearman in. The stick suddenly feels slippery and I have to wipe my palms on my shorts.

  The wind sock is flopping around maybe twenty degrees, first favoring runway 32, then 14. There’s another little runway only 1,400 feet long, just enough, and the crosswind on it will be only about fifty degrees. I circle again looking the place over and trying to decide. Twelve knots of crosswind … the grass will help and I’ve been doing some decent landings these last few days, although certainly not every time and not with any degree of predictability. I’m tempted to try the crosswind. If it was asphalt I would use the short runway, but the twelve-knot crosswind on sod tempts me like whiskey tempts a drunk. I swing the Queen out in a left downwind for runway 14.

  What was it we said in the Navy? “No guts, no glory.” Yeah, and that Cessna 172 I used to rent in Boulder, ol’ November One Seventy-Seven Charlie Bravo, had a little placard mounted right in the center of the instrument panel: “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  John Weisbart’s admonishment was equally blunt. “Don’t alter the appearance of the airplane, Steve. Promise me.”

  Close your eyes, John, and cross your fingers. Here goes nothing.

  Tall trees guard the approach end of the grass strip. And I am high. I kick right rudder and apply left stick, slipping forward and scrubbing off that excess altitude. Coming down on the trees, straighten her out, now apply left rudder.…I’ll hold her straight with left rudder, use right aileron to keep the right wing down…yeah, and we’re floating right over the treetops, the Queen’s nose twitching as the wind swirls about the trees and has varying effects upon our path through it.

  I work that rudder, watching the ground come up, flaring, right aileron, little less left rudder, now more, nose on up … and the main mounts kiss the grass as I get to full back stick. Keep on the rudder, holding her, stick more and more right … and we are taxiing.

  I add power and exhale. Yeaaaaah!

  The young man who helps me gas the Queen has a strange accent that I can’t place. When we are inside he says he is from the Netherlands. I am tempted to ask if he is Amsterdam Dutch, Rotterdam Dutch or Goddamn Dutch, but refrain. Instead I ask if he has any food. It is 6:30 P.M. and I haven’t had a bite all day. He offers a bag half full of potato chips and I gratefully take a handful. “They took the candy machine out this morning,” he tells me—at least that is what I think he says.

  The little FBO shack is my kind of place, a nifty place for guys to hang out and tell lies about flying and to play pool when they have exhausted the flying stories. The pool table looks well used.

  The proprietor comes in. His tummy pokes out of his pullover shirt. He wipes his hands on his dirty jeans and asks where I’m from. He looks like he could whip my socks off on that pool table and tell more flying tales than I could count. I wish I had the time to challenge him to a game, but I want to go on to Montgomery County Airpark in Maryland and call my brother. He’ll come pick me up. And I have to get there before dark.

  The FBO man tells me about the new Terminal Control Areas the feds have inaugurated in the metro Washington area. This is the worst TCA complex in the nation with four of these inverted wedding cakes—Baltimore-Washington International, Andrews Air Force Base, National Airport and Dulles Airport— all running together. They suck up all the airspace from the eastern shore of Maryland to the Blue Ridge Mountains. I spread my chart and he gives me pointers on how to sneak through the VFR corridor that runs between the BWI TCA and the Andrews-National toadstools.

  Reluctantly I say good-bye and go outside to study the wind sock. The takeoff will be a little tricky too. I grin. By God, this is fun!

  I am aviating at 1,400 feet just to the left of U.S. Route 50 as it crosses the Chesapeake Bay bridges. On my left, near Annapolis, is an impressive array of tall, low-frequency transmission towers that the Navy uses to talk to submarines. The red brick buildings of the Naval Academy are also quite prominent, as is the Maryland capitol. On my right, real but quite invisible, is the Baltimore-Washington International—BWI—TCA.

  I have the chart open on the board on my lap, and I make a tick and note the time as I cross The Generals Highway intersection. Two minutes later I cross a four-lane running north and south, and I note that. No other airplanes in sight, but they will be hard to see. The sun is only ten or so degrees above the horizon and red in the haze. Visibility down to six or seven miles, a typical summer day in the east—we complain in Colorado if the visibility is less than 90 miles. These poor schnooks.

  Three more minutes down U.S. 50 to the road intersection at Bowie where I must turn. Before I know it I am there—I think. There are two four-lane intersections here, and which one is the one? Oh well, they are only three-quarters of a mile apart, so it doesn’t matter.

  At the first one I swing the Queen to a heading of 310 degrees. I carefully measured the chart at Laurel and 315 degrees is the track I need over the ground, but with this southwest wind, I throw in a five-degree drift correction. Now to hold this heading on this sloppy wet compass.

  I am sweating. To the righ
t is the BWI TCA and to the left is Andrews. If I make a mistake here and wander off course I will get a flight violation as surely as God made women smarter than men. I think about that now as I kick the rudder to hold course precisely. Maybe for a first offense I’d only get a three-month suspension and a thousand-dollar fine. Maybe I’d lose my license. I’d rather lose a testicle.

  But I routinely bet my flying license. Everyone does every time they go up in an airplane sitting in the cockpit. And I can do this—that’s why I have a license.

  I pass over the first of the Washington-to-Baltimore expressways. I tick it on the chart. Off to the right, up there smack against that l,500-to-10,000 feet blue TCA circle, I can just make out Suburban Airpark. From there fly a group of aviators who truly bet their tickets every day. A minute later I go over the second superhighway.

  1-95 is next … there it is, and then Route 29. Yes. I tick it because I have ticked all the others. Now I can turn north and fly over my brother’s house in Fulton, a little suburb west of Laurel, Maryland. It’s on the other side of that reservoir on the Patuxent River right there, right … what if that wasn’t Route 29?

  Galvanized by doubt, I swing the plane northwest again. That last superhighway had a lot of development around it—I don’t remember seeing all that from the ground.

  But … that had to be 29. There aren’t any more superhighways heading northeast. Convinced, I swing northeast.

  Okay, there’s the reservoir, there’s the bridge at the west end, and John’s house should be in that subdivision right there … and there it is. Golly, he’s out in the driveway. He’s waving. And there’s Nancy, John’s wife, and their daughter, Amy.

  I make three circles, waving like a demented fool, then swing the Queen westward for Montgomery County Airpark.