Biplane

13

THE MAGNETO AGAIN. Only ten minutes after takeoff, the left mag is misfiring. Clearly it is not Automatic Rough at work, for below is Casa Grande and an airport into the wind. It is just that the engine is misfiring and backfiring whenever the left magneto is called upon to spark the cylinders by itself. The right mag works well, with only an occasional single missing of a single beat. Decision time once again, and more difficult. Land now at a field that has some limited repair facilities and find the trouble, or continue on, using the right mag alone?

No answer from the airplane, as if she is sitting back and watching me dispassionately, not caring whether the decision I make here means safety or destruction. If only I were not in a hurry to be home. It would be prudent to stop. Prudence and I haven’t been getting along too well these last days, but after all, one should sometimes follow its leadings.

All the while, Casa Grande drifts slowly behind. I don’t have much money, and it would cost money even if the little hangar there would have the parts the engine needs. If I go ahead, I’m gambling that the good magneto will stay good across the next three hundred miles of desert. If I lose, I’ll land on the highway and seek the help of my fellow man. That’s not too bad a fate, or a very high penalty to pay. What does an airplane engine have two magnetos for, anyway? So that it can run all day on one magneto, it can run all its life on one magneto. Decision made. We go on.

With the decision, a wind rising out of the west. A time for patience has once again arrived, and at altitude, in the midst of the wind, I am slowed so that a lone automobile, towing a house trailer, keeps in perfect pace with me. The cost of my decision to fly with an ailing ignition system is that I fly at altitude and do not allow myself the trick of flying close to the ground in avoidance of the wind. My only negotiable asset now is altitude and I cannot afford to squander it for a few miles per hour. At least I am moving westward.

I’m not concerned, and engine failure is an academic sort of problem from Casa Grande to Yuma, for this is land that I know well and that I have seen day after day and month after month. Just on the other side of those same Santan Mountains off my right wing lies Williams Air Force Base. Just after I had finally earned the right to wear the wings of an Air Force pilot, I came to this land, and to the magnificent swift airplane that was numbered F-86F and that was coded Sabrejet. From those runways we flew, nervous at first in a single-seat airplane in which the first time we flew, we flew alone. And it was such a simple airplane to fly that we would finish our short before-takeoff checklist there on the concrete and stop and wait and shake our heads and mutter, certain that we had forgotten something. You mean all you do is push this little handle forward and let go of the brakes and then fly? That’s what they meant, and following that opening routine we came up from those runways to cross this same desert.

To my left are a few hundred square miles marked Restricted Area on my map, and that are indeed restricted, as far as biplanes are concerned. But then Restricted meant Our Very Own, where we flew to find the strafing targets set in cleared squares of desert and the bull’s-eye rings of the bomb circles. But best of all for us was the desolate land called the Applied Tactics Range. Applied Tactics gives the student the feel of what close air support really is. There on the desert are convoys of old rusting automobiles and trucks, are tanks waiting in the sage and yucca, are roundhouses and artillery emplacements. Once in a while we would be allowed to practice combat tactics on these, learning such basic tenets as Never Strafe a Convoy Lengthwise; Never Attack Twice from the Same Direction; Concentrate Your Fire.

Maybe they’re out there today. If I could make it very quiet, maybe I could hear the sound of the engines and the thud of the practice rockets hitting the sand and the popcorn sound of the fifty-caliber machine guns firing. This is happy country, from a time of good days, filled with that rare sort of friend that one only finds when adventure is shared, and when one trusts one’s life to another.

Where are they in this twist of now? Those other pilots are no longer about me every day, briefing for the first flight before the sun has risen. Some who flew this land with me are still flying, some are not. Some are the same, some have changed. One a purchasing agent now for a giant corporation, one a warehouse manager, one an airline pilot, one in the Air Force, a career man. The friend within them is driven hard in a corner, by trivial things. Talk not to him of rent or taxes or how the home team is doing. The friend within is found in action, in the important things of flying smoothly in the weather, in calling the fuel check, the oxygen check, and in trying to put more bulletholes in the target than any other friend can do.

It is strange to discover this. Here is the same man, that same body whose voice came once on the radio saying, Look at that, and I’d turn and look over my right wing and there would be an isolated mountaintop in spring, with its base all brown and dry, and from its razor top the wind pulling a white tatter of snow, absolutely without sound, and alone. The quiet wind on a quiet mountaintop, and the trail of snow like spray from a mid-ocean stormwave. And in “look at that” a friend is revealed. There is no triviality in those words. They are to say, Notice our mortal enemy, the mountain. He can at times be so very cruel, yet at times like these he can be very handsome, too, can he not? You’ve got to have respect for a mountain.

Without mountains over which to be concerned, the friend shrinks away. When the purchase order and the desk become the important things in a life, the friend is difficult to reach. One can break through, of course, with sheer power and anguish and see again for a second or two the friend within. Hey! Bo! Remember the day when I was dialing a radio in my cockpit and you were flying my wing and you touched your microphone and said, Plan on flying into that hill, ace? Don’t you remember that?

A stirring within, and an answer from the friend.

I remember; don’t worry. I remember. Those days were bright, but we can never live them again, can we? Why must we hurt ourselves in the remembering?

There is a shock of cold when I realize that the desk mind has taken over so much of the thought of a friend and that his brilliant life has become a calm plain. No more the roaring laughing highs of pulling contrails in the sun or rolling down into an attack. No more the furious caged lows of being caught for days on the ground by fog that doesn’t show the other side of the flight line. Nothing devastating ever happens to a purchasing agent, and nothing filled with delight.

* * *

The Restricted Area falls away behind and with it a few lumps of crusted lead, copper clad, buried in the sand, that once shimmered from my gun barrels. Ahead, another mountain, and a town called Yuma. Almost home country, now, biplane. Almost there. But it is surprising how big even home country can be. And for a reason unknown a fragment of statistic drifts through my mind. The great majority of all aircraft crashes occur within twenty-five miles of an airplane’s home base. One of those undoubtedly meaningless things, but of the sort that is so cunningly worded that one remembers it.

Easy to chase that foreboding. I’m not within twenty-five miles of my home base. I’m a lot closer to it than I was a few sunrises ago, but it is still over the horizon ahead.

With the Colorado River below and California air whistling about me, I have the courage to try the other magneto. And now, after two hours running on the right magneto, the left one works perfectly. The last time I tried it, at Casa Grande, backfires and puffs of black smoke from the exhaust. Now, smooth as the youngest of kittens. What a most unusual engine.

Biplane, we are almost home. Hear that? A little more desert to do, one more stop for gasoline, and you’ll be in a warm hangar once again. The Salton Sea glimmers ahead and the squares of green-blotter land to the south of it. Anything can happen now and we can say we have made it to California.

Still, it is a California just in name and feels like home only as Saturday feels like Saturday because I’ve seen a calendar. This desert, and the baked blotter land doesn’t shout, California! the way the long beaches do, or smooth golden hills or the sudden mass of the Sierra Nevada. One isn’t truly in California until one is west of those mountains.

The biplane’s wings flick suddenly dull, as if a switch were thrown. Surprised, we have been enveloped in dusk. The switch is the Sierra itself, thrown to block the sun, casting a giant dark knife-shadow across the desert. The familiar first-lights of cautious automobiles sparkle on the road toward Palm Springs, hurrying in for the night. Our night will be Palm Springs, too, nested down in the grey blur at the base of San Jacinto Mountain. There is now the turning greenflash whiteflash of the airport beacon. And there, spilling over the top of a peak marked on my chart as 10,804 feet above sea level, clouds, as black as the mountain itself.

Palm Springs, airplane! Home of motion-picture stars and heads of state and giants of enterprise. Better, Palm Springs is less than a day from your own home, a hangar again, and Sunday-afternoon flights. Like that, airplane?

There is no response from the Parks. As we turn to land, not the faintest hint of reply.