Biplane

14

THE AIRPORT AT PALM SPRINGS is a rather exclusive place and parked upon it are the most elite and the most expensive airplanes in the world. There is this morning, however, something radically wrong. At the very end of a long row of polished twin-engine aircraft, in fact parked almost in the sagebrush, is a strange oily old biplane. It is tied to the ground by a rope at each wingtip and one at the tail. Underneath the wing, as the grey sun rises, is a dim sleeping bag stretched on the cool concrete.

It is raining. Once a year in Palm Springs it rains, and in the worst years twice. What instrument of coincidence has timed my arrival with the arrival of the Day of Rain? There are no other sleeping bags spread on the concrete of the airport and I must consider this alone.

The rain is light at first, from broken clouds. At first, too, the wetness makes merely the background for a white silhouette in dry of the biplane, and I lie along the dry left wing of the silhouette. The rain goes on, drumming first on the top wing, then slowly falling in big drops from the top wing to boom against the fabric of the lower wing. A pretty sound, and I lie unconcerned and listen. Mount San Jacinto scowls down at me, clouds spraying over its towering peak. I’ll cross you today, San Jacinto, and then it is all downhill to home. Two hours’ flying from here at most, and I shall discover what it feels like to sleep once again in a bed.

The rain continues, and the wetness takes on a sheen of tiny depth. Lying now with my head on the concrete and with my lowest eye open, I can see a wall of water advancing, fully a sixteenth of an inch high. This is a great deal of rain, and the drumming and booming on my wing should stop any second now.

It doesn’t. The wall of water advances slowly into my dry sanctuary. The thirsty concrete drinks, but to no avail. New drops still rush to reinforce the water. By tiny leaps and minuscule bounds, the wall advances. If I were less than a millimeter tall, it would be an awesome spectacle of rampaging nature. Pinpoint twigs and branches are being swept up into that wall, waves thereon are foaming and cresting and the roar of their advance can be heard for inches around. A fearsome, terrifying sight, that water rushing, sweeping over everything in its path. The only reason that I do not run screaming before it is a matter of perspective, an ability to make myself so big that the water is nothing, and of no danger. And I wonder as I watch. Can it be the same with all fearsome things? Can we lift ourselves so far above them that their terror is lost? I wonder, and for the briefest part of a second I can swear that I sense a faint, tired smile. Perhaps my friend is awake once again, briefly returned to lesson teaching.

Phase II of the Lesson of the Advancing Water is that, no matter the perspective, one cannot ignore the problem. Even though it is suddenly only a barely moving film of moisture and not a flash flood of the desert, it can still be annoying and uncomfortable unless I soon solve the problem. My silhouette of dryness grows narrower as the rain continues, and unless I find some way to stop the water’s advance or decide that wet sleeping bags aren’t so bad after all, I’ll be forced to flee.

Unshaven, oil-covered, disheveled with the worst of the barnstormers, I gather my sleeping bag and race for shelter in the luxurious office and waiting room of the general-aviation terminal. Would a good barnstormer have gotten wet? I wonder as I run through the rain. No. A good barnstormer would have climbed into the cockpit, under the waterproof cover, and have been asleep again in an instant. Ah, well. It takes time to learn.

Against one wall of the deserted room is a telephone, a direct line to the weather bureau. It is a strange feeling to hold a telephone in my hand again. A voice comes from the thing, with an offer of general aid.

“I’m at Palm Springs. Want to get across into Long Beach /Los Angeles. How does it look through the pass?” I should have said The Pass. Almost every pilot who flies to Southern California has flown through the gigantic slot cut between the mountains San Jacinto and San Gorgonio. On a windy day, one can count on being tossed about in the pass, but so many new pilots have exaggerated its rigors that even old pilots are beginning to believe that it is a dangerous place.

“The pass is closed.”

Why is it that weathermen are so smug when the weather is bad? At last they can put the pilots in their places? The arrogant devils need to be set back a notch, now and then? “Banning has a two-hundred-foot overcast with one-mile visibility in rain; probably won’t get much better all day long.”

The devil it won’t. The chances of that weather staying so bad all day are about the same as the chances of Palm Springs being flooded in the next half hour.

“How about the pass at Borego or Julian, or San Diego?”

“We don’t have any weather for the passes themselves. San Diego is calling three thousand overcast and light rain.”

I’ll just have to try them and see.

“How’s the Los Angeles weather?”

“Los Angeles. let’s see. Los Angeles is calling fifteen hundred broken to overcast, light rain. Forecast to remain the same all day. A pilot report has the pass closed, by the way, and severe turbulence,”

“Thanks.”

He catches me before I hang up, with a request for my airplane number. Always the entries to make in his logs, and no doubt for a very good reason.

Once I get on the other side of the mountains, there will be no problem. The weather is not quite clear, but it is good enough for finding one’s way about. Banning is in the middle of the pass, and the weather it is reporting is not good. But the report may be hours old. I can’t expect much so early in the morning, but I might as well give Banning a try before I run down along the mountain chain, poking my nose into every pass for a hundred miles. One of them is sure to be open.

Twenty minutes later the biplane and I round the corner of San Jacinto and head into the pass. It certainly does not look good. As if someone has made a temporary bedroom out of Southern California, and has hung a dirty grey blanket between it and the desert, for privacy. If I can make it to Banning, I can stop and wait for the weather to lift.

Below, the highway traffic goes unconcernedly ahead, although the road is slick and shiny in rain. A few drops of rain smear the front windscreen of the biplane, a few more. I have my spot all picked to land if the engine stops in the rain, but it doesn’t falter. Perhaps the biplane, too, is in a hurry. The rain pours down and I discover that one doesn’t get wet flying rainstorms in an open cockpit airplane. The last rainstorm I flew into, I hadn’t noticed. The rain doesn’t really fall, but blows at me head on, and the windscreen kicks it up and over my head. If I want to get wet, I have to stick my head around to one side of the glass panels.

Funny. It doesn’t feel as if I’m getting wet at all. The rain feels like rice, good and dry, thrown a hundred miles an hour into my face. It is only when my head is back in the cockpit and when I feel my helmet with an ungloved hand that I find it wet. The rain gets goggles sparkling clean.

After a few minutes of rain, the first turbulence hits. Often I have heard turbulence described as a giant fist smashing down upon an airplane. I have never really felt it that way in a small airplane until this second. The fist is just the size of a biplane, and it is swinging down at the end of a very long arm. It strikes the airplane so hard that I am thrown against the safety belt and have to hold tightly to the control stick to keep my hand from being jerked away. Strange air, this. Not the constant slamming of the twisted roiled air that one expects from winds across rocky places, but smooth. smooth, and BAM! Then smooth. smooth. BAM! The rain grows heavier, in great weeping veils sorrowing down to the ground. The sky is solid water ahead. We can’t get through.

We turn away, not really discouraged, for we hadn’t expected to get through the first thing in the morning.

Whenever I turn away from bad weather in an airplane not equipped to fly by instruments, I feel very self-righteous. The proper thing to do. The number one cause of fatal accidents in light aircraft, the statistics say, is the pilot who tries to push the weather, to slip through without going on instruments. I’ll push the weather with the best of ’em, I say sanctimoniously, but I’ll always do it with a path open behind me. The biplane, with its instruments that give only a rough approximation of altitude and a misty vague idea of heading, on a wobbly compass, is not built to fly through any weather. Any weather at all. If I absolutely had to, I might be able to get it down through an overcast, flying with my hands off the stick and holding perhaps the W in the compass by rudder alone. But that’s a last-ditch effort, taken only where the land below is flat and I know for sure that the ceiling is at least one thousand feet.

There are those who say that you can spin down through an overcast, and I’d agree with them; a good procedure. But I have heard that with a few of the old airplanes the spin turns into a flat spin after three or four revolutions, and from a flat spin there is no recourse save the parachute. This may be one of the rumors, and untrue. But the danger therein is my thought, I do not know. Not the flat spin, but the fear of the flat spin keeps me from an otherwise practical and effective emergency procedure. It is much easier to stay away from the weather.

The first round goes to San Jacinto, and taking its strange knocking about, we fly, filled with righteousness, back out of the pass. What a fine example we are setting for all the younger pilots. Here is a pilot who has flown instruments before and often, for hours and in thick cloud, turning back from a bit of mist that obscures the ground. What a fine example am I. How much the prudent pilot. I shall live to be very old. Unfortunately, no one is watching.

We turn south along the eastern edge of the mountains, over the bright green squares in the sand that irrigation has wrought. And we climb. It takes a long time to gain altitude. Playing the thermals and the upslope winds as hard as I can, I rise only to the level of the lower peaks; a little more than eight thousand feet, where it is freezing once again. At least here, when I can no longer stand the cold, I have only to come down a little to be warm once again.

We won’t even try Borego Pass. A long narrow gorge running diagonally through the mountains, it is walled only a short way down its length by the same blanket of grey that covers the pass at San Jacinto.

South some more and third time must be the charm. More rough, high country, but at least the cloud is not so bad. I turn at Julian toward a narrow gap in the mountain, and follow a winding road.

The wind through the gap is a direct headwind as I fly west. It flattens the grass along the roadside and the road’s white line creeps reluctantly past my wing. It must be blowing fifty miles an hour at this altitude. There is an awesomeness about it, an uneasy feeling that I am not wanted here, as if I am being lured into the gap in order that some hungry dragon within can have his fill of warm engine and crushed wingspars. We fly and fly and struggle and fly against the wind, and finally the gap is ours. We are through, to a land of high valleys and peaceful green farms in mountain meadows. But look down there. The grass, even the short grass, is being flattened silver by the wind, it is being ironed onto the ground by it. That wind must be fifty miles per hour now at the surface!

This is work, and not fun at all. If the wind would only be on my tail, it would be fun. Ahead, the clouds, watching me and grinning maliciously. The only way out of the valley ahead is to follow the road, and the cloud turns into fog that lies on the road like a big fuzzy barbell that can never be lifted. It is sad. We have fought so hard to get here. Perhaps we can land. If we land here, surely we can outwait the clouds and continue westward this afternoon. The meadows look very good for landing. Light rain in the air, but much sun too. Suddenly they combine off the right wing into a brilliant full-circle rainbow, a really bright one, almost opaque in its radiance. Normally the rainbow would be a beautiful sight, worthy of awe, but I still must fight to move an inch against the wind and I can only take snapshots with my eyes and hope that later, when I am not fighting, I’ll be able to remember the rainbow for what it is, and as fresh and as bright as it is.

I shall land, and save the advance I’ve made. So, decision made, down comes the little biplane from its rainbow, toward the wet green grass of the meadow. A good landing place ahead, worth inspecting closely. Grass is taller than it looked. And wet. Probably a lot of mud under that grass, and these are hard narrow high-pressure tires, perfect for bogging up to axles in. Look there: a cow. I’ve heard of cows eating the fabric right off old airplanes. Something in the dope that they like.

So much for that meadow.

Near a farmhouse, another field to check. Except for the trees, it looks soft and smooth. Should be able to hover right in over the top of them. But what would happen if the wind stops? I’d never be able to get out again. Remember, this valley is four thousand feet high, and that’s some pretty thin air. Only way I’d ever get off again would be in this hurricane wind. Hot day, or no wind, and I’d need four times as much room to get into the air at all. Two fields, two vetos. One more chance, anyway; maybe the pass to San Diego is open, down by the Mexican border.

Landing forgotten, we turn the headwind into tailwind and shoot from the high valleys of Julian like a wheat puff from a cereal gun.

Being cuffed about like a toy glider has a wearing effect on one’s nerves. Last chance, coming up. San Diego. South again across more miles of desert, thinking of nothing but how lonely it would be to have to land here, and how much land we really have in this country that we do not use. Think of all the houses that could be put on this one little stretch of desert. Now all we have to do is coax somebody to come out and live here.

One last highway, the one that leads to San Diego. I have only to fly along this road, as though I were an automobile, and I shall get to San Diego; from there an easy matter to fly up the beach to home. I am an automobile. I am an automobile.

We bank and follow the road. The wind is a living thing, and it doesn’t like the biplane at all. It punches at us constantly, it jabs and batters as if there is an urgent need for it to perfect its style and its rhythm. I hold to the stick very tightly. We must be making progress, but the hilltop to our left is certainly not moving very quickly. It has been there for two minutes. I check the road.

Oh, merciful heavens. We’re moving backward! It is a dizzying feeling, and the first time I have ever seen it from the cockpit of an airplane. I have to steady myself and hold even more tightly to the stick. An airplane must move through the air in order to fly, and almost always that means that it moves over the ground, too. But now white lines in the road are passing me, and I have the strange feeling that I had over Odessa, that I have when I stand at the top of a ladder or a tall building and look down. As if there is a tremendous fall coming in the next few seconds. The airspeed needle is firm on 80 miles per hour. The wind must be at least 85 mph on my nose. The biplane simply cannot move to the west. Nothing I can do will make her move in the direction of the Pacific Ocean.

This is getting ridiculous. We bank hard to the right, dive away from the wind, and I can pluck one single straw of consolation from seeing the highway scream past as I turn east. With the tailwind, my groundspeed must be 180 miles per hour. If I could only hold it, I could set a new biplane speed record to North Carolina. But I am wiser than to really believe that the wind will hold, and I know that just before I cross the South Carolina border into North Carolina the wind would shift to become an eighty-mile headwind, and I would hang suspended in the air one hundred yards from the finish line, unable to reach it. This is a wonderful day for playing all kinds of improbable games with an airplane. I can land the biplane backward today and take off straight up. I can fly sideways across the ground, in fact be more maneuverable than a helicopter could be. But I do not feel like playing games. I only want to accomplish what should be the simple task of reaching the other side of these mountains. Possibly I could tack back and forth, a sailboat in the sky, and eventually reach San Diego. No. Tacking is a meek and subservient thing to do, not befitting the character of an airplane. One must draw the line somewhere.

The only fitting technique is to fight the mountains for every inch I gain, and if the mountains for a moment prove the stronger, to retire, and rest and turn and fight again. For, when the fight belongs to the mountain, it is not proper to seek sly and devious means of sneaking around its might.

There is no mistaking the rebuff of the lesser mountain passes. They are making it clear that my adversary shall be the giant San Jacinto, ruling the pass into Banning.

I have burned a full tank of fuel in the fight to get across the mountains, and have gotten nowhere. Or, more precisely, I have gotten to Borego Springs Airport, one hard runway standing alone in the sagebrush and clouds of dust. Circling overhead, I see that the windsock is standing straight out, across the runway. In a moment it gusts around to point down the asphalt strip, and in another second it is cross again. To land on that runway in the gusting changing high-velocity wind will be to murder one biplane. Yet I must land, and haven’t the fuel to reach for Palm Springs again. I shall land in the desert near the Borego Airport.

An inspection of the dry land rules that out. The surface is just too rough. Catch the wheels in a steep sand dune and we’ll be on our back in less than a second, and only with incredible luck could we escape with less than forty broken wingribs, a bent propeller and an engine full of sand and sagebrush. So much for landing in the desert.

The infield of the airport itself is dirt and sand, dotted with huge sage. I turn the biplane down through the shuddering wind and fly over the windsock, watching the infield. It was level, once. The bulldozers must have leveled it when they scraped a bed for the runway. The brush is three feet high over it, four feet, some places. I could land in the brush, dead slow in the wind, and hope there aren’t any pipes or ditches in the ground. If there are, it will be worse than the open desert. We fly two more passes, inspecting the brush, trying to see the ground beneath it.

At the gas pump, a man stands and watches, a small figure in blue coveralls. What a gulf lies between us! He is as safe and content as he can be, he can even go to sleep leaning against the gas pump, if he wants. But a thousand feet, a hundred feet away, the Parks and I are in trouble. My cork-and-wire fuel gage shows that the tank is empty. We got ourselves into this affair and we’ve got to get ourselves out. The wind gusts at a wide angle to the runway, and a brush landing is the least of our evils. With luck, we will emerge with a few minor scratches.

One last climb for a few hundred feet of working altitude, throttle back, turn into the wind and drop toward the brush. Should the wind shift now, we shall need more than luck.

The Parks settles like a snail in a bright-colored parachute, barely moving across the ground. The brush is tall and brown beneath us, and I fight to keep from pushing the throttle and bolting safely back into the sky. As we scrape the tops of the sage, it is clear that we are not moving slowly at all. Hard back on the stick, hold tight to the throttle and in a crash and rumbling clatter we plow into a waist-high sea of blurred and brittle twigs. There is a snapping all about us, like a forest fire running wild, and twigs erupt in a whirling fountain from the propeller, spraying in a high arc to spin over the top wing and rain into the cockpit. The lower wing cuts like a scythe through the stuff, shredding it, tumbling it in a wide straight swath behind. And we are stopped, after breaking our way almost to the edge of the asphalt, all in one dusty piece, trembling in the wind, still throwing fresh-snapped twigs from the propeller. Throttle forward, we grimly crush ahead to the runway, turn to slowly follow a taxiway leading toward the gas pump.

“That was quite a landing you made, there.” The man hands up the hose, and searches for the sixty-weight oil.

“Make’em that way all the time.”

“Wasn’t quite sure just what you were doing. Can’t remember anybody ever landing out in the brush like that. That’s kind of hard on the airplane, isn’t it?”

“She’s built for it.”

“Guess you’ll be staying the night, in this wind?”

“No. You got a candy machine around, peanuts or something?”

“Yeah, we got a candy machine. You say you won’t be staying?”

“No.”

“Where you headed?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Kind of a long way, isn’t it? A hundred miles? I mean for an old biplane like this?”

“You are right, there. One hundred miles is a long, long way.”

But I am not dismayed, and as I pull the Peanuts selector handle, the oily image in the mirror is smiling.