Biplane

1

IT IS LIKE OPENING NIGHT on a new way of living, only it is opening day, and instead of velvet curtains drawing majestically aside there are hangar doors of corrugated tin, rumbling and scraping in concrete tracks and being more stubborn than majestic. Inside the hangar, wet still with darkness and with two wide pools of dark underwing and evaporating as the tall doors slide, the new way of living. An antique biplane.

I have arrived to do business, to trade. As simple as that. A simple old airplane trade, done every day. No slightest need to feel unsure.

Still, a crowd of misgivings rush toward me from the hangar. This is an old airplane. No matter how you look at it, this airplane was built in 1929 and this is today and if you’re going to get the thing home to California you’ve got to fly it over twenty-seven hundred miles of America.

It is a handsome airplane, though. Dark red and dark yellow, an old barnstormer of a biplane, with great tall wheels, two open cockpits and a precise tictactoe of wires between the wings.

For shame. You have a fine airplane this moment. Have you forgotten the hours and the work and the money you poured into the rebuilding of the airplane you already own? That was only a year ago! A completely rebuilt 1946 Fairchild 24, as good as brand new! Better than brand new; you know every rib and frame and engine cylinder of the Fairchild, and you know that they’re perfect. Can you say as much for this biplane? How do you know that ribs aren’t broken beneath that fabric, or wingspars cracked?

How many thousand miles have you flown the Fairchild? Thousands over the Northeast, from that day you rolled her out of the hangar in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey. Then from Colt’s Neck more thousands to Los Angeles, wife and children seeing the country at first hand as we moved to a new home. Have you forgotten that flight and the airplane that brought your country alive in rivers coursing and great craggy mountains and wheat tassels in the sun? You built this airplane so no weather could stop it, with full flight instruments and dual radios for communication and navigation and a closed cabin to keep out the wind and rain. And now this airplane has flown you across more thousands of miles, from Los Angeles to this little land of Lumberton, North Carolina.

This is good biplane country. March in Lumberton is like June is like August. But the way home is a different land. Remember the frozen lakes in Arizona, three days ago? The snow in Albuquerque? That’s no place for an open-cockpit biplane! The biplane is in her proper place this moment. In Lumberton, with tobacco fields green about her airport, with other antique airplanes sheltered nearby, with her gentle owner taking time from his law practice to tend to her needs.

This biplane is not your airplane, your kind of airplane, even. She belongs and she should belong to Evander M. Britt, of Britt and Britt, attorneys at law. A man who loves old airplanes, with the time to come down and take care of their needs. He has no wild schemes, he hasn’t the faintest desire to fly this airplane across the country. He knows his airplane and what it can do and what it can’t do. Come to your senses. Just fly home in the Fairchild and forget this folly. His advertisement for a trade should find him his coveted lowwing Aeronca, and from someplace just down the road, not a brand new Fairchild 24 from Los Angeles, California. The biplane doesn’t even have a radio!

It is true. If I make this trade, I will be trading the known for the unknown. On the other side stands only one argument, the biplane itself. Without logic, without knowledge, without certainty. I haven’t the right to take it from Mr. Britt. Secretary to the local chapter of the Antique Airplane Association, he should have a biplane. He needs a biplane. He is out of his mind to trade this way. This machine is his mark of belonging to an honored few.

But Evander Britt is a grown man and he knows what he is doing and I don’t care why he wants the Fairchild or how much money I’ve put in the rebuilding or how far I’ve flown in it. I only know that I want that biplane. I want it because I want to travel through time and I want to fly a difficult airplane and I want to feel the wind when I fly and I want people to look, to see, to know that glory still exists. I want to be part of something big and glorious.

This can be a fair trade only because each airplane is worth the same amount of money. Money aside, the two airplanes have absolutely nothing in common. And the biplane? I want it because I want it. I have brought sleeping bag and silk scarf for a biplane voyage home. My decision is made, and now, touching a dark wingtip, nothing can change it.

“Let’s roll ’er out on the grass,” Evander Britt says. “You can pull on that outboard wing strut, down near the bottom.”

In the sunlight, the darks of red and yellow go bright scarlet and blazing bright flame to become a glowing sunrisebiplane in four separate wing panels of cloth and wood and an engine of five black cylinders. Thirty-five years old, and this hangar could be the factory, and this air, 1929. I wonder if airplanes don’t think of us as dogs and cats; for every year they age, we age fifteen or twenty. And as our pets share our household, so do we in turn share with airplanes the changing drifting sweeping household of the sky.

“. not really so hard to start, but you have to get the right combination. About four shots of prime, pull the prop through five or six times. ”

It is all strange and different, this cockpit. A deep leathertrimmed wood-and-fabric hole, cables and wires skimming the wooden floorboards, three knobbed stalks of engine controls to the left, a fuel valve and more engine controls forward, six basic engine and flight instruments on a tiny black-painted instrument panel. No radio.

A four-piece windscreen, low in front of my eyes. If it rains now, this whole thing is going to fill with water.

“Give it a couple of slow pumps with the throttle.”

“One, two. OK.” Funny. You never hear of cockpits filling up with water, but what happens when it rains on one of these things?

“One more shot of prime, and make the switches hot.”

Click-click on the instrument panel.

“CONTACT! And brakes.”

One quick downward swing of the shining propeller and the engine is very suddenly running, catching its breath and choking and coughing hoarse in the morning chill. Silence runs terrified before it and hides in the far corners of the forests around. Clouds of blue smoke wreathe for a second and are whipped away and the silver blade becomes nothing more than a great wide fan, and it blows air back over me like a giant blowing on a dandelion and the sound of it over the engine sound is a deep westwind in the pines.

I can’t see a thing ahead but airplane; a two-passenger front cockpit and a wide cowling and a silver blur that is the propeller. I let go the brakes and look out over the side of the cockpit into the big fan-wind giant-wind and touch the throttle forward. The propeller blur goes thinner and faster and the engine-sound goes deeper, all the while hollow and resonant, as though it were growling and roaring at the bottom of a thousand-gallon drum, lined in mirrors.

The old tall wheels begin to roll along the grass. The old grass, under the old wind, and bright old wings of another year and of this year, bound solidly together with angled old wires and forward-tilting old struts of wood, all a painted butterfly above the chill Carolina grass. Pressing on the rudder pedals, I swing the nose slowly from one side to the other as we roll, making sure that the blind way ahead is clear.

What a very long way has come the dream of flight since 1929. None of the haughty proud businesslike mien of the modern airplane hinted here. None of it. Just a slow leisurely taxi, with the constant S-turns to see ahead, pausing to sniff the breeze and inspect a flower in the grass and to listen to the sound of our engine. A quiet-seeming old biplane. Seeming, though, only seeming.

I have heard about these old airplanes, heard stories aplenty. Unreliable, these machines. You’ve always got to be ready for that engine to stop running. Quit on takeoff, usually, just when you need ’em most. And there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s just the way they are. If you do make it through the takeoff, look out for those old ones once they’re in the air. Slow up just a little too much, boy, and they’ll jerk the rug right out from under you and send you down in a spin. Like as not, you won’t be able to recover from the spin, either. They’ll just wrap up tighter and tighter and all you can do is bail out. Not too strange or unusual for the whole engine to fall out, sometimes. You just can’t tell. That old metal in those old engine mounts is all crystallized by now, and one day SNAP and there you are falling backward out of the sky. And the wood in these airplanes, look out for that old wood. Rotted clean through, more than likely. Hit a little bump in the air, a little gust of wind, and there goes one of your wings folding and fluttering away, or worse, folding back over the cockpit so that you can’t even bail out. But worst of all are the landings. Biplanes have that narrow landing gear and not much rudder to work with; they’ll get away from you before you can blink your eyes and suddenly you’re rolling along the runway in a big ball of wires and splinters and shredded old fabric. Just plain vicious and that’s the only word for ’em. Vicious.

But this airplane seems docile and as trim as a young lady earnestly seeking to make a good impression upon the world. Listen to that engine tick over. Smooth as a tuned racing engine, not a single cylinder left out of the song. “Unreliable,” indeed.

A quick engine runup here on the grass before takeoff. Controls all free and working properly, oil pressure and temperature pointing as they should. Fuel valve is on, mixture is rich, all the levers are where they belong. Spark advance lever, even, and a booster magneto coil. Those haven’t been built into airplanes for the last thirty years.

All right, airplane, let us see how you can fly. A discreet nudge on the throttle, a touch of left rudder to swing the nose around into the wind, facing a broad expanse of tall moist airport grass. Someone should have stamped out those rumors long ago.

Chinstrap fastened on leather helmet, dark goggles lowered.

Throttle coming full forward, and the giant blows hard twisting sound and fanned exhaust upon me. Certainly aren’t very quiet, these engines.

Push forward on the control stick and instantly the tail is flying. Built for little grass fields, the biplanes. Weren’t many airports around in 1929. That’s why the big wheels, too. Roll over the ruts in a pasture, a racetrack, a country road. Built for shortfield takeoffs, because that’s where the passengers were, short fields were where you made your money.

Grass fades into a green felt blur, and the biplane is already light on her wheels.

And suddenly the ground is no more. Smooth into the sky the bright wings climb, the engine thunders in its hollow drum, the tall wheels, still spinning, are lifted. Listen to that! The wind in the wires! And now it’s here all around me. It hasn’t gone at all. It isn’t lost in dusty yellow books with dusty browning photographs. It is here this instant, the taste of it all. That screaming by my ears and that whipping of my scarf—the wind! It’s here for me now just as it was here for the first pilots, that same wind that carried their megaphoned words across the pastures of Illinois and the meadows of Iowa and the picnic grounds of Pennsylvania and the beaches of Florida. “Five dollars, folks, for five minutes. Five minutes with the summer clouds, five minutes in the land of the angels. See your town from the air. You there, sir, how about taking the little lady for a joyride? Absolutely safe, perfectly harmless. Feel that fresh wind that blows where only birds and airplanes fly.” The same wind drumming on the same fabric and singing through the same wires and smashing into the same engine cylinders and sliced by the same sharp bright propeller and stirred and roiled by the same passage of the same machine that roiled it so many years ago.

If the wind and the sun and the mountains over the horizon do not change, a year that we make up in our heads and on our paper calendars is nothing. The farmhouse, there below. How can I tell that it is a farmhouse of today and not a farmhouse of 1931?

There’s a modern car in the driveway. That’s the only way I can tell the passing of time. It isn’t the calendar makers who give us our time and our modern days, but the designers of automobiles and dishwashers and television sets and the current trends in fashion. Without a new car, then, time stands still. Find an old airplane and with a few pumps of prime and the swing of a shining propeller you can push time around as you will, mold it into a finer shape, give its features a more pleasant countenance. An escape machine, this. Climb in the cockpit and move the levers and turn the valves and start the engine and lift from the grass into the great unchanging ocean of air and you are master of your own time.

The personality of the biplane filters back to me as we fly. Elevator trim has to be almost full down to keep the nose from climbing when I take my hand from the control stick. Aileron forces are heavy, rudder and elevator forces are light. In a climb, I can push the throttle full forward and get no more than 1750 revolutions per minute from the shining propeller. The horizon is balanced, in level flight, just atop the Number Two and Five cylinder heads. The airplane stalls gently, and before it stalls there is a tapping in the stick, a warning that the nose is about to drop slowly down, even with the control stick pulled back. There’s nothing at all vicious about this airplane. Windy, of course, when you move your head from behind the glass windscreen, and not so quiet as modern airplanes. The wind goes quiet when the airplane is near its stalling speed; it shrieks warnings if it flies too fast. There is a great deal of airplane flying out ahead of the pilot. The forward windscreen clouds over with oil film and rocker-box grease after an hour in the air. When the throttle has been back for a moment, the engine misfires and chokes as it comes forward again. Certainly not a difficult airplane to fly. Certainly not a vicious one.

A circle over the airport now, with its great runways lying white ribbons in the grass. The most difficult time, they say, is the landing. I must look over the field carefully and make sure the runway is clear. When I am ready to land, that big nose will block the view ahead and I can only trust that nothing will wander into my path until I can slow down and begin S-turning to see. There, the field that I will land upon, the grass next to the runway. Away over to the left, the gasoline pumps and a little cluster of people watching.

We slide down a long invisible ramp in the sky, down past two giant poplar trees guarding the approach to the runway. The biplane flies so slowly that there is time to watch the poplars and see how their leaves flutter silver in the wind. Then I look out to the side as the runway appears below, look out to the side and judge the height, gage the height of tall wheels above the grass, and with a shudder the stall and the airplane is down and rolling left-rudder right-rudder keep it straight beside the runway don’t let it get away from you right-rudder now, just a touch of right rudder. And that’s all there is to it. Simple as can be.

Another takeoff, another landing, another bit of knowing tucked away. Somehow, taxiing to the hangar, I’m surprised that it should be so easy to demolish the stories and the grim warnings.

“Evander Britt, you just made a deal.”

The trade is completed in a day, with only an occasional rustle in the forest that shows where a misgiving lurks.

I am owner of a 1929 Detroit-Ryan Speedster, model Parks P-2A.

Goodbye, Fairchild. We have flown many hours and learned many things together. Of instruments humming and the things that happen when they cease to hum, of riding invisible radio beams over Pennsylvania and Illinois and Nebraska and Utah and California, of landings at international airports with jetliners close behind and on beaches with only a gull or a sandpiper to hurry us along. But now there is more to learn, and different problems.

The hangar doors that had opened on a new way of life close now on an old one. Into the front cockpit of the Parks go the sleeping bag and sandwiches and the jug of water, cans of sixty-weight oil and cockpit covers and C-26 spark plugs, tools and tape and a coil of soft wire.

Fill the gas tank to its five-hour brim; a last handshake from Evander Britt. From those who stand near and know where I plan to fly, a few faint words.

“Good luck.”

“Take it easy, now.”

“You be careful, hear?”

A newspaper reporter is interested to find that the biplane is seven years older than its pilot.

Engine started, muttering softly at the bottom of its drum, I buckle into the unfamiliar parachute harness, fasten the safety belt, and jounce slowly over the grass, fanning it back behind me, moving into position for takeoff.

It is one of those times when there is no doubt that a moment is an important moment, one that will be remembered. In that moment, the old throttle goes forward under my glove and the first second of a journey begins. The technical details are here, and crowding about: rpm at 1750, oil pressure at 70 psi, oil temperature at 100 degrees F. The other details are here too, and I am ready to learn again: I can’t see a thing ahead of this airplane when it is on the ground; look how far forward the throttle will move without gaining another revolution from the engine; this is going to be a long and windy journey; note the grassblades growing at the edge of the runway; how quickly the tail is flying and we can skim the ground on the main wheels only. And we’re off. A constant thunder and beating twisting wind about me, but I can hear it all as they are hearing it, on the ground: a tiny hum increasing, for a quick second loud and powerful overhead, then dwindling on down the scale to end in a tiny old biplane quiet against the sky.