The Spirit of ST Louis (30 page)

A drink of water would be good. I reach for my canteen. No, I'm not thirsty enough now, I've allowed only one quart for the flight, and I'll need it more tomorrow. The instruments? All readings are normal. I drain a few drops of gasoline from the Lunkenheimer sediment bulb—no sign of dirt or water. Fumes drift through the fuselage, and drift way.

When I was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, I decided to give up my course in mechanical engineering, and learn to fly. One of my closer friends, an upperclassman, tried to persuade me not to leave my studies. He said a pilot's life averaged only a few hours in the air, and cited wartime figures to prove his point. Why, he asked, did I want to enter so dangerous a profession? I argued that flying in peacetime was safer than flying in war, and that accidents could be reduced by care and judgment. He shrugged his shoulders and said it was far too dangerous anyway, but that my future was my own.

My friend was captain of the rifle team, and spoke in terms I understood. He was one of the initiated. He knew how to value danger. Hadn't we shot twenty-five-cent pieces out of each other's fingers at a range of fifty feet? His statement impressed me, but I'd grown tired of the endless indoor hours of university life. I longed for open earth and sky. The fascination of aircraft had mounted to form an irresistible force in my mind. Was a life of flying to be renounced because it shouldered danger? I chose a school in Nebraska, and enrolled for a course in the spring.

I'd never been near enough to a plane to touch it before entering the doors of the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's factory. I can still smell the odor of dope that permeated each breath, like ether in a hospital's corridors. I can still see the brightly painted fuselages on the floor, still marvel at the compactness of the Hispano-Suiza engine which turned the force of a hundred and fifty horses through its little shaft of steel.

Ray Page, the Corporation's president, took my check for tuition and welcomed me to his school. On April 9, 1922, at the age of twenty, I made my first flight. The plane had been hauled out from the factory the day before, wings stacked and padded carefully in a big truck, fuselage trailing behind, tail high and foremost. I stood on the air field all morning, watching riggers attach wings and "hook up" ailerons, flippers, and rudder; watching mechanics strain in fuel, drain the sediment bulb, tune up the engine; watching the engineer test cable tautness with his fingers and measure wing droop with his knowing eye.

Behind every movement, word, and detail, one felt the strength of life, the presence of death. There was pride in man's conquest of the air. There was the realization that he took life in hand to fly, that in each bolt and wire and wooden strut death lay imprisoned like the bottled genie -- waiting for an angled grain or loosened nut to let it out. The rigger wound his copper wire with a surgeon's care. The mechanic sat listening to his engine and watching his gages as a doctor would search for a weakness in the human heart -- sign of richness, blowing valve, or leaned-cut mixture? An error meant a ship might crash; a man might die. I stood aside and watched the engine tested, watched the plane taxi out, take off, and spiral up through sky. I'd be on the next flight, if this test showed nothing wrong. I'd be a part of those wings, now no larger than a bird's, black against the clouds toward which they climbed.

How clearly I remember that first flight—I've lived through it again and again. Otto Timm was the pilot.

"CONTACT!"

The mechanic throws his leg and body backward as his arms jerk the propeller down.

"BOOSTER!"

There's a deep cough -- vicious spitting. --The mechanic regains his balance --takes his place by the wing tip. Miraculously his fingers haven't been chopped off by that now invisible blade. The cylinders bark out their power -- merge into a deep and constant roar. I am belted down in the front cockpit, goggles and leather helmet strapped tight on my head. Beside me is a younger boy, one of the workmen from the factory. He, too, has never flown before.

The roar grows louder. Wings begin to tremble. The engine's power shakes up my legs from the floor boards, beats down on my head from the slipstream, starts a flying wire vibrating. I twist about to look back at the pilot. His eyes study the instruments—no trace of a smile on his face. This is a serious business, flying.

The engine quiets. The pilot nods. A mechanic from each side ducks in and unchocks a wheel. We taxi downwind, humping over sod clumps, to the end of the field. A burst of engine -- the tail swings around into wind. There are seconds of calm while the pilot glances a last time at temperature of water, pressures of oil and air; checks again the direction of wind and clearness of field; makes a last slight adjustment to his goggles.

Now! -- The roar becomes deafening -- the plane lurches forward through a hollow in the ground -- the tail rises -- the axle clatters over bumps -- trees rush toward us -- the clatter stops -- the ground recedes -- we are resting on the air -- Up, past riggers and mechanics -- over treetops -- across a ravine, like a hawk -- The ground unfolds -- we bank -- it tilts against a wing -- a hidden, topsy-turvy stage with height to draw its curtain.

Trees become bushes; barns, toys; cows turn into rabbits as we climb. I lose all conscious connection with the past. I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger. The horizon retreats, and veils itself in haze. The great, squared fields of Nebraska become patchwork on a planet's disk. All the country around Lincoln lies like a relief map below -- its lake, its raveled bend of river, its capitol, its offices and suburbs -- a culture of men adhering to the medium of earth.

The world tilts again -- another bank -- we tighten in a spiral -- My head is heavy -- the seat presses hard against me -- I become conscious of my body's weight, of the strength it takes to lift an arm -- Fields curve around a wing tip -- gravity is playing tag with space -- Landing wires loosen -- vibrate with the air. How can those routed wooden spars, how can that matchwork skeleton of ribs withstand such pressure? Those slender flying wires, hardly larger than an eagle's tendon -- how can they bind fuselage to wings? On the farm, we used more metal to tie a wagon to a horse!

Why can't I keep the compass needle centered? I skid the Spirit of St. Louis back onto course again.

We made that flight at Lincoln five years ago last month. I was a novice then. But the novice has the poet's eye. He seen and feels where the expert's senses have been calloused by experience. I have found that contact tends to dull appreciation, and that in the detail of the familiar one loses awareness of the strange. First impressions have a clarity of line and color which experience may forget and not regain.

Now, to me, cows are no longer rabbits; house and barn, no longer toys. Altitude has become a calculated distance, instead of empty space through which to fall. I look down a mile on some farmer's dwelling much as I would view that same dwelling a horizontal mile away. I can read the contour of a hillside that to the beginner's eye looks flat. I can translate the secret textures and the shadings of the ground. Tricks of wind and storm and mountains are to me an open book. But I have never realized air or aircraft, never seen the earth below so clearly, as in those early days of flight.

I was the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's only student that spring. Ira Biffle was my instructor -- a dark-haired, face-creased man of the world and the sky. He'd soloed a lot of flyers for the Signal Corps during the war. But:

"Slim, you'd better watch your step," the factory workmen warned me. "The Army didn't have 'em any tougher."

Biff was impatient, quick, and picturesque of tongue, but not as hard-boiled as his reputation. We got along together well enough. But he'd lost the love of his art, and I found it hard to get time in the air. When rain was falling or wind blew hard, of course, flying was out of the question for a new student. On such days, I rode my motorcycle to the factory and spent hours watching the craftsmen show their skills. A would-be aviator had to learn how to care for his plane in the field. Tail skids and shock absorbers broke, ribs snapped, and wing covering ripped all too easily. Spark plugs needed cleaning out each week, and exhaust valves warped with regularity. You had to know how to lockstitch, how to bind the ends of rubber rope, how to lap a propeller hub to its shaft. There were hundreds of details you had to learn; for as a barnstorming pilot, you were often your own helper, rigger, and mechanic.

But on mornings of calm, clear weather, I felt it was my right to receive the instruction I had paid for. And Biffle was often nowhere to be found. "The air's too turbulent at midday, Slim," he'd tell me when he arrived at the factory, later. "Meet me at the flying field when it smooths out this afternoon."

Around five o'clock, I'd park my motorcycle next the fence line, lie down under a wing, and watch the wind sock In its tale of air -- whipping, wilting, filling with the gusts. Sometimes Biff would come out with his roadster in time to like a half-dozen take-offs and landings before dusk. But often he didn't come at all. "Slim, it was just too rough," he might tell me the next morning, in his high-pitched voice, as he leaned against the Fokker's gold-varnished fuselage. "Let's try at sunrise tomorrow—that's the smoothest time of day.”

Then the factory workmen who overheard would smile.
"Sunrise?"
they'd say later. "Ha, Biff
never
starts work before eleven. He's a damn good pilot," they'd usually continue, "but he's been different since Turk Gardner spun in. Biff took it hard. He knew Turk was good, too. They'd always been close friends."

Wherever aviation people gathered, talk of crashes arose. And yet the safety of flying had steadily increased. I could look forward to some nine hundred hours in the air as the average pilot's lifetime, I was told. I learned that most people thought of aviators as strange and daring men, hardly a 'human breed—men who had nerves of steel and supernatural senses; men who were wild with drink and women, and who placed no value on their lives. But of the aviators at Lincoln there was none who didn't want to live. The pilot admired most had already spent more than two thousand hours in the air. He may not have held onto life as tightly, but he valued it as highly as anyone I knew. He didn't drink, and he didn't smoke. He flew for the love of flying. And above that, he flew to make enough money to marry his fiancée.

In factory and on flying field, I often worked with the boy who shared the cockpit with me on my first flight. He was four years younger than I, but our interest in aviation bridged the gap of time. Bud Gurney came from the sandhills of Nebraska, and he'd been hired by the Corporation a few months before I arrived at the school. He swept floors, lock-stitched wings, and acted as general handy man -- anything to get a job, especially around aircraft.

Bud kept me posted on factory current events. He knew the character of each employee, sieved off their gossip from their facts. "You can trust Saully anywhere," he said. "He's really a good mechanic. But I don't know why Page keeps on paying N – – –. He's just a great big bluff. Watch out for him, Slim. He'll send you off to find a left-handed monkey wrench, or to get a quart of stagger."

The Spirit of St. Louis has a tendency to gain altitude when I'm not watching carefully. I push the stabilizer adjustment forward a single notch, to change pressure on the stick.

It was Bud Gurney, some days later, who warned me that the Corporation's training plane was being sold:

"Ray Page is making a deal with Bahl, Slim. I think he's the best flyer around Lincoln. But you'd better solo pretty soon or you won't have any plane to pilot."

"They can put dual controls in that silver job," I replied. "It's all ready to assemble."

"You're a week behind time. Page sold the silver job too."

I'd received about eight hours of flying instruction when Biff made it clear that his obligations as a teacher were fulfilled. Business, he said, was calling him away from Lincoln. "You can get up and down all right, as long as the air's not too rough. But you'll have to get Page to okay it, Slim, before I can turn you-loose."

I lost no time getting to the factory and into the president's office. But Ray Page showed neither the confidence of his instructor nor the enthusiasm of his flying school's catalogue. "There isn't any question about your ability to fly," he said, after congratulating me. "But you understand we can't just turn an expensive airplane over to a student. Couldn't you put up a bond to cover our loss if you crack up?"

I didn't have enough money for a bond; and I knew that even if I soloed, there wouldn't be a pilot's job waiting for me. Owners of aircraft wanted experienced pilots, men with hundreds of hours of flying to their credit. They were like Ray Page. They weren't going to trust their lives or their machines to a newly graduated student. No, there were other steps that would have to be made between graduation and a pilot's job. Maybe I could get Bahl to take me with him, barnstorming.

Erold Bahl was a different type of pilot. Serious, mild-mannered, slender, there was no showmanship about him. He flew with his cap turned backward and in ordinary business clothes. He never wore an aviator's helmet and breeches like the rest of us. I waited until I found a chance to talk to him alone in one corner of the factory.

"You don't need somebody to help when you're out barnstorming, do you?" I asked. "I'd be glad to pay my own expenses---"

"I don't need any help where I'm going ---" He started out to say no, in his soft but definite way. Then, hesitating a moment as he looked at me, he continued, "But if you want to go along badly enough to pay your own expenses, I'll take you."

We left on our first barnstorming trip in May. I kept the plane wiped clean, pulled through the propeller, and canvassed the crowds for passengers.

"You know, Slim," Bahl told me, after the first few days, "you're working hard, and you're making me extra money. From now on, I'm going to pay your expenses."

I felt secure flying with Bahl. He'd take off in weather that would keep most pilots on the ground; but he handled his plane perfectly, and he never did any silly stunts. "I think aviation can be safe," he told me. "And I intend to make it that way." Bahl believed that safety lay in judgment. He followed no frozen set of rules. I once suggested that we might draw a bigger crowd if I stood out on one of the wings while we flew over town. "You can climb out of the cockpit if you want to," he said, "but watch how you step on the spars, and don't go farther than the inner-bay strut the first time." Those simple instructions gave me my start as a wing walker.

After the trip with Bahl, my finances were getting low. I began working on odd jobs at the factory, at a wage of fifteen dollars every Saturday. And I left my twenty-dollar-a-month boarding house for a room I rented at two dollars and a quarter a week. I had several hundred dollars in the bank at home, accumulated slowly over many years; but I was determined to hold as much of it as I could in reserve for the day when I'd want to buy a plane of my own.

That June—it will be five years ago next month—a parachute maker came to Lincoln to demonstrate his product. His name was Charlie Harden. I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and, minutes later, a black dot, fall off the wing two thousand feet above our field. At almost the same instant, a white streak behind him flowered out into the delicate, wavering muslin of a parachute—a few gossamer yards grasping onto air and suspending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, a man who by stitches, cloth, and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for this immortal moments.

I stood fascinated while he drifted down, swinging with the wind, a part of it, the 'chute's skirt weaving with its eddies lightly, gracefully, until he struck the ground and all that fragile beauty wilted around him into a pile of earth-stained, wrinkled cloth.

A day or two later, when I decided that I too must pass through the experience of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the wing through a hurricane of wind, clinging on to struts and wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then giving up even that tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left in me a feeling of anticipation mixed with dread, of confidence restrained by caution, of courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold on to life? How loosely give it rein? What gain was there for such a risk? I would have no pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No, there was a deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain. It was the quality that led me into aviation in the first place, when safer and more profitable occupations were at hand, and against the advice of most of my friends. It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men -- where immorality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.

My search for the parachute maker ended in a corner of the factory where wing coverings were made. He and his young wife were busily engaged with sewing machine and shears, cutting and stitching the long, triangular strips of a new parachute. Folds and piles of white muslin lay all about them.

"You want to jump?" They both eyed me keenly.

"I'd like to make a double jump," I said.

"A double jump! You want to do a double jump the first time?" The tone was disapproving -- I had to think fast. Why did I want to make a double jump the first time?