Richard Bach: A Gift of Wings

The camera tower was an excellent example. Our camera tower was a place built of telephone poles, a platform thirty feet above a knob of ground called Pigeon Hill. The cameraman and two assistants would climb to that platform every morning in sweet assurance that since this was only a film, they would live to climb down from the tower every afternoon. They had a trust in Chris and me and Jon Hutchinson and the dozen Irish Air Corps pilots that was beyond blind… the cameramen acted as if the aircraft diving down on them for head-on shots, guns blazing, were already pussycats safe on film.

It is ten a.m. We are a flight of two Fokker D-7s and two SE-5s. The engines and the wind are clattering about our heads and down there off our wingtops is the lonely lump of Pigeon Hill, with its tower on top and its cameramen on their platform.

“We want a tail chase this morning,” they tell us on the radio. “An SE in front, a Fokker after him, another SE, and the other Fokker. You got that?”

“Roj.”

“Come on close to the tower, please, then bank up on one wing and turn around us so we can see the tops of your airplanes. Close as you can to each other, please.”

“Roj.”

So here we go, from a thousand feet above the ground we fall into tight line-astern formation, the airplane ahead looming gigantic in our windscreen. Here’s the dive at the tower, that tiny pyramid down there.

“Action! This is a take!”

The SE in the lead jinks violently back and forth, aiming for the tower and the ground. We follow him in the Fokker, firing short bursts of oxyacetylene from our fake guns, aware that another SE is close under our tail, firing, and that the other Fokker is under his. From moment to moment we catch the propwash of the plane ahead, which slams us up into a roaring bank that takes full opposite aileron and rudder to control. This is no problem, with room beneath us. But the room dwindles fast, and in a few seconds the camera tower is a pretty big thing, then a monster, and the cameraman is wearing a white shirt and a blue jacket and a red-and-blue scarf and the SE banks hard around the tower and we’re in the WASH AND STICK RUDDER LOOKOUT WE’RE GONNA ROLL RIGHT INTO…

Gag. Ark. Foosh. We caught it in time the camera tower has flicked past and we’re in one piece and man I thought we had had it then what a way to start off a day and oh boy this ain’t fun this is WORK!

“All right. That was all right, chaps,” comes the radio. “Let’s try it again, and this time could you come a little closer in to the tower and don’t get quite so far apart. Bunch it up a little bit more, please.”

“Roj.”

Dear God in heaven, he wants us CLOSER!

Down we come again line-astern, jinking, swerving, guns popping, close as we can force ourselves to dare, slamming in propwash that grabs us like a big hand and torques us, if we don’t fight, all the way upside-down. The tower rises up at us like an Aztec pyramid of human sacrifice and then “SMOKE NOW, NUMBER ONE, SMOKE SMOKE!”

The SE we’re chasing hits his smoke a hundred yards from the tower and it’s like flying into the side of a thundercloud. The plane rolls wild left and we can’t see a thing except a corner of blurred green that was the ground a second ago and we can’t breathe and somewhere an instant away is the camera tower with those poor dumb trusting slobs cranking away with their little Mitchell, taking pictures. Stomp the right side of the rudderbar for dear life, snatch the stick back hard and we come blasting out of the smoke twenty feet left of the tower. We miss them by twenty feet. It’s interesting to see how quickly a leather flying helmet can get soaked through with sweat.

“That was perfect. That was absolutely right. Now let’s do that one more time…”

“ONE MORE TIME? REMEMBER THIS IS A HUMAN LIFE YOU’RE DEALING WITH!”

It was an Irish pilot who said that, and I remember thinking that his words were well said, my friend, well said.

I kept seeing, the more the tower called for closer and closer passes, that comedian who stands with a banana cream pie while the other one shouts, “Let me have that pie! Let me have it! LET ME HAVE IT!” The temptation is to fly right straight down the center of that Mitchell, rip the thing to a billion pieces over the countryside, then pull up and say, “There! Is that close enough? Is that what you guys want?”

The only one who gave in to temptation was Chris Cagle. He came at the camera in anger, from below the tower, and climbed full throttle, splitting seconds, into the lens. Pulling up at the very last quarter instant, he got the grim pleasure of a millisecond view of the camera crew diving for the deck. That was the only time in the month that they thought the airplanes might be real, after all.

Most of the air-to-air photography in Von Richthofen and Brown was shot from a jet helicopter, an Alouette II. The helicopter cameraman wasn’t visited with quite the same death-wish as the tower crew, but a helicopter is an unnerving thing to fly with. Just because the machine is pointed forward, of course, doesn’t mean that it is moving forward—it could be stopped, or going straight up or down or backward. How does a pilot judge where to aim, to come a safe distance from an object of unknown velocity?

“OK. I am hovering,” the pilot would tell us. “You can come in any time.” But closing rate on a stopped helicopter is just the same as closing rate on a cloud, and that can be alarmingly fast, in the final seconds. One keeps thinking, too, that the poor souls inside the Alouette don’t have parachutes.

Bit by harrowing bit, though, we made the film. We got used to the airplanes, for one thing. Most of the replicas did well to climb two hundred feet per minute after takeoff, and on some days were pressing their luck to clear the canvas hangars at the end of the field. In the immortal words of Jon Hutchinson, “I have to keep telling myself, ‘Hutchinson, this is marvelous, this is lovely, you’re flying a D-7!’ Because if I don’t, it feels like I’m flying a great bloody Pig.”

The four miniature SE-5s were not only at full power to stay with the other airplanes, they were at more than full power. On one flight I chased the Fokker Triplane with a camera mounted on the cowl of a mini SE, and just to stay in the same sky with the Fokker, eighty miles per hour, I was pulling 2650 rpm on an engine red-lined at 2500. Out of that fifty-minute flight, forty-five minutes were spent on the other side of full throttle. The film, like a war, was a mission that had to be accomplished. If an engine blew up that was just too bad… we’d have to land somehow and take up another airplane.

Odd, but one gets used to this kind of flying. In time, even on the tower at Pigeon Hill, caught in propwash and rolling out of control thirty feet in the air, one thinks, I’ll save it. She’ll recover at the last second. She always has… all the while pouring the power of Charles Atlas into the controls, fighting to pull out.

One day I saw an Irish pilot all alone, wearing a sprig of heather in the lapel of his German flying jacket.

“Flying kind of low, aren’t you?” I said, by way of a joke.

His face was gray; he didn’t smile at all. “I thought I had had it. I am lucky to be alive.”

It was such a somber voice that I was caught in morbid curiosity. The leaves in his lapel came from the downslope at Pigeon Hill, and he had harvested it with the undercarriage of a Fokker.

“The last thing I remember was the propwash and all I saw was the ground. I closed my eyes and pulled hard as I could on the stick. And here I am.”