Richard Bach: A Gift of Wings

The tower crew confirmed it that evening. The Fokker had rolled and dived as it passed the tower, bounced off the side of the hill and back into the air. The camera was pointed the other way.

One of the airplanes at Weston was a two-seater, a Caudron 277 Luciole , which was translated for us as Glowworm . It was a square sluggish biplane with a Lewis gun mounted in the rear cockpit in such a way that there was not quite enough room for the gunner to wear a parachute. Hutchinson, just down with the machine as I was about to take it up, described it for me in his pure British tones: “It’s a fine luciole, actually, but it will never be an airplane.”

Thinking that over, I fastened myself into the front seat, started the engine, and took off for a mission in which I was to be shot down by a pair of Pfalzes. It was not an enjoyable scene at all. It was much too real.

The poor Caudron could barely stumble out of its own way, much like the great majority of real two-seaters of the First War. It could neither turn nor climb nor dive, and the pilot sits directly between the wings so that he cannot see up and he cannot see down. The gunner blocks the view behind and the pilot gets what’s left over: a slice of sky ahead, and, sieved through the struts and wires, to the side.

I thought I had understood that two-seater pilots lived a hard life in 1917, but I hadn’t understood that at all. They couldn’t fight, they couldn’t run away, they could hardly tell that they were being attacked until their little fabric coffin burst into flames and then they didn’t have parachutes to bail out with. Perhaps I was a two-seater pilot in another life, for in spite of myself, in spite of saying, “This is a movie, Richard, this is only a movie that we are taking pictures for,” I was frightened when the Pfalzes came in. Their guns sparkled at me, the director shouted, “SMOKE, LUCY, SMOKE, SMOKE!” I hit both smoke switches, slumped in the seat, and wallowed the Luciole into a low-speed spiral dive.

That was the end of the scene for me, simple as that, but I dragged back to Weston like an exhausted snail.

Turning downwind to land, I suddenly saw a flight of Fokkers turning toward me, and went cold in shock. It took seconds to remember that this was not 1917 and that I was not going to be incinerated in my own traffic pattern. I laughed, then, nervously, and got the airplane on the ground as fast as I could. I had no wish to fly the two-seater again and I never did.

Nobody was killed in the time I flew with Von Richthofen and Brown; nobody was even injured. Two airplanes were damaged: an SE with an axle failure while taxiing, a Pfalz in a groundloop. Both were flying again within a week.

The cameras rolled through thousands of feet of color film, hours of film. Most of it looked pretty tame, but for every time that a pilot was truly frightened, certain that he was going to be a mid-air collision, positive that this time the plane was not going to recover at low altitude, there was another exciting scene caught in celluloid.

We gathered in tight little knots to watch the previous day’s action on the six-inch screen of the Movieola. No sound save the whir of the projector; quiet as a small-town library. Occasional comments: “Move it in!” “Liam, was that you in the Pfalz?” “That’s not too bad, there…”

As the filming went into the final week, painters converged on the drab German airplanes and brushed them into the flying rainbows of the Richthofen Circus. We flew the same airplanes as before, but now it was a point of fun to fly the all-red Fokker that would appear on the screen as Von Richthofen himself, or the black Pfalz that would be Hermann Goering’s.

I drew the red Fokker once for the ignoble scene of having one of my wingmen shot down by the Englander. Then once again as the Red Baron to come roaring to the rescue of Werner Voss, shooting an SE off his tail.

The next day I was Roy Brown, chasing Von Richthofen (a red Fokker Triplane, now) and shooting him down for the final scene of the film.

I tried saying it when I climbed out of the cockpit after that flight, carrying my parachute through the quiet evening to our trailer. “I shot down the Red Baron.”

I thought about that. How many pilots can make that statement? “Hey, Chris,” I said. He was stretched out in his half of the trailer. “I shot down the Red Baron!”

His reply was incisive. “Hm,” he said. He didn’t even open his eyes.

Which was to say, So what? So it’s just a movie we’re flying for, and a B movie besides and if it wasn’t for the flying scenes, I wouldn’t cross the street to see the picture, at home.

That’s when it occurred to me that it’s the same in a real war as it was in ours of make-believe. Pilots don’t attend wars or films because they like the blood or the sex or the B-level plots of the things. More important than film is the flying; more important than war is the flying.

It’s probably a shame to say: neither films nor wars will ever lack for men to fly their airplanes. I am myself one of a great many who volunteered for both. But surely someday, a thousand years from now, we can build a world where the only place to log combat time is in the lens of some director shouting, “SMOKE NOW, SMOKE!”

All we need is the will to do it, some replica MIGs, some antique Phantoms with dummy guns, sawdust missiles… If we wanted to, a thousand years from now, we could really make some great films.

“You’d better be careful what you pray for,” somebody once said, “because you’re going to get it.”

I thought of that, twisting a Fokker D-7 hard through my little part of the Great Mass Dogfight scene in Von Richthofen and Brown . The scene had looked neat and safe when we chalked it out on the briefing-room blackboard, but now, in the air, it was scary—fourteen replica fighters crushed into one small cube of sky, each one chasing the other, a few losing position and diving blindly through the rest, rainbow paints flashing colored sunlight, the loud quick blast of a Pfalz engine as the plane flashed beneath without seeing, smoke trails and the thick smell of fireworks in the wind.

Everyone survived that morning, but I was still shaking a bit when I thought about being careful what we pray for. Because the very first magazine article I wrote, twelve years ago, was one in which I prayed that those of us who learned to fly in closed-cockpit airplanes might have a place to rent an open-cockpit one, for the fun of it, “…and fly a Fokker D-7 airframe with one hundred fifty modern horses in the nose,” I had written. And here I was this moment in helmet and goggles and scarf, pilot of a yellow-blue-white-green airplane, Fok. DVII lettered authentically on the fuselage. I came home from the film with forty hours in Fokkers and Pfalzes and SE-5s, my prayers answered so completely that I had all that kind of flying I cared to do for quite some time.

A few years after I had prayed for the Fokker, I had gone for a ride in Chris Cagle’s J-3 Cub, at the Merced Fly-in. Cagle had a thousand hours in that Cub alone, I guess, and as we flew across the afternoon he showed me how to fly at zero miles per hour and how to loop and roll the thing. I remember looking out the open door at the puffed yeast-doughnut tire, and past it to the ground way down below, thinking what a great little airplane, and some day, by God, I’ll own me a Cub! Today I own it, and it has big puffy yeast-doughnut tires and the doors open in flight and I look down and remember, Sure enough, it happened again: I got what I prayed for.