Ричард Бах - Biplane

The crash comes, and over the engine roar I can hear it, I can feel it in the controls. A dull thud at first, as though we had hit something that was very heavy but also very soft, with the left main landing gear. And then—nothing.

We’re flying!

We are just barely flying, staggering through the air above the grass over the embankment. One tenth of a second for relief, and another for shock; ahead is a barbed-wire fence and a stand of trees. The embankment would have been better. I’m going to hit those trees in full flight, I don’t have a chance of clearing them.

Here, let me have it.

It is the gambler again, taking over.

Nose down, we must put the nose down to gain flying speed. The stick inches forward in my hand, and the wheels roll in the grass. They lift again in a moment and the biplane gathers speed. Here comes the fence, and the gambler waits until the last second, gaining every bit of speed he can. Then back on the stick and the fence is cleared and no time to think a full hard right bank and we flash between two poplars, thirty feet above the ground. For a second the world is green leaves and black branches and then suddenly it is darkening blue sky.

OK, the gambler says offhandedly, you can fly it now. That is a weak hand on the control stick, but a hand that would sooner guide the biplane to landing on the highway into the wind than take another try at the crosswind runway. There must be another place to land.

Another circle of the airport and there it is. Like the prayers of the ancients answered in manna all about them, there comes for me the knowledge that the Rayville Airport has two landing strips, and the other strip is grass and it is facing into the wind. Why didn’t I notice it before?

Five minutes later the airplane is parked by the hangars and I walk along the embankment to see where the left wheel hit the dirt.

How was it possible? Even the gambler had been sure that we were going to hit the dike, and hit it very hard indeed. But we didn’t. We grazed it so softly that there is no sign left in the grass. The biplane had no reason to fly then; only a moment before, she was not even moving fast enough to hold her tail in the air. Being a big inanimate object, some would say, the biplane could not have put forth any special effort to fly. Show me aerodynamically, they could say, one single reason for that airplane to fly before it had reached its proper flying speed. And of course I cannot give one single aerodynamic reason. Then, they say, you must have had proper flying speed at the moment you pulled back on the stick. Case closed. What shall we talk about now?

But I walk away unconvinced. I may not be able to land an old biplane in a crosswind, but the other is true: I have flown airplanes for a long enough time to know what to expect from them. If the biplane, in the space of what was at the very most seventy feet, went from twenty miles per hour to full flight, it is the shortest takeoff I have made in any flying machine, save the helicopters. And I have deliberately and very studiously practiced short-field takeoffs in airplanes heavy and light. The shortest I have ever made took some 290 feet of runway and that was wheels-barely-off-the-ground, not clearing a two-foot dike of earth.

My old impossible beliefs have today been reaffirmed. The last answer to flight is not found in the textbooks of aerodynamics. If it were up to aerodynamics, the biplane would at this moment be a cluttered trail of wheels, fuselage and wingpanels angling off the runway at Rayville, Louisiana. But it is not, and stands whole and complete, without a scratch, waiting for whatever adventures will come our way tomorrow.

The clatter of a pickup truck turning onto the gravel drive of the airport. Painted dimly on its door, ADAMS FLYING SERVICE, and behind the wheel a puzzled smile beneath a widebrim Stetson turned up in front, as the Old-Timer always turns up his brim in the western movies.

“Couldn’t figure out what you were. Came over the house and I haven’t heard an engine sound like that for twenty years. Ran out and looked at you and you were too small to be a Stearman, didn’t look quite like a Waco and for sure not a Travel-Air. What the heck kind of airplane is that, anyway?”

“Detroit-Parks. Not too many of them made, so don’t feel bad you didn’t know her. Wright engine. You should have been able to tell the Wright, way it’s all covered with oil.”

“Adams, the name. Lyle. Yeah. Wright stop throwing oil and you better look out. Mind if I look inside?”

Headlights wash the biplane as the pickup turns and rolls closer. The door squeaks open and there are footsteps on the gravel.

“This is a nice little airplane. Look at that. Booster magneto, isn’t it? Boy. Haven’t seen an airplane with a booster mag since I was a kid. And a spark advance. Hey. This is a real flying machine!”

“Nice to hear those words, sir. Most people look at her and wonder how such an old pile of sticks and rag ever get into the air.”

“No, no. Fine airplane. Hey, you want to put her in the hangar tonight? I’ll roll one of the Ag-Cats out and we can swing you right on in. Never matter if it rain on the Gat. Throw a cockpit cover on her, is all.”

“Why, thank y’, Lyle. Doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any rain tonight, though, and I want to be gone before the sun’s up tomorrow. Kinda hard to pull out of a hangar for one guy to do. We been sleeping out anyway.”

“Suit yourself. But I start dusting about sunup anyway; I’ll be out here.”

“That’s OK. Got a place to get some gas, by the way? Might as well get her all filled up tonight.”

“Sure thing. And I’ll drive you down to the café to dinner, if you want.”

* * *

Dinner at the café, with little bits of Louisiana thrown in for flavor. Lyle Adams is a Yankee. Came south to do a little dusting and turned out he liked it and stayed and started his own dusting business. Spraying, nowadays, mostly spraying and seeding. Not a whole lot of dusting still being done. The big modern Ag-Cat is a misty distant offspring of the Parks and her era. A working airplane, with a chemical hopper instead of a front cockpit, all metal and biplane. The Cat looks modern and efficient, and is both. Adams trusts it wholly, loves the machine.

“Great airplane, great airplane. All that wing, she just turns on a dime and gets right back into the field. Course she’s not like an old airplane at all. I used to fly a Howard, up in Minnesota. Take hunters and fishermen out to places where no one’d ever been before. Land in the fields. I remember one time I took four of these guys way up north. ”

The hours spin around swiftly, as they always do when new friends meet. At last the café lights go out and we rattle back in the ADAMS FLYING SERVICE pickup truck to the black green grass under the black yellow wing under a shimmering black sky.

“You sure got a lot of stars down here, Lyle.”

“Kind of a nice place to live, all right. If you like to farm. If you like to fly airplanes, too. Pretty nice place. You’re welcome to sleep at the house, now, like I say. Can’t say as I’d make you come, though, night like this. Fact, I should bring my bag out and sleep under that wing with you. Long time since I done any of that. ”

The handshake in the dark, the wishes for good sleep, the assurances of meeting when the sun comes up tomorrow, and the pickup is crunching away, dwindling its light, quiet, turning the corner, flickering behind a row of trees, gone.