Ричард Бах - Biplane

After a few minutes of rain, the first turbulence hits. Often I have heard turbulence described as a giant fist smashing down upon an airplane. I have never really felt it that way in a small airplane until this second. The fist is just the size of a biplane, and it is swinging down at the end of a very long arm. It strikes the airplane so hard that I am thrown against the safety belt and have to hold tightly to the control stick to keep my hand from being jerked away. Strange air, this. Not the constant slamming of the twisted roiled air that one expects from winds across rocky places, but smooth. smooth, and BAM! Then smooth. smooth. BAM! The rain grows heavier, in great weeping veils sorrowing down to the ground. The sky is solid water ahead. We can’t get through.

We turn away, not really discouraged, for we hadn’t expected to get through the first thing in the morning.

Whenever I turn away from bad weather in an airplane not equipped to fly by instruments, I feel very self-righteous. The proper thing to do. The number one cause of fatal accidents in light aircraft, the statistics say, is the pilot who tries to push the weather, to slip through without going on instruments. I’ll push the weather with the best of ’em, I say sanctimoniously, but I’ll always do it with a path open behind me. The biplane, with its instruments that give only a rough approximation of altitude and a misty vague idea of heading, on a wobbly compass, is not built to fly through any weather. Any weather at all. If I absolutely had to, I might be able to get it down through an overcast, flying with my hands off the stick and holding perhaps the W in the compass by rudder alone. But that’s a last-ditch effort, taken only where the land below is flat and I know for sure that the ceiling is at least one thousand feet.

There are those who say that you can spin down through an overcast, and I’d agree with them; a good procedure. But I have heard that with a few of the old airplanes the spin turns into a flat spin after three or four revolutions, and from a flat spin there is no recourse save the parachute. This may be one of the rumors, and untrue. But the danger therein is my thought, I do not know. Not the flat spin, but the fear of the flat spin keeps me from an otherwise practical and effective emergency procedure. It is much easier to stay away from the weather.

The first round goes to San Jacinto, and taking its strange knocking about, we fly, filled with righteousness, back out of the pass. What a fine example we are setting for all the younger pilots. Here is a pilot who has flown instruments before and often, for hours and in thick cloud, turning back from a bit of mist that obscures the ground. What a fine example am I. How much the prudent pilot. I shall live to be very old. Unfortunately, no one is watching.

We turn south along the eastern edge of the mountains, over the bright green squares in the sand that irrigation has wrought. And we climb. It takes a long time to gain altitude. Playing the thermals and the upslope winds as hard as I can, I rise only to the level of the lower peaks; a little more than eight thousand feet, where it is freezing once again. At least here, when I can no longer stand the cold, I have only to come down a little to be warm once again.

We won’t even try Borego Pass. A long narrow gorge running diagonally through the mountains, it is walled only a short way down its length by the same blanket of grey that covers the pass at San Jacinto.

South some more and third time must be the charm. More rough, high country, but at least the cloud is not so bad. I turn at Julian toward a narrow gap in the mountain, and follow a winding road.

The wind through the gap is a direct headwind as I fly west. It flattens the grass along the roadside and the road’s white line creeps reluctantly past my wing. It must be blowing fifty miles an hour at this altitude. There is an awesomeness about it, an uneasy feeling that I am not wanted here, as if I am being lured into the gap in order that some hungry dragon within can have his fill of warm engine and crushed wingspars. We fly and fly and struggle and fly against the wind, and finally the gap is ours. We are through, to a land of high valleys and peaceful green farms in mountain meadows. But look down there. The grass, even the short grass, is being flattened silver by the wind, it is being ironed onto the ground by it. That wind must be fifty miles per hour now at the surface!

This is work, and not fun at all. If the wind would only be on my tail, it would be fun. Ahead, the clouds, watching me and grinning maliciously. The only way out of the valley ahead is to follow the road, and the cloud turns into fog that lies on the road like a big fuzzy barbell that can never be lifted. It is sad. We have fought so hard to get here. Perhaps we can land. If we land here, surely we can outwait the clouds and continue westward this afternoon. The meadows look very good for landing. Light rain in the air, but much sun too. Suddenly they combine off the right wing into a brilliant full-circle rainbow, a really bright one, almost opaque in its radiance. Normally the rainbow would be a beautiful sight, worthy of awe, but I still must fight to move an inch against the wind and I can only take snapshots with my eyes and hope that later, when I am not fighting, I’ll be able to remember the rainbow for what it is, and as fresh and as bright as it is.

I shall land, and save the advance I’ve made. So, decision made, down comes the little biplane from its rainbow, toward the wet green grass of the meadow. A good landing place ahead, worth inspecting closely. Grass is taller than it looked. And wet. Probably a lot of mud under that grass, and these are hard narrow high-pressure tires, perfect for bogging up to axles in. Look there: a cow. I’ve heard of cows eating the fabric right off old airplanes. Something in the dope that they like.

So much for that meadow.

Near a farmhouse, another field to check. Except for the trees, it looks soft and smooth. Should be able to hover right in over the top of them. But what would happen if the wind stops? I’d never be able to get out again. Remember, this valley is four thousand feet high, and that’s some pretty thin air. Only way I’d ever get off again would be in this hurricane wind. Hot day, or no wind, and I’d need four times as much room to get into the air at all. Two fields, two vetos. One more chance, anyway; maybe the pass to San Diego is open, down by the Mexican border.

Landing forgotten, we turn the headwind into tailwind and shoot from the high valleys of Julian like a wheat puff from a cereal gun.

Being cuffed about like a toy glider has a wearing effect on one’s nerves. Last chance, coming up. San Diego. South again across more miles of desert, thinking of nothing but how lonely it would be to have to land here, and how much land we really have in this country that we do not use. Think of all the houses that could be put on this one little stretch of desert. Now all we have to do is coax somebody to come out and live here.

One last highway, the one that leads to San Diego. I have only to fly along this road, as though I were an automobile, and I shall get to San Diego; from there an easy matter to fly up the beach to home. I am an automobile. I am an automobile.

We bank and follow the road. The wind is a living thing, and it doesn’t like the biplane at all. It punches at us constantly, it jabs and batters as if there is an urgent need for it to perfect its style and its rhythm. I hold to the stick very tightly. We must be making progress, but the hilltop to our left is certainly not moving very quickly. It has been there for two minutes. I check the road.

Oh, merciful heavens. We’re moving backward! It is a dizzying feeling, and the first time I have ever seen it from the cockpit of an airplane. I have to steady myself and hold even more tightly to the stick. An airplane must move through the air in order to fly, and almost always that means that it moves over the ground, too. But now white lines in the road are passing me, and I have the strange feeling that I had over Odessa, that I have when I stand at the top of a ladder or a tall building and look down. As if there is a tremendous fall coming in the next few seconds. The airspeed needle is firm on 80 miles per hour. The wind must be at least 85 mph on my nose. The biplane simply cannot move to the west. Nothing I can do will make her move in the direction of the Pacific Ocean.