Ричард Бах: Biplane

Still, though, the foreboding, the reluctance in the wood and the fabric and a trembling in the control stick.

The airport is a single runway, a hard-surface runway not-far from the water tower. The wind is blowing from the sea, across the runway. Official terminology: crosswind. I have heard the stories of the old pilots. Never land in a crosswind, they said, and told stories of the days when to do this was a painful and costly error.

And for a moment I forget what time it is. The airport is safe in 1964 and I am flying in 1929.

Come on, airplane, settle down. The Parks feels brittle and stiff, and I move the rudder from side to side to make her loosen up. She is trying to remind me of the stories. Crosswinds to her are like flames to a racehorse, and I am leading her, urging her into the heat and the fire, concerned only about fuel and sandwiches.

Eighty miles per hour and lined on the runway. Power back, the Parks settles lifelessly toward the ground. I am puzzled that she should feel so dead. Settle down, there, little friend. In a minute you will be drinking a tank of cool red eighty-octane.

The wheels touch the concrete smoothly at 70 mph, and, tail held high, we slow, runway blurred still at the edges. Finally the tail loses its flying speed and the tailwheel comes down to squeak on the hard surface. And we meet the inevitable. Moving at thirty miles per hour, the biplane, against her will and mine, begins to turn into the wind. Sudden full rudder against the turn has no effect, and she swings faster into the wind. Press hard opposite brake. but that instant when the brake could have helped is past and from the slow turn a monster grabs the biplane and slams her into an instant whiplash turnabout. With a great shriek from the tires we snap around, sliding sideways down the runway. A shriek, a horizon blurring all around, a sharp pistol-shot from the right main landing gear, all in a half-second. While I sit powerless in the cockpit, numbly holding full opposite rudder, a wheel breaks, folds beneath the airplane. A wingtip grinds suddenly down into the concrete, spraying sparks and splinters and old fabric to mix with blue burning rubber smoke. Scraping and screaming about me, the biplane is lashed once, hard, by her old enemy, the crosswind.

And then it is quiet, save for the engine panting and quickly dying as I cut the switches.

You fool.

You stupid idiot you harebrained excuse for a pilot you hamfisted imbecile. You idiot you fool you dumb stupid—you’ve broken her! Look at what you’ve done, you idiot, you fool! I climb slowly from the cockpit. It has been very quick, very sudden, and I have destroyed an airplane because I didn’t heed the old warnings. Nineteen twenty-nine does not mix with today. They are separate separate worlds. You fool. The right wheel is smashed beneath the airplane and torn in two pieces. You idiot. The right wingtip is shredded, the rear wingspar cracked. You dumb stupid imbecile. I forced 1929 into the present and that force was enough to shear the carbon-steel bolts of the right main gear fittings, to twist them into little bent-clay cylinders of something once useful. You worthless clod.

A few tears of gasoline fall from the engine. It is very quiet on the runway. The crosswind sighs now, unconcerned, no longer interested.

Airport attendants, those that heard the crash, drive from the hangar with a truck and a winch and they lift the nose of the biplane, and help me guide her under a roof. A tall jack is moved in to replace the missing wheel and broken landing gear strut.

They leave me and I sit alone with the biplane. What is the lesson, airplane? What am I supposed to learn here? There is no answer. Outside, the sky goes dark, and later it begins to rain.

“I S THAT ALL THAT’S WRONG?” Colonel George Carr speaking, and the words echo in the hangar. “From the way Evander talked, I thought you had HURT something! Son of a gun, boy, we’ll have you flying by tomorrow noon!”

George Carr. A collection of letters that stands for a weatherbeaten face below a shock of grey hair and warm blue eyes that have seen many calendars come and go, and many, many airplanes.

The call to Lumberton, this morning, had not been easy to make.

“Evander, I’m at Crescent Beach.”

“You’re fine, I hope,” Evander Britt said. “And how’s your new airplane flying? Still like it?”

I was grateful for the straight-line. “I like it fine, Van. But I don’t think it’s too crazy about me.”

“Now how would you mean that?” If he thought from my call that something had gone wrong, he was certain of it now.

“I had a bit of a ground-loop here, trying to land in a crosswind. Lost a gear and a wheel, tore one wing up pretty bad. Wonder if you’d happen to have a spare gear and wheel around.” There. I had said it. Whatever he says now I deserve. The worst thing he can say, I deserve every bit of it. I clenched my teeth.

“Oh. no. ”

For a moment there was full silence on the line, when he knew that he had given his airplane to the wrong man, to a brash cocky youngster who hadn’t begun to learn how to fly an airplane or to be a pilot. The silence was not enjoyable.

“Well.” He was brisk and friendly again, all business, trying to solve my problems. “I’ve got a spare set of landing gear all right, that you can have. And a set of wings, if you need. You broke the wheel, did you?”

“Right main wheel. Tire looks usable, but there’s not a chance for the wheel.”

“I don’t have any wheels. Maybe Gordon Sherman, over in Asheville, might loan you one to get home on. I’ll call him up now and drive over and get it if he does. Don’t know what we’re going to do if he doesn’t have one. Those big wheels scarcer than hens’ teeth. I’ll call George Carr the minute I hang up. He’s done all the mechanic work on the Parks, and licensed it for you. If anyone can fix the Parks, he can. I’ll put the landing gear and wheel in his car, if he’ll drive down. I’d be down myself, but I’ve got a case going in court tomorrow that I just can’t leave. You have the airplane in a hangar, do you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. We’re having some rain up here, moving down that way. Wouldn’t want to get her wet.” He paused. “If you want to have your Fairchild back, I’m making the offer.”

“Thanks, Van. I got my airplane right now. All I have to do is learn how to fly it.”

George Carr had arrived, windshield wipers squeaking across battered glass, three hours later.

* * *

“Why don’t you strip the fabric off around that aileron fitting there, so we can get at it a little easier? Might pull that panel beneath the wing, too, would help.”

The colonel works happily, because he likes to work on airplanes. He likes to see them come back to life beneath his hands. He is pounding with a rawhide mallet on a twisted bracket, straightening it. Pound, pound, echoing.

“. used to take my old Kreider-Reisner 31 out Sundays, land on the crossroads. People for the most part never seen an airplane up close before, let alone got in one.” Pound. Pound pound-pound. “Yeah. For a while there it was a pretty good livin’.” Pound-pound-pound.

He talks on, as we work, of a world that I am just beginning to know. A world in which a pilot always has to be ready to repair his airplane, or it will never fly again. He speaks without nostalgia or longing for the days past, as though they weren’t really past at all, as though as soon as he has the wheel back on the biplane we’ll start the engine and fly to a crossroad or a pasture close to town, to begin flying the folk who have never seen an airplane up close before, let alone got in one.