The Cannibal Queen (3 page)

Yet pilotage has its limits. You must be able to see the ground and you must correctly identify what you see. At night the level of difficulty increases dramatically since all landmarks except towns and cities are hidden by darkness.

And since the
Queen
also lacks a turn-and-bank indicator, I cannot fly her into a cloud. Anything that obscures the ground or the horizon deprives you of your sense of when the aircraft is level. In the Stearman you are like a bird—your inner ear is your primary attitude reference and your brain is your navigation aid.

At St. Francis we saw a few Stearmans outfitted with all the gadgets and certified for instrument flight. At night. In my opinion a Stearman so equipped is just another airplane, although a funny-looking one. The only thing left to do is add a canopy and voilà! you’ll have the world’s most inefficient airliner.

But to each his own. If VOR and DME and ILS and Loran instruments make them happy, why not? Airplanes are like women—pick what you like and try to get it away from the guy who has it, then dress it out to the limit of your wallet and taste.

As David follows the interstate eastward, I sit back in the rear cockpit and luxuriate in the warmth and glow of a brilliant summer sky. An open cockpit makes you a part of that sky. You can reach out and grab a handful, sit up straight and let the wind play with the top of your helmet, or put your elbows on the padded edges of the cockpit and ride along in your winged chariot like a modern-day Caesar.

Here above the farms and ranches of the Great Plains aviation lives up to the promise that inspired dreamers through the ages. Here you are truly separate from the earth, at least for a little while, removed from the cares and concerns that occupy you on the ground. This separation from the earth is more than symbolic, more than a physical removal—it has an emotional dimension as tangible as the wood, fabric and steel that has transported you aloft.

We humans need to belong, to be a part of a family, to have a circle of friends and work that occupies our hands and brains. Yet we also need some means to place our daily concerns and our lives in proper perspective. Flying provides that. Cockpits are our mountaintops, our seats above the clouds where we can see into forever. The machines lift us into a pristine wilderness on journeys that strengthen, refresh and renew.

Hays, Kansas, becomes visible about 15 miles away. We circle the lone runway and land to the north. Taxiing in, the little terminal-FBO office looks different somehow. “We tore the old one down and built a new one,” the line boy tells me.

Oh. “Well, I haven’t been here in three or four years.” Not since the last time I took a Cessna 172 from Denver to Topeka.

This is our first real fuel stop on our aerial odyssey and David wants to pump the gas in. Standing on the back of the seat in the front cockpit, he fills the tank in the center of the upper wing. Like stock Stearmans, the
Queen
holds 46 gallons of gas and 6.6 gallons of oil. She burns about 12 gallons of gasoline and 1 quart of oil per hour, so her maximum range with a reserve is three hours. Watching David handle the fuel nozzle, I resolve to attempt no leg longer than two and a half hours. Gasoline to an airplane is like air to a diver—when you’re out, you’ve got a major problem.

Two and a half hours at about 80 knots works out to 200 nautical miles in calm air, a great deal less if you are flying directly into a strong prairie wind. But I have no fixed schedule and the entire summer to fly in.

Since I first learned to fly I have wanted to make a long flight, to fly as far and as long as I could stand it, then to eat and sleep and fly again. Just fly, watching the world roll beneath, listening to the engine, watching the clouds drift past and the sun arc westward in the blue sky above.

This is the summer of my long flight. This will be my Stearman summer.

I climb back into the cockpit eager to fly on. We will take off to the south and then turn east to follow the four-lane interstate. At the hold-short line I ease the
Queen
to a halt and run the engine up to 1,600 RPM. Cycle the prop twice to get hot oil into the prop hub, then check the mags. As usual I get a 125 RPM drop on the right mag and 50 on the left. She has done that since the day I acquired her and Steve Hall, the mechanic, can find nothing wrong. The
Queen
has an idiosyncrasy. I can live with that. I have several.

Taxi onto the runway and line the
Queen
up with the center line by putting an equal amount of runway on both sides of the nose. On the ground the
Queen
sits on her tail wheel with her nose pointed toward heaven, so the pilot cannot see directly forward. In this regard she is exactly like so many of the World War II airplanes that she and her sisters trained tens of thousands of pilots to fly—the B-17, P-40, P-47, P-51, Hellcat, Corsair, Avenger, and so on. When Harold Zipp and Jack Clark of Stearman Aircraft designed this masterpiece in 1933 by modifying Lloyd Stearman’s C-l design,
all
military aircraft had tail wheels.

I smoothly push the throttle and mixture knob forward with my left hand—the mixture knob goes about halfway and the throttle goes all the way to the stop. Today at Hays, 2,000 feet above sea level, the manifold pressure increases to 28 inches and the RPM goes to 2,250. As we go east toward the Mississippi we will come down off the high plains and each field will be lower than the last.

Simultaneously with the power increase, I tweak in some right rudder to counter the torque effect of the swirling air striking the rudder, and push the stick full forward. The tail must come off the ground as soon as possible so I can see where I am going and adjust our course down the runway with rudder.

Today at Hays the tail comes up within 10 seconds. In Boulder it takes about 15. As the tail comes up another rudder adjustment is required to counter the P-factor of the prop arc moving downward. With the tail up the plane is in the proper attitude to fly, running along on just its two main wheels, and I move the stick slowly back toward neutral as the load on the control surfaces changes with increasing airspeed.

Looking forward through the two little glass windshields, around the top of David’s head, I can see the entire runway and the center line. I jockey the rudder to hold us straight and today add some right stick into the prevailing crosswind to hold the right wing down.

Airspeed increasing nicely, 40 MPH … 50 … a glance at the engine gauges while I jockey the rudder … 60 … 65 and stick back a little to let the elevators bite and the wings take the weight of people, gasoline and airplane, all 3,000 pounds of it, controls constantly moving as necessary to keep the wings level and the nose rising in the unstable air.

She’s flying. Stop the nose coming up with forward stick and start giving her some forward trim.

Up we go away from the earth.

Once David asked, “When the tail comes up like that, what keeps the plane from going right on over on its nose?”

“Aerodynamics. As the tail rises above a streamlined position it becomes an airfoil with a downward lift vector, which pulls the tail back down to where it should be.”

“Oh,” he says, visualizing it and understanding. I think.

The Wright brothers’ greatest contribution to heavier-than-air flight was the realization that the machine would be flying in an unstable medium, the atmosphere, so it had to be designed in such a way that the pilot could make the constant adjustments necessary to counter the vagaries of the moving air, adjustments that birds make by altering the position of feathers, thereby changing the curvature and shape of their wings. They grasped the fact that a successful flying machine would have to be an artificial bird. It would have to climb, turn, and descend in unstable air under the absolute control of the person who flew it. No fools these American-Gothic originals, they decided to emulate the birds and achieve control by changing the shape of the machine’s wings. We still do that today, although we use ailerons or flaperons instead of wing warping, the Wrights’ technique.

The Wrights’ insight and solution solved the problem that had baffled and stymied all the experimenters before them, all those crazy dreamers through the ages who had tinkered and tried. It had stymied the Wrights’ contemporaries too, who immediately copied or tried to improve on the Wright technique once they grasped its implications.

The technical solution to the problem of controlled flight is more than a history lesson. It has profound implications. Flying an airplane is more complex than operating a boat: you merely steer a boat and occasionally push or pull on the throttle to go faster or slower. To fly an aircraft you must constantly alter the shape of the wings, you must use stick and rudder to climb or descend or turn to counter the swirls and vertical motion of the air; you must judge your height and speed and progress through the air and alter these factors as necessary to return to earth in a controlled manner. To fly an airplane you must truly fly as the birds do, an ironic truth that would have made the ancient dreamers smile.

Thank you, Orville. Thank you, Wilbur, wherever you are.

Flying is a skill, of course, like riding a bicycle, one that can be learned by anyone of modest intelligence and physical gifts who has the ability to take instruction. But when truly mastered and the aircraft becomes a part of you, an extension of your physical abilities, then flying is an art. And by happy coincidence, this mastery of the skill can occur with any airplane—indeed, with any craft that leaves the ground—if the pilot will only work at it long enough and hard enough.

I don’t have anywhere near that skill level yet in the
Cannibal
Queen. Maybe by the end of the summer I’ll get a taste of it again. I had it once, back in my twenties when I flew A-6 Intruders for Uncle Sam. After a thousand hours or so I could really fly that machine, make it do precisely what I wanted it to do in any flight regime. I could hold altitude like the altimeter needle was glued to the dial, nail an airspeed, bring the plane right to the edge of the stall and hold her there with whatever power setting I chose. I could feather it onto the runway or plant it, as I chose, where I chose, with whatever sink rate I chose. I could
fly
that airplane.

That is the feeling I want again. Flying is the only skill in life that I have ever mastered to that degree of proficiency. Some musicians have that level of skill, as do champion race car drivers, motorcycle riders, golfers, tennis players, and so on. It can be acquired if one works hard enough and has a little bit of talent.

Forbes Field in Topeka is a former military base with three or four long, wide runways and a huge parking mat with weeds growing up through the cracks in the concrete. The Kansas Air National Guard flies KC-135 tankers from one end of the field. One was busy making approaches as we taxied in.

It’s a long taxi, about halfway across Kansas, so I added power and raised the tail and steered with the rudder. Occasionally the prop whacked off a tall weed.

David and I got a motel room at an establishment on South Topeka Avenue that I often stayed in when I was in the Naval Reserve and commanded a reserve unit here. I like Topeka. Although it’s the capital of Kansas, it’s really just a small town on the eastern plains. It has lots of neat little houses owned by working Americans and lots of older cars and comfortable, tree-lined streets. There are also a couple of good barbecue places where the prices are very reasonable.

The following morning at 8
A.M.
the clouds were low and dark. A thunderstorm loomed to the northwest. And this was the day a professional photographer would take our picture. We had arranged to meet at a small, private grass field to the north of town, so David and I prepared the Stearman for flight and took off. As we flew north over the west side of the city the clouds ahead looked nasty.

“Rain,” David announced.

“Terrific.”

We go into it at a thousand feet. Visibility drops somewhat but not too much. And we stay relatively dry in the cockpit, which is nicer.

The field is right where the sectional has it spotted, so I drop down for a low pass to look it over. A mudhole with standing water is about 500 feet from the approach end, and there is another at midfield. The taxi areas in front of the one tee-hangar look like quagmires. I make another pass then head southeast for Billard Field.

Billard belongs to the city of Topeka and has a non-federal control tower. It is small in comparison to the faded grandeur of Forbes and has a really neat little terminal that houses the FBO and a restaurant that serves decent coffee and hamburgers, although the person who wrote the menu gave the sandwiches cutesy names like Baron Burger and Cherokee Favorite. We order breakfast in the restaurant and settle in to wait. I suspect the photographer will go out to the grass field and then come here when he discovers we aren’t there. And that is what happens.

Luckily the storm bypasses Billard. The photographer, David Zlotky, snaps away. Soon David and I are back in the airplane while Zlotky waits with his camera beside the runway. I plan for a dozen landings unless he waves me in sooner.

The landings are fun. I come in high and slip the plane some, do some wheel landings, some full stall, really work at flying the Queen. Like a fine horse, she responds to every twitch of the controls, absolutely obedient, seemingly trying to please the man with the reins. This quality is what made the Stearman such a fine trainer.

If only I were better at it. But I guess if competence came too easily it wouldn’t be worth much.

Here we come on base leg, intentionally high and five miles-per-hour fast, carrying a smidgen too much power. Wind off the left side, with maybe five knots crosswind component. On final, still high and fast, I crank in a ton of right rudder and apply left stick. She comes down like a brick in the slip.

Now! Straighten her out, little right rudder for the crosswind, power just so, glide angle okay … coming down nicely …begin the flare by reducing power and pulling the stick back while the rudder is adjusted and more left aileron is applied. Correct for the burbling air and shifting wind, increase the backstick, watch the nose … and she touches down slightly tail first. The mains fall a good six inches. Darn!