The Cannibal Queen (11 page)
Finally I take her and make a couple of two-G turns to give him the taste of it, then head back for the field. On the downwind we fly over a Little League ballpark with four fields arranged like pie quarters. The lights are on and the teams are on the fields. We float overhead under the overcast.
I decide to land on the grass runway they have mowed to the right of the east-west paved one. As I float in, the man on Unicom tells me that we have two spectators, so I should wave. I ask if they are out on the grass. When he doesn’t respond I add power. We fly down the runway at fifty feet as I repeat the question. I feel absolutely confident David knows not to leave the area of the parking mat, but this could be someone else. The Unicom man says, No, they are on the mat.
I put her down on the next approach and taxi in. David assists Ray from the cockpit and straps in Corey while I keep the engine running. This time I take off from the grass. Corey tells me this is his very first airplane ride.
Thirteen and never been up in a plane? I am stunned. I took my first airplane ride at the age of six in an Aeronca Champ without an electrical system. I can still remember my Dad hand-propping the engine while the pilot, my Dad’s law partner, grinned at me. I was too small to see over the instrument panel, so I looked at the gauges and listened to the engine and savored the weird sensations. I recall looking out the window at the trees below and thinking how wonderful it all was. The flight lasted seventeen minutes. Didn’t matter. I was hooked.
I let Corey fly the Queen. We go north around the end of the island, make the turn up the St. Marys River, then drift south over the anchorage where David and I had our jet-ski adventure this morning. Two pulp mills are pouring their fumes into the still evening sky.
I enter the pattern for the grass runway on a left base. On final we are ten miles per hour fast, so I lower the nose. When I flare we float along above the grass like cottonwood fluff drifting on a breeze. At last we alight and I use the remainder of the strip to get stopped.
I am furious with myself. Why didn’t I slip her down, scrub off that excess airspeed? What was I thinking about?
I am still seething at myself as we say good-bye to Ray and Corey and watch them leave. Damnation! Am I ever going to learn to fly this plane?
“Corey said flying in a Stearman has been a lifetime ambition for his dad,” David tells me. “He told me so while we were waiting.” This makes me feel better.
We are sitting in a Pizza Hut when the last of the twilight fades. In minutes some of the Little League crowd comes in, two complete teams and their parents. They are boisterous, happy. The last of my frustration leaks away.
David is smiling, the crowd is raucous, I am content. A summer evening in small-town America. I like it more than words can express. My life is passing too quickly, but by God I am spending it well.
The next morning I wake up David at seven o’clock. I want to arrive in Orlando by noon before the usual Florida afternoon thunderstorms get cooking. The morning here is foggy. The briefer at the Flight Service Station tells me that Jacksonville airport just a few miles east is 200 feet and a quarter mile in fog. “This stuff looks localized in the Jacksonville area, though. Gainesville is clear and so is Orlando. It should burn off before long.”
I thank him and go out onto the lawn that leads to the beach and look at the sky. Fog floating eastward in strands, with patches of blue above.
David and I turn in the car at the airport FBO and I get a cup of coffee from the courtesy pot. I leave a quarter in the kitty. Out on the mat where the
Queen
is tied down we can see the goo westward toward the Jacksonville airport. I look south. That’s the way we will go, south along the beach, through the Mayport Naval Station airport traffic area, flying just off the beach until we near Daytona Beach, where we will strike a little southwest for Orlando. More blue sky to the south.
We untie the airplane and load our stuff into the baggage bin behind the rear cockpit; then I go back inside for another cup of coffee. As I sip it I decide the sky to the south is definitely clearing. I throw the styrofoam cup in a trash can by the fuel pump and climb into the cockpit. David is already seated up forward.
This morning the surface wind is out of the south at five or six knots, so I use runway 18. These abandoned military fields were a real bonanza to small towns, providing them with first-class airports that small communities could never afford to build. And some can’t afford to even maintain.
Eleven hundred feet puts us just on top of the scattered, patchy fog layer. I turn the flying over to David and get on the radio to Mayport tower. They cheerfully let us fly through their airspace. We spot an aircraft carrier, hull number 60, lying tied to the Mayport carrier pier. I try to remember which ship that is, but can’t. She is smaller than
Nimitz
-class boats, I concude, although not by much. Her decks are bare of aircraft but there is some heavy equipment by the catapults. They must be working on the cats. Four surface warships are also tied up there. They look to my rusty eye to be a couple destroyers and two guided missile frigates.
In minutes David turns the flying back over to me and rests his head on the right side of the cockpit. I ask him if he is going to sleep. No, he’s just looking.
He’s not in love with flying, as I am. Perhaps that is inevitable. He will fall in love with it only if he sweats bullets trying to come up with the money for aircraft rentals and instructors and gasoline, then lies awake nights wondering why the skills are so difficult to master and the money so hard to come by. We truly value only what we earn.
South of Jacksonville we leave the last patch of fog behind. The gauzy sky gives us plenty of soft, diffused sunshine and excellent visibility.
Off to the left the sea sparkles as the sun reflects off the swells. A few fishing boats trolling their nets are in sight most of the time. No other ships. To our right the beach shines like a golden ribbon in the sun. Between the dune and highway A1A sits a single endless row of beach houses side by side, all facing the sea, that stretches away to the south until it disappears in the haze. Has anyone ever counted the houses along the beach between Jacksonville and Daytona?
Nearing De Land, David has a suggestion. “Let’s land at Orlando and get the camera out of the baggage bin, then fly over Disney World.”
“Why don’t we land at this next airport and get the camera out? Then we’ll be ready.”
He agrees that would save time.
We have been flying for an hour and sixteen minutes when I cut the engine by the fuel pump in De Land. We have gas to go on to Orlando, but we fuel and oil the plane anyway.
I put the camera around my neck and we depart heading southwest. I soon turn the plane over to David while I consult my sectional chart. Let’s see. … There is an Airport Radar Service Area in Orlando. The FAA owns the air from the surface to 4,000 feet for five nautical miles in all directions around the tower, and from 1,400 feet to 4,000 for five more miles. If we stay outside that circle with a ten-mile radius, we will be okay. And luckily Disney World is marked on the chart as being southwest of the city, safely outside the circle. Maybe five miles outside it.
We will fly southwest across the northern approaches to the city to Lake Apopka. That will be a snap to find. Then we will head straight south to Disney World. No problem.
On the way to Lake Apopka David is busy in the front cockpit, though I can’t see just what he is doing. Then he sticks his right arm out in the wind. A paper airplane is attached. He turns it loose. I sigh.
Leaving Lake Apopka I see a large silver ball sitting on the ground fifteen miles or so south and point it out to David. “I’ll bet that’s Disney World.” It is. We later learn that’s the geodesic dome at EPCOT Center.
So we fly toward it. I snap some pictures of David leaning out the left side of the front cockpit, then the right. Then I change rolls of film.
Over the sprawling Disney complex I search the sky for other aircraft, then gawk at the sights below. We are flying at 1,200 feet now. As David flies I photograph. Then we turn and start back north. Now I maneuver the plane with one hand while I use the camera with the other. The sunlight is streaming through the gaps in the cloud layer a thousand feet above us onto the bright yellow wing, so I want the wing in the picture with the Disney edifices so that everyone will know that this picture wasn’t taken by a NASA Satellite. I shoot the whole roll of film as we fly from sunlight to shadow back to sunlight.
Heading north back to Lake Apopka, I dial in the ATIS frequency for Orlando Executive. The radio is marginal at best and the transmission is scratchy, which is one reason I don’t like to work with Approach controllers. I often miss a transmission or don’t get their drift. Now I listen carefully. He says something about a TCA.
A
TCA?
A huge, sprawling Terminal Control Area? My God, I thought Orlando had a piddling little ARSA!
I listen to the recording again while I stare at the sectional. Yep, he said “TCA.”
A shot of adrenaline whacks me in the heart. Have I violated restricted airspace because I didn’t know it was there? I cuss without keying the intercom.
Holding the stick between my knees, I wrestle with the sectional chart until I find the date information. Lordy, this thing expired in September of last year! I’m flying with an outdated chart! Well, if I’ve just earned my first flight violation, it’s too late to sweat it now. It’s done.
Flying east from Lake Apopka, I switch to Executive Tower and listen a while. Other aircraft are coming in VFR from the north. David releases two more paper airplanes before I give Tower a call. They answer routinely.
Will some FAA enforcer be waiting for me on the ground?
A fine and license suspension would be just perfect. I stew about this all the way in.
No one is waiting for us. We taxi around awhile and a guy in a truck leads me to a place to tie down the Queen. As I wipe the oil off the fuselage I curse my own foolishness for not checking the expiration dates on these charts more carefully. A thousand details to take care of and I only remembered 999.
I make a deal with a guy who works for the FBO to wash the plane sometime during the next five days. She needs a bath to get rid of this grime. Hell, so do I.
Inside the FBO is a pilot shop. I make a beeline for it and latch onto a Jacksonville sectional chart. Outside I unfold it. Relief floods over me. They gave Orlando a TCA all right, one with the usual circle with the 30-mile radius centered on Orlando International. But the airspace that is controlled down to the altitudes where I fly the
Cannibal Queen
is rectangular, the first rectangular TCA I have ever laid eyes on. And the airspace over Disney World is uncontrolled up to 3,000 feet.
That was a close squeak.
“Did you see me release those paper airplanes?” David wants to know.
“Yeah.”
“I wrote messages on them.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t tell you.”
I scrutinize his face. He wants me to think the messages were obscene, but if I ask him he’ll deny it. He gives me a big, slow grin, his braces gleaming.
His mother will be here tonight. Thank goodness.
I throw down the newspaper just as David comes back into our hotel room. He has been downstairs feeding some of my hard-earned quarters into video games. He looks tired. We swam when we first got here, then I tried to nap and read the paper while he amused himself. He stacks the unused quarters on the dresser and falls into bed facedown. In minutes he is asleep.
We have four and a half more hours to wait before the plane is due with Nancy and the girls, at 10:16
P.M.
I turn on the computer and get busy.
When I turn it off three hours later, he is still asleep. I wake him and we head for the commercial airport a mile away. The terminal is really snazzy, new and modern.
The plane will be more or less on time. As we eat a tasteless hamburger in the only airport grease shop still open, I thank him for flying with me these past ten days.
He grins.
“You glad it’s over?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah,” he admits. “That’s a lot of flying. But thanks for taking me.”
What a fine young man he is. Walking down the concourse I am still glowing; then he sticks a finger in my ribs. The flying hasn’t changed him.
D
ISNEY
W
ORLD WAS BUILT BY PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT BIG.
T
HIS
monument to the American credo that Bigger is Better and Biggest is Best cannot be seen in its entirety by any one mortal, not if he is accompanied by youngsters who insist on sleeping until 11
A.M
.
Fortunately, after a day or so of walking and standing in endless lines in the muggy Florida summer heat, you will lose any desire you might have had to see the
whole
thing. The thought will occur to you that the Disney folks have a lot of people on their staff who think the perfect family vacation resort is a place where everyone can do precisely the kind of things most moms like to do on Sunday afternoons—shop in quaint little doodad stores for worthless souvenirs, wander endlessly looking at faintly amusing architecture (Oh, wow! Here’s the casbah in Tangiers without the dirt and squalor and Moslem fanatics ready to slit your throat), and occasionally invest in a soft drink at movie theater prices to keep the kids pacified. You will survey infinite vistas of manicured, weed-free lawns and flower beds while you recall your scraggly little petunia patch back home. You will listen to zillions of young children squeal about thirst and bathrooms. All this you can do on a smaller scale in any large city.
What makes Disney World special are the continuous conveyor belts of little plastic cars that carry a cargo of up to eight humans each through dark, winding tunnels filled with weird stuff. So you go from building to building, shuffle slowly through mind-numbing mazes of crowd-control railings, and if your bladder holds out and a thunderstorm doesn’t soak you, you will see more weird stuff than you can hope to remember for more than an hour. And to think the people who thought this up work for a drug-free company!