The Cannibal Queen (38 page)
I thanked Dave Lewis for his hospitality and preflighted the
Cannibal
Queen.
Are warbirds the ultimate upscale status toy? Certainly. They’re like beautiful women—if you have to ask what one costs, you can’t afford it. But for your edification I will tell you that you could own a couple of Lamborghini Diablos and a Ferrari for the price of one good P-51. And the Mustang will cost you a fortune in maintenance and operating costs—plan on hiring a couple of full-time mechanics and buying gasoline by the truckload. You’d also better be a pretty good pilot or you and your toy will end up in the same smoking hole.
But Chino is more than a toy shop for the filthy rich. Here the heavy iron is restored and maintained by experts and continues to fly. Here and at airshows across the country people like you and me can thrill to the roar of big piston engines and watch with awe as Mustangs and Corsairs and Hellcats take off with 52 inches of manifold pressure and point their long, gleaming snouts skyward. There is more to aviation than airliners and Cessnas. Thank heavens!
Some warbirds obviously should be preserved in museums for future generations. Yet when an airplane is permanently moved inside and polished so slick a fly groundloops trying to land, somehow we are all a little poorer. Some of these machines should be flying, should be out there in their natural habitat, the great open spaces of the sky.
I think a warbird is the perfect way for a person with more money than he can count to lighten the load. On airframe restoration experts. On machine shops. On engine experts. On custom paint specialists. On experienced flight instructors. Liz Taylor’s emeralds never gave me an ounce of satisfaction.
T
HE VISIBILITY IS ONLY THREE MILES WITH THE SKY PARTIALLY
obscured by haze. There’s too much moisture in the air—humidity is about 35%. And the smog thickens the mix.
I study the sectional yet again and carefully note the ARSA approach frequencies. Chino is under the ARSA centered around Ontario Airport, eight miles north. East of Ontario is the Norton Air Force Base ARSA. West of Ontario is Pomona, with an airport traffic area that reaches up to 3,000 feet. Ten miles east of Chino is Riverside Airport, which also has an airport traffic area. March Air Force Base is southeast of Riverside. Eight miles south of Chino are hills, one with a peak of 3,085 feet. South of that row of hills are Marine Corps Air Station El Toro and John Wayne—Orange County Airport. To the west of Chino lies the great malignant mushroom of the Los Angeles TCA and all the airports in its shadow—LAX, Los Alamitos, Long Beach, Burbank, El Monte, Torrance and so on.
This basin is no place for a fellow without navigation aids to wander around semi-lost. You’ll get a flight violation quicker than an IRS agent can clean out your wallet. Full of misgivings, I strap on the
Queen
and light off the Lycoming.
After an intersection takeoff the
Queen
climbs quickly to 1,500 feet. A left turn clears the traffic pattern; then I ask Tower if I can switch to Ontario Approach. They grant permission.
I want desperately to avoid getting lost in this soup in the two or ten minutes it will take for Approach to pick me up and grant me permission to enter the ARSA. I make a left turn and place Chino Airport on my left wing as I make my call. Straight east five or six miles is a four-lane highway running north and south. If I hold over that highway I should be clear of both the Chino and Riverside airport traffic areas and under the Ontario ARSA.
Approach answers immediately and assigns me a discrete squawk. I dial it in and look again for Chino Airport. Still visible. I am debating whether to make a tight 180 to keep it in sight or fly east to the highway when Approach announces radar contact and grants me permission to head north through the ARSA.
Well, that was easy. Today. They’re obviously not very busy. A fellow wouldn’t want to try this without nav aids on a soupy day with a flock of migratory airliners coming and going. Then Approach will just tell you to stay clear, if they condescend to talk to you at all.
Climbing through 3,000 feet I top the hazy marine layer and visibility instantly improves to maybe 15 miles. El Cajon Pass is ten degrees right. Beyond it is the Mohave.
I go through at 5,500 feet and follow the interstate toward Barstow. The air above the dirty, yellow-brown land is hot. Wispy high clouds merely diffuse the sunlight without weakening it. In minutes I am sweating in the cockpit under my leather jacket.
At Barstow the winds are supposedly calm. That is what the FBO man tells me on the radio. But on final approach I find they are shifting around all over the compass at four or five knots. The landing is a typical desert arrival—I’m proud that I didn’t scrape a wingtip.
I shut down by the fuel pump and stow the jacket in the baggage bin. The temperature here is in the high nineties. Baking in the sun are rows of Army olive-drab helicopters in front of three long, white, clapboard hangars. I’ve never seen anything quite like these hundred-yard-long sheds. They look like they might have once held a hundred cavalry horses each.
The FBO man asks where I’m bound and I tell him up toward Vegas. “Good luck at the tables,” he says.
“Won’t be doing any of that,” I assure him. “I’m going on up toward Zion and Bryce Canyon.”
Northeast of Barstow the desert seems lifeless from three thousand feet above it. The peaks are black rock. Alluvial skirts of sand and gravel fan out below them and peter out on the harsh brown flats. The watercourses are quite plain, but there is no water. Not a drop. All this erosion resulted from occasional showers and thunderstorms, only a few inches of water a year total. So the stark, eroded landscape is a profound monument to the immensity of time.
In this bleak wilderness of sand and stone there are few good places for an emergency landing. Inevitably any spot you choose will have a boulder or a gulley in the wrong place that will wipe off the landing gear or flip the plane onto its nose or back. A forced landing—that is one where the engine is still running and you can fly around down low for awhile to find a likely spot—has a better chance. If you can, find a road.
Passing Baker I look left, off to the northwest, at Death Valley. The heat shimmering off the desert up that way vaporizes my vague desire to land at Furnace Creek in the heart of Death Valley. At 211 feet below sea level, the airport there is the lowest in the United States. I’ve landed at Furnace Creek before in other airplanes in the winter or fall. In early August the heat will be truly awesome. I like the Lycoming engine on the
Cannibal Queen
too much to subject it to that kind of abuse.
That thought automatically brings my eyes to the engine gauges. Cylinder head temp is 220 degrees, the hottest I’ve ever seen it. Oil temp is 165 and pressure is steady at 50, the minimum safe pressure.
I’m bouncing again in desert thermals so I let the updrafts carry the
Queen
higher. The air will be cooler the higher I get and I have a 4,630-foot-high pass ahead, just south of Clark Mountain in the Tonopah Range. The turbulence in that pass may be fierce today, so I hit it high, at 7,500 feet, and cross with no problem.
Out here in the desert the visibility is excellent, easily a hundred miles, so Las Vegas is visible quite a distance away. I leave the interstate and head east across the McCullough Range. The highest peak here is under me at 7,026 feet, but the winds forced upward by the mountains slam the
Queen
around.
On the eastern side of the McCulloughs is a salt flat, then a gentle incline up to Boulder City overlooking Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. The airport is a new one on the southwest side of the city, on the slope below the town. It’s 2,200 feet above the ocean.
The Unicom guy says the wind is out of the north and suggests runway 33. I make a left base entry and am soon floating down final, floating so much that I know the wind is behind me. Toying with the idea of going around, I keep descending.
There’s a wind sock at the approach end and it verifies the wind is out of the south, behind me, at seven or eight knots. At least it’s not a crosswind. I’ll give it a try.
With the power at idle I begin my flare. A wind sock at midfield catches my eye—wind out of the west at seven or eight.
I fly through the shift just before the wheels touch. Left wing down, right rudder, stick slamming around to hold her, then she’s on. As I roll out I see a third wind sock at the upwind end of this runway: this one indicates the wind is out of the north! At seven or eight knots.
The line boys who help me fuel the
Queen
are Indians. “How hot is it?” I ask.
“Last I looked, a hundred and four.”
Well, Coonts, you wanted desert. By gum, boy, you got it!
Lake Mead is emerald green from 2,500 feet above it. The sand-colored rock ridges are visible after they enter the green water: they seem to descend into infinite green depths as shadows until finally the yellowish color is completely merged with the green of the water. Speedboats pulling water skiers plow the surface.
North of Lake Mead I pick up the interstate just east of the Mormon Mesa VOR. The white cone of the radio nav aid is quite prominent amid the rock and dirt of this hot, empty land. And Lordy, it is hot!
I take a squint at the engine instruments and my heart sinks. The oil temperature is up to 175 degrees and the pressure is down to 45, 5 PSI below the green. As oil gets hotter it gets thinner. Is it lubricating the engine properly? Cylinder head temp is only 190, so maybe.
How the heck would I know?
Now I fret. My eyes keep coming back to the oil temp and pressure gauges. If I try to climb to cooler air the climb will really cook the oil. I reduce power an inch. Maybe that will help. Since nothing is free, the immediate result is the loss of five miles per hour in airspeed. That means less air is going through the cooling fins of the cylinders.
Have I developed an oil leak? I use my hand to wipe the sides of the Queen. Dry as usual. No oil film on the forward windshield.
The air’s just too darned hot. That’s what it is.
St. George, Utah, is just ahead through the pass. I decide to land and sit for a couple hours until the air cools a little. That oil pressure needle below the green arc is impossible to disregard.
My call on Unicom is answered promptly. The wind is 240 at 12. Recommend runway 16. Okay.
My first look at the field makes my stomach churn. The single asphalt runway sits on top of a ridge that drops steeply away on all sides, especially the approach end. And the approach end of runway 16 is guarded by a huge hill to the west. The wind is coming around the south end of that prodigious hill and roaring up that steep slope to the runway. Hill? Big as it is, it’s a mountain to this West Virginia boy.
I keep the right wing down as I flare and let the right wheel make first contact. I can feel the wind shift toward the right. She bounces. Stick back and right and lots of left rudder, and still I swerve alarmingly before I save it.
Disgust washes over me. Damn this desert flying! Another religious experience. Before this trip is over I’m going to be qualified to live in a monastery.
It’s 102 degrees at the St. George airport, which is 2,938 feet above sea level. The wind is 12 knots gusting to 21. The line boy tells me about the wind. “Always comes humping from the west in the afternoon. You gotta get here before noon if you want to avoid it.”
At 6
P.M.
I’m rolling down the runway feeding in right stick and left rudder to keep the
Queen
straight as the strong right cross wind makes the plane goosey. Now I lift the left wheel, then the right. Airborne, crabbing, but she’s climbing!
The wind squirts the
Queen
eastward across the town of St. George when I turn in that direction. Away from the ridge upon which the airport sits the air is calmer and the plane climbs smoothly but slowly. The shadows are lengthening in the little city below and streaming eastward off the mesas that stand to the north and south.
The two hours on the ground allowed the oil to cool. It stabilizes at 160 degrees and 60 PSI. Now if it will just stay there!
Heat and wind are part and parcel of the desert’s stark beauty, which you either love or hate. There can be no in-between. The land is too primal for subtle emotions. And too big. Only mortal man is small here.
I steer the
Cannibal Queen
northward across Hurricane Mesa toward the great red cliffs of Zion, then turn and fly southeast with the cliffs off my left wing.
A gnat flying by the face of God, that is what I am. The size of the jagged red cliffs overwhelms me. The inanimate, basic power of stone that has resisted wind and water through the eons fills me with awe. Life is uncertain, life is short, life is filled with pain and joy, yet these great red cliffs endure the ages, only occasionally yielding a grain of sand.
All my ambitions, all my dreams, all my hopes, they are as a gust of evening wind against the grandeur of the red cliffs.
And what am I? The God who raised the stone from the place where it was made into this position and rejoices at its constancy, what does He expect of me? What could I possibly achieve to be worthy of His notice in my short span upon the earth?
Man is a foolish little creature, worried about transitory things. We are all, each of us, saturated with that egocentric silliness that causes some of the women in Boulder to fret about the intensity of their orgasms. Do you really think the Creator of billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, has time for silly, tiny man?
The gods of old were all little gods. Science has ripped away the veil of time and distance and shrunk us to our proper place in the great scheme of things, yet we still cling to our ancient, little gods like a drowning man clings to a board.
Little people in little rooms in little places purport to tell us the eternal truths. People that don’t understand the most basic laws of physics tell us with straight faces that they have mastered the incomprehensible. How could they know?