The Cannibal Queen (46 page)

Some people feel that the Experimental Aircraft Association—the EAA—at Oshkosh is the best way to keep Joe Public in aviation. I have my doubts, but I’m going to Oshkosh to take a look.

The Rockford ATIS is scratchy. Maybe it’s my radio receiver or maybe the woman who made the tape enunciated poorly, but after listening through three repetitions I still don’t understand what the wind is.

Oh well.

I’m tired. The sun, wind and engine noise have taken their toll. No doubt the two hours of sweating on the ramp in Padu-cah has contributed. So I’m just sitting here with my mind in neutral watching the world go by and the sun drop into the haze on the western horizon. I’ll never make it to Oshkosh before dark, so I’ll land at Rockford and spend the night.

I call Approach when I am about 15 miles out. The controller clears me to make a left downwind entry to runway 18. Okay.

And another plane calls, a Cherokee 32 miles southeast. Finally Approach asks me if I have the field in sight. Yes. “Eleven o’clock and five or six miles.”

“Go to Tower.”

Tower’s reply to my call is short and to the point. “Runway 18, cleared to land.”

I descend to the downwind and shove the prop to full increase, adjust the trim, nudge the mixture up. Landing checklist complete. Gear is welded, no flaps, no hook, no boost pump, no flaperon pop-up, no thrust reversers.

As I start the turn to base, the Cherokee calls base.

What?

“Stearman’s turning left base,” I remind everyone.

This wakes up the guy in the tower. “Where are you on base, Cherokee?”

“Four miles out.”

Turning final I realize I have a problem. There’s a hell of a crosswind here. Now I remember that I never got the ATIS information clearly.

“Tower, say your wind.”

“One Zero Zero at ten.”

Feels like twelve to fifteen. Eighty degrees off runway heading. I’ve got a gob of right rudder and left aileron crammed in and still I’m drifting.

Damn that jerk! They’ve got a runway pointed right into this hurricane and he gave a goddamn ground-looping biplane runway 18 to crash on!

I start to add power to go around and hesitate. If I go around I can ream out that lazy bugger on the air, and I’m tempted. But the challenge of landing the
Cannibal Queen
in a healthy crosswind is irresistible.

I flatten the glide and lower the left wing. I want the left main wheel to touch first, then as the right comes down the tail must also. My speed must be just right, the angle perfect.

No grass to help. This is pavement.

I juggle the power and rudder and stick and watch the pavement come closer, closer … little back stick, throttle closed …

And we’re there! The left main touches and I catch the swerve as the right tire and tail wheel kiss. Stick full left. Another little swerve and gentle brakes and whew!

Parking the
Queen
the glow of a good landing fades. I crabbed my way north along highways since leaving Paducah, fighting an easterly wind, and the crab got worse the last hour into Rockford. I paid no attention.

And when Approach said runway 18, I assumed the wind was out of the south!

I could have asked, of course, and never did. I was tired, complacent. The wheels had stopped turning.

And I should have gone around and landed into the wind on a different runway. What if I had dragged a wingtip or ground-looped? After six hours of flying, all wrung out, that’s no time to try to prove you’re as good as Eddie Rickenbacker. The government built those other runways for guys like you to use, if only you’re smart enough to ask for one when the disciple in the tower is asleep at the switch.

Dammit, you know the rule. It’s written in blood.
Never take a chance if you don’t have to
.

I walk toward the FBO thoroughly disgusted with myself.

The weather Sunday is a carbon copy of Saturday—visibility about ten miles in haze and no clouds anywhere. By 10 A.M. I am flying north at 3,500 feet, bound for Oshkosh. The first town of any size north of Rockford is Janesville, Wisconsin, so when the TRSA that guards Rockford spits me out, I dial in the tower freq to get permission to fly through the Janesville airport traffic area.

The first thing I hear is some guy giving the tower controller a rundown on an airshow performance. No, this is a request. This is all the stuff he wants the tower to let him do right now!

Are they having an airshow?

It sounds like a circus, something right out of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Pipers and Cessnas coming and going, a flight of four T-34s practicing an airshow routine, a flight of two Stearmans somewhere in the pattern, two more Stearmans inbound, some guy that can barely speak English ten miles east and inbound, an AT-6 doing circles north of the field, and somebody lost, can’t find the field. Through all of this the tower controller stays cool, keeps them coming, doesn’t use foul language. I’m impressed. The tower at O’Hare must have sent their best pro to the big leagues, Janesville.

I stare out of my cockpit at the saturated airspace around this little airport in Wisconsin. Planes everywhere—T-34s spewing smoke, planes landing, taking off, Holy Toledo! If it’s like this on Sunday morning, what are Saturdays like? Doesn’t anyone around here play golf?

If it’s bumper cars in Janesville, what will it be like in Osh-kosh, the home of the EAA? Will I find a hundred weird planes in the same little chunk of airspace?

No. Oshkosh is properly somnolent this Sunday morning. Two other planes leave while I am inbound, but I have the field all to myself. The tower controller gives me runway 22, right into the teeth of the ten-knot wind from the southwest.

I park the
Cannibal Queen
at Basler Aviation and stroll toward the office. A man preflighting a Cessna 172 wants to chat, so I pause to visit.

It is obvious he is a little shook. He is a student on his first solo cross-county and he got slightly lost getting here. He asked for help and was assigned a discrete IFF squawk, but the fifth time the controller told him to recycle the transponder he found he had it in standby all along. So now, safely connected with the firma, he wants someone to talk to and I am the only one around.

“Oshkosh is an easy field, y’know, because it’s right here by Lake Winnebago. But the haze is so bad I couldn’t see the lake.”

Uh-huh. Using pilotage sounds so doggone easy—you have the chart and you can see the ground, so how could anyone get lost? Well, it’s easy. Easy for an old hand and easier still for a student trying it for the first time. The problem is that charts are constructed of symbols—they depict reality but they are not photographs. The skill is transposing the symbols to the real world, and vice versa.

I talk to the student a bit and wonder if he really should go on alone, yet I hesitate to suggest he call his flight instructor. Maybe I should. I don’t because I think he is learning something by flailing around the sky making basic mistakes. As long as he doesn’t drive it into the ground, what could happen to him in this flat countryside dotted with airports? An instructor has to kick them out of the nest sometime, and apparently his has concluded that today is the day.

I know how the student feels. Everyone who ever learned to fly has had days like this. It all sounds so easy …

The EAA was founded in Oshkosh in 1953 by Paul Poberezny to assist people interested in designing or building an airplane at home, i.e., a home-built. The FAA licenses do-it-yourself aircraft in the “experimental” category, a nice little exception to the rules that require commercial builders to spend millions getting a design certified for sale to the public. The growth of enterprise liability lawsuits against general aviation aircraft manufacturers in the 1960s, ’70s and into the ’80s, and the resulting decisions by Piper, Beech and Cessna to stop or drastically curtail the manufacture of single-engine airplanes spurred the EAA’s growth.

Today the EAA proclaims itself as “
the Sport Aviation Association
.” And it is. It puts on the world’s biggest annual air-show the first week in August here at Oshkosh, it lobbies hard in Washington on general aviation issues, and it still provides technical advice to all those people busy in their garages or tee-hangars building their own flying machines. It also publishes a neat monthly magazine, Sport Aviation, which is automatically sent to every EAA member.

The focus of the EAA has always been on light civilian aircraft. Their new museum complex on one side of the Oshkosh airport has an F-86 mounted on a pedestal out front, an F-80 parked around back and a World War II hangar exhibit. Still, military flying machines are somehow out of place here. The strength of the museum is civilian antiques from the 1920s and 1930s and a breathtaking display of home-builts.

The Wright brothers were the first home-builders. Their Flyer was a home-built, and had the FAA been around then, presumably the feds would have given it an experimental certificate. Of course, the brothers would have then tried to get the Flyer certificated in the unrestricted category so they could make and sell other aircraft of the Flyer type. The resulting hassle would have probably bankrupted them.

Entrepreneurs today avoid the certification problem by selling only the plans for successful aircraft. Some also sell prefabricated parts, but you, the buyer and user, must build the darn thing yourself. That’s the rub. That’s also the only reason the designers and parts fabricators can stay in business—legally you are the manufacturer of your home-built, so if you crash it your widow has no one to sue.

One of the first home-builders without higher aspirations was a Minnesota automobile mechanic named Bernard H. Pietenpol, who got the bug in 1922. Aircraft engines were expensive then too, so Mr. Pietenpol used the engine from a Model T Ford in his first plane. And his second. When he needed an engine for his third the Model A was out; Mr. Pietenpol found that engine an adequate source of power. His Pietenpol Aircamper cruised at 70 MPH with two people aboard, but you had to build it yourself in your own barn and fly it from your own pasture.

Pietenpol designed and built 24 aircraft during his lifetime, the final one with an engine from a Chevrolet Corvair. He thought this engine excellent for aircraft use.

Pietenpol was obviously something of a mechanical genius. He gave up auto mechanics but taught himself radio, and television when that came along, and made his living repairing these devices. Building airplanes was his hobby. His hangar and two of his aircraft are at the EAA museum.

Another fellow who showed what a home-builder could do was Donald P. Taylor, who built something called a Thorp T-18 and proceeded to fly it around the world in 1976. He took two months to make the journey, flying 24,627 miles in 171.5 hours. Taylor’s plane is in the museum.

“I did it,” Taylor said, “to prove the individual still counts for something in this world—that a little guy can still go out alone and accomplish something no one has done before.”

The latest home-builders to fly into the pages of the record books have the big record, the one the experts said would never fall. They flew their craft, Voyager, nonstop around the world on one tank of gas. Yes, Burt and Dick Rutan and Jeane Yeager were home-builders. Designed by Burt Rutan, the plane was constructed of space-age composites and took six years to build, about the norm for a home-built. Then Dick Rutan and Jeane Yeager flew it nonstop around the globe.

The EAA museum has a full-scale replica of the fuselage of Voyager. The composite material is half the weight of steel and five times as strong. But you have to mold the parts and cook them: the family oven probably isn’t big enough.

You say you want to own your own plane? You’re tired of renting. But forty-year-old fabric-covered tail-draggers don’t turn you on and used Cessnas, Mooneys, Pipers and Beeches seem out of financial reach or too stodgy. What’s left? Build your own. You say you’re not a mechanical genius like Bernard Pietenpol or a world-class aeronautical engineer like Burt Rutan? Can you do it?

The average American probably tinkered with cars when he was young and maybe even overhauled a lawn mower or two. Today he takes the car to Jiffy Lube. If the lawn mower needs anything more than a new blade or sparkplug, it goes to the shop. Mr. Average owns a few hand tools—pliers, some wrenches, a couple screwdrivers and a hammer—and he gets them out for minor fix-up jobs around the house. Rebuilding an antique car would be a stupendous project for Mr. Average.

To successfully build an airplane you must be an incurable tinkerer. You must like to work with your hands and be fairly good at it. Most successful home-builders are professional mechanics or engineers—many have airframe and powerplant mechanic’s licenses from the FAA. These are the people with big red professional tool cases from Sears filled with thousands of dollars’ worth of tools that they know how to use. The planes they build are usually carefully constructed. Building the plane is the challenge.

Right there is the problem. The people who want to fly the planes can’t build them. Fortunately the people who can build them aren’t all that interested in flying them. Stories of builders spending six or eight years building the plane of their dreams, flying it two or three times, then selling it, are legion. Happens all the time. But in this imperfect world there are a lot more flyers than there are builders.

One of the goals of the EAA is to design a plane that is so easy and cheap to construct that Mr. Average can get in on the fun. The fun of building.

I don’t think it will ever happen. Mr. Average is never going to spend all of his spare time for two or three or six years in his garage or out at the airport working like a slave so he can go fly someday when it’s finished.

There is a place for home-builders, and the EAA has done a magnificent job fulfilling their needs. And it has become a powerful, much-needed voice in general aviation. But if general aviation is going to be saved, we need legislation that relieves aircraft manufacturers of the unlimited strict liability they currently face. In effect, a company that manufactures and sells an aircraft to the public today guarantees it for the life of the plane, literally forever. How much must they charge to purchase insurance to cover that risk? How much will the judgments be ten years from now? Twenty? Thirty? Fifty?