“We” · Chapter 2 (1/2)

II

My First Plane

Since I had first started flying at Lincoln, the year before, I had held an ambition to own an airplane of my own. So when I took my last flight with Lynch in Montana, and started down the Yellowstone, I had decided that the next spring I would be flying my own ship.

Consequently when April arrived, I left Miami and went to Americus, Georgia, where the Government had auctioned off a large number of “Jennies,” as we called certain wartime training planes. I bought one of these ships with a new Curtiss OX-5 motor and full equipment for five hundred dollars. They had cost the Government nearly twice as many thousands, but at the close of the war the surplus planes were sold for what they would bring and the training fields were abandoned. Americus, Georgia, was a typical example of this. The planes had been auctioned for as little as fifty dollars apiece the year before. A few days after I arrived, the last officer left the post and it took its place among the phantom airports of the war.

I lived alone on the post during the two weeks my plane was being assembled, sometimes sleeping in one of the twelve remaining hangars and sometimes in one of the barracks buildings. One afternoon a visiting plane arrived and Reese stepped out of the cockpit. I had not heard from him since we had traded planes in Montana, and he stayed with me on the post that night while we exchanged experiences of the previous year.

One of the interesting facts bearing on the life of aviators is that they rarely lose track of one another permanently. Distance means little to the pilot, and there is always someone dropping in from somewhere who knows all the various flyers in his section of the country, and who is willing to sit down and do a little “ground flying” with the local pilots. In this way intimate contact is continually established throughout the clan. (“Ground flying” is the term used to designate the exchange of flying experiences among airmen.)

I had not soloed up to the time I bought my Jenny at Americus, although at that time the fact was strictly confidential.

After my training at Lincoln I had not been able to furnish the required bond and, although I had done a little flying on cross country trips with Bahl and Lynch, I had never been up in a plane alone. Therefore when my Jenny was completely assembled and ready to fly I was undecided as to the best method of procedure. No one on the field knew that I had never soloed. I had not been in a plane for six months; but I did not have sufficient money to pay for more instruction, so one day I taxied to one end of the field, opened the throttle and started to take off. When the plane was about four feet off the ground, the right wing began to drop, so I decided that it was time to make a landing. I accomplished this on one wheel and one wing skid but without doing any damage to the ship. I noticed that the wind was blowing hard and suddenly decided that I would wait for calmer weather before making any more flights and taxied back to the hangar.

A pilot who was waiting for delivery on one of the Jennies offered to give me a little dual instruction, and I flew around with him for thirty minutes and made several landings. At the end of this time he taxied up to the line and told me that I would have no trouble and was only a little rusty from not flying recently. He advised me to wait until evening when the air was smooth and then to make a few solo flights.

When evening came I taxied out from the line, took one last look at the instruments and took off on my first solo.

The first solo flight is one of the events in a pilot’s life which forever remains impressed on his memory. It is the culmination of difficult hours of instruction, hard weeks of training and often years of anticipation. To be absolutely alone for the first time in the cockpit of a plane hundreds of feet above the ground is an experience never to be forgotten.

After a week of practice flights around Southern Field I rolled my equipment and a few spare parts up in a blanket, lashed them in the front cockpit and took off for Minnesota.

This was my first cross country flight alone, less than a week after my solo hop. Altogether I had less than five hours of solo time to my credit. I had, however, obtained invaluable experience the year before while flying around in the western states with Biffle, Bahl, and Lynch.

While learning to fly in Nebraska the previous spring, I discovered that nearly every pilot in existence had flown in Texas at one time or another during his flying career. Accordingly I decided that, at the first opportunity I would fly to Texas myself and although I travelled a rather roundabout way from Georgia to Minnesota, my course passed through Texarkana en route.

The first hop was from Americus to Montgomery, Alabama, and passed over some fairly rough territory of which both Georgia and Alabama have their share.

I had been warned before leaving the field, that the airline course to Texas was over some of the “worst flying country in the south” and had been advised to take either a northern course directly to Minnesota or to follow the Gulf of Mexico. This advice served to create a desire to find out what the “worst flying country in the south” looked like. I had a great deal of confidence in my Jenny with its powerful OX-5 engine, and it seemed absurd to me at that time to detour by airplane. Consequently I laid my route in the most direct line possible to conform with my limited cruising range with forty gallons of fuel.

The flight to Montgomery was uneventful. I landed at the army field there before noon, filled the fuel tanks and took off again for Meridian, Mississippi.

I arrived over Meridian in late afternoon and for the first time was faced with the problem of finding a suitable field and landing in it.

An experienced pilot can see at a glance nearly everything necessary to know about a landing field. He can tell its size, the condition of the ground, height of grass or weeds, whether there are any rocks, holes, posts or ditches in the way, if the land is rough and rolling or flat and smooth; in short whether the field is suitable to land in or if it would be advisable to look for another and better one. In fact, the success of a barnstorming pilot of the old days was measured to a large extent by his artfulness in the choice of fields from which to operate. Often, in case of motor failure, the safety of his passengers, himself, and his ship depended upon his alertness in choosing the best available landing place and his ability in maneuvering the plane into it. If his motor failure was only partial or at high altitude, time was not so essential, as a plane can glide a great distance, either with a motor which only “revs” down a couple of hundred rpm or without any assistance from the engine at all. The average wartime machine could glide at least five times its height, which meant that if it was five thousand feet above the ground the pilot could pick a field to land in five miles away with safety; but if the failure was soon after the takeoff, then instant decision and immediate action were necessary.

An amateur, on the other hand, has not overcome the strangeness of altitude, and the ground below looks entirely different than it does from the air, although there is not the sensation, in an airplane, of looking down as from a high building. Hills appear as flat country, boulders and ditches are invisible, sizes are deceptive and marshes appear as solid grassland. The student has not the background of experience so essential to the successful pilot, yet his only method of learning lies in his own initiative in meeting and overcoming service conditions.

There was no regular airport in Meridian in 1923, and a few fields available for a reasonably safe landing. After a half hour’s search I decided on the largest pasture I could see, made the best kind of a short field landing I knew how by coming down just over the treetops, with the engine wide open, to the edge of the field, then cutting the gun and allowing the ship to slow down to its landing speed. This method brings the plane in with tremendous velocity and requires a much larger landing field than is necessary, but until the pilot has flown long enough to have the “feel” of his ship it is far safer to come in fast than too slow.

It had been raining at Meridian and the field was a little soft, so that when my “Jenny” finally did settle to the ground it had a very short roll and there was still some clear ground in front.

I taxied up to a fence corner alongside of a small house and proceeded to tie down for the night. I had gained considerable respect for the wind in Kansas and Nebraska, so after turning off the gasoline and letting the motor stop by running the carburetor dry, (a safety expedient to keep the ever-present person who stands directly under the propeller while he wiggles it up and down, from becoming an aeronautical fatality) I pushed the nose of the plane up to a fence and after blocking the wheels securely, tied each wing tip to a fence post and covered the motor and cockpit with a canvas in case of rain.

By this time the usual barnstorming crowd had gathered and I spent the remaining daylight explaining that the hole in the radiator was for the propeller shaft to go through; that the wings were not made of catgut, tin, or cast iron, but of wood framework covered with cotton or linen shrunk to drum tightness by acetate and nitrate dope; that the only way to find out how it feels to fly was to try it for five dollars; that it was not as serious for the engine to stop as for a wing to fall off; and the thousand other questions which can only be conceived in such a gathering.

As night came on and the visibility decreased the crowd departed, leaving me alone with a handful of small boys who always remain to the last and can only be induced to depart by being allowed to follow the aviator from the field.

I accepted an invitation to spend the night in the small house beside the field.

The next morning I telephoned for a gas truck to come out to the field and spent the time before the truck arrived in the task of cleaning the distributor head, draining the carburetor jet wells and oiling the rocker arms on the engine.

While I was working, one of the local inhabitants came up and volunteered the information that he had been a pilot during the war but had not flown since and “wouldn’t mind takin’ a ride again.” I assured him that much as I would enjoy taking him up, flying was very expensive and that I did not have a large fund available to buy gasoline. I added that if he would pay operating costs, which would be five dollars for a short ride, I would be glad to accommodate him. He produced a five dollar bill and after warming up the motor I put him in the cockpit and taxied through the mud to the farthest corner of the field. This was to be my first passenger.

The field was soft and the man was heavy; we stalled over the fence by three feet and the nearest tree by five. I found myself heading up a thickly wooded slope, which was sloping upward at least as fast as I was climbing in that direction and for three minutes my Jenny and the slope fought it out over the fifteen feet of air between them. Eventually, however, in the true Jenny style we skimmed over the hilltop and obtained a little reserve altitude. I had passed through one of those almost-but-not-quite accidents for which Jennies are so famous and which so greatly retarded the growth of commercial flying during the postwar period.

I decided that my passenger was entitled to a good ride after that takeoff and kept him up chasing a buzzard for twenty minutes. After we landed he commented on the wonderful takeoff and how much he enjoyed flying low over the treetops; again assured me that he had flown a great deal in the war; and rushed off to tell his friends all about his first airplane ride.

The gasoline truck had arrived and after servicing the ship I took off again and headed west. I had no place in mind for the next stop and intended to be governed by my fuel supply in picking the next field.

The sky was overcast with numerous local storms. I had brought along a compass, but had failed to install it on the instrument board, and it was of little use in a suitcase out of reach. The boundary lines in the south do not run north and south, east and west as they do in the Northern states but curve and bend in every conceivable direction, being located by natural landmarks rather than meridians and parallels. I was flying by a map of the entire United States, with each state relatively small.

I left Meridian and started in the direction of Texas, cutting across country with no regard for roads or railways. For a time during the first hour I was not sure of my location on the map, but soon passed over a railway intersection which appeared to be in the proper place and satisfied me about my position. Then the territory became wilder and again I saw no checkpoints. The storm areas were more numerous and the possible landing fields farther apart, until near the end of the second hour I decided to land in the first available field to locate my position and take on more fuel. It required nearly thirty more minutes to find a place in which a plane could land and take off with any degree of safety, and after circling the field several times to make sure it was hard and contained no obstacles, I landed in one corner, rolled down a hillside, taxied over a short level stretch, and came to rest halfway up the slope on the far side of the field.

A storm was approaching rapidly and I taxied back towards the fence corner at rather high speed. Suddenly I saw a ditch directly in front of me and an instant later heard the crash of splintering wood as the landing gear dropped down and the propeller came in contact with the ground. The tail of the plane rose up in the air, turned almost completely over, then settled back to about a forty-five degree angle. My first “crack-up”!

I climbed out of the cockpit and surveyed the machine. Actually the only damage done was to the propeller, and although the wings and fuselage were covered with mud, no other part of the plane showed any marked signs of strain. I had taxied back about thirty feet east of the landing tracks and had struck the end of a grass-covered ditch. Had I been ten feet farther over, the accident would never have happened. The usual crowd was assembling, as the impact of the “prop” with the ground had been heard in all of the neighboring fields and an airplane was a rare sight in those parts.

They informed me that I was halfway between Maben and Mathiston, Mississippi, and that I had flown one hundred and twenty-five miles north instead of west.

When enough men had assembled we lifted the plane out of the ditch, pushed it over to a group of pine trees and tied it down to two of the trees. After removing all loose equipment I rode into Maben with one of the storekeepers who had locked up his business when he heard about the landing of the plane.

I wired Wyche at Americus to ship me one of the two propellers I had purchased before leaving, then engaged a room at the old Southern Hotel.

While waiting for the propeller I had extracted promises from half a dozen citizens to ride at five dollars each. This would about cover the cost of the “prop,” as well as my expenses while waiting for it to arrive. When it did come I put it on the shaft between showers, with the assistance of most of Maben and Mathiston. I gave the plane a test flight and announced that I was ready to carry passengers when it was not raining too hard.