"Aeromancy"© Paul Berge Aviation Stories

"Launch The Revolution"

2011-06-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

“Launch the Revolution”
© 2006, Paul Berge

By afternoon the crowd had grown to several thousand around the airport’s perimeter. Faces turned skyward with eyes shaded against the sun when an official worried, “He refuses to come down.”
Even the guards in the tower protected by concertina wire gazed at the small airplane overhead, unsure what to do. The tower chief ran up the stairs, her footsteps clanging against steel. Breathless, she demanded binoculars although it was clear she’d never see the truth. “How long has that been up there?”
“Ten hours,” a tower guard answered through a smile. “Maybe twelve.”
“That’s impossible.”
“So we thought,” he replied and then indicated the crowd below. “But word spread. This morning it was just a few. Now look at the cars coming from all directions.” Indeed, the roads were packed. More people arrived on bicycles and some on foot to see the man who flew without permission, refusing to come down.
Disgusted, the tower chief pressed the binoculars at the guard and demanded, “Have you ordered him down?” And before he could reply the crowd murmured as the tiny airplane, little more than a butterfly with yellow wings and a green tail, lowered its nose. “What’s he doing?”
“A loop, I think…Yup, it’s a loop.”
“Well, stop him, make him stop that illicit looping!”
The crowd applauded as the little airplane traced a perfect O. And in one voice they gasped when the airplane pulled into what appeared to be another loop but at the top did not dive. Instead, it hung in the air, its silver propeller slicing the blue. Its wings slowly rotated from the torque until they realized they could no longer lift and dropped into a spin. In turn after turn the airplane spun toward the earth. And then as crash trucks lurched and eyes peered between fingers, it climbed again bringing a shout from the crowd.
“I’ll take his license!” the tower chief spat.
“You’ve already taken all the licenses,” the guard noted. “Nothing left to take.” And he, too, silently cheered the pilot.
“That’s...that’s nonsense!”
“Isn’t it, though,” the guard laughed and then pointed toward the hangars where more pilots—without authorization—smashed locks and pushed little airplanes into the sunlight. The tower chief grabbed a microphone and tried to restore order, but her mouth only flapped like a bass sucking air in a fisherman’s net. Powerless, she watched engines start, and without any regard for her authority dozens of little airplanes taxied to the runway. She managed a gagging plea to “Stop…” but stared in disbelief at those who escaped her grasp and lifted into what she’d presumed was her sky, a sky to be jealously controlled.
Slumping into administrative oblivion she vanished amid the sound of airplanes twirling about her head. Soon the guards abandoned the tower to join the mob as it swarmed over the fence and spread blankets on the grass. And long past sunset they watched the power of lift wielded by revolutionaries who refused to come down.

(First appeared in Pacific Flyer magazine, March 2007)

“Old Gray”

2011-01-16T10:18:00.000-08:00

Dawn slipped over the mountains and quietly extinguished the desert stars in passing. They didn’t seem to mind. Having kept watch all night it was time, again, for sunlight to rouse earth dwellers from bed. Chuck dwelled above the planet so was already awake and at the airport. After parking his Studebaker Lark he kicked the hangar door to chase out any snakes that might’ve curled beneath the rubber skirt. When nothing stirred, he slid the door open and smiled at the old Tri-Pacer waiting beneath a dusty skylight. She smiled back.

Painted the same light gray of his mothballed West Point uniform, she had pearl white wings trimmed in blue. Piper chevrons raked her tail. She looked as though she’d been awake all night combing the stars for dreams. And, maybe, caught a few. Chuck walked around the nose and patted her cowling. If Piper made Tri-Pacer biscuits he would’ve fed her one. And, yes—he’d tell anyone who didn’t understand—the Tripe was a she. Chuck didn’t give a rat’s butt who thought it inappropriate to think of his old gray beauty as female. Something this pretty couldn’t be otherwise. And he’d stare down anyone who claimed that Tri-Pacers were funny looking. Those same fools turned up their noses at Navions and Apaches.

With one hand on the strut, Chuck ducked beneath the right wing to open the cockpit door. Leaning inside, he inhaled that elegant blend of leather and butyrate dope with a hint of avgas. He wondered why it couldn’t be bottled so all women could smell as good: Eau d’Avion—$1000 per ounce. Chuck was a romantic and a rebel who couldn’t explain his attachment to this airplane. She wasn’t as sleek as those Mooneys that taxied by with their tails on backwards. Nor could she haul the load of a rumbling Skylane. “But so what?” he asked aloud. “I love her.” But mostly he loved the thought of her in flight.

Outside in the cool air with the throttle set, Chuck reached beneath the seat for the starter button. “TSA couldn’t confiscate you if they wanted,” he muttered. “They couldn’t find your starter with both hands.” The white hair on his neck bristled thinking of the country’s worst agency. He shook it off and looked toward the pink desert sky. And by the time they departed all thoughts of fools flushed from his mind, replaced by airplane dreams coming to life. It was their daily routine. Together, they’d wander about the morning sky, the short-winged Piper telling Chuck what she knew about flight. Despite their long relationship, each trip offered new insights into life beyond gravity. And returning to land, he’d let his companion find her way to the runway as she had for over 50 years. There was nothing he could teach her. She wouldn’t listen if he’d tried. And, later, he’d thank her for the visit while yearning for the next dawn when she’d reveal more dreams taken from the desert stars.

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Ailerona

2010-12-20T10:41:00.000-08:00

by Paul Berge

There’s a place in the Midwest approachable only from the sky. It’s south of Canada and a bit north of Mexico. Draw a line along the eastern edge of the Rockies, and it’s to the right of that and west of Youngstown, Ohio, maybe Columbus. It’s strictly a middle-of-America place, although there have been reports of it north of International Falls, and it was once spotted in California’s Central Valley, and along the Snake River in Idaho, although I suspect those were false sightings. No one’s seen it in New Jersey since 1966.

This place is called Ailerona. It has no ICAO identifier, doesn’t appear on any sectional or airport guide. It can’t be loaded into a GPS database; if you tried, you’d blow the RAIM guts out of the box.

Despite the lack of navaids, Ailerona is supposedly easy to find if you know how to look. I haven’t been there myself, but I once met a pilot in Wagner, South Dakota who knew a guy in Alliance, Nebraska, who’d flown over Ailerona one winter day in a Maule. He said it appeared through a crystalline veil of snow and looked like sunrise at noon. He reported an expanse of green across low hills above which a Super Cub flew in loose formation with a Taperwing Waco until the Cub descended to an upsloping pasture where the cows turned their heads to marvel at the appropriateness of a Cub in their salad bar.

Ailerona appeared briefly in Greek mythology when Icarus tried to fly across the Mediterranean in his waxwing homebuilt in search of this perfect place. He looked too hard however, and his wings melted. Ever since then the FAA has denied Ailerona’s existence fearing that if pilots saw its wooden hangars full of Stearmans, Fairchilds, Lockheed Vegas and Lodestars, if they saw the fuel truck hauling both 100 and 80 octane at 35 and 30 cents respectively, if pilots saw all that, they’d question the way things are.

I thought I saw Ailerona up in Michigan while standing beneath a Husky’s wing during a thunderstorm that looked like creation itself. Another time, it flashed briefly through my old Bonanza while scud running between a low overcast and the flat pine forests of northern Minnesota. I skimmed the trees at 150 knots through a 300-foot wedge of clear air that led nowhere and I hoped would never end. Each time that I thought I saw Ailerona however, it disappeared. I tried to grasp it, to log the moment for spiritual currency and, in the process, the vision said I wasn’t ready and faded away.

Ailerona holds the raw stuff of flight from biplanes to the Concorde. It’s where aviation began and, today, is the one corner of flight where no one can clip your wings. It’s out there, and chances are you’ve already seen it—perhaps in that perfect instrument approach or the beautifully executed crosswind landing. It may even exist outside the Midwest, although what better place to begin the search?

The End…or is it?

© 1981, 2001, 2003, 2009,First published in Minnesota Flyer, Richard Coffey, editor/publisher, later in Pacific Flyer, Wayman Dunlap, editor/publisher. Featured on the audio book, “Ailerona,” Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC, all rights reserved by the author.

Husky Sunset

2010-12-16T10:17:00.000-08:00

Jake pressed his left thumb against the throttle’s microphone button and uttered the phrase that makes air traffic controllers smile, “Cancel IFR.”

“Husky 34V, cancellation received,” Center replied. “Squawk VFR.” And even though it wasn’t by the book, she tossed in a “G’day,” like blowing him an ATC kiss. Let the phraseology police write her a ticket; she liked being friendly.

“It is,” Jake said to a voice he’d never meet and changed the transponder code to 1200. He then switched frequencies to CTAF, but after thirty seconds of listening to that mindless clatter—“...traffic in the area, please advise…”— he turned off the radio, throttled back to low cruise and removed his headset. It was Friday afternoon and time to enjoy the commute, something earthbound creatures rarely do.

With controlled airspace behind him, the sky took on a more genteel tone. Suburban highways gave way to steep hillsides of redwood trees. As clouds clicked sunlight on-and-off, the landscape flashed between deep greens and mossy gray. He banked to glide down a shallow canyon where a logging road disappeared into the forest and easing in the throttle, pulled up again. It’s what classy tail draggers with lots of power do best.

As the Husky descended across the last ridge line, Jake slid the side window open and scooped his hand into the wind to inhale the sea air. Sunlight poked from beneath a thin marine layer, smearing his windshield so he had to look to the side to tell where he was going. But, after thirty years flying the Santa Cruz Mountains, Jake knew his position exactly.

He turned southeast bound along the shoreline where farm fields seemed to flow across the sea cliffs and into the surf. The coastal highway twisted like a lazy snake from Half Moon Bay and wriggled itself into the Santa Cruz city limits. Jake gazed across the water where specks of fishing boats floated as though placed there by a sloppy kid who refused to pick up his toys. He then looked inland at thousands of houses plastered up the hillsides and fed by streams of cars. And then, as he always did, he scanned from wing tip to wingtip and banked to watch the sunlight wash against the airplane’s yellow fabric. A hundred churches below couldn’t inspire the reverence he felt for this gift, and he thanked whatever made it possible and had blessed him with the view.

In the old days, as he liked to think of them, Jake might’ve been tempted by any of the beaches inviting a passing airplane to touch a wheel and skim where the surf rolled the sand flat. Often one to give into temptation, he’d have cut the throttle, pulled on full flaps and landed on a stretch of sand hidden among the cliffs. The Husky would make it easy. “Can land it down a chimney,” the seller had bragged, “and stop halfway across the fireplace.” His hand nudged the flap handle, but he’d avoid temptation, today, and continue to the airport.

Time was, Jake—then, a new pilot—thought nothing of landing his Aeronca Champ on an empty beach or along a farmer’s irrigation road in the Salinas Valley. But time, the law and, perhaps, some unexplainable mellowing that comes with experience—he refused to say, with age—caused him to fly a little higher and head home before the sun set. And this, being Friday, he had an appointment to keep at the hangar, one that had grown better with the years.

Ten miles out, Jake switched on the radio and suffered through the chatter of pilots who flew by their microphones and didn’t quite understand lift. Turning downwind, he spotted two Cessnas on final and a Cirrus on a base leg so wide he was tempted to cut inside and land ahead of it. Instead, he throttled back and slowed the Husky to near hovering speed to await his turn. When it came, he dropped on the base leg like a hawk on an unsuspecting mouse. With flaps full, and the runway numbers locked in the windshield, at 200 feet Jake glanced to make sure that Vern, the airport manager, wasn’t watching. And then, he sidestepped to the grass between the runway and taxiway. His wheels skimmed between two blue lights and touched in a gentle rumble. He was stopped and turned off before reaching the intersecting taxiway. But not before the airport manager saw him, and from his pick-up truck waved a shame-on-you index finger and grinned.

It’d been another routine commute across the mountains, and when the Husky stopped in front of the hangar, Jake checked his watch and saw that he was five minutes late. Already his hangar neighbor, Kathy, was seated in a lounge chair outside her hangar, an empty chair beside her and between them a small table, two glasses and, what Jake knew was a bottle of scotch.

He’d put the airplane away later, and walking quickly to join her, he apologized, “Sorry I’m late.”

“Headwinds?” she asked and didn’t expect an answer as she offered him a crystal glass, the lower third glowing limpid gold as though the setting sun had poured their drinks.

“Balvenie?” Impressed.

“Mmm,” she murmured. “Distracted along the beach, again?”

“Momentarily disoriented,” he answered and lifted his glass to touch hers. “You?” He nodded toward the Bellanca Super Viking inside her hangar.

“Had the same problem, only down south around Big Sur.

“Shame,” he said, and their glasses clinked. Then, in silence they watched the sun melt beneath the horizon, expecting it to hiss as it dropped in the Monterey Bay. Together, each in private reflection, they sipped the scotch and felt the warmth of near perfection flood the end of another flying day.

© Paul Berge

All other rights reserved by the author and Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC

“Destination Unexpected—Borger, Texas”

2008-03-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

from “Aeromancy” © 2005, Paul Berge
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In open-cockpit flying you learn to navigate using senses suppressed by a closed-cabin, and approaching Borger airport (BGD) in the Texas Panhandle, I leaned my face into the slipstream to sniff my way toward the refineries in the surrounding hills. It reminded me of being a kid in New Jersey on hot summer days when chemical plant exhaust tinged the sky Dr. Seuss yellow from the stuff that makes modern life possible if occasionally unhealthy.

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Borger wasn’t my planned destination. I wondered whose destination it could be outside anyone associated with the petro business. But I didn’t ponder too long as I banked onto downwind leg and pulled the power abeam the numbers to drop the way biplanes do in a slipping descent on base leg to the flare and a burnt-rubber touchdown. It’s a fluid, twisting dive and with all that drag from wings, wires, and the pilot’s wide grin there’s rarely any float. Lacking straight-ahead visibility past the long nose, the pilot feels for the ground and senses drift through peripheral vision. Landings aren’t always pretty, especially on pavement when a crosswind demands stick into the wind and opposite rudder with a nose-high blind path ahead. Tail draggers are made for grass fields and old tail dragger pilots do our best when forced onto the hard stuff. Here, in Borger, the runways were perfect for jets full of oil execs.

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The Marquart Charger holds 27 gallons to feed its 180 horses giving two hours range with a puckered-up reserve. At 120 mph that’s about 250 miles, but I plan 150 or so between stops, longer when the winds allow. On this day nothing allowed.

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I’d been in the air since somewhere in New Mexico with stops throughout the high plains including West Texas (T27) on the east side of El Paso. It has a long skinny runway that leads to an FBO with a shaded porch where you could sit, drink a Dr. Pepper, and watch ultra lights drag around the pattern in the heat. Free cookies came with the avgas, and after an hour’s stay I slogged off northeast only to be stopped by the rear guard of thunderstorms ransacking Oklahoma. Borger, just above Amarillo, was in the clear, but as my wheels rolled through steaming puddles on the runway I knew it hadn’t been clear for long.

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A tall gray man with a leathery face and a silver belt buckle the size of a Volkswagen hubcap waved me into a tie down spot while a second man, younger with a smaller buckle, stood by holding chocks. They treated my dusty two-seater biplane as they might a corporate jet. At the crossed-arm signal to stop, I applied brakes, killed the engine with mixture, and before I could push the goggles off my eyes, Big Buckle called, “Need to use the car? We can bring that ‘round for ya. Getchya hotel room in town should you need it, good restaurants, too.”
“I’m just topping off and heading out,” I answered and unhooked my harness to stand in the cockpit. The buckles clunked on the floorboards. But before I could grab the upper wing handles and drop a leg over the side, Little Buckle had run for the fuel truck, and the other man said, “We’ll getchya turned right around. You can use the weather radar inside and help yourself to coffee, should be a doughnut left, too.” I imagine if I’d asked them to wash the biplane they would’ve dragged out a hose; it was that kind of friendly. Mostly, though, I nodded and waited for the fuel truck.

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I never let anyone fuel the biplane because it’s, frankly, a nuisance. The 27 gallons are dispersed among two wing tanks, each smaller than a shoe box, and the larger fuselage tank beneath the upper wing and just aft of the hot engine compartment. All three filler necks were designed for fuel nozzles no bigger than soda straws, so spilling is common. I’d rather swear at myself than pretend to not notice when a helpful line guy shoots a fountain of 100LL into his face.
“Where ya say you’re headed?”
“Iowa, eventually, but next stop Liberal, maybe Dodge City,” I said and receiving no response, I pointed in the wrong direction and added, “Kansas.”
“I know where it is, but weather’s not so good up that way.” He pointed in the correct direction. Texans are masters of understatement. "Not so good" meant that anything smaller than a four-bedroom brick ranch house was probably getting tossed at the moment. “Might want to check weather,” he muttered as the fuel truck approached.

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After washing the upper wings with avgas and pumping a quart across the cowling around the main tank so it ran into the front cockpit, I handed the hose down and mopped up. All that fuss for fifteen gallons made me feel almost guilty, but when I noticed that the price was lower than anything else I’d found over two weeks, I wished I could’ve held more.

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Later, after I’d finished their last doughnut and spilled coffee in the pilots lounge, I strapped back into the biplane and fired up. Warm, sulfurous air from the refineries washed over me like a monstrous baby fart as I taxied past jackrabbits with no sense of adventure.

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Opening the throttle the biplane’s nose pulled left, and the prop breeze turned to hurricane force. Tail up and with gentle back pressure the collection of wings, struts and wires popped off the earth, and we banked north toward what I’d planned as my next destination. But, even though the thunderstorms were now well into trashing Nebraska and moving away from me, I knew that when it comes to biplaning cross-country, what I planned was of little value. I’d just have to see what awaited a hundred or so miles away. And, at 500 feet above Texas, as the last whiff of oil refinery was replaced by endless flat green of the western Oklahoma, I was gently reminded of the whole point of open cockpit navigation. It ain't the destination that matters but the almost getting there that counts.

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(Next stop: Guyman, Hooker, Oklahoma)
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The End
© Paul Berge
ailerona@aol.com

American Skies

2008-03-05T08:31:00.000-08:00

by Paul Berge
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Looking down from America’s skies you see a country that spreads itself open like a family album. As a flight instructor with a passion for antique airplanes, I cruise across the middle of the nation between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers rarely above the height of my fellow travelers--the red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures. From 500 feet above the cornfields, rolling pastures, and second-growth forests, we literally have a birds-eye view of a country that often forgets to look up.

It’s a country that sprawls itself out like a fat uncle beneath a shade tree after a summer picnic—content and well fed.

It’s a country that loves its parks and scenic overlooks, yet cuts great ribbons of Interstate highways through the glory of the prairie so that those on the one coast won’t dawdle getting to the other.

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And from the altitude of the bald eagles that migrate through Iowa each year, I throttle back my 56-year old airplane and drift with a uniquely American wind over small towns that have been missed by the freeways and remain the resting stops of faded souls.

From the Midwestern sky I track the Mormon Trail and can follow the dozens of abandoned railroad lines that once linked countless forgotten prairie towns together so long ago. From just above the noise of the 21st century, seated behind a 65-horsepower engine, with two cloth wings stretching from my core, I fly through this sky that has been the dome of a vast continent since long before anyone envisioned our manifest destiny.

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The American sky is unlike any other. When I’m aloft, alone or with a student, with the wind singing through the struts and into the cockpit, I glance at the few ancient instruments on the airplane’s panel and feel the connection with other American fliers who’ve lived in these skies--Lindbergh, Earhart, or Ernest Gann. We’ve shared a sky that’s less than a half-mile above the real estate we call our nation. We who fly on fabric wings live in a stratum that time has graciously overlooked. For the few hours that the fuel tank allows us to stay in that sky we’re the guests of something truly ethereal that so few Americans ever touch. Yet, oddly, this album of beauty is there for the taking. It’s open to all who believe in this country’s ability to amaze, inspire and—inside this old airplane—rejuvenate. It’s there provided we Americans never forget how to fly.
--Paul Berge

Toto's Revenge

2008-02-09T14:39:00.000-08:00

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Kansas Ain't Flat When Viewed From a Biplane

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by Paul Berge.

Best FBO? Hard to say. I’m no fan of metropolitan airports with their Berlin Wall security and prefer, instead, the outback fields where crop dusters fly 200-foot traffic patterns and tick-pimpled dogs sleep beside a broken pop machine with a sign that reads: “Leave money in coffee can. Signed, Betty.”

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Million Air at Van Nuys, California surprised me when I’d expected big-city snubs only to be treated like a fat-dollar celebrity. (Some say I’m easily mistaken for Robin Williams before liposuction, so maybe that was it.) Ramp fees were waived after I purchased a skinny ten gallons and swiped the last brownie off the counter.

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Guymon (shown below) located in the accusing finger of Oklahoma’s panhandle is an unsung bargain close to a great Mexican diner. And if you behave yourself at Frasca Field (C16) in Urbana, Illinois, you can tour Frasca’s simulator factory. Show a respectful blend of awe and gratitude, and you may get the VIP trip through Rudy Frasca’s private museum of war birds, old birds, and odd birds. Don’t touch anything; you break it, you probably can't afford to buy it.

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Salina, Kansas makes any tramp pilot’s Top Ten list. And it’s not just because of the pretty girls in tight shorts who direct transients into tie-down spots and then cause middle-aged men to drop jaw-first from their airplanes watching them bend over to chock the tires. Okay, that might be one of the reasons. The other is the lobby where you’ll eat fresh chocolate-chip cookies and get sworn at by a parrot, macaw, or whatever that foul-speaking thing is that was obviously raised by Navy linguists.

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Parked midway between everything hip on the West Coast and urbane on the East, Kansas needs to do something to get noticed. Cookies alone won’t do it, so the state offers a bigger show as I relearned when wandering through on no particular route in something unsophisticated that taxis with its tail in the dirt and no lid over the cockpits. Four wings completed my barnstorming ensemble, so wherever I’d arrive someone usually remarked, “Nice biplane; think you’ll ever learn to land it?” At least in Salina they smile when they say that—giggle, actually.

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For those unfamiliar with the Midwest, here’s a quick lesson: It’s not all flat. Iowa even has ski resorts, although, they are a bit silly; my favorite is located near the Boone (BNW) airport, where there’s a homebuilders’ workshop/co-op open to anyone having trouble riveting together a quick-build RV.

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Kansas, however, is a flat billiard table stretching to all horizons covered in endless pastures and whatever it is growing below in waving green felt. In the cool morning sky a few hundred feet above all that waving, I could see as far as the earth’s curvature allowed. Beyond that I didn’t care, because the openness sucked my mind dry, removing all remnants of 1970s Rocky Mountain highs and filled the void with a 2-D vision that staggers most viewers but made me want to fly above it forever. Or at least until the afternoon sky warmed and all that green below sweated into the air currents rising to colder heights. Plus, I was hungry and almost out of gas, so taking a tip from a freight dog who knew where to find free cookies, I headed to Salina.

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The tower controller wasn’t particularly friendly, and to punctuate my disdain for his indifference, I demonstrated a triple-bounce wheel landing on the 12,000-foot runway.
“If able, turn left at the end,” he said, “And taxi to the ramp.”

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I was able and did, following a shorts-clad ramp rat waving parking batons like a KU cheerleader. I think his name was Daryl, and it was apparent that he handled the lesser customers while the biz jet behind me received the full Flower reception. Still, like Odysseus on the Isle of Babes I lingered until the weather soured. Flight Service painted an optimistic picture of the route: “If you hurry and get real lucky, you may survive the line of Level Six thunderstorms forming between Salina and Topeka.” Once in Topeka (TOP) the forecast called for clear skies and sweet siren songs all the way to my final resting place, er, destination in Iowa. So, I departed and, like Odysseus, I must’ve irritated the weather gods, and because I didn’t understand that Kansas could morph into a mountain state I found myself weaving through canyons of vertical development the likes of which gives any sensible barnstormer pause. Unfortunately, every airport where I’d hoped to pause went down the weather toilet.

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Smart pilots avoid anything made of water vapor the color of scorched marshmallows growing to 70,000 feet. It was late afternoon, and Kansas having broiled all day in the sun now released its steamed energy skyward. The air was deceptively smooth at the feet of these towering thugs, but as I tuned nearby AWOS frequencies, reports deteriorated from rain, to wind, to blowing frogs.

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I monitored Flight Watch (122.0) with the thought of climbing on top, but heard an anxious Bonanza driver several thousand feet above me trying to make the same mistakes only to report that the clouds grew around him so fast that he turned tail for Texas. I decided to do likewise back to Salina only to find my back door closed. Cut off, my plans shifted from reaching Topeka to considering a survivable side road landing. The gods toy with the wayfarer who ignores evidence of his own stupidity. So as clouds boiled around me in unbelievable glory and terror, thumping their vaporous chests, I pressed eastward through a twisting alleyway of narrowing sanity above Kansas greenery, and running just a little faster than the squall line, floated into Topeka. No cookies, no bargain-priced avgas, or Playmate staff, just a guy in a blue work shirt leaning into the wind to help me tie the biplane down shortly before the sky unloaded.

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Best FBO? Tough to say, but as lightning chiseled the sky, I was damn glad this one was there.

.............................................................The End
© Paul Berge, all rights reserved.

Cockpit photo courtesy of Curtis Kelly.

Fly Iowa in an Open-Cockpit Biplane

2007-12-30T06:47:00.000-08:00

New Aerial Video by Iowa Public TV: http://www.iptv.org/iowajournal/story.cfm/117
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Produced by Marlin Schram

Antique Airplane Association Launches Website

2007-11-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

Oxymorons Aside, AAA/APM Takes Antiques to the Internet

Here it is, Air Cadets, the new Antique Airplane Association/Air Power Museum website: http://www.antiqueairfield.com/

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See the pumpkins drop, hear the laughter, question the sanity, but whatever your take, take a trip to Antique Airfield (IA27), Iowa, third grass field from Ottumwa and straight on 'til the dawn of your imagination.

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TSA not permitted. This is real aviation.

"Connie" © by Paul Berge

2007-09-19T06:40:00.001-07:00

She’s got curves, long ones that invite the eye to gaze from her slender nose to what can only be called the cutest tail in the sky. They call her, Connie, a Lockheed L1049 G “Super” Constellation, and she may be getting on in years, but she’s just as beautiful as the day she left the Burbank, Ca. plant a half-century ago. Today, N6937C sits on the Kansas City’s Downtown Airport ramp TWA once called home to its Connie fleet. This Connie never flew for Trans World Airlines, but as one of the last of her line she’s the centerpiece of the Airline History Museum, widely known as Save-A-Connie. Although temporarily grounded, she welcomes visitors the way airlines once lured passengers—with style and a hint of sex.

TWA is long gone as are many of the carriers from those glory days: Pan Am, Braniff, Eastern, Republic…the ghost line stretches into the desert where the great ships were chopped into beer cans. This particular Connie started life in 1958 as a cargo hauler for Slick Airways and managed to live into old age as a Canadian crop duster destined for the junk heap when rescued by dreamers determined to keep a sliver of the airline golden age alive even as the crews who flew these great airplanes pass away.

They weren’t like you and me, the pilots from the I Love Lucy age. For a few brief decades airline pilots were royalty, and passengers dressed appropriately for court. Peasants didn’t traipse into Louis XIV’s Versailles anymore than a 1956 passenger would clod onto a Connie in blue jeans, Harley-Davidson T-shirt and slinging a backpack. They dressed like first-nighters at Noel Coward’s latest on Broadway. In exchange, the airlines allowed passengers’ blood to circulate freely through their legs with seats—all first class—designed for bottom comfort and not for bottom line satisfaction. And, yes, there was food—real food served on real china with silverware.

In this time after World War II, and before airline travel became mass transit, the flight was the thing and the destination almost an afterthought. Americans smoked Chesterfields because Perry Como did, drank martinis with Mamie Eisenhower and hailed Caesar, Sid Caesar, on Sunday nights at 9.

Airplanes had round engines so packed with horsepower that the jet had to be introduced just to give all that ambitious might a place to expand. But when thrust broke free from the banks of supercharged pistons and cylinders, the kerosene power that replaced it may have proved efficient but, frankly, smelled funny. Jets never matched the essence of what it meant to fly instead of merely travel. Now, airlines are subway tubes and terminals are cattle barns with passengers herded down chutes like so many head to be processed rather than guests to be pampered.

All gone?

No. Traces of this once global empire of aerial class now reside in the Airline History Museum (AHM). You can access it 21st Century-style at http://www.airlinehistorymuseum.com/. Or the next time you’re stuck in seat 37G aboard a Crampac Airways SkyBus, waiting for a delayed flight to un-delay itself, run screaming off the airplane. Hop into your Cessna 170 and fly back in time to Kansas City Downtown Airport. As the name implies, it’s where airports should be--within a shout of downtown. Beg a ride or take a walk around the perimeter road until you see the old Quonset-style hangar that once housed TWA’s Connie maintenance shop. That’s the Airline History Museum. Open seven days a week—check online for exact times.

Besides the Super Constellation, the Airline History Museum has a 1952 Martin 404 and a 1941 Douglas DC-3. Martin once competed with Convair for the short-haul routes. This 404 was part of Eastern Airlines fleet of 60 Martin 404s. The DC-3…well, there ain’t nuthin’ the DC-series legends haven’t done since they first appeared in the 1930s. The museum’s DC-3 is undergoing an extensive--and expensive--rebuild, so it’s anyone’s guess when it’ll fly again. But as it sits, who cares? “Hangar Queen,” in this case, is a term of respect for a royal dame who’s earned her crown.

Until two years ago, the Connie regularly flew to air shows and appeared in movies, including Martin Scorcese’s The Aviator and Jim Carey’s Ace Ventura. Walk-on roles, however, don’t pay the bills. Avgas alone can suck a bank account dry when burning 400 gallons-per-hour while making circles in the sky training crews. And then, there’s oil. The Connie goes through lots of it in flight, and judging from the oil stained ramps in old photographs, lots of it while sitting on the ground.

Starting up an airline may be folly. Starting up a flying museum dedicated to preserving old airliners may seem like folly, but, thankfully, it’s run on passion. TWA had Howard Hughes to bankroll its operations. The Airline History Museum has volunteers who buck rivets, weld, stitch and swap out engines to get the Connie flying once again. These same volunteers hold fund raisers, and on October 6, 2007 will clear the hangar floor for the world’s most prestigious hangar dance featuring guest, John Travolta, an airport kid from New Jersey who shares that passion for keeping the sound of four radial engines a living part of the American skyscape. You’re invited. Check online for details.

So who flies this thing?

On a warm Sunday afternoon in mid-September I met with Charles “Skip” Gatschet, a retired TWA captain who’d begun his career teaching in a TWA simulator, moved into the Martin 404 right seat where he flew the Ohio Valley until he transferred to Connies and flew the world. In 1986, he made his last flight as captain in a Boeing 767. After that, they did away with the airline.

Gatschet showed me around the museum, stopping to explain the inner workings of a cutaway Wright R-3350- EA3, 18-cylinder, turbo-compound radial engine.* Wrapped around the working data of museum pieces were priceless stories about airline life in another era. I didn’t want to leave. Guys like Skip Gatschet (shown at right) fly the Connie, and if you’re lucky he may be on duty the day you visit. If not, someone else who remembers or simply has respect for this rapidly fading past will invite you to see what aviation can be when beauty lures us into the air. Consider this your invitation…

Contacts:
Save A Connie, Inc., is a 501(c)3 entity that does business as The Airline History Museum. AHM being a subsidiary of SAC.
Involvement by interested people is easy and anyone can do as little or much as his interest and availability allow. Membership dues are $110 per year, and anyone can join by simply sending name, address, phone number and check along with a request for membership to:
The Airline History Museum
201 N.W. Lou Holland Drive
Kansas City, MO 64116-4223
Or call the museum at 1-800-513-9484 or 816-421-3401. Membership privileges allow unlimited access to the museum, the right to ride on the airplanes to air shows and so forth. There is a monthly newsletter. Donation of one's time and talent to the common effort is greatly appreciated.

The End

****

* Museum’s Connie engines: Wright R-3350 - EA-3 18 cylinder turbo-compound, originally rated at 3,440 BHP at takeoff. In current operation the museum is restricted by the use of 100LL fuel to 2,880 BHP at takeoff. (restricted to 51" MAP at 2,900 RPM).

© 2007, Paul Berge, all rights reserved.

Blakesburg 07

2007-09-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

Antique Airplane Association Reunion
© 2007, Paul Berge

Somewhere west, perhaps east, of Ailerona is a patch of aviation sanity in a hyphenated world fascinated with high-tech same-think. It’s Blakesburg’s Antique Airfield (IA27 to those with GPS) located a few miles from an Iowa town that hasn’t changed much since Dewey defeated Truman for the middleweight championship in 1948. A tavern, grocery store with a pair of Sinclair gas pumps outside and a few brick buildings mark the business district where the stop sign is more advisory than law. A WWI artillery piece in a small park dedicated to forgotten heroes aims menacingly toward an empty pizza parlor.

Watch for stray dogs as you turn east through a few of blocks of clapboard houses and double-wides beneath immense shade trees, and then cross a bridge above the Burlington Northern rail line. Leaving town the two-lane blacktop curves through a canyon of green-almost-gold corn. So far, you could be anywhere along the Hawkeye state’s side roads, but you’ve passed into the southeast corner where Confederate raiders once roamed and time hasn’t so much stopped but, instead, ages like a dusty bottle of Châteaux l'Empenage ’47 or a ‘39 Packard in your grandmother’s wooden garage. Time exhibits a muted elegance here. Blakesburg is on the map, but its influence takes your mind into new dimensions, especially when you arrive, as we did, by air.

“Take a deep look,” I called to Mike Vogt, my guest for the day, riding in the 1946 Aeronca Champ’s front seat. At six-foot-something his knees rubbed the instrument panel, making him look more cramped than an airline passenger trapped in seat 27F at O’Hare. He didn’t mind, because the fifty-mile flight from Des Moines to Blakesburg in a 60-year-old airplane transports more than your body. It moves the soul; if not, you don’t have one.

“What's that?” he called over the 65-horse engine and summer wind through the open side window.

“1929,” I answered as we passed behind and slightly below a pair of Travel Air biplanes with round engines and floppy-eared ailerons climbing past our nose. “It returns here every Labor Day, stays for about a week and then flies back into History where the FAA can’t touch it.” And I could see from his smile that he began to see what I meant, began to feel the time shift.

Antique Airfield is the home of the Antique Airplane Association and Air Power Museum, collectively known as AAA/APM. The brainchild of Robert Taylor, AAA founder, in 1953, back before many of today’s antiques were built. A pilot and aircraft mechanic who’d served in the 6th Air Force during WWII, Bob had the vision that one day aviation’s past would need protection. With the help of family and countless volunteers over the decades AAA/APM has quietly preserved 1929, 1939, ‘49, ‘59 and all the winged years before and in between as they “Keep The Antiques Flying!”

And that’s the rub—Flying! The word “museum” brings images of air-conditioned vaults full of polished exhibits behind velvet ropes with sleepy docents explaining the worth of dormant history. AAA’s mission is to keep lift beneath the antiquers’ wings, to live history, to preserve the hardware and the skills to fly, maintain and promote these aviation treasures. Oil, grass and exhaust stains, bug guts and the occasional popped tail wheel spring all go into this clacking—flying—corner of the aviation universe. It’s an exclusive community open to anyone willing to dream of what’s been and what’s still possible when fabric-covered wings attach to the imagination.

This year the flying gods smiled on the AAA reunion as high pressure dominated weather charts, allowing pilots to fly in from both coasts. A nearly full moon and misty sunsets made Antique Airfield seem like a digital movie set where a Luscombe chased a C3 Aeronca around the patch until darkness closed the sky for the night, leaving behind the deepest black speckled with stars you can’t see from the 21st Century.

Inside the Pilot’s Pub, beer and cigars accented flying stories told, retold and embellished with great sweeps of aviator hands. Old voices conjured up ghosts from radial engines days, while younger minds sucked it all in and will carry this time-warped bit of aeronautical purity into their futures. And by Sunday night, after most of the pilots had decamped to retrace their journeys back to Colorado, Arizona and Pennsylvania in Cessna Bobcats, Stearmans and Fairchilds, those who remained suffered through an awards ceremony in which a tiny speck of the world’s immense population saluted those who Keep The Antiques Flying until the next reunion when the gods will smile again, and 1929 will return to Blakesburg, Iowa where the future is always worth flying.

The End

***
View the AAA/APM 2007 Fly-In: http://aaa-apm.org/images/BTBPhotoStory.wmv
© 2007, Paul Berge, all rights reserved (Above right: Pilots Pub with convenient parking)

"Old Airfields Never Die" © Paul Berge

2007-08-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

They Just Slowly Fade From Memory...

a story by Paul Berge, © 1989

A dead airport often takes a long time to decay. The lucky ones, when murdered by city councils, are quickly rendered. Their hangars are torn down, the debris trucked to dump sites. The airplanes scattered like flies from a shaken tablecloth. Then the bulldozers, the morticians at the controls, rip apart any trace of runway, ramps or foundations. When done correctly, five decades of aviation memory can be obliterated inside of a month. It's the only merciful way.

The worst cases are the dead ones left unclaimed. They appear on sectionals as airport symbols with Xs in their eyes. They may be dead, but no one wants the body. Northeast of Des Moines, Iowa is one.

Jones Field. That was the last name it had, before someone, apparently named Jones, discovered how fruitless it was to compete with grass and smiles against the corporate muscle of kerosene and pavement. Now an airfield, once called Jones, lies dead.

It died in stages. First the airplanes left--not all. A Navion stayed, and a Cessna 175 and a Beechcraft Musketeer with flat tires and a glazed windshield. They looked like three old veterans, escapees from the VA home. Old fliers with more memories under the chipped paint and cracked vinyl than all the turbine screamers across town.

No longer able to fly, they became homes for sparrows and mice. Their humiliation continued as the vandals came and smashed out their instruments and left beer bottles on their seats. Someone put a bullet through the Navion's tail. There was no need, but it was done.

The runways went to seed. A farmer, working the neighboring field ran his disk across them, making them unusable, except to those who flew Champs and Cubs with big tires and tended to ignore NOTAMS and other death warrants.

I stayed with the airport through its final agonies. I saw the hangar lose its windows, then its UNICOM antenna and the CESSNA FLIGHT CENTER sign. I saw the picnic table where we once sat in the shade, watching Bill Norlin's Taylorcraft spot land on a bare dirt patch. And I saw the shop become an empty cavern of broken glass and stagnant puddles.

A tornado tried to put the coup de grace on the field but only smashed the T-hangars where the Navion and Cessna 175 remained. One was flipped onto the other, and they were both loaded onto flatbeds and hauled to the junk man. I never saw the Musketeer leave. I assume it, too, was hauled, not flown, away.

The runways are still discernible from the air, although I doubt the Lear drivers, heading for International, ever look. The lone hangar refuses to crumble, and I see more of its parts scattered around as though vultures were feasting on the carcass.

Jones Field--Des Moines, Iowa--is not dead yet, but hasn't much dying left to do.

***

"Emily Flies Again" ©, Paul Berge

2007-07-21T06:01:00.000-07:00

Every Good Kid Deserves A Biplane

She slipped the web harness over her shoulders, while I cautiously told her how to attach them to the lap belt. The trick, of course, was to convey the instructions without sounding like an instructor dad who still viewed his teenage daughter as a toddler in dress-up princess clothes--which, of course, being a dad, I do.

This was Emily’s first ride in an open-cockpit biplane. Shortly after her birth I’d taken her flying in our Cherokee; strapped in a baby bucket we’d climb and swoop, and she’d gurgle and burp. By the time she was three, she flew our Aeronca from the front seat, although, mostly that consisted of yanking the joystick back and forth while squealing: “Eeee-yaaah…” By age nine, she no longer believed in princesses, and airplanes were something that Dad kept at the “boring” airport where old guys retold the same dull stories inside smelly hangars.

Then, on an unusually warm afternoon when the countryside had changed to gold beneath a sky so blue as to make a Crayola engineer squint, I was headed to the airport and asked—as I always do: “Emily, wanna fly the biplane?” With my hand on the door I expected her usual: “Ah, no thanks…” But, instead, she replied, “Sure.”

One syllable broke through that long pause over the past half-decade. “Sure,” and she grinned slightly, because teenagers aren’t supposed to show excessive emotion to parents. She pulled a UC Santa Cruz Banana Slug sweatshirt over her head and said, “Let’s go.” I would’ve taken her hand—the one belonging to the three-year-old who used to fly with me—but I knew better.

Despite the time gap, she hadn’t forgotten how to behave at the airfield. She stayed clear of propellers and helped remove the cockpit canopies and mousetraps from beneath the seats. Luckily, the trap lines were empty, the mice having learned it was safer to nest in the neighbor’s Cessna 172 than inside the biplane.

“Pull on the strut,” I said, and then tugging on the opposite wing, we rolled the Marquart Charger from its hangar. Sunlight—the unreal kind in late afternoon across dormant farmland—lit her face as no canned makeup ever could. “Now, hold your side while we swing the tail,” and she understood how to turn the biplane until it pointed toward the grass runway.

It was a short but glorious flight across the few years that had separated us from her childhood to now, and as we landed—bounced—landed again, and taxied to the hangar, I anxiously awaited her approval as she would’ve awaited mine long ago.

She undid the harness, slipped the leather helmet from her head so the pony tail swung out, and then with a smile I’d waited to see for so long, she turned and replied to my, “So?” with, “I liked it…” And she pulled herself up by the top wing and just had to add: “Not much of a landing, though.”

And that’s my Emily, flying again at fourteen.

****

© 2005, Paul Berge; all rights reserved; first appeared in the Pacific Flyer, Wayman Dunlap, publisher

"Betty Bounce" ©, Paul Berge

2007-06-24T06:58:00.000-07:00

A romance story about a boy and his love of a Cessna 195

It’s impossible to forget your first love. The time, the place, and especially the aroma of obsession embeds itself inside the brain and never leaves. Years later, you can be on another planet and a mere whiff of fragrance will trigger the sweetness of memory and, in my case, a memory lost.

Her name was Betty, a Cessna 195, and I fell in love with her on the ramp one cold Saturday in late November. I’d ridden my bicycle out to watch airplanes take off and land. My friends thought me just shy of nuts for wasting a weekend staring at flight, but they hadn’t yet felt love. They didn’t know its velvet grasp. At 14 I was captive.

It had begun innocently enough. I'd slipped through the chain link fence at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport to walk the rows of parked aircraft--back in a time when an airport kid could wander beneath the wings as private pilots swaggered past. I’d just ducked beneath a Twin Beech 18 when I saw her parked at the end of the row. She hadn’t been there yesterday and judging from the long-dried bugs on her wing’s leading edge, she flew a lot and would be gone tomorrow—just the sort of love you don’t need but can’t resist.

Her fuselage was slender, her cowling round and full of the promise of horsepower. A thin trickle of oil dripped from her cowl and into a crust of snow below. It fell the way a drop of red wine might run down a woman’s chin if she laughed at something you’d said over dinner.

Uninvited, I wiped at the oil with my fingers and then paused to stare up at her narrow windshield, beneath which was her name in flowing cursive--Betty Bounce. I said it aloud to feel it on my lips—"Betty Bounce…"

Her strutless wings invited me to look inside. Slowly I put my hand to the glass in the door and peered at her dark instrument panel where strange dials and knobs told me she had class. The black radios and an artificial horizon cocked to one side bespoke of a spirit born to travel. Betty could never stay in one place—she’d invite you along, but if you hesitated, she’d laugh and depart.

Overwhelmed with passion, I did what no respectable airport kid dared do—I opened her door and eased my face deep inside. The intoxicating smell of avgas, oil, and cracked leather rushed through my sinuses and drilled deep into that part of my brain where love flares for a moment and never quite dies.

Quickly, I shut the door.
I’d gone too far.
I ran off—knees weak, heart pounding with lust for this goddess of flight. Reaching the fence, I turned and she laughed ever so gently. We both knew I was too young, and we parted.

Decades later as I opened the door to another Cessna 195 at Blakesburg, Iowa’s Antique Airfield the aroma of oil and avgas with a hint of cracked leather rushed over me. I looked up and smiled, because Betty was back. She wouldn’t stay, of course, but at least we had time to reminisce.

***

Betty Bounce was a real airplane. If anyone knows what happened to her, please let me know. This story appears in the short story collection, Ailerona © by Paul Berge, all rights reserved. "Betty Bounce" ©, the short story, first appeared in the Minnesota Flyer (Richard Coffey, publisher) and later in the Pacific Flyer (Wayman Dunlap, publisher). The author reserves all rights to this story. Please contact Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC for reproduction permission.

"Toto's Revenge" ©

2007-05-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

“Toto’s Revenge”
from Aeromancy ©, 2005, Paul Berge

Best FBO? Hard to say. I’m no fan of metropolitan airports with their Berlin Wall security and prefer, instead, the outback fields where crop dusters fly 200-foot traffic patterns and tick-pimpled dogs sleep beside a broken pop machine with a sign that reads: “Leave money in coffee can. Signed, Betty.”

Million Air at Van Nuys (VNY), California surprised me when I’d expected big-city snubs only to be treated like a fat-dollar celebrity. (Some say I’m easily mistaken for Robin Williams before liposuction, so maybe that was it.) Ramp fees were waived after I purchased a paltry ten gallons and swiped the last brownie off the counter.
Guymon (GUY, photo above right) located in the accusing finger of Oklahoma’s panhandle is an unsung bargain close to a great Mexican diner, and if you behave yourself at Frasca Field (C16) in Urbana, Illinois, you can tour Frasca’s simulator factory. Show a respectful blend of awe and gratitude, and you may get the VIP trip through Rudy Frasca’s private museum of war birds, old birds, and odd birds. Don’t touch anything. And don't talk--listen.
Flower Aviation in Salina, Kansas (SLN) makes any tramp pilot’s Top Ten list. And it’s not just because of the pretty girls in tight shorts who direct transients into tie-down spots and then cause middle-aged men to drop jaw-first from their airplanes watching them bend over to chock the tires.
Okay, that might be one of the reasons.

The other is the lobby where you’ll eat fresh chocolate-chip cookies and get sworn at by a parrot, macaw, or whatever that foul-speaking thing is that was obviously raised by Navy linguists.
Kansas, parked midway between everything hip on the West Coast and urbane on the East, needs to do something to get noticed. Cookies alone won’t do it, so the state offers a bigger show as I relearned when wandering through on no particular route in something unsophisticated that taxis with its tail in the dirt and no lid over the cockpits. Four wings completed my barnstorming ensemble, so wherever I’d arrive someone usually remarked, “Nice biplane; think you’ll ever learn to land it?” At least in Salina they smile when they say that—giggle, actually.
For those unfamiliar with the Midwest, here’s a quick lesson: It’s not all flat. Iowa even has ski resorts, although, they are a bit silly; my favorite is located near the Boone (BNW) airport, where there’s a homebuilders’ workshop/co-op open to anyone having trouble riveting together a quick-build RV-8.
Kansas, however, is a flat billiard table stretching to all horizons covered in endless pastures and whatever it is growing below in waving green felt. In the cool morning sky a few hundred feet above all that waving, I could see as far as the earth’s curvature allowed. Beyond that I didn’t care, because the openness sucked my mind dry, removing all remnants of 1970s Rocky Mountain highs and filled the void with a 2-D vision that staggers most viewers but made me want to fly above it forever. Or at least until the afternoon sky warmed and all that green below sweated into the air currents rising to colder heights. Plus, I was hungry and almost out of gas, so taking a tip from a freight dog who knew where to find free cookies, I headed to Salina.
The tower controller wasn’t particularly friendly, and to punctuate my disdain for his indifference, I demonstrated a triple-bounce wheel landing on the 12,000-foot runway.
“If able, turn left at the end,” he said, “And taxi to the ramp.”
I was able and did, following a shorts-clad ramp rat waving parking batons like a KU cheerleader. I think his name was Daryl, and it was apparent that he handled the lesser customers while the biz jet behind me received the full Flower reception.
Still, like Odysseus on the Isle of Babes I lingered until the weather soured. Flight Service painted an optimistic picture of the route: “If you hurry and get real lucky, you may survive the line of Level Six thunderstorms forming between Salina and Topeka.” Once in Topeka (TOP) the forecast called for clear skies and blessed siren songs all the way to my final resting place, er, destination in Iowa. So, I departed and, like Odysseus, I must’ve irritated the weather gods, and because I didn’t understand that Kansas could morph into a mountain state I found myself weaving through canyons of vertical development the likes of which gives any sensible barnstormer pause. Unfortunately, every airport where I’d hoped to pause went down the weather toilet.
Smart pilots avoid anything made of water vapor the color of marshmallows growing to 70,000 feet. It was late afternoon, and Kansas having broiled all day in the sun now released its steamed energy skyward. The air was deceptively smooth at the feet of these towering thugs, but as I tuned nearby AWOS frequencies, reports deteriorated from rain, to wind, to blowing frogs.
I monitored Flight Watch (122.0) with the thought of climbing on top, but heard an anxious Bonanza driver several thousand feet above me trying to make the same mistakes only to report that the clouds grew around him so fast that he turned tail for Texas. I decided to do likewise back to Salina only to find my back door closed. Cut off, my plans shifted from reaching Topeka to considering a survivable side road landing.
The gods toy with the wayfarer who ignores evidence of his own stupidity. So as clouds boiled around me in unbelievable glory and terror, thumping their vaporous chests, I pressed eastward through a twisting alleyway of narrowing sanity above Kansas' greenery, and running just a little faster than the squall line, floated into Topeka. No cookies, no bargain-priced avgas, or Playmate staff, just a guy in a blue work shirt leaning into the wind to help me tie the biplane down shortly before the sky unloaded.
Best FBO? Tough to say, but as lightning chiseled the sky, I was damn glad this one was there.

***The End

P-51 Red Tail Mustang

2007-05-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

Many of you saw Don Hinz or Doug Rozendaal flying the Commemorative Air Force Red Tail Mustang at Airshows and Fly-ins across America. With your help we can be flying again soon. We have raised a significant amount of money in the past 6 months. The fuselage and tail are structurally complete. We have an engine and we are very close to starting the rebuild of our wing, but we still need your help to finish it up.

We are hosting the Minnesota public premier showing of “Red Tail Reborn” at the Minnesota Historical Society on June 6th. This documentary will air nationwide on PBS, but this is your chance to see it first. There will be a cocktail hour, charity silent auction, Keynote address, (Tubby Smith is tentatively confirmed) and the documentary showing.

The details are on the website. http://www.redtail.org/ You can see the documentary trailer on that website. http://www.redtailreborn.com/ We are seeking individual attendees and table sponsors. If you have any questions please call Dani @ 715-426-9716.

Please consider attending and bring a neighbor or friend as well. If you can’t attend, but would like to help get the Red Tail Flying again, you can do that too at our website. This promises to be a special evening that will include several Original Tuskegee Airmen and a special presentation to the Hinz family. This will be an aviation evening not to miss.

****

"The Logbook" © by Paul Berge

2007-05-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Logbook © by Paul Berge appears on the audiobook CD by the same title ISBN 0-9728150-2-3.

1987

The double beam from atop the control tower cut through the frozen gloom in tireless strokes--green, white; green, white....
Yellow flashes from the hazard lights on the snowplows moved slowly along the runway.
Vernon had just slid his car off the access road in front of the cargo terminal when he pushed his sleeve up to read his watch--1:38 a.m. Except for the handful of snowplows, the airport was quiet. The last airliner would have landed at midnight, and the nightly cargo flights, a collection of just about anything with engines, wings and a vacuous hole for cargo, would arrive around 3 a.m. The pilots were all young. They hauled everything from canceled checks to lobster tails. It was aviation at its most raw. Vernon, by contrast, hadn’t flown since losing his medical certificate on his 66th birthday.
It was a short distance to the terminal--the old terminal, not used for passengers since the early 1970's. There was a newer one made of glass across the field for the airlines. Vernon worked in the old brick terminal, now used exclusively for cargo.
After trying the car door, held shut by a snowdrift, he crawled over the gearshift and brake handle and out the passenger's side. He slammed the door, catching his coat and lost his balance on the ice.
“Whaaa....Umph!”
His right elbow struck the frozen pavement with a sharp jab of pain, and he wallowed in the slush, tangled in his overcoat, spitting venom.
Vernon pushed himself to his feet and walked stiffly toward the old terminal. The snow changed back to sleet. By the light of the street lamps he saw his reflection in the glass doors. A stocky old man in a baggy overcoat, he thought, then squared his shoulders and moved the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.
His elbow throbbed from the fall, but the rest of his body felt strong. Watching his reflection through the rain, he remembered the first day he had walked up to the terminal, decades earlier. Recently discharged from the Navy after two years in the Pacific, flying Martin PBM flying boats, he was just another pilot looking for a job. The offer of $30 per week and a room had brought him to the Midwest. Fifty years of life since then had kept him there.
He pushed the door open and shook the sleet from his hat.
"Evening, Vern," a sleepy voice from behind the dispatcher's counter called.
"Hmmm," Vernon grumbled. The room was warm, stuffy warm. The smell of coffee and cigarettes made it lonely.
"Is it snowing yet?"
"Started to," Vernon answered. "Mostly sleet. Got stuck in a snowbank." He waved vaguely at the parking lot.
"One of the plows can pull you out later."
"Umm," Vernon grunted. A radio played music somewhere in a darkened corner. Vernon stepped around a pile of cinder blocks and boards in the center of the room.
"Haven’t they started remodeling in here yet?" he asked looking around at the gutted old building.
"No, just deposited more junk."
He ignored the answer and went into the men's room. Looking at himself in the cracked mirror above the sink he decided his face was the same--the same one he had brought in 1947. There were more lines, of course, and parts sagged where once they had been tight, but it was the same face staring back. He ran his hand across his short wavy hair.
"Cab Calloway's hair," he said and laughed.
Suddenly, a toilet flushed behind him, and a stall door swung open with a long squeak. "What'd you say?" One of the mechanics emerged buttoning his insulated overalls, an amused smirk on his lips.
"Huh?" Vernon started. "Oh, my hair." He pointed, embarrassed. "My wife used to say I had Cab Calloway's hair."
"Who?"
"Cab...never mind."
The mechanic left, and Vernon glanced around at the battered tile walls, steam radiator and heavy porcelain fixtures. "Old," he sighed. "All old and worn out." He rubbed his sore elbow, then tossed the cold cigar butt into a urinal and strode out. He glanced down the long dark hallway, past the empty stalls where Frontier, Braniff, and Tri-State Airlines had all had their ticket counters. At the end of the hall was the empty operations office and the old flight school; all long gone.
"The Mitsubishi flying 321 is stuck in Omaha. I thought I could get the Cheyenne on 308 to swing over there from Kansas City and..."
Vernon cut the dispatcher's voice off with a wave. "Give me ten minutes," he said and disappeared into his office, a tiny room across from where the hangar had been. He closed the door behind him and stood in the dark, staring out the window.
He missed the hangar--missed it terribly. He missed many things. He missed his wife. He missed flying. He missed being a child and listening to the mail planes fly over his house toward the night beacon, flashing steady white every ten seconds.
He massaged his elbow. The control tower’s rotating beacon swept green and white overhead. He looked out where the hangar had been. It was almost completely gone now, only the one wall remained, and as soon as the weather cleared it, too, would go. A bulldozer sat posed, waiting. He flicked on the light. A cluttered desk, a single file cabinet, the radiator and a phone--these were his tools. On one wall were two photographs. He lit another cigar. Blue smoke rose toward the ceiling. He stepped closer to the wall and stared. One photograph showed the nose of a Martin PBM towering above a small cluster of young men in casual Navy uniforms. Everyone smiled, including the short officer with the wavy hair dressed in tee shirt and cap and cigar clamped arrogantly between his teeth. Someone had scrawled: "With Love, From, Iwo Jima--1945" across the picture.
The other photograph had been taken beside the now demolished hangar outside his office. It showed a pair of Aeronca Champs drawn nose to nose and a wedding party in tuxedos and gowns arranged in a crescent in front of the planes. All the faces were young and happy, including the young groom with the black wavy hair and his bride.
"Chief Pilot and Squaw--June 1948"

The door swung open behind him, and the aroma of coffee flowed in with the dispatcher.
"I go home now," the dispatcher said. "I sent 308 to Omaha to pick up 312's load; your first flight's due in at 3:16 a.m.; 308 will be in at 3:45; 312, when they fix it, will go back to Kansas City; the runway's been glycoled; I hear one of Night Express's went off the runway at Minneapolis--so much for the
competition; the coffee's fresh; we need sugar, and there's only three thousand gallons of Jet fuel, more should be delivered tomorrow if it doesn't snow. Good Night."
Vernon followed him out.
"What's this?" he asked picking up a dusty black book from the counter.
"That? Oh, one of the construction worker's found it this morning when they tore out a wall..." He pointed toward the old hangar. "It's someone's logbook--old, real old. I was going to toss it out." With that he left.
Vernon turned the logbook over slowly in his hands. The binding was dry and cracked. It opened with a gentle rustle. The musty smell of the years rose to his nostrils sending a sharp pang through his emotions. He read the name: Charles S. Dansig. It meant nothing. The wind blew suddenly, rattling snow against the plate windows like thousands of tiny claws. Vernon looked up and reached for the thermostat, turning it a notch higher. He took the logbook into his office. He sat at his desk and read the name in the logbook again: Charles S. Dansig. It was taking on a familiar ring. He thought a moment, staring out the window past the bulldozer now fuzzy with snow. A thought dawned. He glanced at the two photographs on the wall. In one lunge he moved from behind his desk to the wall and lifted the Navy picture from its nail. The light was pale, so he twisted the desk lamp's neck, pointing it at the wall.
"Dansig," he said to himself. "Charlie Dansig, I've heard that name, I know it…"
Turning the photograph over, he fumbled with the staples holding the cardboard back to the frame. One of the staples was brittle and snapped, making a neat incision in his right index finger. A drop of blood soaked into the cardboard.
The photograph slid easily from the frame. He moved closer to the lamp and turned the glossy print over. The same fountain pen that had scrawled across the picture's face listed the crew's name starting with the plane's commander, Vernon L. Ackerbach, Lt., USN. Vernon scanned down the list, but the only name close to Dansig was, Charles "Charlie Horse" Danbury, a gunner. He set the print down on the glass frame and stared into the snow. The green and white arms of the beacon swept through the dusty night. He turned back to the wall, looking at the wedding photo. One by one, he examined the party, naming the young figures. "Harold Reynolds, Susie Hickok, Trevor Hedges...." He paused briefly and stared at his late wife, her round face smiling and bright; the white lace cascading across her dark hair. He said her name, "Peggy."
Suddenly, he looked to the end of the line and saw a tall, older man, dressed in a tuxedo the same as the others. The figure smiled like the others, but Vernon had forgotten his name. He flipped the picture over and tore the photograph from its mount, reading the back. Again the names were listed, but nothing even close to, Charles S. Dansig. The forgotten man was, Daniel Jones, a pilot Vernon had known and forgotten long ago. Dejected, he sat behind the desk and pushed the dismantled frames away. Their presence in the old building across from the old hangar depressed him. He watched the snow, then turned back to the desk, adjusted the lamp, and reached for the logbook.
With little interest, he flipped through the yellow edged pages reading the entries. They began in 1929 and ended abruptly in late 1931. Several blank pages followed the last entry. Vernon leaned over the desk. This was apparently Dansig’s second logbook. He estimated him to have almost 2000 hours when it terminated in 1931; almost a thousand of that coming in the last two years. The entries were scribbled, some in pen, others in dull pencil. Daily entries had been abandoned at the very beginning of the book, the owner choosing to lump weekly totals together in single line entries. It as apparent Charles S. Dansig flew the mail. Almost all the logged time was in a Boeing 40 biplane, one of those huge mail carriers Vernon remembered seeing as a boy.
He recalled sneaking off at night with his brother, riding double on the bicycle, to the airport in Salt Lake City to watch the mail planes come in. Nobody had bothered them as they stood in the dark arguing over which was better, the open cockpit Boeing 40's or the great model 80's, the tri-motors. His brother leaned toward the later, while Vernon argued the merits of having one's head out in the wind where one could feel the sky. A stab of loneliness rocked him, thinking of his brother. He tried not to think of the dead, but the memories came flooding back.
Slowly, he reached for the photographs, choosing the wedding picture. He stared at the group, the two Aeroncas and the date, June, 1948. He remembered how the wedding had been delayed a year after his brother's death. He wanted to cry, but refused. He slid the photograph away from him and picked up the logbook again.
"Well, Mr. Dansig, how did you manage to lose this?"
Suddenly, he noticed the radio was silent, the music gone. A low hum of static hissed through the halls. He glanced at his watch, 2:30 a.m.
"Must have gone off the air," he mumbled and stood. Outside the office he snapped the radio off. At the far end of the hallway, where the flight school had been, a fluorescent bulb flickered, trying to die. Wind rattled something deep inside the building. Vernon shivered from the cold.
"Impossible to heat this damn place," he said.
He walked down the long empty hall toward the flickering bulb, his own footsteps sharp against the cold stone floor. Looking at his hand, he noticed he still carried the logbook.
"Mmm," he uttered and reached for the light switch outside the old flight school office, and hesitated.
The school had been gone since 1951 when he last instructed there. Since then it had been used as an operations room, a maintenance office; an insurance company had even leased it for two years. Lately, it had been used for storage. Vernon peered inside and snapped on a light--four walls, all yellow, and a mop and bucket. Nothing remained of the hundreds of young men who passed through on the G.I. Bill. There was no trace of the maps, the training aids, the posters. Vernon stepped inside. He turned to his right, to exactly where the counter had stood, where Peggy had stood. He saw her. At least he felt as though he could see her.
"Hello," he said shyly. The cold walls stared back. "New skirt? I like plaid...Doing anything after work? No? I just got paid, care to...You would? Great! I have a student, now," he said aloud. "I'll see you when..." He heard his excited voice echo in the empty room and froze. He turned abruptly, leaving the room after smacking the light switch off. The fluorescent bulb still flickered as he strode back along the empty hallway toward his office.
"Stupid," he mumbled. "Forget them…Gone…They're all gone!"
He rounded the corner into his office and gathered the photographs in one hand trying to take the frames as well. He still carried the logbook. Smash! The two glass frames hit the floor and shattered, the shards dispersing under the desk and chair. "Ahhh…" He bent to pick up the broken frames, then stood.
"You can stay there!" he shouted. "You belong there!"
He turned toward the snow and felt his eyes swell. "You left me here," he said quietly.
A light poked through the snow. It moved toward him, sweeping its white beam from left to right, as though feeling its way in the darkness. Vernon stared. He looked at his watch, 2:40 a.m. The first arrival was not due for at least a half-hour. The beam continued to search, moving closer. The outline of an aircraft appeared, a large plane, a taildragger. The green and white beacon from the tower flashed overhead, and the deep rumble of radial engines vibrated the windows. All the company planes were turbines. Nobody used radial engines around there. Other companies still used DC-3's, but none came there. He watched the light, thick in the blowing snow. The airplane took shape, a twin engine with two rudders--an old twin Beech. The radial engines sent a deep throb into Vernon's insides. He remembered the same twins hauling passengers out of that very terminal forty years earlier.
The twin swiveled around, blowing snow in a great cloud toward the glass. Vernon left his office, ran down the hallway, and through the door. Once in the snow he moved quickly toward the airplane. Snow blew in cold eddies around him. He wore no coat, but ignored the cold. He carried the logbook.
"Peggy, remember the Twin Beech we took to Florida?" His voice was happy. He started to run and slipped, recovered and continued. The green and white lights washed above. The Twin
Beech shut one engine down, and a cargo door swung open. A vague face looked out from the darkened fuselage.
"Hello!" Vernon called. No one answered. "Have you come for me?" He stopped in front of the open door. The face leaned out.
"What?" It was a young face on a young man dressed in blue jeans and a nylon parka. He needed a shave and chewed gum nervously.
"Did you come for me?" Vernon asked again, feeling something was wrong.
"You from Federal Express?" the pilot asked and kicked at the doorframe to keep his feet warm. "I've never flown in here; normally go into Cedar Rapids, but it's closed. There's supposed
to be a truck meet me here. You it?"
Vernon shook his head slowly and stared at the plane. The one radial still running ticked evenly.
"If you're not it, I'm closing the door. It's cold out here. Where's your coat?" the pilot asked.
Vernon suddenly felt the cold. "I...What year is this?" he asked.
The pilot was already reaching for the door. "This? Ah, I think it's a '48, '47 or a '48. Hell, I don't know."
"No, I mean what year is it now?"
The pilot tilted his head. "Look, I think you'd better get inside, or get home. You can't be standing around in the cold like that. Why don't you go on. The van's pulling up now."
Vernon turned. A large van pulled through the gate and past his car still perched on the snow bank. He walked back to the terminal, his elbow beginning to ache again. Before he reached the door he turned. "Is your name, Dansig?" he called. "Charles S. Dansig?"
The pilot shook his head and waved the delivery van back toward the airplane.

Vernon walked along the hallway and back into his office. He sat. Emotion drained from him, leaving only an emptiness. The Twin Beech fired its other engine and Vernon listened to it taxi away, then, silence. He sat, unmoving. He felt foolish. He glanced at the photographs.
"Ghosts," he said. "I wanted ghosts." Planting his elbows on the desk, he rubbed his face with both hands. A white light flashed through the window moving his shadow momentarily across the wall where the photographs had been. He glanced over his shoulder. The control tower's beam pulsated once, white, and then seconds later, white again, no green. He barely noted it. Another plane taxied toward the terminal, its light searching through the snow. A large piston engine shook the windows again. Vernon chuckled. "Not one of mine," he said.
He kept his back to the window. The plane's landing light poked through the glass again, keeping Vernon's shadow on the wall. He held his head in his hands. The engine ticked at idle behind him, and a strong wind shook the building. He glanced up. The flicker of the fluorescent bulb was the only movement in the hallway, but he felt something.
"Baloney," he said, still leaning on the desk. But something was moving, moving toward him. He listened, and heard nothing other that the snow against the glass and the airplane's motor outside. His shadow barely moved beside the doorframe. The hallway light flickered. Suddenly, someone appeared in the doorway, filling the frame.
"You have something of mine," a deep voice said. He stood in shadow, the light from outside not reaching him. Vernon sat frozen, his shadow unmoving. The figure raised an arm into the light. It was coated in thick leather, its hand in heavy gauntlet. A finger pointed toward him.
"There, on the desk."
Vernon barely moved his eyes, looking where the figure indicated. The logbook.
"No need to be surprised," the voice said, now almost friendly. "You've been looking for me. I felt it, so I came."
Vernon spoke, his voice a thin creak. "Dansig? Charles S. Dansig?"
"Charlie. I need the logbook. I never filled in my last flight, you know." His hand opened slowly.
Vernon picked the book from the desk and started to hand it to him. "I...I suspected there might be...things...like you." The hand still reached out waiting for the book. "Are there others?"
"Yes."
Vernon glanced at the wedding photo, the Navy photo. "All the others?"
"Somewhere."
"Do you know them?"
"Some."
"Can you...can I...?"
"I cannot, but you can."
"How?"
"You found me didn't you?"
"Yes, but..."
"Find them." With that, the figure stretched its hand even further. "Please, I must go."

Vernon looked outside at the airplane, a biplane, a Boeing Model 40, mail plane. A steady white beacon light flashed--no green. He remembered the old airway beacons flashing solid white
when he was a child. He looked back at the figure, still in shadow. He stood and moved closer. The nearer he got, the more vague the figure became. He could almost see through it to the hallway.
"Please," the voice said.
Vernon placed the logbook in the outstretched hand. The fingers closed, and the figure vanished almost instantly along the hallway toward the flickering light. Vernon ran to the window. The solid white beacon flashed and the Boeing 40, under a blast of power swiveled its tail and disappeared in a cloud of twisting snow. The beacon from the tower flashed white..., then green. Vernon sat lightly at the desk and picked up the wedding photograph. A lightness overcame him, and he ran his fingers over Peggy's face.
"Just find them," he said. "Find them."

***THE END***

2007-04-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

“First Flight Deserved Last Rites” A C.A.P. cadet's intro to flight.
© 2004, Paul Berge

Dreamers by definition live on the edge of reality and learn that to deviate from the sublime can lead to unintended enlightenment. In the summer of 1967, my aviation fantasies reformed when I took my first airplane ride.

A Civil Air Patrol recruiter promised flight that I, a 13-year old dreamer, expanded into visions of being at the controls of a T-38 jet trainer, taxiing to the runway with the canopy up and an oxygen mask dangling from my helmet. I envisioned smooth climbs past marshmallow clouds where I’d impress the instructor with loops and rolls and perhaps a maneuver that the Air Force hadn’t yet imagined. So, it was with profound anticipation that I stood in formation at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey with several thousand other sweating C.A.P. cadets, our acned faces scarlet from the heat. A colonel resembling Ernest Borgnine wiped his forehead and gave the vital preflight mission briefing: “The first flight commences after lunch, so don’t eat too much.” That was it; not a lot of info for a first-time flyer, but being a teenager, I ignored what I didn’t understand and packed away macaroni salad, tater tots, and lime Jell-O, washed down with a half-gallon of chocolate milk.

Later, outside the mess hall we loaded onto blue school buses and rode to the flight line where instead of rows of sleek T-38s we found a lone—rather worn--C-130 Hercules, four-engine transport shimmering in the dull heat, its back end open like a panting eel awaiting prey. A crewman, barely older than us, stood on the ramp smirking with amused distain. Being a teenager I was used to that look from adults but didn’t expect it on my first flight.

“Find a seat and buckle in,” he called as we herded into the Herc’s belly. Intense heat sucked the air from my lungs and I dropped onto a canvas seat along the bulkhead beneath a window that was too high above me to use. “Let’s git a move on, gentlemen,” our host grumbled. Then, as the ramp door shut he gave his welcome-aboard speech: “Don’t touch nuthin’, don’t get out a’ yer seats ‘til I says so, and don’t puke on my airplane.” I vaguely wondered what he meant by that because I felt fine. “If’n you do feel dis-com-fort,” he continued, “then use the bags located above your seats.” Then he disappeared before I could ask him to repeat since I didn’t see any bags. Still, I wasn’t ill, so I handled the information the way I did all adult advice and ignored it.

As yet my first flight didn’t match my soaring imagination. Where I’d expected fighter-style cockpits, I now sat strapped on a bench inside a solar oven with no view of the sky. An engine whined to life and managed to route its kerosene exhaust into the airplane. Eventually, all four turbines churned against the heat, and we taxied for what seemed like miles, although without a window I could only mark progress as the wheels clicked across the expansion joints in the pavement. The heat intensified and soon burnt jet fuel was all we breathed, but being from New Jersey my lungs could handle it.

Finally, this aluminum warehouse with its wilted cargo rumbled down the runway until with an upward pitch of the deck followed moments later by the groan of gear retracting, I knew we were flying. Since entering the airplane however, I hadn’t seen a speck of sky but despite this, I knew I’d crossed over from being a dreamer of flight to flyer.

“You can stand up and look outside now,” the airman called. As one we unbuckled our seatbelts, stood, and lunged to peer through the few available windows. But as I stood and turned I felt all the squishy parts inside my head continue to spin even though my skull had stopped. Instantly, as though I’d been injected with a fast-acting emetic, my skin chilled, knees unhooked, and I slid like wet laundry onto the seat and stared at the floor, where there appeared two well-shined black shoes beneath an airman’s voice: “You ain’t gonna puke now are you?”

I tried to answer, but instead of words macaroni salad and tater tots in a slurry of warm chocolate milk and lime Jell-O shot from my mouth and onto those shiny shoes.

There was much yelling after that, but I didn’t care because I was dying. In all my earthbound fantasies of flight, I’d never once dreamt of airsickness, didn’t know it existed, and I’d guess that any of the dozen or so other cadets on that flight who soon followed my lead to coat an Air Force transport’s floor with barely-chewed mess hall chow, were equally surprised at this phenomenon.

After 20 minutes of shaking C.A.P. cadets into jellied wretches above the New Jersey pinelands in the summer heat, the C-130 returned to base. The landing gear moaned down and locked before its tires smacked the runway with the grace of a cement truck dropped from a Zeppelin. And as we taxied back I expected to see a row of ambulances waiting to haul us to emergency Red Cross tents. But, instead, the Hercules stopped, dropped its back ramp, and with military efficiency we were herded off—green-faced and broken—while the next batch of cadets marched up the other side of the ramp no-doubt wondering what fate awaited them aloft. I can still see their faces as the cargo door sealed them inside the fetid C-130’s belly before it taxied away.

Some firsts aren’t so hot. On that, my first flight, I didn’t even get to look out the window. There was no joyous swooping and soaring. I didn’t slip surly bonds or touch the face of anyone’s god but, instead, merely heaved on an unsung airman’s shoes. Still, whatever dream had led me to flight survived despite this gut-shot of reality, and although it took several more flights—none in a C-130—before anyone would invite me back a second time, my dream of wings never died. And today when a new student climbs into the cockpit with me I never mention the possibility of aerial dis-com-fort because I don’t want to plant a bad seed inside a dreamer’s imagination where fantasies of flight should grow. Enlightened as I now am, however, I won’t hesitate to cinch a garbage bag over their heads at the first hint of a dream reaching the edge.

The End

****

First Flight Deserved Last Rites © was written by Paul Berge, all rights reserved. And the CAP and USAF reserved the right to never invite him back for a second ride.

2007-04-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

The Last Ride Forever ©, 1987, 2004, 2007 by Paul Berge, originally appeared in the audio book the Logbook (ISBN 0-9728150-2-3) © 2004. Join a WASP on her final flight.

(continued from Part 2. See Archive at left for Part 1)

...The snake reached for the upper tube and, tongue probing the air, wound slowly toward the chipmunk.

Eva turned and ran. The bristled weeds clutched at her gown and legs. She reached the hangar completely out of breath and pressed her face against the wooden door. It gave. She stepped back and glanced over her shoulder at the fuselage where the chipmunk was about to be swallowed whole by the snake. She pressed on the door and followed it inside.

And, now, Part 3, the conclusion to Last Ride Forever, by Paul Berge:

Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the many cracks in the ceiling, probing the still room with dusty yellow fingers. Eva’s feet dragged through the grit and debris on the warped linoleum floor. A mouse scurried along a baseboard and disappeared through a crack.

A row of windows faced the abandoned runway. Most of the glass had been smashed out and plywood boards covered the holes. Eva’s bare feet pressed into the glass shards without cutting.
“This was the pilot’s lounge,” she said. “That’s where the model airplanes hung.”
She swiped at the ceiling as though trying to set the imaginary models in motion.
“There was a couch across here, below the windows. Somebody was always trying to sleep there. And a table in the center of the room covered with magazines and charts and coffee cups.

“Whenever anyone soloed we would cut their shirt tail off and pin it to the walls around the room.”
She twirled in a sweeping turn, her two arms taking in the whole room. Her face wore a bright distant smile.
“The instructor would print the date of the solo on the shirt tail and sign it. I complained when they cut mine, because it was my favorite blouse, but I really didn’t mind, you know.” She pointed. “It hung there. April 16th, 1940. And Ed’s signature across the bottom.
“When he was cutting it out he made like he would accidentally snip through my bra strap. Well, of course, this made everyone laugh and applaud. My face turned the brightest red.” She stared at the empty wall, where the paint was now peeling and water stains ran to the floor.
Something stirred outside--an engine barked. Eva turned.

“Wake up, Mrs. Gwyer,” the nurse’s voice cut through the deep fog in Eva’s brain. “Wake up, I need to change your bedding.” It was a different nurse, one she had never seen. The woman was tall and strong, yet gentle. She felt herself being lifted while fresh sheets were tucked under her weak and useless body.
“Why don’t you let me alone?” she implored, her voice merely a croak.

The room was dark, except for the harsh direct light from above the bed. The nurse worked swiftly, effortlessly. Eva was jostled from side to side, allowing the nurse to make the bed one half at a time. The smell of starched white linen was strong in her nostrils.
“I was at the airport,” she said. “I remember. I was there, just now.” Eva gazed straight at the nurse who nodded and smiled while tucking in the corners, pulling the sheets drum tight.
“What airport was that, Mrs. Gwyer?”

Eva’s face grew blank, confused by the question, as though the nurse had asked something completely absurd. “What airport was what?” Eva asked.
“You said you were at an airport,” the nurse persisted. Somewhere beyond the doorway a phone rang, and a muffled voice answered it. Outside, the night sky flashed with diffused lightning. Eva turned toward the glass.

“It looks like rain tonight,” the nurse said and pulled the sheets to Eva’s chin. “Do you need anything?”
Eva stared into the friendly eyes, considering the question. Filled with sincerity, it fell woefully short of anything she could comprehend. ‘Do I need anything? Yes, I need everything. I need life, and health...and I want, no I long to look at the clouds.’

The lightning flashed again. Eva turned back to the window and saw her reflection in the black glass, a hollow shadow, alone and tired. Suddenly, the night exploded in stark white, and she saw the trees lean against the initial blast of the storm. The window rattled from the boom of distant thunder drawing near.
“I want to fly,” she said. “I want to fly again.” She turned back to the nurse. “I used to fly. Ed taught me. Did you know him?”
“No.”

She turned back to the dark window. Lightning tracked spider webs across the sky.
“Ed always wore an old leather jacket and smoked Chesterfields. He drove a motorcycle; it made such a racket. He’d run it right down the runway, racing the airplanes. Drove the airport manager--can’t think of his name, ah, Bill something--drove him nuts.” She turned to the nurse, who listened patiently, her face deeply creviced by the overhead light.

“Bill Cleverdon. That was his name, and Ed’s motorcycle was an Indian. The first time he asked me out on a date I was terrified he’d show up on that bike, but somehow he borrowed Bill’s Essex, and that was almost as bad. Seats were worn through, and you could look right between the rotten floorboards at the road whizzing past.”

The nurse said nothing, only listened. She had done it many times before. It was all that was left to do.
Eva looked into the night. “Ed had thick wavy brown hair.”

The sky rumbled, and fat raindrops, like tears, splattered against the glass, smearing her reflection.

“The Army shaved it all off when he went in, of course, but by the time he went overseas in ‘44 it had grown back--pretty much.”

She was quiet. A telephone rang down the hallway again. Someone swept into the room, whispered to the nurse and left.

“Mrs. Gwyer, I have to go. You call if you need...” But Eva was staring at the rain and muttering to herself. The nurse left.

Water cascaded in sheets along the glass. Eva thought for a moment she was looking into a fast moving river.

“Ed?” she called, raising herself on an elbow. “Do you remember the Waco? Do you remember how we flew it down the beach that summer?” She dropped heavily onto the pillow. Suddenly, the room was lighted with a bright white flash, and then plunged into shadows again. “We should do that again.”

Eva tugged at her hospital gown caught on the barbed wire fence. It gave with a sharp rip, and she fell giggling to the weeds. Flat on her back, she gazed at the deep blue sky and watched chubby white clouds move slowly toward the horizon.

The air was heavy with pine; from somewhere in the distance the sweet chirp of a clarinet played Artie Shaw. She recognized the tune, or at least knew that she should remember it. She rose.

“What a beautiful day!” she exclaimed, and brushed stems and seeds from her gown. “Will you look at the way I’m dressed.” She laughed aloud. One hand ran fingers through her suddenly long hair. The sound of a small airplane motor starting made her turn.

“Where are you?” she called. She started to run, her legs strong, eager to move. The sun pressed down, spreading vague warmth that also blinded her. She had trouble seeing where she was headed, or what was around her.

She found the runway, still crumbled and full of weeds, and at the limits of her hazy vision she could see the hangar past the chain link fence.

She glanced down at her gown, at her feet. They were melting out of focus. The clarinet played on. The airplane motor ticked in time with the music. She ran.

Overhead, an airliner descended, its jet engines whining. She turned, saw the aluminum skin glint in the sun, then, instantly, it vanished.

Eva no longer felt her body move; only the sensation of motion carried her along the runway toward the hangar and the source of the music.
The chain link fence was in sharp focus, blocking her path, and she reached out to grab it.
“Mrs. Gwyer,” the voice called. She ran. “Mrs. Gwyer, do you hear me?”
“No!” Eva shouted, and the airport faded until the hospital room appeared in her vision. Two figures huddled together over her bed, and a third entered.

“How is she?” the third asked.
‘Hello, Barbara,’ Eva tried to say.
“Can she talk? Can she hear me?” her daughter asked, her questions sharp and to the point, the way she always spoke.

‘Barbara, you’re just going to have to loosen up a little, you’re too damn serious.’

Someone poked her arm with a needle. The pain eluded her.
‘Oh, don’t waste your time, for crying out loud...’
The light faded, and she was at the airport.

“Mrs. Gwyer...” the voice persisted.

‘Good-bye,’ Eva thought and reached for the chain link fence. It gave under her pressure, evaporating into air. She moved along the runway toward the hangar where the office door stood open.

“Close the door, Eva. You’ll let all the flies out.” The man’s voice came from behind a counter near the source of the music. She pushed the door shut behind her, and a swarm of tiny airplanes suspended from the ceiling danced on the wind.
“Hello, Bill,” she called. “What’s that music?”
The man barely took form, beyond the little airplanes, but his voice came back, “Begin the Beguine?”
She nodded slowly and approached the window. Outside, the world was bright, and hazy figures appeared around a grass field dotted with airplanes.
“Is he out there?” she asked.
“See for yourself,” Bill’s voice answered.

Eva moved closer to the window, looking for the man in the leather jacket and wavy hair. Someone taxied a Cub past, and someone waved.

“Have I come to stay?” she asked Bill. He shrugged, his entire form still misty near the music. Eva turned back to the window, lifting herself onto the arm of a couch. She leaned against the cool glass, and from the corner of her vision saw the rusted fuselage alone in a patch of weeds.

She flinched. The chipmunk was there, atop the highest tube. The snake had curled its way unnoticed to a position directly behind it. Eva stared. She waited, as the snake, its tongue probing the air, sized up its prey. Like the chipmunk, she was unable to move.

Before she knew what happened, it struck.

She gasped. The music stopped. The chipmunk was gone. The snake eased down the tubing and disappeared, swallowing the image of the rusted fuselage with it. The music returned. The door behind her opened, and the little suspended airplanes bounced overhead. She stepped outside.

There, beyond the Cubs, past the Rearwin, the Taylorcraft, and the Fairchild, stood the Waco. Its massive wings reached out for her, its silver propeller spun in a huge disk, reflecting the sun’s glare.

And around the tail, stepped a man, dressed in a leather jacket and running his fingers through his wavy brown hair.

The End

The Last Ride Forever© was written by Paul Berge and was produced for radio by Rejection Slip Theater. Morgan Halgren of Iowa Public TV, played Eva. Rejection Slip Theater can be heard, free, worldwide at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/rejectionsliptheater
To order the CD audio book, the Logbook©, for $19.95 plus tax and shipping, send an e-mail request to: rejectslip@aol.com DO NOT INCLUDE CREDIT CARD INFO!

2007-04-10T08:46:00.000-07:00

***

(continued from Part 1--see Archive) The pine trees moaned with the wind. Eva drew closer to the hangar. Its boards weathered gray, its windows either missing entirely or cracked. She stepped past a rusted twist of steel tubing with a small tree growing through it. It was a fuselage, but from what she could only guess. A chipmunk sat on the highest point, its front paws held as though in prayer, its eyes fixed and staring. Below him, the grass moved where a snake gradually wound its way along a tube, coiling up towards the chipmunk...

****

And, now, Part 2 of The Last Ride Forever, by Paul Berge:

Eva stared. The chipmunk remained immobile, the snake inching ever closer. The wind blew the aroma of the warm pines toward them, and she saw the snake’s tongue shoot out, probing. She wanted to shout, to warn the little animal, but her voice failed her. Gradually, the snake worked his way through the remains of the old airplane, reaching for the chipmunk.

Eva turned to the hangar. She could see where the flying school’s sign had once hung. The COCA COLA sign was still there, but it was shot full of rusty holes, so only the tip of the green bottle was still recognizable.
She looked back at the chipmunk. It never moved.
‘Run!’ she wanted to shout, but the sound never left her voice. The snake, its tongue shooting forth in quick stabs, moved closer.

“Ed was a flight instructor here,” she said, purposefully turning away from the snake. “That’s where I met him.” She pointed at the hangar, to a small door beside the riddled COCA COLA sign. “That was the office. It was full of model airplanes suspended from the ceiling by strings, so whenever anyone opened the door all the little airplanes would dance around like they were caught in a storm.”
She smiled.
She glanced at the chipmunk, still motionless on the fuselage, its paws still in prayer. The snake was now only inches below him.

“There was a map on the wall, too,” she said too loudly. “A map of the whole country, with a tack marking this airport, and a string off that so you could measure distances to any place else in the country.”

The snake was now within striking distance of the chipmunk, but still it refused to move, or admit to the danger.
‘Why don’t you do something?’ she screamed, but again, the voice only echoed in her head, never reaching the animal.
Slowly, the snake’s head rose.
“Do something!”

“We’re doing something,” the young man’s voice came softly through the fog. “You just relax.”
Eva’s vision broke through a heavy cloud. She was no longer at the airport, no longer staring at the hangar and the snake.
“What?” she asked, confused, and saw the doctor leaning over her bed, one hand on her shoulder the other holding a chart in a gray metal folder.

“Can you hear me, Mrs. Gwyer?” He shouted the question, as though calling to her down a long tunnel. She heard his voice, but wanted to ignore him. She turned her head on the pillow and looked down at her feet. The blankets were pulled back, and a nurse rubbed lotion onto her frail twig legs. The hospital gown was bunched to one side.

“I’ll give you something to help you sleep,” the young doctor shouted again and wrote furiously in the metal folder before snapping it shut. She only caught his eyes once, deep set and dark--tired and impersonal eyes.
“I want...” Eva said and forgot what she wanted.
“What, Dear,” the nurse’s friendly voice asked. “What do you want?”
Eva strained to remember what she wanted. She knew she had been dreaming, but the dream was vanishing until all she could remember was the snake.

“A snake,” she announced. ‘No, that can’t be right,’ she thought and laughed inside her head.
“You want a snake?” the nurse asked with an amused lilt in her voice. “I don’t think you want that. Now, just let me turn you over and I’ll get your back.”

Eva felt herself being gently rolled over. She felt as though her body was a light bag of fragile bones ready to crack. Her face pressed into the pillow, her nose filled with the sanitized odor of hospital linen. Across the room she recognized a face, her daughter.

The woman, in her mid-40s, stood alone and sad in the shadows, staring at her dying mother being rubbed and charted by the staff. Eva smiled and saw her daughter force a smile in return. ‘Why is she so gloomy?’ she asked herself, feeling her senses sharpen. “Barbara?” she called.

“Yes, Mom,” her daughter answered and moved toward the bed.
“What am I doing here?” she asked. Her daughter started to answer and looked to the doctor, who shrugged, not an I-don’t-know shrug but more I-can’t-help. Eva tapped her almost hairless skull weakly. “I feel something going on in here, Barbara. There’s something taking me away...”
She closed her eyes.

The doctor took Barbara aside. “She’s in little pain,” he said. He spoke mechanically, having been on duty for over 23 hours already. “She’ll talk about strange things; brain tumors do that. One minute lucid; the next she could babble like an infant.”
“How much longer?”
“Anytime,” he said. “All we can do is keep her comfortable.”
“What, no more miracle cures like the chemotherapy, until the rest of her hair falls out? Or maybe teeth or eyes?”
“I’m sorry. We had to try, but we can’t always...”
She cut him off with a wave, and he left the room. The nurse finished the rubdown, rolled Eva onto her back and tucked the blankets securely around her. She then placed the oxygen tubes back into her nostrils and started to leave.
“Thank-you,” Barbara said, her voice hollow.
“Your mother has been talking about airplanes a great deal. Did she work for the airlines?”
Barbara thought for a minute. “No,” she said. And then, “But she was a pilot…”
“Oh?”
“A long time ago, before the war, before I was born. And during the war she flew with the WASP….”
“Oh, I’ve heard of them,” the nurse said and tried to recall the acronym: “Women’s Air Something Planes?”
“Women Airforce Service Pilots…yes. She flew bombers on, ah, ferry flights, during the war.”
“Really?” The nurse seemed honestly impressed.
Barbara laughed. “I haven’t thought about that in years; she rarely ever mentioned it. She has some old photographs of herself in the pilot’s seat of these big old airplanes, her and some other women in uniform. She said they flew all kinds of warplanes across the country. She saw more military duty than many men in the service, but for years they never received any recognition from the government as veterans. I don’t know if they’d even let her into a veteran’s hospital. She’d never let me ask.”

“Did she fly after the war?” the nurse asked.
“No, she became pregnant with me in 1945, and my father was killed over Germany. He was a fighter pilot. She never flew again. Rarely spoke of him.”
“Did she remarry?”
“Yes, and he became my father. He died several years ago. I loved him, but I don’t think they really ever got along too well together.”

Suddenly, Barbara looked at the nurse. “I don’t know why I told you that...I shouldn’t have. Excuse me.”
She stared at her mother, thin and still beneath the heavy covers. Only the occasional rise and fall of her chest indicating any life. “Please call me if anything...” She left the room in a hurry.

Eva unhooked the hem of her hospital gown from the rusty barb on the wire fence. Her bare feet pressed lightly into the dried weeds. Overhead, an airliner descended toward a runway three miles away, and Eva walked toward the old hangar on the deserted airstrip.

The scent of pine was heavy in the warm air, and she breathed in deeply. Passing a dusty pit full of beer cans and a shopping cart, she remembered a day in 1940 when a friend ground looped a Taylorcraft into it.

“Oh, they got into such an argument,” she said aloud. “They eventually got married, you know,” she said to no one. “George and Doris that is. He went off and flew bombers in the Pacific--B-24’s. She was the one who told me all about the WASP, talked me into joining. Last I heard they lived in New York, upstate somewhere. He’s retired from TWA, I believe. She writes to me--a Christmas card every year...” Her voice trailed off as she stepped onto the deteriorated runway and stared at the wooden hangar.

Eva reached the chain link fence. Her legs grew heavy, her breath tight and short. She leaned against the fence.

“There was a grass strip that ran across the paved runway,” she said. “We actually preferred the grass to the pavement. Every landing was a good one on grass. The flight examiners would make us land on the pavement, and, oh, how the tires would chirp and squeal. Showed us what sloppy landings we were really making. Did I mention I soloed here? In a Waco?”

She pushed away from the fence, stepped over a broken bottle and walked toward the hangar. Her pace quickened with each step.
“We had a Fairchild.” She pointed toward a cluster of low trees. “There was another hangar there.” The concrete base of the long vanished hangar could be seen through the foliage.
“I took my instrument training in the Fairchild. Ed instructed in that, too.” She looked away. A flight of robins lifted from the pine trees, circled over the runway, and in an undulating wave, returned to the woods. Eva continued toward the hangar.

She saw the rusted fuselage beneath the bullet riddled COCA COLA sign. The chipmunk sat unmoving, unaware of the snake beginning to coil along the welded tubing toward him.

‘That’s not the place to be,’ she tried to say, but the words stuck in her throat. The snake reached for the upper tube and, tongue probing the air, wound slowly toward the chipmunk.

Eva turned and ran. The bristled weeds clutched at her gown and legs. She reached the hangar completely out of breath and pressed her face against the wooden door. It gave. She stepped back and glanced over her shoulder at the fuselage where the chipmunk was about to be swallowed whole by the snake. She pressed on the door and followed it inside. (to be continued…)

*** End Part 2 of 3 ***

To order the CD audio book, the Logbook©, for $19.95 plus tax and shipping, send an e-mail request to: rejectslip@aol.com DO NOT INCLUDE CREDIT CARD INFO!

2007-04-05T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Last Ride Forever ©, 1987, 2004, 2007 by Paul Berge, originally appeared in the audio book the Logbook (ISBN 0-9728150-2-3) © 2004. Join a WASP on her final flight.

She stepped carefully over the top strand of the wire fence. A rusty barb tore at her dressing gown, refusing to let her proceed. With one hand on the old dry post, Eva clutched the gown and pulled. The cotton skirt ripped in a long ragged strip from her knee to across her hip. She wanted to cry. The wind, although light, was warm and carried forgotten smells from the pinewoods across the abandoned runway.
Everything was exactly as it had once been, but everything had changed.

Weeds obscured the ramp where once a dozen small airplanes had parked. The pole where the SHELL fuel sign had been was still visible. Even the ring where the enamel yellow sign hung still remained, only now it looked to Eva like a basketball hoop set the wrong way. A sparrow perched in the center, its head twitching in the breeze, ignoring her. She clutched the tattered gown as best she could around her thin legs and set out across the field.

Overhead, the whine of an airliner slowly crossed the sky. She watched the jet lower its wheels on final approach to the international airport only three miles away. The sun glinted off the jet’s fuselage, and it rocked briefly in the wind. When she turned her eyes back to the old airstrip, the sparrow was gone.

She wanted to stop. Her breath came hard, her heart pounding in her temples and ears, her vision suddenly cloudy. The climb over the barbed wire fence had somehow exhausted her. Eva desperately wanted to get across the runway to the parking ramp, to the old building just visible against the pine trees.
“Should have worn my shoes,” she mumbled looking at her bare feet in the dry weeds. The torn hospital gown did little to block the wind, but she could not remember why she was wearing it.

Another jet descended across the trees, its landing gear popping out at the same spot where the last one had extended its.
“Like robots,” Eva said with a smile. “Can’t think for themselves.”
The runway was almost completely overgrown with stubby vegetation. The black hardtop had decomposed into gray pebbles laced with cracks where the weeds had taken root. Slowly the old pavement was returning to earth. When the weeds had broken the pavement into small enough pieces, the pine trees would take root, and eventually there would be no trace of the airfield ever having been there. Eva took all this in without sadness. She was resigned to the strip’s fate, almost happy.

The gravel crunched under her bare feet in soft contrast to the stream of jets overhead. A flight of robins, headed north, popped from the trees and swooped low over her head. Friendly chirps blended perfectly with her footsteps.

“Doris and George ran the Taylorcraft off the runway right over there,” she said and pointed toward a dusty pit beneath a line of scrub oak. She laughed. “Doris said George was flying, and George swore he told her to make the landing…” She stopped and put a thin white hand to her chin, the delicate fingertips touching her dry lips. She tilted her head, seeing what was long gone. “I think Doris was paying more attention to George, than the airplane, and I know George had his eyes on other things than the runway.” She stared at the empty pit beside the runway, the only thing there, now, a dozen empty beer cans and a shopping cart turned on its side.

Eva walked down the abandoned runway and stared at the chain link fence that cut across it two thirds of the way down. The city had years before converted the land into a parking area for its road equipment, and erected a fence across the runway around a collection of snow plows. She looked beyond the fence.

What drew her along was the hangar, or what was left of it, at the far end of the field. It was the only structure remaining.

“I soloed here,” she announced to no one. “In April, April the 16th, 1940.” She stepped on a stone and recoiled, almost falling. Her strength was failing rapidly, her vision was fading, she longed to sleep, to lie on the broken pavement amid the tall weeds and sleep.

“I soloed here,” she repeated. “In a Waco. That’s a biplane, an awfully big biplane.” She listened to more robins flying out from the trees; there voices as sweet as the spring air itself, their energy as young and vital, as she felt old and wasted. She looked down at the white hospital gown, and a shudder of fear raced through her. She gathered the skirt tight around her and headed toward the hangar.
“Yes,” she cried, “I soloed here.” Her feet scraped on the old pavement, her steps quickening. “I made three landings--good landings. Although, maybe, I bounced the first one just a little.” Tears rose to her eyes, further clouding her vision. She hurried toward the hangar so far away. “I remember that big radial engine swinging a massive silver propeller. I was so scared of that when I first flew, but after eight or ten hours I came to love it.”
She left the runway for the taller weeds along the chain link fence. Her fingers clutched at the metal weave, and she pulled herself along, hand over hand, her breath coming in short tight spasms as she tried to reach the hangar.

“There were so many of us!” she cried aloud. “So many, and everyone so young and beautiful and so...so...” She leaned her face against the chain mail, her voice coming in sobs. “Jack took the Cub up one afternoon and did twenty loops in a row. Beth, took that as a challenge, and as soon as he landed, hopped in and did twenty-five.” She pushed away from the fence and ran her fingers through the few strands of gray hair left on her head. “Then Allison showed them all up by doing thirty loops and a five-turn spin back into the pattern.”

The pine trees moaned with the wind. Eva drew closer to the hangar. Its boards weathered gray, its windows either missing entirely or cracked. She stepped past a rusted twist of steel tubing with a small tree growing through it. It was a fuselage, but from what she could only guess. A chipmunk sat on the highest point, its front paws held as though in prayer, its eyes fixed and staring. Below him, the grass moved where a snake gradually wound its way along a tube, coiling up towards the chipmunk....(to be continued)

*** End Part 1 ***

To order the CD audio book, the Logbook©, for $19.95 plus tax and shipping, send an e-mail request to: rejectslip@aol.com DO NOT INCLUDE CREDIT CARD INFO!

2007-03-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

“Jet engines sound different on cold nights,” Michael thought walking through the snow toward the control tower. “But they still smell the same,” he said aloud.
His eyes were heavy from lack of sleep when he punched in the door code and went inside. The front offices were dark, typewriters covered. Working without management around was the only advantage he could find for the midnight watch.
He stuffed his cigar into a metal ashtray on the wall before heading down the dark hallway toward the TRACON. He pushed open another door labeled, RESTRICTED--AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Anyone home?” he called. Inside, five radarscopes were arranged in a semi-circle along the far wall.
“Already moved it upstairs,” he said to himself. The room was empty and as dark as the hallway, but, of course, it was always dark. The five scopes gave off a weak green light, their radar sweeps turning in perfect unison like a synchronized Laundromat, any targets on a slow tumble. The evening shift had moved the operation to the single BRITE scope in the tower cab for the midnight watch. He wished for the hundredth time that one of the scopes from the TRACON could be moved to the tower cab to replace the BRITE.
“It's dangerous vectoring off that antiquated piece of junk,” he had often complained.
“Nothing wrong with the BRITE; always worked fine; do your best, besides, there's nothing we can do about it...” The responses flooded back in his memory like voices on an answering machine. He had long since quit complaining, there was no use anymore. The system was far more powerful than he; it would survive regardless. He, however…

Michael rode the elevator for six floors, and then walked the remaining three flights to the cab. Halfway there he plugged a fresh cigar into his mouth, and, by the top step, his heart thumping in his ears, he caught his breath.
“Good evening, Mike,” Helen called, glancing over her shoulder, before turning back to the BRITE scope. She stood alone in a corner, working traffic. The few lights from radio switches and the harsh glare of the reading lamp reflected off the surrounding windows.
“Hello, hello,” Michael answered through a deep yawn.
“Tired?” she asked and turned her head toward the window, where far below, amid the blue and yellow lights, a Boeing 727 pushed away from the terminal.
“No, United,” she said into the microphone. “That taxiway's still closed. Turn left on Papa, then D-2, follow the outer and hold short of runway two-three.”
She wore a headset, so the answer was lost, but Michael could almost see the confusion form in a large question mark above the airliner's cockpit.
“They still got taxiway Echo closed?” he asked and reached inside a cabinet for his coffee cup. “Wasn't that supposed to open last week?”
“Was to, but you know how those promises go.” They both smiled with looks of shared frustration tempered by years of disappointment.
“Get any sleep this afternoon?” she asked.
“Never do.”
“I can't ever get more than a catnap, either, before a mid. Somehow, I just can't seem to convince my body to cooperate. 'Hey, body, now pay attention. We're going to get up at five a.m., work for eight hours, go home at two-thirty, get up at ten p.m. and work until eight a.m.. Now, brain, I want you to stay sharp. Those are real airplanes you'll be working.'“ She started to laugh, and then keyed her microphone while pointing out the window. “United six-oh-two, hold short of two-three; traffic landing.”
“Put it up in the speakers,” Michael said and plugged in a hand microphone.
Helen flipped the receiver switches up, and United's voice scratched through the speaker, “...Don't worry, we're holding.”
He, too, sounded tired, slightly irritable.
“Just don't scare me like that,” Helen said to the glass without keying the frequency. “You ready for this?” she asked Michael.
“Not really, but the paycheck might stop coming if I said, no.” He moved closer to the board with the flight plans. “What have you got?”
“There's flow control into Denver, still...”
“Weather?”
“Why else?”
“I don't know, maybe they just wanted to give the tower over there a break. Maybe everyone went on strike. Who knows?”
Helen recoiled theatrically, covering her ears. “Strike? Perish the thought.”
“Those words never left these lips,” Michael said making a locking gesture at his mouth. “Besides, they can't fire us all.”
“Anyhow,” Helen continued, “United's holding short of two-three; he wants twelve left. I guess he thinks it's closer to Chicago, who knows? TWA's on short final for two-three; Mitsubishi Five Mike Romeo is following TWA, eating his lunch and...” She scanned the darkened airport as though searching for someone. “Down there somewhere,” she pointed, “is Twin Cessna Three Delta Lima, he's called ready.”
“I got it,” Michael said as TWA touched the pavement and shot past United in a rumble of thrust reversers. “United, ah, ah, what's-your-number, cross runway two-three.”
“That's United Six-Oh-Two, Tower. We're crossing two-three.”
“Glad I'm not staying up all night,” Helen said unplugging her headset and wadding it into a knot. “I'm beat.”
“Tell me about it,” he sighed. “Mitsubishi Five Mike Romeo, runway two-three cleared to land, traffic departing twelve left, wind two two zero at eight.” The Mitsubishi pilot read back the clearance while Michael turned to Helen. “At least I got tomorrow off. I can catch up on a week's sleep.”
“Got overtime again this week?”
“Of course. Who doesn't? Twin Cessna Three Delta Lima, runway three-zero-right taxi into position and hold.” A voice acknowledged, and red and white lights moved onto a far corner of the crossing runway. “TWA Eleven Eighty-four, turn left first intersection, cross three-zero left, via Alpha two, hold short of three-zero right, traffic to depart.”
“Roger, turn left, cross the left, alpha two, short of the right, TWA Eleven Eighty-four.”
“Can't remember the last time I saw a two-day weekend,” Helen said heading for the stairs. “Well, have a nice mid. Try and stay awake.” She vanished.
“Why?” Michael called after her. He heard the door click below. “Ah, Twin Cessna, let's see, Three Delta Lima runway three-zero right, cleared for take-off, caution wake turbulence from the DC-9 landed on two-three, wind two three zero at seven.”
“Roger,” the Cessna pilot answered, and the flashing lights moved down the runway.
“Mitsubishi Five Mike Romeo, traffic a twin Cessna departing thirty right prior to your arrival.”
“Got 'em in sight.”
The Twin Cessna rolled past TWA's nose and lifted. TWA switched his taxi lights off while the airplane departed.
“TWA Eleven Eighty-four, cross thirty right, taxi via Charlie stay this frequency.”
“Eleven Eighty-four, with you to the gate, good night.”
“Night.”
Michael turned to the BRITE radarscope, a scuffed tan box with an ill-focused presentation. Adjusting the contrast knob, he saw the data tag for Twin Cessna Three Delta Lima acquire about a half-mile away from the actual target.
“Close enough,” he muttered. “Twin Cessna Three Delta Lima, radar contact. Turn right on course.”
The Cessna pilot acknowledged, and United called, “Tower, United Six-Oh-Two ready on twelve left.”
“United Six-Oh-Two, runway one-two left, taxi into position and hold, traffic landing two-three.”
The airliner crawled onto the runway, its landing light cutting like a broad white sword through the night. The Mitsubishi was about to squat on the intersecting runway.
“Ah, Tower, did you say United was cleared for take-off?” Michael clamped the mike button, “Negative, United, hold in position, traffic landing two-three.”
“Okay, on the hold, United Six-Oh-Two.”
“What am I doing here?” Michael asked the darkness. His own reflection looked back at him from the glass. It looked sad, the face heavy and deeply creased with dark furrows. He shrugged, watched the Mitsubishi land and throw on the reversers. He lit his cigar, blew a cloud of blue smoke at the BRITE scope and said, “United Six-Oh-Two, cleared for take off.”

Thirty minutes into the shift, the traffic tapered off to nothing. He poured water through the coffee maker and set the empty pot on the burner. A bead of water, caught under the glass pot, hissed. He switched on the radio. Jazz. One good thing about the mids, he thought, the radio stations played better music. John Coltraine’s saxophone filled the cab with a mellow sadness, and he sat in one of the tall chairs, propping his feet on the counter.
The empty radarscope turned at a pace in time with the music. He shifted his weight trying to find a comfortable position; it was a long haul until sunrise. Suddenly, the armrest gave under the slight pressure of his elbow, almost spilling him to the floor.
“Shiii….stupid piece of junk,” he grumbled kicking the chair away and reaching for another. “Can't they buy anything around here that doesn't break. Low bidder junk.”
He settled into another chair, after first testing it. He picked up a copy of an old sports magazine. Never interested in sports, the images of brawny men in short tight pants and padded shoulders grappling for each other on plastic grass only added to the boredom.
“Wonder who took the swimsuit issue?” he mused, glancing around the cab and opened the not-so-secret compartment behind the clearance delivery consul where the dirty magazines were kept--nothing. An article listing the top twenty salaries in the NFL caught his interest. He read the salaries under the photographs.
“One million-four,” he muttered. “And will ya look at this--two million bucks.” He read further. “Oh, only seven hundred thousand a year for you, poor babe.” He studied the faces, all thick neck types with teeth missing and blank stares in their eyes. He took his own checkbook from his hip pocket and thumbed to the balance. Discouraged, he shoved it back into his pocket. Catching a glimpse of his reflection again in the window, he puffed his chest and grimaced like the faces in the magazine.
“Michael Grands, Air Traffic Controller, free agent. You want me to vector, it's gonna cost ya.” The grotesque image staring back from the glass relaxed and slumped in the chair. “Not much it's gonna cost ya,” he said and closed his eyes. A stinging warmth under his lids told him he should sleep. He listened to a piano, gentle and friendly with the low wail of the saxophone.

He had no idea how long he sat like that, but when the Center called, trying to make a hand-off, his body moved with the speed of wet cement. He pressed the interphone button.
“Approach, hello,” he said, his voice like death.
“Sorry to disturb you, but, hand-off...” The voice at the other end was filled with mock cheer, another controller fighting sleep.
“Ah, radar corn flakes, Air Express One-Thirty-Eight.” He disconnected and wrote the aircraft's altitude on a blank flight plan strip. “Glory be to the marvels of automation,” he muttered.
Each night at midnight, just before the first inbound rush of late-night cargo haulers, the Center's computer would be shut down for maintenance. The result was that all flight plan data were then passed manually over the phone, adding to controller workload. It made it feel like 1960 but went with the job. Who cared?
“Approach, Express One-Thirty-Eight, descending out of eight for six, airport in sight, requesting runway five.” The young freight dog’s voice reported with a stony boredom that came from a steady routine of hauling bags of cancelled checks all across the Midwest, night after night, in a worn out Twin Cessna.
“Express One-Thirty-Eight,” Michael answered while pouring a cup of coffee, “Cleared visual approach, runway five, cleared to land, taxi to the ramp, wind two-three-zero at six, altimeter three-zero-zero-zero.”
The Express pilot slurred an answer, but Michael was busy mopping at the coffee he’d just spilled.
“Approach. Hand-off.” It was the Center, again, pawning off a Learjet screaming from the north at twice light speed.
“Radar Contact,” Michael yelled into the phone after jotting down the information.
Seconds later: “Approach, Night Jet Seven-Oh-One, leaving flight level two-one-oh for eleven, looking for lower, airport in sight, requesting runway two-three.”
“What else?” Michael mumbled. “Love opposite direction approaches.” He took a moment to relight his cigar, then, grabbing the microphone, answered in one long breath, “Night Jet Seven-Oh-One, Approach, cleared visual approach runway two-three, cleared to land, taxi to the ramp, wind two-three zero at six, altimeter three-zero-zero-zero, traffic a Twin Cessna fifteen out for runway five, landing as soon as you clear.”
“We'll hustle.” It was another young voice, confident, cool. Michael knew the Lear pilot would keep the tiny jet moving at incredible speed until short final, then hit the pavement, throw on reversers and turn off with less than half the runway used. He knew this. Fifteen years of watching it, told him it would work. Still, he watched impressed, when the Lear touched, made the turn, and almost instantly, the Twin Cessna landed in the opposite direction, and the two raced each other to the ramp.
“Approach. Hand-off. Got a couple of 'em.”
“Radar contact all of ‘em,” Michael called again over the interphone and scribbled new flight strips.
“Approach, Air Lump Six-Twelve with you descending to six, airport in sight requesting thirty right....Approach,
Interstate Four-Nine-Seven with you, airport in sight, requesting runway one-two left....Approach, Late Night Eight-Eighteen with you, airport in sight, requesting runway two-three....Approach....Approach.... Approach....”
The calls rattled from the speaker like children's voices in a day care center, loud, unignorable, all demanding to be first. Michael knew the business. He knew the pilots ran under tremendous pressure to meet schedules, to shave a minute or two off their runs wherever possible. To them, a straight-in approach to the nearest runway, regardless of wind conditions, could mean a total of ten, twenty minutes saved over the course of an evening. Plus, he knew that these guys loved this stuff—max performance, freight dog machismo.
“Cleared visual approach, cleared to land runway two-three....Cleared to land, follow the Baron, half-mile final....cleared to land runway three-zero right, hold short of two-three, traffic landing that runway....Cleared to land....Cleared to land....Cleared to land....”
The words flew between Michael and the pilots with a rapidity only those who flew could possibly understand. His mind was a tired jumble of flashing lights, call signs, and radar targets, all converging on the center of the scope--all converging on him.
He grumbled between transmissions, “....hope this works....stupid way to make a living....tired, tired, tired.”
His eyes burned from straining to read the fuzzy numbers on the scope. He wished they would all go away, and, yet, he felt the usual thrill from orchestrating millions of dollars worth of airplanes and cargo, flung at him from all points of the compass, into a neat procession across the ramp.
“Navajo Six-Two-Kilo, cleared to land runway two-three, taxi to the ramp,” he said to the last target on the scope.
“Roger, you want us to stay with you, Approach or go to tower?” the pilot asked, a touch of innocence in his voice.
“New pilot,” Michael thought. “Stay this frequency,” he said. “I am tower, and ground control, and clearance delivery....” his voice trailed off.
“You wear all the hats at night, huh?”
Michael ignored the question and looked down at the ramp below the tower where the airplanes now parked. Two a.m., and it was swarming with activity. Delivery vans from Federal Express, Purolator, and a few independents raced through the gate, weaving between aircraft as though driven by demons.
Everyone rushed. The pilots, even before the propellers seemed to come to a stop, had the doors open and were flinging plastic bags onto the pavement. Mounds of bank notes and checks, express letters and small packages grew beside each fuselage. Michael could see the puffs of night steam from their voices, calling orders, making jokes, each young pilot trying to be the fastest, the most casual, the best. One day, they, too, would need sleep, but tonight they were young and could fly ‘til dawn without closing an eye.
In daylight the ramp would be thick with polished corporate jets and smartly dressed pilots with crisp white shirts, toting baggage for well-heeled clients. But after midnight, the black sky unleashed the rawest elements of flying. The night world was full of blue jeans and sneakers, young unshaven faces chewing gum and feeling alive.
Michael watched them pack the airplanes full, first tossing the bags deep into the fuselage, then squeezing them in, pounding the bags to make room for more. Within minutes, the mounds had vanished, and the propellers started to turn. Michael took a quick swallow of coffee. He heard one of the Lears start to whine, its turbines spooling up. Its door was still open when the speaker by Michael's hip shouted, “Tower, Night Jet Seven-Oh-One, taxi out of cargo, to Chicago Midway, requesting two-three.”
Michael answered, “Night Jet Seven-Oh-One, taxi to runway two-three, cleared to Midway as filed, maintain one-zero thousand, expect two-three-oh, ten minutes later, cleared for take-off, turn left on course, wind two-three-zero at eight, altimeter three-zero-zero-one.”
The co-pilot was just closing the upper half of the Lear's door as it taxied from the ramp; a Twin Cessna, one engine running and the other starting to crank, right behind it.
“Tower, Express One-Two-Eight, taxiing out of cargo, request two-three to Kansas City, got the numbers.”
“Express,” Michael said, “follow the Lear, cleared to Kansas City, as filed, maintain six, cleared for take-off, caution wake turbulence.”
Another voice called and Michael rattled off another clearance while the Lear fired down the runway and lifted in a tight left turn, wasting no time pointing its nose toward Chicago. The Twin Cessna rolled almost directly behind it, and banked into a steep turn toward the south. A Mitsubishi was hard on his
tail, rotating past mid-field and banking tight for Minneapolis.
“Night Jet Seven-Oh-One, radar contact....Express One-Two-Eight, radar contact....Blah-Blah-Blah, radar contact....radar
contact....” Michael's clipped voice chased the airplanes away, until they were tiny flashing lights among the stars, swallowed back into night sky.
One-by-one, starting with the Lear, he shipped them over to Center frequencies and dropped heavily onto the chair. The scope beside him flashed its pale green light in a steady pulse, completely out of time with the Kenny G music on the radio. Michael closed his eyes but never slept. He hated Kenny G and wondered how it got on the jazz station; someone must’ve fallen asleep there, too.

Four a.m., Michael's brain was wrapped in fog when the next rush began. It was lead by a Convair 640, bringing the morning's Wall Street Journal. Quickly, a stream of Lears, Cheyennes, and a pair of Twin Commanders appeared on the scope. All requesting direct to the airport, all requesting to be first, and they all, somehow, managed to get their wishes.
Michael's voice was thick with fatigue, not the healthy kind from, say, playing basketball, but, instead, soul drenching fatigue, brain-cell-eating tired. He mouthed the clearances from habit, his mind barely formulating the sequences. A Centurion pilot, new to the area, announced he would need the ILS approach to find the runway. With a deep moan, Michael vectored him to the final approach course and sequenced him behind one of the Commanders. A routine task in daylight, after midnight, it only drained his already spent energy.
He glanced at his watch--4:30--24 hours since he had last slept. During that time he had worked a busy day shift in the TRACON, and was still hours away from being relieved. The scope was empty again. The Centurion taxied past the tower toward the hangars. Michael's eyes clamped shut without him knowing.
“Approach. Hey, Approach.” the voice, shrill through Michael's unconscious world, snapped him to his feet. “Ohh,” he uttered and glanced around, reaching for the microphone. He saw a data tag on the scope flashing from the southwest--America West Airlines--the first airliner of the morning.
Computer must be back up, he thought.
“Cactus Twelve-Seventy-two, Approach, Good Morning,” he said, hoping the words came out as imagined.
“Good Morning, Approach. Center said they couldn't get a hold of you, so we should try. We're level at eleven thousand and looking at the airport.”
Michael glanced around at the scope and runways, making certain there was nothing unusual there, like other airliners wandering around without guidance. He cleared America West to land and rubbed his face, pressing life into the skin.
To the east the sky lightened to a sickly pink--5:30 a.m. In a half hour the day shift would be in to open the TRACON.
Twenty-five hours since last he slept.
“Say wind,” the America West pilot said.
Michael's brain hesitated. Say wind? Say wind, what? His brain was mush. “Oh, ah, wind, three-two-zero at one-zero,” his voice answered.
“Thanks.”
Two more airliners arrived before 6 a.m., a United Boeing 737 from O'Hare and a TWA DC-9 from St. Louis. United requested runway 30R, while TWA asked for runway five. They both got their wishes. Somehow it worked, and, at 6 o'clock, the TRACON opened for business.
Michael spent the last hour of his shift seated on the couch in the break room reading the paper. Mostly, he looked at the pictures, the small print beneath a blur of nonsense.
As he walked out the front door, someone passed him on the way in. “Morning, Mike. How was the mid?”
“Ah, all right, you know. The usual.”

“Well, enjoy your weekend.”

And Michael stepped into the cold morning air as a jet departed, sounding completley different than it had eight hours before. Smelled about the same, though.

The End

2007-02-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

“Late For Work”
© 1989, 2007, Paul Berge

He glanced at his watch--the third time he’d done so since leaving the house. The car was pointed toward the freeway into the sun that was peeking over the trees between the new leaves. And then, for reasons unknown to this day, Mike turned at the AIRPORT sign. He knew it was wrong.
Dew from the grass collected on his shoes. The windsock over the first hangar hung limp, guarded by a sparrow hawk perched on top. It seemed to be meditating as it watched the sun rise. Mike reached for the tie-down rope and untying it, let it fall into the damp grass.
A quick preflight, and he opened the Cessna 140’s door to climb inside. He flicked the master switch on, heard the familiar clunk and turned the mag switch to BOTH.
“Clear!” he called to the dawn and pierced it by pulling the starter handle. Through the prop blast that pushed the dew up the windshield, he looked to the windsock, but the hawk didn’t flinch from its za-zen gaze. Oil pressure rose, and the engine warmed on the taxi to the end of the runway.
Pink sunlight flooded the runway, and Mike centered the airplane’s nose on the long strip between the newly emerging corn. His hands ran through a familiar last chance, pre-takeoff check: Controls free, mag switch on BOTH; fuel on; mixture rich; carb heat cold.
And when he inched the throttle forward the airplane shook, and cool air blew through the open side window. Rolling across the uneven surface, the tail wheel bounced in the ruts, the sound oil-drummed through the fuselage, and then, wheels left the ground as though they’d abandoned any respect for Earth’s gravity.
For several minutes it was all there: The sunrise, the calm air, the sky and the feeling that no matter how mundane the rest of the day tried to be—and often succeeded--Mike had started above it all.
His approach was smooth. The wheels touched in gentle rumbles, and he stuck his face through the side window just to watch the tires kick the dew in silver rooster tails.
Back in the car and returning to the freeway past the AIRPORT sign, he studied the resigned commuting faces in the cars around him, removed his watch and was glad he was late for work. Again.

The End
© Paul Berge 1989, 2007
Please contact Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC for reprint permission: www.ailerona.com

2007-02-01T06:37:00.000-08:00

"The Hangar," Part II©

Continued from Part I (posted on 1/11/07 The Hangar Part I© is at: http://paulbergeaviationstories.blogspot.com/2007/01/hangar.html )

(up music...Hey, it's a mind movie, use your imagination)

...I guessed him to be in his late fifties, maybe six feet tall, dark and stocky with a thick neck and closely trimmed gray hair. He wore stiff white overalls with LEARN TO FLY stenciled across the back. With one arm he reached far behind the engine while the other arm arched over a cylinder head. The two hands tried to meet somewhere in a tight corner near the firewall.
“Come on, you piece of...there. Gotchya!” The dark figure swiveled his head like a mud turtle and looked at a toolbox just out of reach to his left. I stood quietly behind to his right.

And, now, Paul Berge's "The Hangar," Part 2©:
“Hand me that pair of wire cutters, will ya,” he called and waved toward the toolbox without looking at me. “Those, next to the safety wire. I don’t want to let go of this thing; took me forever to reach it...gotta get me a pair of wire twisters some day.”
The dog sat beside the toolbox and gave me a look of, “Well, are you going to get the wire cutters or what?”
“These the ones?” I asked picking out a large pair.
“No, the smaller ones...yeah, those, thanks.” He took them from me, and with much face making and grunting completed whatever it was he was after.
“Why-the-hell is everything you want to work on always where you can’t reach it?” he asked without waiting for my answer.
His accent was out of place for the Midwest, more like East Coast, New York or Philadelphia. He tended to run words together and squash his r’s, so “wire cutters” became, “wiyah cuttahs.” But he spoke inconsistently, the accent appearing briefly throughout the more commonplace flat Midwest tone.
I expected him to ask what I was doing there or tell me his name while offering his hand. Instead, he pulled an oily rag from his back pocket and disappeared around to the other side of the Ryan while wiping his hands.
“What’s that dog doing in here?” he asked. The dog was lying on the cool slab of concrete near the tail wheel. “He’s supposed to stay outside,” he snapped again while reaching down to scratch the dog’s head. “Keeps messin’ the place up.” He stood and took a small bowl from the workbench, upsetting a coffee can full of nuts and screws in the process. They scattered across the bench and onto the floor, bouncing and skipping under tables and into dark corners.
“Stupid dog. I told you he messes the place up.”
He filled the dish with water and placed it on the floor near the dog who ignored it, and then gathered most of the hardware and put it on the bench.
“Name’s Nervino; Emilio Nervino. Some call me Ed.” He flashed a wide grin showing a perfect row of white teeth. “What do some call you?”
“I just flew in...” I said.
“That tells me what you did, not who you are.”
“Oh, I saw your hangar from above and it looked like a pretty good place to...”
“Now I’m finding out why you’re here; still don’t know who you are. You got a name?”
“Yes...”
“Good. Hand me that grease gun near the phone.”
He pointed to a table behind me in an exceptionally dark section of the hangar. The grease gun sat wrapped in a rag below a plate on the wall where a phone had once hung. Beside the plate was an old calendar with a picture of Santa Claus in flying goggles and leather helmet sitting astride an Archer Aero oil can rocketing across a starry night sky. A fiery plume trailed behind and Santa waved merrily at the viewer. The date on the calendar: December 1960.
Its proximity to the missing phone had once made the calendar an ideal message pad with names and phone numbers scrawled across the page and onto the wall. I read:
DECEMBER 1--PICK UP DALE AT CSQ
DECEMBER 3--JIM, 9 AM; DON, 11 AM; KATE, 3 PM
DECEMBER 6--OFF
And on it went.
Greasy fingerprints smeared the notes. I wondered if any of the people attached to those names were still in the area or even alive, for that matter. I wanted to call them later on the off chance that one might be at the old number. But then, what would I say if they did answer?
“Ah, hello. You don’t know me, but I got your name off a hangar wall, and I was just wondering if you were still alive, still flying...”
Ed interrupted. “You found that grease gun yet?”
“Got it now.” I grabbed the gun and left the rag behind, instantly getting grease all over my hands.
“Let’s have it here.” He took the gun and moved around the airplane lubricating things I never knew needed grease. Finished, he tossed the gun onto the bench and hit the coffee can with the screws. Again, hardware bounced on the floor. Several pieces dropped into the dog’s water. Ed ignored it this time and unlatched the hangar’s double doors.
“Get the other door, will ya,” he called. “There’re two pins in the floor; you need to pull them up, then unhook the door near the handle. The whole thing slides open after that.”
He slid his half of the old doors open while I pulled the pins, unfastened the hook and tried to push mine. It was heavy and barely moved. Ed’s half slammed against the stops, and he turned to charge mine. It groaned and slid onto the outriggers. The wind, calmer now, gently rocked the open doors. Sparrows flew out the door startled by the sudden wave of sunlight that poured over the Ryan. Its white wings and tail feathers shone in the glare. The green fuselage had none of the chalky white stains that soiled everything else in the hangar.
“Whose Champ is that?” Ed called.
“I’ll move it.” I answered and ran toward my airplane.
“Still doesn’t tell me whose it is,” he mumbled. “No need to move it, fine where it is.” He rummaged through the small baggage compartment in the Ryan’s fuselage, removed two leather helmets with goggles and dropped them on a wing.
In full daylight the Ryan was an absolute beauty. There were no traces of the oil and exhaust stains normally present on aircraft its age. The monoplane was spotless as though wiped clean after each flight.
“Does this thing ever fly?” I asked thinking he might have recently rebuilt it.
“Fly it all the time,” he said. “Grab a wing.”
I took the handhold on the left wing, and we moved the Ryan out of the hangar tail first. We rotated it until it pointed toward the runway.
“Ever prop one of these?” he called from the wing root as he loosened parachute straps on the front seat.
“Yes,” I lied.
“It’s not like that Champ of yours, you know.” He knew I lied. “Go ahead, pull it through a couple of times; I’ll tell you when to stop.” He swung himself into the rear cockpit.
I hesitated staring at the long wooden prop.
“Switch is OFF.”
One prop tip pointed toward seven o’clock, so I didn’t have far to reach. After I had pulled it through about six times he called, “There, that should be a good spot. Switch is ON. Brakes are probably on, too.”
I took hold of the propeller blade again and gave a reasonable heave while walking it through to my right. It left my hand before I had time to realize. The Kinner barked dully, coughed and barked again, before setting up its distinct, pok-pok--apok-apok rhythm. Ed grinned from the rear cockpit while waving me into the front.
The prop blast slapped my pants legs as I stood on the wing pushing aside the parachute straps on the seat. Right foot over the rim, then left, then I banged my shins before I lowered myself in. Buckles and straps slipped and clanked against the metal fuselage. Finally strapped in, I donned the helmet he’d set on the joystick for me. Immediately, his voice came hollow through the Gosport tube attached to the earflaps.
“You in okay?”
“Yeah,” I yelled into a plastic funnel hanging near my knee. I assumed this was the speaking portion of the primitive intercom. It was either that or I had just yelled into a relief tube.
“Good,” he came back assuaging my concerns. The joystick swung a wide circle and banged against my knees, Ed’s way of showing how much room he’d need. The throttle inched forward, and the Kinner’s cylinders in front of me shuddered. The fuel gauge bounced in its glass tube over the nose tank. The engine gave a clacking belch and the propeller blew dust and weeds into my Champ tied behind.
Ed wasted no time on a run-up. He taxied onto the runway, pointed the nose into the wind and pushed the throttle and stick forward. Barely had we started to roll when the tail lifted and the pok-pokking mass of 1940s Ryan climbed into the midwestern sky.
The left wing dropped, and we passed across the corn without climbing. I pictured the knuckled landing gear hanging like a wasp’s legs as we flew across fields, rising casually over hedge trees, corncribs and Aeromotor windmills.
Over a bean field, he lifted the nose and opened the throttle. The engine shook as Ed made a slow spiral climb banking first to the left and then to the right. Somewhere about 1500 feet above the ground he leveled. I glanced over my shoulder and saw his eyes smile through the goggles. Put a pair of machine-guns in front of him and he could have been straight out of Dawn Patrol.
He inscribed a circle with his left hand in the air. I gathered we would soon be out of straight and level. I nodded. I reached to tighten my straps when the stick shot forward, throttle back, and the nose dropped. I grasped the cockpit’s rim. Airspeed rose; wind rushed through the wires and cylinder cooling fins. The stick came back, nose up, throttle forward, engine banging, and the horizon dropped. Blue sky, blue sky, more sky, speed bleeding off; over the top, and I looked straight up into cornfields. The nose came over dropping down from the top of the loop. The throttle well back producing that gentle pok, pok of the Kinner, and the corn slid beneath us in a blur.
Before I could digest this, the nose came up again with the throttle less than full. The stick shot back abruptly, and a heavy dose of rudder sent us plowing into a heavy snap roll to the left. We rolled level, the nose dipped slightly for speed, then again the stick came back as Ed stomped the right rudder snapping us the opposite way. The Kinner radial engine that normally took two adults to lift onto its mounts, twisted effortlessly through the afternoon sky. Its black cylinders never complained. We turned wide to the left, back toward the airport.
He leveled the wings and let the nose drop to gain speed. Then up it came, throttle wide open, and the stick, this time, moved forward as we approached vertical. Ed kicked the tail out from under us with a heavy foot on the rudder. The old Ryan arched over onto its wing, almost hovering in the sky for a moment and then gravity sucked us straight down toward the fields below. From the corner of my vision I could see the flying wires flex and bow under the strain.
We leveled. Ed rocked the wings from side to side. The hot August sun hammered on my leather helmet. Despite the open cockpit I was sweating heavily, wrung out. I poked my face into the slipstream and watched the ground slide beneath. The wind grabbed my cheeks trying to pull my skin off.
“You’ll get bugs in your teeth doin’ that,” came the voice through the Gosport. I wanted to tell him I’d had enough but was embarrassed to admit it. I wondered how much more I could take before I really embarrassed myself by adding an unwanted stripe down one side of the fuselage. Somehow, he sensed my thoughts, and a thick calm settled over the entire airplane. My uneasiness faded, and we flew across Iowa in no particular direction.
I knew so little about this person, Emilio “Ed” Nervino. I had walked into his hangar an uninvited stranger and now found myself soaking up his unique brand of hospitality.
The left wing dipped, its round tip pointed toward a herd of cattle eating their way across a pasture. The wing rose again and stopped on a distant puff of cloud, the only relief in the sky.
I watched the summer scene, flat and hot, skim past us. We were two creatures from the Earth, completely without feathers, heads peeping out of a machine from an era long faded. We were headed nowhere and would arrive only when it was right. Ed flew with the ease of someone having spent a lifetime in the sky. There was no faking this talent. This was not by-the-book aviation. This was flight, pure and honest. He said nothing at this point. The great wealth of his experience, the years of oil-spitting engines and countless miles of sky could not be confined to the rear cockpit. It overflowed onto the fuselage, along the wings and enveloped me.
The warm sun must have lulled me into forgetting time when Ed’s voice came through the tube: “I have to be getting you back now.”
I shuddered. A cold blast of wind slipped over my damp back. The day was still warm, and evening a long way off.

We dragged low across the cornfield, over the wire fence, and the Ryan squatted onto the runway. The windsock atop the hangar flicked listlessly while Ed taxied back, s-turning to see where he was headed. I removed my helmet and felt the soft air flow across my scalp. The world spun past when the tail dragger pivoted on one wheel until it was pointed back into the hangar. He switched the magnetos off, and the Kinner rattled to a stop. The propeller took a few easy swings before it was still. I sat for a long moment feeling too relaxed to climb out.
I fly. I know that world up there--a world open exclusively to those who want it; those not interested should remain on the ground, no hard feelings, and your loss. Ed had shown me that same world from his viewpoint, from his machine, in his way. With perfect understanding of his corner of that world, he shared the vision with a stranger. It took little effort, but the impact left me seated in the Ryan’s front cockpit wanting to know more about him.
He’d climbed down and stood by the left wing. He smiled. I felt as though he saw straight into my thoughts, an unfair advantage since I couldn’t see back. There was a strong urge to speak, to question and throw up defenses against this intrusion. The feeling dissipated when he slapped the wing’s fabric and said, “Grab your wing. Let’s get this rag bucket inside.”
The Ryan rolled smoothly into the hangar and came to rest against the chocks where it had been parked before. The hangar door halves, however, were less cooperative and stuck just short of closing.
“Push from the outside,” he said.
I stepped through the crack between the two doors and grabbed a handle. We both pushed, and it closed with a deep-throated, BONG, echoing through the building.
“I’ll go around through the other door,” I called but heard no reply only the scraping of the latch being bolted from inside.

The wind had increased again, and scraps of dried weeds swirled around my feet as I made my way to the far side of the hangar. A cloud of dust blew against the door below the LEARN TO FLY sign. I reached for the handle and pulled. The door lurched but did not open. I jiggled the handle and still nothing--locked.
“Mmmm,” I murmured and looked through the glass. The Swift and the Cessna were both visible, but nothing inside moved. There was no sign of Ed. Confused, I glanced to either side looking for a second door I might have overlooked. But this was the only door on this side, and it was unmistakably locked.
I knocked while peering through the glass. Only the occasional sparrow moved inside. The wind shook the building, and the LEARN TO FLY sign banged against the wall over my head.
“There’s no one there.”
I turned quickly and saw a woman astride a horse near the corner of the hangar.
“What...?”

“There’s no one there,” she repeated. “You’re wasting your time.” She spoke with cool self-assurance and pulled the horse’s head sharply with the reins to keep it from sampling the weeds.
Amid the rotted Navions and tired hangar she was out of place atop the bay mare dressed in hacking coat and boots. Her glossy blonde hair streaked with silver was tucked snug into a bun welded to the back of her head. The horse stepped restlessly to the side and was corrected with a jerk of the reins without her looking at the animal.
“I know someone’s here,” I said. “I just landed.”
“Yes.” She interrupted. “I saw you come in. We keep the runway open all year round, but there really is nothing here.”
“Who’s we?” I became annoyed with this woman on her horse.
“We, the Nervinos. We own all this.” She gestured with her crop. “I am Kate Nervino. My Uncle Ed once ran a flying business out here.”
“Once?”
“He was fairly wealthy, although certainly not from flying. Owned several businesses in New York at one time but left all that to move out here. Anyhow, this was his. He gave flying lessons, fixed old airplanes...”
“Your uncle—Ed…Emilio Nervino?”
“Yes. Emilio.” She laughed. “No one called him that.”
“What...? Did he go broke or something?” I was confused.
“Oh, no.” She paused and then, “He died. Apparently he had high blood pressure, or something, and the government said he was grounded. I was just a girl at the time.” Her voice softened. “He used to take me flying. He was a beautiful man, a very good pilot; lived for flying. He was forever taking strangers up for rides or fixing their airplanes without charging. No way to run a business.
“Anyway,” she continued, “when the FAA told him he couldn’t fly anymore, he just closed up shop one day, went home, and gradually rotted away until he died several months later.” Her voice was distant and cold. “He lost interest.”
“When did this happen?” My voice was hollow, as if the words had come from someone else’s mouth.
“Well, he lost his medical in December of Nineteen, ah...Sixty. I remember I was out here for Christmas. And he died in early spring, just when the air was turning warm.”
A gust of wind shook the hangar violently and rattled the LEARN TO FLY sign. The sign, fresh paint gone, was old and faded by weather and years, and the wind threatened to carry it away.
“In his will, he stipulated the runway be kept open to anyone wanting to use it. The hangar was to be left untouched.” She gazed at the decaying structure. “Nobody’s been in there since he died.”
The wind felt cold.
“You’re welcome to use the airport,” she called and turned the horse’s head. “But there’s really nothing here.” She trotted off along a dirt road toward a grove of cottonwoods.

I ran around the hangar looking for an entrance, but none existed except a small window at eye level on the side wall. Through it I could see the Ryan exactly where we’d put it moments before. The light was enough to make out details but not strong enough to explain them away.
The Ryan’s tires were flat and cracked. The wings, previously white and glistening, were now covered in grime. The airplane had aged decades in the time it had taken to leave Ed and get to this window. The fabric was pockmarked with small holes from mice or fallen debris. The fuselage, once polished green, was now dull and covered with white bird crap. An abandoned nest was wedged between two engine cylinders.
On the workbench below the windowsill were Ed’s overalls covered in the greasy dust of time. Mice had eaten a large hole through the lettering on the back, through the LEARN TO FLY.

The wind was stiff when I taxied away from the hangar in the Champ. Before taking off, I saw the greasy dog walk slowly toward the Navions. He stopped under the wing where I had found him earlier, pawed the ground without interest and settled down. His gaze caught mine briefly before his head dropped, eyes closed in sleep and I left. My gypsy summer could now change into autumn and I could begin to learn to fly.

The End
© Paul Berge 1987, 2007
Please contact us for reprint permission: www.ailerona.com

"Ailerona"©

2007-01-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

"Ailerona" © first appeared in Minnesota Flyer (Richard Coffey, publisher) and subsequently in Pacific Flyer (Wayman Dunlap, publisher). It's a short story and the title of an audio book by Paul Berge and available through Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC or the Antique Airplane Association. All rights reserved by the author.

"Ailerona" © by Paul Berge

There’s a place in the Midwest approachable only from the sky. It’s south of Canada and a bit north of Mexico. Draw a line along the eastern edge of the Rockies, and it’s to the right of that and west of Youngstown, Ohio, maybe Columbus. It’s strictly a middle-of-America place, although there have been reports of it north of International Falls, and it was once spotted in California’s Central Valley and along the Snake River in Idaho, although I suspect those were false sightings. No one’s reported it in New Jersey since 1946.

This place is called Ailerona. It has no ICAO identifier, doesn’t appear on any sectional or airport guide. It can’t be loaded into a GPS database; if you tried, you’d blow the RAIM out of the box.

Despite the lack of navaids, Ailerona is supposedly easy to find if you know how to look. I haven’t been there myself, but I once met a pilot in Wagner, South Dakota who knew a guy in Alliance, Nebraska, who’d flown over Ailerona one winter day in a Maule. He said it appeared through a crystalline veil of snow and looked like sunrise at noon. He reported an expanse of green across low hills above which a Super Cub flew in loose formation with a Taperwing Waco until the Cub descended to an upsloping pasture where the cows turned their heads to marvel at the appropriateness of a Cub in their salad bar.

Ailerona appeared briefly in Greek mythology when Icarus tried to fly across the Mediterranean in his waxwing homebuilt in search of this perfect place. He looked too hard however, and his wings melted. Ever since then the FAA has denied Ailerona’s existence fearing that if pilots saw its wooden hangars full of Stearmans, Fairchilds, and Lockheed Vegas and Lodestars, if they saw the fuel truck hauling both 100 and 80 octane at 35 and 30 cents respectively, if pilots saw all that, they’d question the way things are.

I thought I saw Ailerona up in Michigan while standing beneath a Husky’s wing during a thunderstorm that looked like creation itself. Another time, it flashed briefly through my old Bonanza while scud running between a low overcast and the flat pine forests of northern Minnesota. I skimmed the trees at 150 knots through a 300-foot wedge of clear air that led nowhere and I hoped would never end. Each time that I thought I saw Ailerona however, it disappeared. I tried to grasp it, to log the moment for spiritual currency and, in the process, the vision said I wasn’t ready and faded away.
Ailerona holds the raw stuff of flight from biplanes to the Concorde. It’s where aviation began and, today, is the one corner of flight where no one can clip your wings. It’s out there, and chances are you’ve already seen it--perhaps in that perfect instrument approach or the beautifully executed crosswind landing. It may even exist outside the Midwest, although what better place to begin the search?

2007-01-15T08:36:00.000-08:00

The following story, "Open Cockpit Mind" ©, by Paul Berge, was written in 2005 and updated in 2007. It was published in the Antique Airplane Association's magazine, Antique Airfield Runway, Robert Taylor, publisher (http://aaa-apm.org/ ), and tells of a trip Berge flew from Iowa to California and back in 2005. Photo above shows the Marquart Charger at Taft-Kern, California. Paul Berge in the rear seat and Curtis Kelly in the front. Photo taken by TSA security camera warning the non-flying public to be on the look-out for flying gypsies.

All rights reserved by the author and Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC. For reprint permission or for details on how to submit your aviation short story (you won't get paid so don't quit the day job) please contact Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC at http://www.ailerona.com/ or call 515-961-0654

"Open Cockpit Mind" ©

Like blackened teeth in the lower jaw of a long dead titan, the mountain ridge northeast of El Paso, Texas blocked what I’d thought would be a shortcut to Carlsbad, New Mexico. But, whatever I’d thought in my former life before departing on this 4000-mile biplane ride rarely matched what the mountains and deserts viewed from an open cockpit had to teach. In short, there was no way I was getting over that ridge without a serious handshake from the ghost riders dancing among the craggy peaks.

It had begun two weeks earlier when I left Iowa in a Marquart Charger headed to Watsonville, California for its annual Memorial Day fly-in and spaghetti fest. I’d worked at that airport in the 1970s, and this was my first return flight. Doing so in a biplane seemed the perfect way to fly across both miles and time, only I didn’t realize how broad both spectra were. The miles, I could measure on charts that ripped apart in the cockpit’s wind, but above landscapes so wide the mind was sucked into unseen horizons that reworked all concepts of place and time. Looking back, now, the journey plays out as a mind movie where the reels are run in no particular order—a mountain landing in Ruidoso, New Mexico with density altitude at 10,000 feet shares the screen with a hellish fire bog called Blyth, California where triple-digit heat on a deserted air field made me feel as though I’d flown off the planet and into a place where rattlesnakes complained about the heat. Still, when all these disparate images are raked together, sorted, and laid end for end, the trip begins with a cool morning take-off from a small grass strip in Iowa and ends 45 flying hours later on the same turf but with a changed pilot re-educated by a truly amazing biplane.

About the Biplane:
It’s a Marquart Charger (MA-5) and was designed by Ed Marquart of Riverside, California’s Flabob Airport and built 25 years ago by Dr. Roy C. Wicker of Quitman, Georgia. Not many were built over the years, perhaps a hundred, but at every stop on my trip, someone would slowly walk toward the biplane with that respectful I-think-I-recognize-it look.
“Is it a Skybolt?”
“Nope, Marquart Charger,” I’d answer while unbuckling the four-point harness and pulling myself out of the cockpit by the handles on the upper wing, a maneuver that, by itself, makes owning a biplane worthwhile.
“Marquette, huh?”
“No,” I’d say and swing first one leg then the other over the rim to climb down the wing. “Marquart—‘quart,’” and spell it out to drive the name deep into the stranger’s consciousness. After that, I’d list the specs: “Four wings, four ailerons, two seats, but I’m using the front seat for baggage,” pointing to the metal lid with the compass on top covering the front cockpit.
“Aerobatic?”
“ Yeah, but I’m lousy at it.”
“What’s it got for an engine?”
“Lycoming O-360,” and I’d pop the cowling open so heat rolled past us. “Hundred and eighty horsepower, swinging a McCauley fixed-pitch prop.”
“Inverted fuel?”
“No.”
“Smoke system?”
“Only where oil leaks onto the exhaust.”
“Fast, is it?”
“For a biplane, sure, but speed’s not the selling point. Cruises about a hundred and five knots at sixty-five percent power, faster if you wanna burn more gas, which since it uses hundred octane costing more than single-malt scotch, I don’t always wanna do.”
“Burn about twelve gallons an hour?”
“More like ten, stop-to-stop,” I’d say. “Makes the math easy enough even for me.”
I’ve never liked math, so round numbers work best, and in round terms the Charger flies at Cessna 172 speeds—the old straight tails, not the stuffy new ones at a quarter mil each--while burning Cherokee 180 fuel rates with the advantage of having only half the Cherokee’s range and load capabilities.

Advantage? Absolutely, because with a Charger you make lots of stops, and if you arrive in Lordsburg, New Mexico in a Cherokee no one walks through the ramp’s furnace to ask you about your airplane. They don’t stand beside it while their sneakers melt into the hot pavement and stare at the stacked wings laced together with shiny flying wires and bug-crusted struts. They don’t ask the Cherokee drivers where they’re from, are they mad, or what’s it like to ride across the sky with nothing above their brains but a coat of SPF 500 sunscreen and a canvas flying helmet?
When I landed in Kansas after dodging Toto-eating thunderstorms, the owner of a Hawker bizjet that’d landed behind me rushed over to circle the biplane in awe saying how much better it must be to see the world from my machine than from his kerosene tube-o-comfort. I offered to swap him even, but guys who own jets and wear dreamy dot.com smiles have more sense than biplane pilots like me who’ve been too long in the air and are in need of a bath, real food, and a clean rag to wipe the oil leaks dripping from the cowl. He smiled, climbed into his jet, and ordered the two pilots up front to whoosh him back into his world where, no doubt, that night over white wine in Aspen he’d retell his friends about the gray-haired, smelly bi-winged bum he’d met in Kansas, “Pass the brie, please, Clarissa…” and the Marquart would fade from his memory.
For 25 years this Marquart--built from plans, no kits—has turned heads and brought smiles to flyers and non-believers alike. Ed Marquart apparently spent years designing what was for him the best of all biplanes, and I’d say he got it right. Walk around one and study the shapes. As your eyes pass the images to your brain you’ll see a Great Lakes Trainer, or perhaps just a hint of Bucker in the swept wings. Many see a Steen Skybolt until the Charger owner explains how Rubinesque in the waist and tail Skybolts are by comparison. Others see Starduster or Hatz—all gems in their own ways, but in the end this biplane with so many influences in its pedigree is a unique item—it’s a Marquart. It’s a funny name to say (sounds like the Aflack duck clearing its throat), but it’s a good biplane to fly.
Structurally, it’s nothing exotic and that adds to its charm. Wood wings—spars and ribs—with a welded steel fuselage lined with aluminum stringers form its Lauren Bacall waistline above a tight tail, all covered in cotton and dope that’s still tough after 25 hangared years. N645’s US Navy paint scheme is a tribute to its builder’s (Wicker) wartime career as a Naval Aviator.
The tail looks too small, and in that momentary transition from tail-high wheel landing to tail-down taxi, it feels briefly inadequate especially in crosswinds. While it wheel lands as sweetly as a Citabria, Aeronca Champ, or Cessna 140, it’s easy to overreact to the turning tendencies at slow speeds—at least in this Charger, I can’t speak for others.
Since I routinely operate from a 2200-foot grass strip in Iowa, the mile-long runways so common out West seemed like child’s play, but at the higher density altitudes—routinely above 5000 feet—my touchdowns tended to be hard. Until I got the hang of higher altitude ops an embarrassing whiff of burning rubber accompanied each arrival. With faster touchdown groundspeeds and the lack of soft grass to correct my sloppy technique, landings were, well, spirited at times. Where I’ve been used to a soft rumbling touchdown on dewy turf followed by a short roll as the tail wheel acted like a hook in the grass, the heat-soaked pavement in Benson, Arizona squealed as scrub raced past, runway lights threatened to clip the lower wing tips, and coyotes ran for the hills.
The temptation is to bring the tail down too soon, which simply increases the angle of attack, adds lift, and makes the arrival even squirrelier. Full-stall landings might be better, but, hell, I like wheel landing. The secret is to trust in Ed Marquart’s design and allow the biplane to roll without too much pilot-induced interference. Properly rigged and aptly flown—meaning don’t get too aggressive--the Charger rolls straight. Thankfully, it has the old Goodyear brakes, which are so crappy there’s little chance of aggravating the situation with amateurish braking.
Take-offs can be a directional challenge, too, at high altitudes with full fuel and light winds. That little bit of extra runway needed before lift-off gives more exposure to stupidity (aka: Pilot Induced Stupidity Syndrome). The trick is to feed the throttle in smoothly and anticipate the left-turning tendencies both from normal torque and p-factor as the power increases and from the gyroscopic left-turn tendency induced as the tail rises. Then, gently correct with the merest breath of right rudder while holding aileron against the crosswind—all basic stick-and-rudder technique used at sea level but magnified somewhat by heat, altitude, and the self-induced anxiety of knowing that a thousand miles from home is a dumb place to drag a wing tip.
The Marquart was never over gross even with two on board, and with many of its 180 horses available on take-off (assuming you lean properly), if all else fails just squeeze back on the stick to coax the whole bundle of wires, wings, and sweaty owner clear of the ground. Lower the nose into ground effect, and as the speed nudges 85 knots, climb away. Once clear of the taller cacti, oil rigs, and cowboy hats, a 95-knot climb gives descent cooling but never good forward visibility.
Although never over gross, the CG does shift aft with weight, which aids cruise speed but took all nose-down trim from the biplanes screw-jack trim system. While stalls in this swept-wing biplane are somewhat benign, practicing them at low altitude when fully loaded isn’t advisable, so close attention to airspeed and coordination—as in any airplane—is a must in the pattern.

Limiting Factors:
The Marquart is blind over the nose to the rear seat pilot in command. My beginner’s tendency was to lower the nose too much for cruise. The result was a 200 foot-per-minute descent--good airspeed, but down you go. Properly trimmed you won’t see much past the cowling in level flight so occasional pitch dips or gentle banks are in order throughout cruise to spot traffic and TV towers. In a Cherokee or other traveling machine this might be considered a design flaw, but the biplane mind knows that straight-and-level is not a goal here. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to travel more than two minutes without rolling left, then right, while tilting your head back to watch for Fokkers, or to gaze over the cockpit’s rim in envy of the buzzards circling through nearby thermals.
The biplane’s mission is to fly not to travel. Getting to a destination is a happy byproduct of the adventure. Before taking the biplane plunge you have to ask yourself, “Do you want to get somewhere or do you want to be somewhere?” In open-cockpit, you’re always somewhere even though it might be nowhere near your intended destination. Time, somehow, loses its earthly grip in flight.
Still, my destination was northern California along the Monterey Bay, and en route I stopped in Van Nuys to pick up Curtis Kelly, a friend who’s also a tail wheel pilot. From Van Nuys, where I’d irritated just about every air traffic controller with my microphone-in-the wind voice, to Watsonville, Curtis rode in the front seat while I discovered how miserably windy it gets in the back when the front hole is open. The problem is the windshields.
A quick look at the two cockpits shows each with a windshield equal in size. Both were transplanted from a Ryan PT22—classy but that front screen generates hurricanes in the back. Picture the slipstream flowing along the fuselage when the front seat is buttoned up; it hits the rear screen and coils into space leaving the solo pilot grinning in relative calm. I can fly alone from the back seat wearing a baseball cap turned ‘round and a pair of sunglasses without fear of losing either. But when you open the front seat for guests and tack on the forward windshield things change. The wind now smacks the front glass, which, because it stands so tall, deflects the blast into the under side of the upper wing where it ricochets down onto the rear pilot’s head. The sensation is like losing an hour-long pillow fight. The front-seater, meanwhile, sits in comfort, confused why the guy behind him is so punch drunk on landing. The solution, I’m told, is to cut the front windshield down by a third to reduce that deflection. Since I can’t bring myself to damage a 60-year-old airplane part, I’m having a smaller windshield made from Lexan®. We’ll see how that fits and report back. Either that or you’ll see a Lexan windscreen for sale on e-Bay in a month.
Despite the backseat pummeling, I found that by wearing goggles throughout the flight with a front seat passenger I could survive with only minor brain damage, which my neurologist assures me isn’t permanent…isn’t permanent...isn’t per…(Thwack!).
I’m fine, really.

Engine heat was another issue even before the journey. With the Lycoming turning money into power, a lot of heat needs to escape and usually through the firewall and into the fuselage, where with the front cockpit sealed shut, it quickly flows to the rear seat to cook the pilot’s feet. Being open cockpit does nothing to cool things below the belt. In fact, the open cockpit acts like a chimney drawing heat onto the pilot. A pair of NACA vents at thigh level brings in some air, but still the heat persists, and knowing I’d be headed to places named Death-By-Heatstroke, Arizona, I cut two vents into the boot cowling and padded the firewall on the passenger side. The results were good; heat was greatly reduced. Still, near the surface on scorching days it’s bloody hot in any airplane.
Sadly, in winter that heat isn’t there, so you’ll freeze your butt in the Marquart in January. Its detachable bubble canopy helps on sunny winter days, but the key word is detachable. On a particularly cold morning I tried to taxi with the bubble canopy partially latched only to discover how easily it becomes detached from the airframe, taking rivets, eyeglasses, and my choicest swear words with it.
All the comfort issues from wind and heat were minor and in no way overrode the tremendous joy this open-cockpit biplane offers. I’ve been flying and teaching in tail wheelers such as Champs and Citabrias for years, but the step into the biplane life unlatches and demands a whole new appreciation of the sky.
Biplanes are made for grass, but the Marquart mixes well with the big stuff. Returning to Van Nuys from Camarillo, the tower growled at me to proceed direct to the end of the runway and keep my speed up because a jet was to follow. Debates over shock-cooling aside, the Marquart can give ATC good climb and descent rates and a decent speed to short final, where with power back you gently lift the nose to bleed off speed to make the runway and a reasonable turn-off.
Several times when wheel landing at towered airports, I had to ignore controllers asking me to make a turn-off while the tail was still in the air. Landing at Salina, Kansas, for instance, the tower controller—swamped with two airplanes--harped at me to make the first intersection, but with one wheel barely on the ground at that point, I ignored him (I’d been a controller for 17 years, so I know how to ignore authority). When he repeated the request and told me to “expedite my taxi,” I lowered the tail wheel and politely explained that unless he wanted to call the wrecker, I’d need to be a little more cautious in ground ops.
Inexperienced line personnel exhibit a similar lack of understanding when directing tail wheel airplanes into tie-downs. They’ll signal me to a spot and then wave at me to taxi directly toward them until I can no longer see their arms. They get the message and step aside when the spinning prop keeps coming despite their signals to stop.

Endurance:
The Marquart Charger, like many biplanes, isn’t known for its range. It’s designed to run about the sky on pretty days having fun. Cross-country trips are best planned with the knowledge that you’ll make lots of stops. The Charger holds 28 gallons, 27 of which are usable, divided among three tanks. The main holds 17 gallons in the fuselage forward of the front cockpit. It has an electric fuel gauge on the rear instrument panel and is accurate to within 15 gallons. Two five-gallon aux tanks are in the top wing. Each tank has a tiny filler neck, so the airplane was regularly flushed clean with avgas at each refueling. Reaching the upper tanks is an awkward balancing act when standing on a stepladder’s warning placard: Do Not Sit Or Stand…
With 27 gallons burned at ten gallons per hour, the Charger gets roughly two-and-a-half hours range if you don’t mind landing in the desert. I planned one to one-and-a-half-hour legs, netting from 100 to 200 miles depending on winds. Drinking bottled water en route assured that I wouldn’t be tempted to stretch that, although, over Santa Barbara when that extra cup of morning coffee called ready to leave, I seriously considered standing up to relieve myself while Curtis flew.
The fuel selector is located in the rear cockpit. I’d normally take off on the main tank, climb, and then level off and set power and mixture. Then, I’d switch to aux and hit the timer. Fifty minutes later—about one hour into the flight--I’d switch back to main where I knew I had at least an hour left plus a few gallons sloshing around in the upstairs tank. The longest leg I flew on this trip was 1:40.
I did run a tank dry over the Oklahoma panhandle. It’s surprisingly easy to do when you’re not paying attention and, instead, staring at a wind turbine farm below. The sound of coughing silence, however, gets the message across and with boost pump on it was only a few agonizing seconds before the engine growled back to life. A few more and my heart did the same.

The Route:
Headed across country you’re going to cross mountains at some point. I chose the southern route for several reasons, but mainly because in years past I’d flown two northerly routes via Interstate 80 and even further north along Interstate 90 through Missoula, Montana. Foul weather blocked these routes for the entire time.
The southerly route from Lubbock, Texas (home of the WWII Glider Pilots Museum) through El Paso, Lordsburg, Benson, Arizona, Tucson, Phoenix, Palm Springs, Banning, and across Los Angeles offered lots of fuel stops, easy-to-follow Interstate 10 (a comfort if the engine quit), plus lower terrain when compared to routes through Wyoming or even via Albuquerque along the old Route 66. High temperatures were a concern but just a few thousand feet above most terrain the air was smooth, and wearing tee shirt, shorts, and cloth helmet I was comfortable.
The scenery from up there was mind bogglingly stark yet beautiful, and I’ll admit at times it felt intimidating since I was used to lush green Iowa. I carried lots of water but I’d made the mistake of not drinking regularly on the first legs and found myself dehydrated—a syndrome that’s not automatically recognized but easily prevented.

Unto the Maw:
So, somewhere northeast of El Paso, Texas, after a week and a half in the Marquart Charger, I followed a highway across a vast expanse of dryness leading to Carlsbad, New Mexico my next fuel stop. On the map, the road bowed to the right but looking around the biplane’s nose I saw a wide valley dotted with green circles from pivot-point irrigation. The desert literally bloomed through here and beaconed for me to shave a few miles off my safety route along the highway and go direct. I veered away from the concrete ribbon and felt good following the lily pads across this sea of brown. To my right was a giant salt flat, a place that would drain all traces of moisture from any ill-fated traveler who landed there. To my left were miles of a New Mexico that routinely ate up conquistadors, silver prospectors, and Iowa lame brains like me with no respect for its harsh immensity and our own insignificance.
Ahead, the lily pads quit at the base of a mountain ridge where at the south end the blackened teeth of the long dead titan offered a foreboding specter. I checked the gas gauge and timers knowing I had plenty of fuel, especially with the tailwind, but the closer I came to the hills, the louder the ghost riders laughed until the lily pads disappeared and I saw I’d need to climb even higher to cross the last few dozen miles of earth that looked as though it hadn’t softened since whatever volcanic heave that created it had cooled millions of years before. And it was then I chickened out and turned toward the highway I’d abandoned miles back.
Green gave way to salt flats and then climbed into the rugged teeth of a ridge that loomed well above my head poking out from my tiny biplane shell. The wind pushed me along at groundspeeds over 150 knots, amazing for a boxy old pile of cotton, wood, and wire. As I paralleled the ridge headed for the left turn that would reconnect me with the relative comfort of the highway the thought dawned that whatever wind pushed me so smoothly along this ridge would likely prove amusing when I made the turn to the leeward side.
It was then the ghost riders laughed, and the wind hooked me around the mountain’s point like a scrap of litter swirling down a storm drain. Still smooth, the air seemed to reach a giant enveloping arm that turned me over the highway, and as I accepted the shove I felt the biplane sink—and not just a little.
The VSI pointed down 500 feet per minute and I cracked the throttle, which only amused the mountain, as the winds now tumbled in a wave across the ridge and sat like a crushingly soft weight on the biplane. No lenticular clouds, no dust, no mobile homes swirling past, just a blue sky dying over me, taking me toward the desert floor despite the biplane’s now full power climb and prayerful utterances from the cockpit.
Finally, when the ghost riders were fully amused and I’d turned to the safety of the flat lands to my right, the sky seemed to wink, as in, “Got yer attention, now, didn’t we?”
And I nodded politely toward the toothy ridge, giving a quick salute from a sweaty palm, and said, “Hey, I’m just learning.”
And the mountain let me, and the biplane, pass.
It would be three more days of dodging Kansas thunderstorms, scud running beneath foggy decks, and turning back when I was only 30 miles from home before the journey decided I’d learned enough…
For now.
The End
© 2005, 2007, Paul Berge, all rights reserved.

2007-01-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

The following short story, "Crash Fire Rescue," © by Paul Berge, was written in 1987 and updated in 2007. It comes from a collection of Berge's aviation stories titled: "Aeromancy"©. All rights reserved by the author and Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC. For reprint permission or for details on how to submit your aviation short story (you won't get paid so don't quit the day job) please contact Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC at http://www.ailerona.com/ or call 515-961-0654

"Crash Fire Rescue" by Paul Berge, © 1987, 2007

It played out in a slow-motion movie with the sound track slightly out of sync. Dusk had given way to purple twilight, and the runway lights--little pots of fire--had just blinked on. A few student pilots still slogged around the traffic pattern in Cessna 150s. I’d locked the fuel truck and was about to put the crash truck away when Jim--I can't remember his last name, nor anyone else's from this incident for that matter--turned final in his 1939 Fairchild, a long-nosed model 24 with the Ranger engine.
Being new to the airport business I still watched airplanes land--still do, actually--and had stopped to watch the old high-wing monoplane descend. The bowlegged landing gear reached for the ground, and its rotating beacon signaled, Watch me…Watch me….

The wind was light off the bay, and the airplane was more shadow than substance adding to the unreal setting. Given the serenity something had to pop. Suddenly, a wing lifted and then dropped. It took only a second for it to plow into the pavement extinguishing its green position light as the right gear leg buckled. Since I stood far away there was no immediate sound. The wingtip grabbed the runway and pivoted the airplane around digging the propeller into pavement. Still, there was no sound, just the horrible sight of a grand old flying machine chewing asphalt while pirouetting on its nose. Like a prima ballerina wiping out, tragic enough to make you gasp, even though you hate to admit how cool it looked.

It stopped, and there is nothing that looks more stopped than a wrecked airplane. Finally, the sound arrived: Grrunchh-cwafff-phhhttth! The rotating beacon flashed: Did ya watch? Did ya watch me?

Being in charge, and the only airport employee on duty, I swung into action. "Holy Cow, did you see that?" I asked no one.
Already Chuck, Bob, Frank, Hal, Ed, Thad and just about every airport regular who’d been in the Pilots Lounge charged past me.
"Get the truck out there!" Chuck shouted.
"Right," I answered and turned to unlock the fuel truck. Thinking that bringing a thousand gallons of avgas to a crash might be less than appropriate, I reconsidered and ran to the crash truck. I loved the crash truck. It was a 1952 Army surplus 4x4 Dodge painted yellow with CFR stenciled in big letters on booth doors. CFR stood for Crash Fire Rescue, although the airport manager said it really meant, “Crappy Friggin’ Rig.”
The crash truck had a bum transmission stuck in compound first gear, a power range ideal for pulling halftracks from ditches or uprooting redwood stumps, but that limited rescue speed to something less than a brisk walk. Unless a pilot had the foresight to crash beside the CFR truck, rescue would probably be leisurely.
The truck’s back end held an impressive fire extinguisher apparatus consisting of two large stainless tanks, several valves and pressure gauges, plus a reel with two hoses that, when extended, ended in a double-nozzle. With pistol-grip controls it resembled twin anti-aircraft guns. I had no idea how to use any of this.
I did know how to operate the rotating light and siren. I particularly liked the siren. It made the truck sound fast, and once at the crash scene Chuck instructed me to position the truck so as to deflect any landing aircraft from striking us and to "turn that dopey siren off." I did both. Chuck had been a B-24 pilot during the war and had that natural command presence my generation was told it lacked. Plus he was really big with a deep voice, and since he could spot-land an Interstate Cadet better than anyone on the field, he automatically took control.

The wreck site was more chaos than tragedy. Jim, the Fairchild’s owner, pointed at the limp windsock as though blaming it for his wipe out. No one was hurt, although some girl about 19—pretty and obviously taken with me--explained it had been her first time ever in an airplane, and she wondered if this was standard. I shrugged, and the last I saw her she was walking into the darkness shaking her head. I often had that effect on women.
"Don't we have to notify someone?" I asked the crowd. After all, I was in charge. Mostly, the assembled rescuers returned amused stares and told me to lift with the others on the wing once Frank had his tow truck positioned.
Frank was one of the legendary pilot loungers on the field. He owned a Bonanza and ran a small towing operation in town. This gave him the perfect excuse to hang out at the airport ready to snatch a crumpled Cherokee, or in this case, a Fairchild off the runway. No one knew better than Frank how to cradle a mangled wing or lift a Mooney that had landed with its gear safely tucked inside the wells.

It's a slow process moving a Fairchild 24 with only one good gear leg and a wing that dragged on the ground. It’s a big airplane. Barely into the rescue effort, it dawned on me that not only were we trying to remove a disabled aircraft from a runway--one still in use--but also we were trying to do so discreetly to avoid unnecessary calls to or from the FAA or worse, the local newspaper. Sneaking a broken Fairchild across a busy airport ramp at sunset is about like smuggling a Sumo wrestler into McDonalds. There were the odd stares from faces in aircraft landing over our heads, passengers' expressions frozen in the glare of the many headlights contributing to the secrecy of the project.

Somehow, though, it worked. In less than two hours of grunting, swearing—a break for everyone to go pee--and a lot of lifting, we managed to squeeze this broken hunk of cabin monoplane back into its hangar. And then, like bootleggers hiding their stash, the doors were shut with furtive glances to make certain no more than a few dozen passersby had seen.
Rescue, then, turned to resurrection. Bob rolled in welding tanks, Thad unbolted the shattered prop while I was sent to unlock so-and-so's hangar because he had a length of tubing plus some extra fabric and dope that might come in handy. He'd understand. Besides, he wasn't due back from Mexico for at least a week.

By dawn, there was a Fairchild standing back on two legs and tail wheel. Mind you, the main gear legs didn't match real close, and the whole thing tended to list to starboard, but it stood as more or less a complete airplane.
Before the doors were slid open and the empty pizza boxes and beer cans swept out, Jim brushed the last coat of silver dope onto the wing tip.
"Didn't break much when it hit this time," he said. "At least nothing too important."

That was from my summer of 1978. Word has never leaked about the night the Fairchild 24 bent a leg--until now. Oddly, I can't remember any of the real names of the rescuers or even the Fairchild’s owner for that matter. Besides, I think the statute of limitations has long since run out. What hasn’t run out is my love of watching airplanes land at sunset. I just hope there’ll always be a Pilot’s Lounge complement of rescuers available to ignore the FAA and answer the call to action.
The End
© 1987, 2007 Paul Berge, all rights reserved.

2007-01-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

The following short story, "Heading South," © by Paul Berge, was written in 1987 and updated in 2007. It appears on the audiobook the Logbook © (artwork by John McCloy). All rights reserved by the author and Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC. For reprint permission or for details on how to submit your aviation short story (you won't get paid so don't quit the day job) please contact Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC at http://www.ailerona.com/ or call 515-961-0654

"Heading South" © 1987, Paul Berge

TRACON 1987

“United’s heading two-sixty and descending to six. Northwest is climbing to eight, ‘cause you have to miss this Merlin over-flight at nine.”
“Is Northwest on course yet?”
“No,” I answered. The other controller slid her chair past mine and scribbled her initials onto the sign-on position log.
“I got it,” she drawled.
“You got it,” I answered. I heard how bored I sounded, as though someone else had spoken.
I unplugged my headset from the slot below the radarscope. It was time to leave. I’d been there since dawn. Seemed it was all I did anymore.

Leaving any radar room is like leaving a bar in the middle of the day. It takes a while for your eyes to adjust and you feel as though the rest of the world has gone on without you. But it was spring and the air smelled sweet, but as I walked toward my car I was thinking about things such as what to have for dinner and why I didn’t care what I had for dinner. Maybe I’d have that dream again about the radarscope that turns to JELL-O just as all the all the blips come together. I hadn’t had that dream for almost 20 years and, lately, it’d been returning. Four more years until retirement at age 50. Hope the dream goes away.

Just as I turned out of the parking lot, I passed the hangars on the general aviation ramp. Inside one hangar was a 1946 Aeronca 7AC Champ, my one escape. Although I hadn’t flown it in over a month, it never left my mind. Circumstances had somehow kept me away.
It hurt to think of the pilots who would give their teeth to have their own tail dragger parked in a hangar waiting to fly. Worse, it hurt to think that I was once one of those pilots. But something had happened. All day long I talk to airplanes but never see one if I'm inside the radar room. Flying, to me, had lost its romance, and the Champ--through no fault of its own--had become an airplane in definition only.
The day was warm even for early May. Cumulus clouds grew slowly in the western sky. Later, they would grow into whitish blobs on the radarscope giving headaches to pilots and controllers. But now they were just puffy white clouds yearning for a taildragger, like the Champ, to kiss. I considered obliging and found the car steering its way through the open gate toward the hangar.
Before I could make it to the hangar, however, I spotted something among the rows of metal airplanes. Behind a Twin Cessna and across from a Piper Navajo sat a two-seat, fabric-covered tail dragger with its door open. It was a Champ but new to the field, and from the looks of the person loading baggage it would soon depart. I drove over.

“Hello,” I called and stopped the car.
The pilot turned, and a quick smile appeared on the bright face below a rumpled baseball cap. “Hello,” she answered. “Am I in your tie-down spot?” She slid from the airplane and met me as I stepped from the car.
“No.”
“I didn’t know where to park yesterday. It was almost dark when we arrived. There was no one here.”
She wore faded blue jeans, the cuffs rolled above her ankles, tattered white tennis shoes and a tee shirt with the faded image of a Cub printed across her breasts. Nice, I might add, breasts...not the sort of thing a federal employee is supposed to notice. But I was off duty.

“Are you new to the field?” I asked for an opener. What I really wanted to say was: “Hey, you don’t know me and, even though at the moment I reek of stale radar I’m really all right and would you mind very much running off with me? I’m that pathetically lonely. We could fly Champs together forever while living off our savings, assuming you’re wealthy…”
“Sort of,” she said. I don’t think she caught the underlying text. “I’m just passing through.”
“Where to?”
“Oh, heading south it looks like.” She glanced at the sky.
“What’s there?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged so cute my eyeballs sighed. “I’ve never been that way before. I guess it’s time to go see. Do you have an airplane?” Her voice was absolutely sweet with a trace of husky self-confidence.
Do I have an airplane? Oh, Jeez, I knew the answer to that question, but for the love of mud my brain locked. Finally: “Yes. A…a Champ, as a matter of fact. Care to see it? It’s just over there--in a hangar.” I pointed in case she'd never seen a hangar before. I felt like I was asking a girl to dance at the Freshman Acne Pimple Ball.
She nodded, yes, turned quickly to the airplane and called: “Now, you stay there, Elizabeth, I’ll be right back.”
Whoa, I thought. She's named her airplane, Elizabeth? That's when I saw a little face pop over the rear window ledge. A black nose, black floppy ears and sad brown eyes looked first at her and then suspiciously at me. Elizabeth.
“Your dog flies with you?” And as soon as I asked, the concept made sense. Why shouldn't your dog fly with you? I looked where the rear seat cushion would normally be and saw, instead, a small metal box padded with a blanket. A cargo net hung off to the side.
“The net acts like a seat belt,” she explained. “She's a good dog; she’ll stay put until we get back.”
We left and the dog followed.

“My name’s Kim,” she said. Her face seemed to light up like a bright moon whenever she spoke. She bounced lightly on her feet as she walked, her whole being exuding a happiness with whatever she did. The feeling was catchy. Just walking beside her made me feel good.
“Michael,” I said and held out my hand. “I’m Michael.” She took it without hesitation. Her grip was firm and confident.
We arrived at the hangar.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been in here,” I said.
“Why? Is there something wrong with your airplane?”
“No, it’s me."
“What's wrong with you?”
“I haven’t had time to go up lately.”
“Why not?” She was direct.
“Work,” I said having no other excuse. The job was always an easy place to dump responsibility. The minute I tell people I’m an air traffic controller a knowing look comes to their eyes, automatically excusing me from normal behavior. It’s like telling someone you’re a kamikaze pilot.
“What do you do?” she asked.
I slid the long hangar door open, like rolling away the stone before a tomb. “Air traffic controller,” I answered and watched for the look. She only stared--no look; in fact, not impressed at all. “I work in the approach control, the TRACON.” I motioned vaguely at the control tower across the field.
“And that keeps you from flying?” she asked with her same directness. Her face carried the smile that could do no wrong.
To redirect the conversation I pointed inside the hangar and said, “There it is.”
Dusty sunlight spread across the Champ. She walked toward it, approaching as she would an untamed animal. She ran two fingertips along the back of the fuselage and wiped away a layer of brown silt. She rubbed the dirt between her fingers and said nothing, but the message was clear: ‘You shameful person. There are people in China going without any kind of airplane, and here you keep one locked away where it collects dust and rots. Shame…’
“You should fly it,” she said. “Maybe wash it.”
I guess she sensed how uncomfortable I’d become, and her eyes turned soft as she walked toward me. “It’s a beautiful airplane.”
And it was, too. Under the dust was a well-restored airplane painted light yellow with a black upper cowling and deep black lines outlining the struts and landing gear. The glass was in excellent shape and mostly free of scratches. The interior almost new. It wasn’t original but I liked it.
“Would you like to fly it?” I asked.
“I have to be going. Burning daylight.” She brushed past me with what I imagined to be a brief pause to smile.
I followed her back to her airplane and watched Elizabeth hop into the box in the rear. Kim fastened the net over the box, and the dog curled into a tight circle in the blankets.
“Will you come back this way?” I asked.
She climbed into the front seat and while fastening her seatbelt said, “No. At least not soon. Could you give me a spin?” She indicated the propeller. Old Champs have no electrical systems, so you have to hand-prop them to start.
“Sure...” I said, and then quickly added, “ Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“I don’t know. What’s the question?”
“How is it you can do this?” I motioned slightly, hoping she would understand what I was asking, but the truth was I was unsure myself what I wanted to know. “How can you, ah, do you have a job?”
“How is it I can fly around whenever I want? Is that it?”
I nodded.
“I’m asked that often,” she said leaning forward. I waited for some revelation about her, but she tilted her head and with a giggle said, “I just do it. That’s all. It’s not difficult.” She saw my blank expression and added, “Have you ever tried it?”
“You mean just pack up and leave?” I snapped my fingers. “Just like that?”
She snapped hers back only louder. “Yes, like that.” She laughed and, “Why not?”
Why not? I found myself pointing at the control tower across the field. She turned.
“That?” she asked. “But that’s just a job. How can that stand in the way of doing anything?” She shook her head and smiled again. My shoulders drooped.
“My job’s important,” I protested weakly. “I, I need it.”
“If that’s what you want,” she replied.
“It’s not that I want it...”
“Well, then?”
“A person can’t just...just leave. You know...” I found myself flapping my arms and feeling foolish. “You don’t understand,” I muttered.
“No, I don’t. Could you spin the prop? I’d like to get going. You’re welcome to come along.”
I felt myself reel from her dare. There were too many things to hold me back, and I desperately groped for the safety of an excuse to avoid another chance to really live.
“I can’t,” I said and took the propeller blade in my hands. “Switch on… Brakes on…Throttle cracked?”
She repeated my calls verifying the magneto switch and brakes were on and throttle slightly opened. I pulled the propeller through and stepped aside. The engine caught with a bark and idled. I walked away from the spinning disk and stood with my hands inside my pockets watching her. I decided I’d fallen in love with the woman I'd met only 30 minutes prior. She closed the door and picked a handheld transceiver from the floor to call ground control to taxi.
I watched her for a minute and then she turned, waved and flashed a devastating smile. Elizabeth poked her nose through the netting above the box, shook her head as though to indicate, You idiot, and they taxied away.
Soon, I stood alone on a quiet ramp watching a small tail dragger follow a Boeing 737. The Boeing departed in a roar of jet noise and climbed high above the distant tower. Two minutes later the Champ took the runway and, in a faint ticking of the four-cylinder motor, it rose slowly from the pavement and headed south.
Kim and Elizabeth were gone.

That night I fell asleep on the couch and awoke after midnight from a soft dream about pastures and airplanes flying low over treetops on warm afternoons. Or was it cool mornings? I couldn’t remember.
Alone in the pre-dawn quiet, I thought of Kim and her Champ. I wished I had a dog in a box on the back seat. And I wished with intense longing for the courage to say, “I’m heading south because I’ve never been there.”

It was my day off. Tomorrow I'd be back into the radar room for scheduled overtime, an amusing term, 'scheduled overtime,' it sounds like a scheduled mistake. I tried to fall back to sleep and return to the dream world I'd found with the treetops and pastures--with the tail draggers.
But my mind stayed awake and my body followed. Sleep would not come. Around four I sat up and stared out the window and over the rooftops to the east where a thunderstorm died and the sun had yet to appear.
“Which way is south?” I asked the darkness and turned to the four walls and the refrigerator humming politely in the kitchen but no one answered.
“South is that way,” I said and walked to the large window overlooking the parking garage. I thought I saw her face in the dark trees but shook it off.
I dressed.

The airport was abandoned at 5 o'clock when I pulled up to the gate in the chain link fence. Birds flew in noisy swarms from the trees, heading out to scrounge for breakfast. The gate squeaked on rusty hinges and clanked shut behind me. The eastern sky grew pink melting the last of the stars. I opened the hangar door.
“I’m sorry,” I said to my airplane. “I’m sorry I’ve been away so long.” I walked around it, running my fingers through the layer of grime. I saw where Kim had left two parallel trails in the dust. “You need a bath,” I said and pushed the Champ toward a faucet where a garden hose lie coiled.

“Up early?” the flight instructor who also ran the fuel truck, called. The sun was above the trees, and the air was cool and smelled of May.
“Got lots to do, Colleen,” I answered and sloshed cold water over the wings.
“Goin’ somewhere?”
I nodded and climbed off the stepladder to move it. My motions were quick, I was in a hurry to leave. Without knowing it I had a bright moon-smile.
“I’m flying south today.”
I squirted water over the windshield and scanned the cloudless morning sky. A turboprop commuter took off. Its propellers churned the morning air with a squeal like grinding coffee beans. I watched it bank over the terminal and head north.
“What’s down south?” the instructor asked from the truck cab.
“Don’t know. That’s why I’m going.”
She shook her head with a laugh and drove off to fuel a King Air being towed from one of the corporate hangars.

The Champ’s 65-horsepower motor ticked over quietly, and I spoke into the microphone connected to the old portable radio anchored to the floorboards between my feet.
“Tower, this is Champ 85607, at the ramp, ready to depart, southbound, and I don’t have the ATIS, and I don’t have a transponder, and I can’t get any other frequency than this one, and you probably won’t hear me on it after I clear the trees. What do you think of that?”
Pause.
“Mikey? Is that you?”
“Morning, Rachael. It’s me. Can I get out of here?”
“Ah, Champ 607, sure, we're here to help. Taxi to runway 23, cleared for take-off, turn left on course, southbound.”
I opened the throttle drowning out whatever the tower said after that--something about wind and altimeters, but I could see the trees, and they were dead still. I didn’t need an altimeter setting to clear them.
The Champ’s tail rose, and as I felt the wings lift I eased back on the joystick. Steady at 60 mph, I climbed past the tower, close enough to see the supervisor shake his head. I rocked my wings and banked away.
“See you tomorrow, Mikey,” tower said.
“Don’t plan on it.”

For two hours the Champ flew with the morning sun climbing higher above the horizon. At first, I felt like a passenger merely along for the ride. But as the city fell behind and the vast Midwest landscape, thick with spring, unfolded before me I slowly took control of the airplane.
And somewhere outside a tiny four-building town I saw her airplane. It sat alone on a hilltop surrounded by gently moving grass sprinkled with wildflowers.
I flew low overhead, and from beneath a wing Kim appeared with Elizabeth at her feet.
I landed and stopped beside her.

Two Champs on a hilltop, and I smiled as bright a moon-smile as I could to match hers.
“Heading south?” she asked.
“Not sure where south is, but it would appear I'm headed that way,” I answered. And I know it's corny, but I could hear music.

The End
© Paul Berge, All rights reserved.

2007-01-11T17:00:00.000-08:00

The following short story, "First Time on Skis," © by Paul Berge, was written in 1990 and updated in 2007. It was published in the Minnesota Flyer, Richard Coffey publisher, and comes from a collection of Berge's aviation stories titled: "Aeromancy"©. All rights reserved by the author and Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC. For reprint permission or for details on how to submit your aviation short story (you won't get paid so don't quit the day job) please contact Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC at http://www.ailerona.com/ or call 515-961-0654

"Keep it on the white--not the green!" Ray shouted through the Taylorcraft's door. "Give 'er the throttle again, push forward on the yoke to bring the tail up and I'll rock the strut here to get you free." He kept his free hand on his hat to keep it from blowing away in the prop blast.
"Right," I answered and nodded the way your kid answers when he hasn’t a clue what you just said. It was a little embarrassing, my first time on skis, and I'd barely made it six feet before grinding the right ski into the mud.
I opened the throttle again and moved the yoke forward. The T-craft's tail was light enough to lift in its own slipstream. The nose dropped. I walked the rudders trying to break free of the mud. Ray leaned into the strut and rocked back and forth until the ski broke away, and I was on the snow.
Suddenly, I was a snowmobile with wings.

Any Taylorcraft takes about no runway to lift, and about half that, again, to land. This 1939, BL-65 wanted to fly long before I'd figured out which way the massive tachometer dial turned. This was my first time flying without wheels. Too busy trying to discover what the airplane would do I missed the fact that it wanted to fly--right now. When in doubt, pull back on the yoke--it's about the best thing to do after thoroughly screwing up a take-off roll. Airplanes fly a lot better than we can, so just get them into the air. I learned that the first time I'd ever flown a tail wheel.
I pulled back. The skis left the ragged earth, and it was just a matter of flying an airplane, sort of....
Flying a Taylorcraft is like sitting in something made too small for anyone. Once the claustrophobia passes, however, and you feel at home with the three- inch slat of windshield, it's just another airplane--"Pull back to go up, keep pulling back to go down.” The 65-h.p. Continental engine was no different than the one on my Aeronca Champ, so all that throttle stuff felt normal.
It was landing that was the unblazed territory. The runway was buried under patchy snow. The airplane had no wheels, just a pair of battered skis Ray had found in a farm auction somewhere.
"Gave fifty bucks for the pair," he'd said, and as soon as the first snow fell, we had a ski plane. Robin's egg blue, with white wings and silver feet, it truly looked like a bird instead of a machine. To land it made me look as though I'd never been near a tail dragger--with wheels or without.
"What speed do you land this thing at?" I'd asked.
"Dunno; airspeed's busted," Ray answered. "Probably about
fifty. Just watch the ribbons on the struts. So long as they're pointing back, you've got enough speed..."
He started to reach for the prop, then added, "You can tell if your turns are uncoordinated, 'cause the side window pops open." He grabbed the prop. "Switch on. Leave the throttle closed, and don't bother with the brakes." Oh, yeah—skis forgot already.
I now turned final, a slight crosswind blew from the right, and I corrected. The T-craft almost hovered coming over the fence. Ray sat in a chair on the leeward side of the hangar, arms crossed, legs stretched before him, unconcerned. I only got a quick glimpse, but that was my impression, anyhow--unconcerned.
I squeezed a little throttle as I dropped below the hangars. Wind buffeted the airplane lifting it slightly. I dropped the right wing and pressed opposite rudder to keep it running straight.
When you come in a little too fast in an airplane with wheels, you bounce. When you come in a little too fast in a plane with skis--you bounce; only it feels like someone just slapped your butt with a board.
I bounced. Luckily, the airplane knew how to land, so we settled into the crusty snow with a slapping racket that seemed to emphasize the fact that I had no control over anything.
Grateful the runway lights weren't too close together, we shot between two, drove across the shoulder and into the harvested bean field.
"Power," Ray had told me. "Power and rudder. That's all you've got to taxi. Use lots of both."
I did and S-turned like a destroyer evading U-boats.
Back between the runway lights, across the runway again and into the bean stubble on the other side. I was making progress. A couple more tries, and I'd be home.
Mud and snow struck the wings and sprayed through the open window (it had popped open on final). I saw someone shut a hangar door--real fast. Something hit the tail just as the left ski caught a drift almost driving the opposite wingtip into the ground. Things spun; things creaked. I yanked back on the throttle and was back where I'd started, facing the hangar, the engine ticking evenly, and Ray walking toward me unruffled.
"Got the hang of that pretty quick," he said as the engine quit. "You know, come spring, I'm thinking of putting floats on this thing; got a pair lined up from a fella in Minnesota. What'd you think?" I glanced back at my track through the beans and between the runway lights, and then looked at Ray, "I'm game...."
The End
© Paul Berge, 1990, 2007

2007-01-11T16:31:00.000-08:00

The following short story, "The Hangar," © by Paul Berge, was written in 1987 and updated in 2007. It comes from a collection of Berge's aviation stories titled: "Aeromancy"©. All rights reserved by the author and Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC. For reprint permission or for details on how to submit your aviation short story (you won't get paid so don't quit the day job) please contact Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC at http://www.ailerona.com/ or call 515-961-0654

"The Hangar" © 1987, 2007 by Paul Berge

Part I

Crossing over the field I saw it. A small airport like so many others in the Midwest, it had one runway and one large hangar. It wasn’t on the chart, but I didn’t see any X’s on the runway to indicate it was closed, and the worst that could happen would be I’d be told to get lost. Throughout my first summer as a gypsy pilot I’d been told to get lost before, so.…
I circled the north-south strip and noted that the wind was out of the northwest at about 15 knots. The air was warm coming through the Aeronca Champ’s side window. Below, the corn was deep green with gold tassels. The fields moved in the wind like ocean waves eliminating the need for a windsock. With a good cornfield you can see the wind, all of it, and judge how it will snuggle the aircraft right to the ground.
Turning downwind I closed the throttle, and the 65-horse engine popped once. I continued in a left bank to base leg and then onto final, watching the corn while picking my spot on the sod runway. A quick glance at the tattered windsock confirmed what the corn had already told me. I felt smug, the worst feeling a pilot can get, because it means you don’t know nuthin’ and might be too stupid to learn. At 19 I hadn’t learned how to learn yet, too stupid to know how dumb I was.
With left wing down I flew low across the fence and rolled the left wheel onto the grass. Slight forward pressure on the stick kept the Champ planted on the ground as the tail eased itself down and airspeed bled off. The smell of warm earth flowed through the open window.

A pair of yellow- painted tires marked where to taxi off the runway without dropping into the drainage ditch along the edge. It was an unpretentious airport with only the one building and no fuel pumps. I taxied behind the hangar out of the wind and turning hard swung the tail over a tie-down rope. Two more ropes were under the wings in the weeds. I reached behind to snap off the magnetos. The propeller took one easy swing and stopped.
The ropes under the wings proved little more then weathered stumps of hemp, so I grabbed my own from the baggage compartment where I kept my sleeping bag, dirty laundry, tools and a half-dozen Snickers Bars. While threading the ropes through the rusty eyehooks in the dirt I stared at the hangar. Its wood had weathered gray long ago. About two stories high it guessed it covered two, maybe three thousand square feet, at any rate, too large for such a small airfield.
The hangar’s two immense door halves shook and complained with each gust of wind much as a ship would at dock in choppy waters. Or that something was inside trying to huff its way out.
Sparrows darted through the many cracks. A strip of corrugated steel trim flapped above the door track. I pictured it ripping off to fly through the air and slice through my fabric wing, or me. But I realized it had survived untold years without falling so I ignored it. I’d learned long ago to ignore what threatened or I couldn’t understand.

I walked through the dry weeds to the far side of the hangar where parked outside were two abandoned Navions and a Luscombe fuselage discarded on its side in the dirt. Navions were sleek low-wing four-seaters, built, it was dreamed, for returning P-51 pilots. And before the war that had created the Mustang heroes the Luscombe had been a quick two-seat tail dragger, a delight to fly. Now, in 1986, they were abandoned hulks. A small greasy dog lay beneath the Navion’s wing. He lifted his head, gave a disinterested bark as I neared and was back asleep before I could answer. He didn’t seem to believe I was there, or care.

The two Navions were identical. Both sat on flat tires, and their once orange paint schemes had faded to a dull yellow like week-old banana custard that no one wanted. One airplane’s nose strut was extended to its limit leaving the tail low. It had no propeller, and a glance under the cowling showed all the cylinders gone leaving only empty holes in the case. Rusty connecting rods poked out. I started to reach inside when a pair of wasps flew past squelching that idea.

Breaching all forms of airport etiquette I climbed onto a wing and the Navion moaned under my weight.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll only be a minute; just want to look inside, into your past.”
Little was visible through the cracked and frosted Plexiglas. I tried the canopy and it complained but gave. Time and unknown grave robbers had ravaged the interior and cannibalized the instrument panel. The upholstery was faded, torn, and the carpeting pulled up revealing corroded aluminum. Everything was coated with bits of hay, cornstalk and age.
I found the registration pouch on the pilot’s side, but the documents inside were little more than yellowed scraps. One form, though, was preserved well enough to read the owner’s name—Emilio Nervino.
“Well, Mr. Nervino,” I said to the form, “I hope you don’t mind me poking around your airplane.” A sharp screech flashed by my ear. Wasps, I thought and jumped back dropping the document pouch.
A sparrow perched on the canopy lip and scolded me. She beat her wings like an enraged nun to emphasize her point, whatever it was, and with a final annoyed chirp flew off.
I picked the registration pouch from the seat, slid it back in place and closed the canopy. When I climbed down the Navion moaned relief and woke the greasy dog and it followed me to the hangar.

Despite the airport’s state of advanced decay a freshly painted metal sign reading, LEARN TO FLY, hung above a single door. A wind gust shook the building, which appeared ready to blow away with the next blast. The new sign, however, was anchored firmly to the wall, amazingly out of place, its message more of a taunt than an invitation to me.
“Wanna go inside, boy?” I called to the dog now leaning against the door. I expected him to bounce off the ground, tail wagging in appreciation but he hardly raised his head long enough to cast a disapproving gaze. I felt silly. Dogs have that effect on me.
“Well, suit yourself,” I said and opened the door. The dog slipped quietly inside, and the door closed behind us.

It was cool like the inside of a cave or a tomb, I thought , and was mildly content with that metaphor until I realized I’d never been inside a tomb or a cave for that matter. My eyes took several minutes adjusting to the dim light and knowing I would stumble over the dog if I moved, I stood and listened.
The wind sang through the high ceiling where sparrows flew between the rafters.
Gradually my eyes adjusted to the dark. The hangar was crowded with a lifetime’s worth of aviation stuff. Nearest me was a Globe Swift—a lowing, two-seat monoplane, silver with blue trim and a tinted canopy. Its nose bowl grill smiled at me the way I imagined a crocodile might smile at a poodle. It had one gear leg extended under a wing and the other wing was supported by a jack stand. It sat as if waiting for something. A wheel sat nearby on an upturned crate. The dust on each piece gave the impression that someone had been repairing the landing gear, decided to step out for a beer and disappeared into the far stretches of the Universe. I’ve known beer to have that effect.
Behind the Swift was a Champ like mine, except orange and yellow in the original paint scheme with the orange sweeping under its belly. The fabric was cracked and brittle, looking as if it would punch through with the slightest pressure. A sweater was draped across the front seat and hanging on the joystick was an olive green baseball cap--the old kind without the plastic adjusting band on the back. Like the Swift, this airplane seemed hastily abandoned some years before.
Scattered around the hangar were engines and parts of engines. Magnetos on benches, a carburetor shared a moldy wooden box with a mouse nest. Spare doors, one I recognized from a Fairchild 24, hung along one wall. A four-cylinder Franklin engine was on the floor against a parts washing tank. A large radial sat on a pallet beside the Champ, a crated propeller beside it. Suspended from the walls were wings--some with fabric, and others stripped bare, ribs exposed.
Workbenches and tool chests on wheels stood curiously undisturbed throughout the hangar. Two red barrels, one labeled 40W and the other 50W, rested on stands near a small door labeled, MEN’S, and what appeared as an afterthought, AND WOMEN’S, TOO--KNOCK FIRST.
Suddenly, birds chirped wildly above me in the rafters, fighting over some contested piece of territory or a particular female’s attention. The racket subsided with the loser winging across the room and landing on the propeller tip of a Cessna 195.
Then, I saw someone move.
The figure moved quickly around the propeller and disappeared again into the shadows. He made no noise. With the dog following, I picked my way carefully around the Cessna’s tail toward the far corner of the hangar and found him standing on the opposite side of a Ryan PT-22 monoplane. Only his legs showed beneath the Kinner radial engine. I remained fixed in shadow just the other side of the Ryan. I made no sound, nor did the dog.
A row of small windows along the ceiling at this end of the hangar let in enough light for me to see that the Ryan was a seemingly functional airplane, the first I’d seen since landing. Gradually, I maneuvered myself around its tail until I could see him from the side and slightly behind. He seemed not to notice me, being absorbed with something in the engine.

I guessed him to be in his late 50s, maybe six feet tall, dark and stocky with a thick neck and closely trimmed gray hair. He wore stiff white overalls with LEARN TO FLY stenciled across the back. With one arm he reached far behind the engine while the other arm arched over a cylinder head. The two hands tried to meet somewhere in a tight corner near the firewall.
“Come on, you piece of...there. Gotchya!” The dark figure swiveled his head like a mud turtle and looked at a toolbox just out of reach to his left. I stood quietly behind to his right.
(to be continued...For Part 2 Go to: http://paulbergeaviationstories.blogspot.com/2007/02/hangar-part-2-by-paul-berge.html)
End Part I
© Paul Berge, 1987, 2007

2007-01-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

The following short story, "The Fuselage," © by Paul Berge, was written in 1987 and updated in 2007. It comes from a collection of Berge's aviation stories titled: "Aeromancy"©. All rights reserved by the author and Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC. For reprint permission or for details on how to submit your aviation short story (you won't get paid so don't quit the day job) please contact Ahquabi House Publishing, LLC at www.ailerona.com or call 515-961-0654

"The Fuselage" © by Paul Berge

He drove a '59 Rambler. It first appeared at the airport when Terry bought the old Waco fuselage, hauled it to the airport on a flatbed trailer and set it at the north end of the hangars in the weeds.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A Waco, Taperwing Waco,” Terry answered. “Bought it at a farm auction in Nebraska.”
“Where’s the rest of it?” There was only the uncovered airframe and vertical fin. The gear legs were attached but bent and without wheels.
“That’s all I got.”
“No wings? No engine?” I barely hid my amusement.
“No,” he said defensively. “Don’t need more. I can rebuild it with what’s there...and some plans...and a little scrounging.”

And that’s how it stayed throughout the year. The only one ever going near it was the old man who drove the Rambler. He’d turn up at twilight and always parked his car near a spot in the fence where the posts leaned over, drooping the barbed wire to the ground making it easy for him to step over and walk slowly to the old biplane’s fuselage. He had to be well over 90, I guessed, although he seemed in good health. At first, I thought he was just another stranger out to watch airplanes fly and simply chose that spot near the Waco to remain unobtrusive. Soon, however, I noticed he never watched us fly, preferring, instead, to stare at the derelict fuselage.

He did more than stare at it, his eyes moving as though taking inventory of what was left in the rusted structure, and I thought I saw him talking to the fuselage or talking with someone that I couldn’t see. Throughout the winter he’d appear before sunset, park the Rambler beside the fence, then pick his way through the dead weeds and snow around the fuselage--always studying it. He never looked anywhere else and never at me. His hands would occasionally reach out to touch the rusty airframe, and then as if he stood beside a complete biplane with engine and wings attached, he would nod his head in some sort of approval of something else I couldn’t see.

I moved closer to him one snowy afternoon and stood within hearing distance at the edge of a hangar. The air was cold and still as the inside of a closet. Snow collected on his thin shoulders and wide-brimmed hat. It coated the airframe’s tubing in fuzzy rails. His breath rose in weak puffs, indicating he was speaking. I strained to hear, but his voice was too thin. It sounded as though he issued instructions to someone unseen. Then he patted the fuselage with an approving smile and shuffled toward the Rambler, taking, I assumed, his unseen companion with him.

“Hey, Terry,” I asked one afternoon inside the shop. “Have you ever seen that old guy who comes out here poking around the Waco?”
“What old guy?” Terry answered from beneath a customer’s airplane.
“Some guy hangs around...You haven’t seen him?”
“No, I don’t get down that end of the field, too busy.” He dropped a wrench and it rang sharp against the concrete floor, punctuating his suspicion: “Why?”
“Oh, just wondering,” I said. “He seems, I don’t know, peculiar, that’s all.”
“You see any weirdoes around here, you chase them off. Airports always seem to attract weirdoes, somehow. Don’t know what it is about them.”

Spring came, snow left, yellow flowers grew thick around the derelict fuselage, and the Rambler continued to show up at sunset. I was busy flight instructing for Terry, hoping to save enough money to pay for my Airline Transport Pilot’s license. A rumor had spread that the airlines were hiring—the one’s that weren’t bankrupt--and the fever had me. I had to build hours, so day after day I slogged around the pattern, repeating the same speeches about airspeed and coordination to my faceless students. In spite of me, they learned to fly, and I accumulated hours toward my airline goal.

The days lengthened, the air turned warm, and the Rambler parked alongside the fence almost daily. I watched the old man for a few seconds at a time with each pass we’d make on a touch-and-go. For several days he confined himself to the airplane’s nose, pointing at the firewall and its empty motor mounts. Just as he had directed his imaginary companion around the nonexistent wings throughout the winter, he now assisted in overhauling an engine that wasn’t there. He even dragged an old wooden crate beside the fuselage and stood on it to reach where the tops cylinders would be, if there had been any, which there weren’t.

“Hey, Terry, that old guy’s back. You ought to see him. He thinks he’s putting an engine on the Waco.”
“Uh-huh,” Terry muttered without looking up from a stack of fuel receipts. “I thought I told you to keep the weirdoes out.”
“I don’t think he’s causing any trouble, it’s just...”
“Uh-huh. Don’t you have a student waiting outside?”

Around and around I droned in the traffic pattern through bad landing after bad landing. “Watch your airspeed; hold more rudder next time; correct for the wind, keep that wing down, use that adverse aileron yaw to your advantage. Okay, let’s go around and try it again.” The words fell from my mouth like so much nonsense from a parrot. Then, down the narrow airstrip, back into the sky, and each evening before sunset the Rambler would appear on the gravel road, stop beside the fence and the old man would walk slowly through the wildflowers to work on his biplane. I had to consider it his; no one else went near it.
“Hey, Susan,” I interrupted a student one afternoon, tapping her shoulder as we lifted off. “Do you see that old guy over there?”
“Where?” she responded in near panic. “Sorry! I didn’t see him; did I hit him?”
“No, he’s by the hangar.”
“Dead?”
“No. Alive…I think. See?”
“Huh?”
“No, back behind us...Oh, it’s too late, you can’t see him now. Watch your airspeed, let’s climb on up to 3000 feet.” I made a note never to interrupt Susan with my stray observations while she was concentrating on landing.

Spring folded into summer, and the yellow flowers around the fuselage gave way to fat grass and thistle full of bees and mice. I managed to get my airline license and then picked up the occasional charter flight hauling chickens mostly. Flying from dawn until after dark, the hours piled up in my logbook, and by mid-summer all I could think about was getting on with the airlines. My application was in, so I waited and continued to drag around the pattern in worn-out Cessnas looking for the old man to arrive each afternoon to put in his time with the Waco.

“Are you sure you’ve never seen him?” I asked Terry one morning before the first student arrived. “He’s down there every evening.”
“What’s his name?” Terry asked pouring a saucer full of evaporated milk for the airport cat.
“I don’t know, I’ve never met him, I’m always busy when he comes out, but you must have seen him.”
“No,” Terry snapped. “I’ve more important things to do than sit around chatting with airport groupies who’ve got more time than they know what to do with, so they sit out here drinking my coffee, watching me work and my airplanes fly without ever buying anything.”
“But he doesn’t watch them fly,” I said. “He just stays with the Waco...like...like he was rebuilding it or something.”
“Has he been dinking around with my fuselage?”
“No, he really doesn’t do anything, that’s my point. He thinks he’s doing something.”
“All right,” Terry said standing. “Let’s go down right now and meet this nut case.”
“He’s not there now, he only shows at sunset.”
Terry shook his head and disappeared into the shop. I heard something drop and his muffled voice complaining. My first student drove up and the sun rose over the trees.

That evening as a thunderstorm rumbled to the east, and the ground steamed from the shower that had just passed over, I stood outside the office inhaling that beautiful moment that doesn’t exist anywhere else but on a small airport when the sky is soft and sounds like old dreams. My back ached from sitting all day in cramped cockpits. A Cessna 150 crawled overhead approaching to land, its engine a murmur against the distant thunder.

I looked along the hangar row and saw the Rambler’s grill poking through the weeds. The old man, silhouetted by the orange sun, was inside the Waco’s rear cockpit, seated on an overturned bucket, moving his head from side to side. He’d stare at the blank instrument panel, then lean out, calling to someone near the propeller--only, of course, there was no one near the propeller, and there was no propeller on this wingless, motorless, skeleton biplane.

I looked around and except for the Cessna turning final I was alone. Terry had run into town, and my next flight, a charter, was not due for fifteen minutes, so I went to finally meet the old man in the Waco. I made it as far as the second hangar when Terry’s truck drove into the parking lot beside a gray Cadillac. He hurried toward me, calling: “Your charter’s here.” My passengers walked toward the Piper Seneca while talking on cellphones with that I’m-very-important look that indicates that they have nothing to say and only talk on cellphones in hopes someone will acknowledge their being.
“What are you waiting for?” Terry asked. “Get their bags...and smile.”
I glanced toward the Waco before turning back. The old man motioned toward his phantom assistant while shaking his head. Apparently the Waco’s imaginary engine had refused to start.
“Did you see him?” I called back to Terry, but he was already inside the office.

With autumn a week away, Terry was mowing the weeds around the Waco. The flail mower cut even circles around the old airframe, chewing up thistle and grass into dying summer’s pulp. I hadn’t seen the Rambler for a week and missed the old man’s presence at twilight. The sun dropped below the horizon, and the air cooled as Terry parked the tractor in its shed, and I went home.

Mixed in with the usual mail that evening was a thick envelope from the airlines. I tore into it dropping a handful of forms onto the kitchen table. I read the cover letter, hoping to spot the key phrase somewhere in the standard organizational format. There it was: “Please notify this office no later than 15 October to schedule an interview...” I was in—well, almost. No more students or charters, I was going to work for the airlines. One day it might even pay more than flight-instructing.

That night I barely slept and was out to the airport before dawn. The air was cool, and the wind calm across a rosy sky. The runway lights flickered pale yellow, and I walked through the dew-covered grass in what I thought was a random route but actually lead toward the Waco. Fate giggled at my notions of self-control when I heard a deep clacking rumble slap at the morning air. An engine started, a large engine, definitely not one of the Cessnas or even the Seneca, which I knew was still inside the hangar. Someone advanced the throttle, and what sounded like a radial engine growled from around the last hangar. I hurried as the sun broke above the treetops turning autumn into a firestorm of yellows and lavender. The radial’s call, a vicious drum line, was now intense as I turned the corner of the last hangar, and a sparrow shot past my face from beneath an eave. I swatted, then stood with arms limp at my side staring at a full, all-black biplane with furnace-red trim, its radial engine swinging a long silver propeller that caught the sun’s early rays in a flashing pinwheel of dream light.

It was, of course, the Waco Taperwing that had no wings. Only, now it did, and a tail, and tires, plus a radial engine, and a woman who looked like dawn itself as she smiled from the front cockpit. The sunlight was sucked into the ebony fabric and exploded back in deep glory, accented by the red trim that looked too hot to touch. Atop this flaming vision a tall figure in leather swung into the rear cockpit. But before he settled into his seat he turned toward me. The sun lit his face in that same red that fired the sky, but even in shadow, I would’ve known who it was--the old man from the Rambler.

It was his face but sixty years younger; the hair full, curly, and dark. His shoulders were broad, arms and legs quick. He waved, smiled, and pulled a leather helmet over his ears but left the straps dangling. Squinting against the sight, I barely returned his wave when he opened the throttle, and the Waco taxied past me in a symphony of wind and power. Then ignoring the paved runway, it bounced across the grass and lifted into the dawn sky. With a wave from both occupants, it banked and vanished in a tapering finale of unearthly light and sound.

The runway lights clicked off as Terry’s pickup turned onto the gravel road toward the office. For several minutes I stared at the now empty sky then turned back to where the Waco had been. The weeds were evenly cropped where Terry had mowed but stood in a ragged V forming the shape of the now missing fuselage. The sun rose higher. The dawn colors faded into daylight, and I looked beyond the weeds and the fence to the Rambler parked alone and empty. Terry appeared by my side.
“Where the blazes is my Waco?” he bellowed.
“I...I don’t think it was ever yours,” I said and walked toward the car. And there on the dashboard was the key, the car’s title signed by the owner, and a note to me: Hey Kid. Pump the accelerator twice on a cold day and she starts fine. It’s a boring car, but looks as though you’re heading into a boring life unless you remember what you saw here.
And I tossed the key back on the dash and walked away realizing that I had a long way to go before I learned how to fly.

"Aeromancy"© Paul Berge Aviation Stories

"Launch The Revolution"

“Old Gray”

Ailerona

Husky Sunset

“Destination Unexpected—Borger, Texas”

American Skies

Toto's Revenge

Fly Iowa in an Open-Cockpit Biplane

Antique Airplane Association Launches Website

"Connie" © by Paul Berge

Blakesburg 07

"Old Airfields Never Die" © Paul Berge

"Emily Flies Again" ©, Paul Berge

"Betty Bounce" ©, Paul Berge

"Toto's Revenge" ©

P-51 Red Tail Mustang

"The Logbook" © by Paul Berge

"First Flight Deserved Last Rites" ©

"Last Ride Forever" Part 3 of 3 © 1987, 2007, Paul Berge

"Last Ride Forever" Part 2 of 3 © 1987, 2007, Paul Berge

"Last Ride Forever" Part 1 of 3, © 1987, 2007, Paul Berge

"ATC Midnight Rules 1987" © 1987, 2007, Paul Berge

"Late For Work"© by Paul Berge

"The Hangar, Part 2" © by Paul Berge

"Ailerona"©

"Open Cockpit Mind" ©

"Crash Fire Rescue" ©

"Heading South"©

"First Time On Skis"©

"The Hangar" © Part 1

"The Fuselage" ©