A NEW ADVENTURE: BY JONATHAN BARON

A Coast to Coast Farewell

Jonathan Baron

Under the big top, the massive aviation expos have their jugglers and their clowns, their elephants and their carneys, dreams of the high wire perched upon the oxygen altitudes while the fire breathers put kerosene down their throats and blow flame. There are the marquee features with displays all lit up, showing us a new path contained in boxes of circuits that will never let us lose our way amid the darkness of night, the blindness of thick clouds, and the harbors of thin pavement we must inevitably seek.

In one of the circus tents at Lakeland I met Robert, the president of the Bellanca club. This tent was for type clubs, among the most humble of the bunch of very temporary structures. I’d seen Robert before. I’d shook his hand, but I’d never really met him as the site had been the Bellanca fly-in at Columbia, California and he’s one busy guy at those Bellanca gathering of the clans. Pining for something simple and casual like Columbia, I proposed a scheme: I’d fly from the east coast in my 1950 Bellanca 14-19 Cruisemaster to that event in California and take him with me.

Shortly after Lakeland the phoned me to ask if I was truly serious. I’d flown east to west and west to east before, most times in my Luscombe. After eight years of painful, expensive, and necessary repairs to its many systems, my Cruisemaster had at last proven dependable during the previous half year. It’s the sort of airplane suited for taking such a trip again, this time with cargo: a passenger and our luggage. Yes I was serious.

My ‘Master became our Club’s Air Force One on the Sunday before the event as I flew from Orange, Country Airport to Wayne Delp Memorial south of Albany, New York – a mixture of turf and embedded pavement pieces. It sits atop a gorgeous little hill on the west bank of the Hudson river at the foot of those mountains and beautiful country that seldom come to mind to most people when they hear the words New York. They never think of the York after the New, and that countryside in England that inspired the name. Such a bucolic end to roughly 345 miles of needle threading between large and self important huge hunks of airspace. I’d averaged 147 welcome knots enroute. This would be the last time I would see such an impressive sum for several days.

Our president happily awaited me at midfield. An elfish, portly man in his early 60s with a puff of gray hair atop his large head framing a broad face incapable of a frown he would prove good company. Though born in Hungry his accent is thick with the sound most people associate with New York. He carried very little personal luggage. My collection of clothing, though, was almost massive. Yes it’s a quirk, but I consider tee shirts underwear and shorts undignified. Thus I’d packed a shirt for each of ten days and actual pants, each to be worn for two days.

Onward to Albany and cheap gas: $3.60 a gallon. Then, to my mind at least, the trip commenced. Landed at Johnstown, famous for a tragic flood. They don’t give you a traditional courtesy car in Johnstown. They give you a late model, well equipped minivan which we used to get lost, over and over. Get very lost and you spiral down and down a long hill, coming at last to where the flood happened. Rebuilt to resemble the original town, it didn’t look real…it looked like a movie set or the work of a master of CGI. Looking at the topography – this town wedged so deep below the surrounding countryside – I imagined a sign above pointing to it that read, “Place doomed town here.”

Somehow we managed to find food and, later, lodging and, of course, inexplicable hours of watching The Weather Channel.

Long gone are the days of mild and vaguely attractive men and women in the studio talking about the weather in various places in the country, with the occasional expert – the too ugly for television guy who’s on camera because he’s an expert – saying expert things. They must choose the ugly guy or nobody would believe him. Oh, the made for television folks are still there but the focus was the current fashion in weather reporting: guys being blown around in violent weather talking with great excitement into microphones reporting more wind noise than words. Super cells marching across the country. And the hail…how big was it? Smashed bits and huge dents on their vehicles – the proud marks of either courage or insanity – shown with great enthusiasm. To an aviator, though, one thought: an unprintable one.

Our flight path the following days deviated distinctly from my printed portions of WAC charts with confident yellow course lines. Yet we managed to find the magic corridor between meteorological events that attract storm crews. Our route was southerly. Only downside was that those upper air charts were full of arrows fletched with lines on their tails aimed precisely at our nose. Lebanon, Tennessee for fuel. Fort Smith, Arkansas and RON right on the border of Oklahoma. Across Oklahoma and veering toward the Texas panhandle feels like an infinity of flat. There’s a beauty beyond the eye in country where growing grain is unhampered by hills, and below are echoes of a more independent life between the section lines and off the guidelines of conforming demands of the contemporary grid. Certainly the crop duster, making his living below our wing, would have seen mountains very differently had they been there.

We then flew over tan fields pock marked with abandoned oil wells. Here headwinds feel like an inexplicable punishment for some sin you pray forgiveness for. At length, however, you see the Guadalupe Pass and the beginning of a world of high desert. Beyond, two huge cliffs, nearly identical in size and curved at the top look like the Ten Commandments tablets. The Spanish name for them is less biblical - Dos Cabezas: two heads. In the desert southwest, mountains seemed carved by razors and uncarpeted. Its lowlands were the bottom of the ocean once before the largest argument in geological history tore the surface of the earth into dissenting continents.

Flying an airplane with range in a country as vast and ecologically diverse as the United States can seem like a journey across a solar system with stops at colonies on other planets. Far behind us were colonies of green, of hills and modest mountains wearing trees. Before us lay an arid world that rarely had the ability to create much of anything vertical. The only plants capable of stature ironically looked like men raising their arms in surrender. One fellow calls them French cactus.

Next day we stopped at The Big House, though it’s called by its Spanish name, Casa Grande. Nobody on the radio though seemed capable of pronouncing it as a Spanish speaker would. The “e” on the end gives them trouble.

Casa Grande is one of only two airports near Phoenix with approaches suitable for instrument training. The strangeness of listening to a CTAF busy with calls involving instrument approaches on a day with 70 miles visibility was arresting enough. The fact that the FBO was IFR in its own way was odder. Transients arriving from the ramp are invisible. Clouds of indifference or utter disinterest obscure the passerby. They are invisible to the pilots based there. It was only after they noticed the bright red and white Cruisemaster that they paid any notice, first to the airplane and then to us. We were then accorded the honor of meeting the airport elder, a smiling happy man in his 90s. His skin had a pale translucent quality, as if he was passing from the flesh of this world into the ghostly state of the world beyond.

Onward to another colony on yet another planet. Alpha Zulu 50, Triangle Airpark, is a patch of desert sand in Arizona not far, as an aircraft flies, from Las Vegas. The wind howls at AZ50 even at midnight. Free from the world of zoning, much less that imposition of esthetics common to communities obsessed with property values and the vague virtue of “Keeping up appearances,” aircraft hangars and houses reflecting diverse sensibilities line a broad dirt runway 4000 feet long. Our host, Bruce, met us at midfield in his truck and we followed him through the dust to his hangar and home.

Two types of aircraft dominate Bruce’s taste: Triple Tail Bellancas and Stinson 108s. A Bellanca -3 is his flying airplane along with a cute, white single place parasol wing bird that looks like a Heath. Two Cruisairs in various states of restoration, as well as a Stinson 108 comprise the rest. In his shop air cold enough to turn the desert sand into permafrost blows from a swamp cooler. When the temperature/dewpoint spread can be as much as 50 degrees, water evaporation is a powerful force.

All manner of pre-WWII aircraft instruments fill shelves, as do examples of aircraft radios dating back to the days when they were called, “the wireless.”

“If you see anything you need just take it,” Bruce said. He was that way about everything. Comfortable with himself and in the overalls he always wears, and happy for the company – though he’s not alone there – Bruce’s shop and home were everything Casa Grande is not.

To his sensibilities the route to Columbia is a course of roughly 300-310 degrees straight over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. To mine, however, the route is along a path less bold: Apple Valley, Palmdale, over the Tehachapi pass, and up the Central Valley. After a short stop at Jean, Nevada for fuel that’s the way I went. Three hours later we were entering the right downwind for runway 17 at Columbia the day before the fly-in was going to begin.

Unlike nearly all our stops, winds were light and variable. I could fly an easy approach between 60 and 65 mph. A Triple Tail can do that wonderfully, power-on, and it can make for a leisurely round-out, flare and touchdown. Didn’t happen. After a touchdown near centerline the nose went left. This was less a swerve than it was an inexplicable HARD TURN to larboard. Full, and I mean FULL right rudder and brake did nothing at all. Left wing hit, and we were whipped into the grass. Puzzled beyond words I looked out my left window. The gear was down and pointing forward. Odd sight, that. It had been a slow landing. Robert and I barely bumped shoulders. I was furious. What the hell could I have done to cause this?

Nothing as it turns out. It took little scrutiny to see what had gone wrong. The left drag strut, at the over-center hinge point had broken. One half of it, obscured by a microswitch, had been in bad shape beforehand. 59 years of landings had taken care of the rest. Though I’d later note a logbook entry from my least favorite shop in Oregon, or any state, dated December of 2006 claiming a left landing gear overhaul…well…it didn’t matter. Runway photos showed that it had gone wrong nearly at the moment of touchdown…red paint from flaps and wingtip told that tale without ambiguity or alternate endings.

Fate ordains that, if we’re lucky, we will fall in love. When the love affair ends we can look back on many things but all love ends. Looking at that forward pointing left gear leg out of my cockpit window was that act that finally exceeded my tolerance. The conclusion was beyond debate. Having purchased a hangar queen and lacking neither the skills nor the funds to go through every portion of that airplane and restore it, I had no business owning a complex aircraft in its 60^th year.

But I was there. Robert was there too. Neither of us had received a bruise and we’d spend the weekend surrounded by our Bellanca brothers. For Robert it had been his first trip across the country by light airplane and he was as gleeful as a child for most of the trip. And if this was to be my final flight in this airplane I had loved so, this was a great and fitting one to end on. Always my pride but seldom my joy I can only hope it finds itself in more capable hands that love her as much as I did.

Not in the mood to dwell on this part of the trip, I did the only sane thing: I enjoyed the fly-in. Far from the circus of Lakeland, though it has its virtues, Columbia had something damned near impossible to achieve: a gathering of the most individualistic, iconoclastic, independent aviators left in General Aviation. Aware that it well may be the last time I will see them, I relished their company for nearly four days.

Bruce would later bring me back to Triangle, right over the Sierras and Death Valley. He pointed out various features below that only a few people knew existed, early mining settlements, former cat houses tucked away next to long gone dirt strips, a fascinating version of history you’ll never find on metal roadside signs with raised letters. I’d leave for home from McCarran a couple of days later. Robert would catch a ride to Sacramento with one of the Viking guys.

As I write this I am told by a fellow at the NTSB that they are “leaning” toward ruling my accident a mechanical failure and not pilot error. I make plenty of pilot errors but this was not among them, nor was the decision to fly to Columbia in my Cruisemaster a mistake either. What would have truly been tragic would have been my Triple Tail breaking on a run to some pancake breakfast 40 miles from home.  Given the age of the airplane and the non-lethal nature of the outcome, I can see this in no light other than a grand journey.  I’m not a patch flier. I find it difficult to summon the motivation to fly without a destination other than where I began. I became a pilot to go places. I’ve never been to more than on this trip.

-end-

A Summer’s Epilog

by Jonathan Baron

Fall is epilog and prelude. October is the long farewell to summer here in Virginia. The war of heat and thunder, of humidity and haze rising from battle, leaving the flying landscape choked with a residue like smoke and dust, condemning the innocent inhabitants to breathe air like syrup, all of it ends. And in this aftermath, before the leaves fall from exhaustion and turn forests into clusters of skeletons and ghosts, crisp air reveals the countryside. Buildings and hills have shapes again. There is detail in the distance. Air and airplane regain the vigor of an FAA standard day.

A Yankee, I’m stunned by the jackets and heavy shirts people are wearing now. For them the weather – low 70s during the day, 50s at night – is cold. I’m grateful to see long pants replace summer shorts. Our passion is less embraced by generations following us, and if tee shirts and shorts ever flattered us they did so in a different sort of previous season.

Up high in October, skimming along the spine of the Appalachians in my 1950 Bellanca 14-19 Cruisemaster, ‘Master for short – a suitable name because it owns me – I fly over little airports with brave names such as Mountain Empire, wondering aloud, “Why not now?” Why now, like the summer, are the fly-ins all but over? Why the hell do we plan to gather when the thunderheads are blooming and moist heat robs us of our dignity? The air is not throwing temper tantrums now. The forest leaves die a brilliant death below. Yes, the days are getting short, the evenings are chilled but, unlike heat, there is an easy remedy to that discomfort all of us possess. It’s called clothing. There is a solution to the darkness available only to our species. It’s called fire and a tradition, bred into us so completely it feels as genetic as it is ancient, summons only human beings to the flame and inspires us to tell stories. Why not now? For the love of God and every winged creation of nature and man, why not now?

Let aircraft packed with technology, more capable of coping with summer weather, let them rule the summer. They can have it. Give us, caretakers of the venerable airplanes that stir our spirits and senses, give us the fall. Our old engines are mighty in October, the sky is deep blue, and the stars are so brilliant at night even older eyes can see the spectacle of the Milky Way.

Perhaps my own circumstances, the fact that the same washboard of ridges I’m flying over now served as the anchor for towering cumulous and sealed me off from every damned fly-in this year, has deprived me of my objectivity. The benefits of summer fly-ins must outweigh those that favor the fall. Why else would they be held then? As every minute detail of every ridge and valley in between onward to the horizon startles me I can’t think of one worthy reason. Maybe the challenges of my location skew my thinking.

Then there’s the ‘Master itself. Like any aircraft filled with parts and features whose composition is sarcastically referred to as a substance called unobtanium, it demands preparation more unpredictable than any summer storm. My Bellanca has spent most of the seven years I’ve owned it AOG. It kept trying to maintain that status this year too. Seat rails breaking – literally left and right - prop back plate failure, the back plate failure caused by a careless shop’s inexplicable removal of adjustment spacers, a generator turning its last power producing revolution, and a subtle wiring flaw that kept cooking voltage regulators like batches of fast food French fries – all coming one after another like those myriad maladies of a patient of Doctor House.

But fate was not on its side this time. I just happened to have perhaps the last new 14-19 backplate left on the planet, the remnant of the Bellanca factory had the rails, Harzell had the spacers (I still don’t believe that one), a little shop in Louisville had a NOS generator armature, and a very cunning mechanic diagnosed every problem and fixed them all, including the wiring SNAFU. At night, as rain turned my hangar into the inside of a timpani, he managed the final act, getting back in what had seemed impossible to get out – the generator – while twisting in agony beneath the panel with its awkwardly removable firewall dishpan. He did it for days on weekends, and nights after his day job. He did it as a favor. He did it as a friend. He and his wife are the unheralded guardians of a nearly forgotten little airport in Gordonsville and they also look out for humble old airplanes in distress.

As my Bellanca crisscrosses the mountain peaks without so much as a shudder in air as still as a statue I begin to wonder. Why have I allowed fly-ins to define what flying season is? Meeting other pilots who share my taste in airplanes was not among the list of reasons – conscious or unconscious – that motivated my learning to fly. No one learns to fly to go to fly-ins; we learn to fly, to fly.  

Ours is a calling driven by a solitary desire: that simple impulse of delight in the Yeats poem, not putting good friends through hell, making and cancelling of hotel reservations, formulating plans on forums or over the telephone or through email, and imagining that a collection of people from distant places who fly old airplanes define aviation community.

The reason I failed to list the necessity of aviation community among my reasons for becoming a pilot was due to ignorance. I’m not from a flying family. I had no concept of the notion when I was failing to make perfect circles around farm silos or striving to hit my own wake at the end of a 360 degree steep turn in vain. Just getting that Cessna 152 I trained in to obey me rather than taunt me was all I could handle. Going from disbelief that a human being could actually control an airplane to envisioning the pleasure of simply sitting with others who’ve gone through the very same process long ago was beyond my imagination. And a single summer of so many failed attempts to cross the mountains sleeping below me now did not ruin my flying season.  

Far more remarkable than any fly-in has been the rebirth of an airport community in sleepy little Gordonsville. All summer long it offered fellowship no matter the weather. Constant and growing, nurtured by the same people who returned me to the air, far more aviation life exists there than in the larger country airport down the road, flush as its been with Federal funds, rows of hangars and dormant facilities that sit like cemetery stones. “Airports are people,” my friend says. Thus the buildings down the road with a runway twice as wide and brilliantly lit at night is no airport at all, but Gordonsville is. I cannot be based there – not yet – but my aviation life can only be there. The warm clothing comes out, the lamps are lit, and movies in a hanger nearly three quarters of a century old replace the campfire.

I flick the yoke aside as all of us who fly old Bellancas do – that quick twist that throws away level flight with such speed we feel like we rolled the airplane with an idle thought alone. I haul back, watching the world below me turn ‘round. I haul back until my head tingles – sturdy little airplane – and I turn for home. Funny how a determined pull on a little yoke can clear your head. Aviation psychotherapy: you just drain a bit of blood from your addled brain, refill it, and a more serene mind sits on your shoulders in its place.

As I bank to the northeast and away from this mountain range so ancient it preceded Continental Drift, I tune to the far away AWOS of my home field. I push the Test button on my radio to break squelch and hear that mechanical voice sooner than I would have otherwise. Wind calm. Good. I am at peace, having finished the epilog to a single season past, and I will not end this day landing face first into the setting sun.

-end-