Why I Never Learned to Fly - Part II

In my previous post, I described my first flying lesson, an adventure that nearly turned to disaster as my nearly-blind-as-a-bat instructor lost his glasses and I suddenly had to bring the plane back to the ground. Undaunted, I accepted his invitation to go up again. I was 18, and was of course sure I was immortal. Here’s what happened next.

The next morning, Charlie told me that Lulu was repaired and ready to fly; did I still want to go for a flight? Of course, said I. So two days later I found myself following his smoke-belching Buick back to Compton and more adventures—this time less dramatic, I hoped.

Lulu was a war surplus Army Air Corps trainer, a Fairchild PT-26. Unlike the Ercoupe, she had conventional landing gear (two main wheels under the wings and a little tail wheel), and in place of the Ercoupe’s shiny aluminum skin, fabric stretched over plywood frames and aluminum tubing. Lulu was painted bright yellow. I liked her at once.

There were other differences between Lulu and the Ercoupe, reflecting the plane’s origin as a military trainer: pilot and passenger/trainee sat one in front of the other, in bucket seats. The dual controls were conventional: each seat had rudder pedals with toe brakes and a joystick between the knees to control ailerons and elevator. The canopy slid back and was not likely to jump its tracks. A six-cylinder engine (the Ercoupe had four) provided power.

Charlie did a quick walk-around inspection, and we climbed aboard, Charlie in the front cockpit, I in the rear. The wooden framework gave a friendly creak as I stepped on the wing. The airplane had a comfortable smell, like an old wooden boat.

A PT-26 (not Lulu),  in Canadian Air Force markings

“Let’s fly out to Catalina,” said Charlie. It sounded good to me. Santa Catalina Island was a short hop: about 35 miles from Compton and 25 miles off the coast. We could make it out there and back in less than an hour.

The takeoff was uneventful, and Charlie soon gestured over his shoulder for me to take the controls. Lulu seemed almost as easy to handle as the Ercoupe, though a lot of practice would be needed before I would be competent at coordinating rudder and stick. And the plane had many controls and instruments the Ercoupe lacked, but these were features I wouldn’t need to learn to use on this first lesson.

We climbed out over brown hills bristling with oil derricks, crossed the coastline just east of Long Beach, and started out over the Pacific, brilliant blue in the late afternoon light. Catalina was a tawny lump rising out of the sea ahead, San Clemente a low line on the horizon twenty miles farther out to sea. 

This was beautiful, I thought; why hadn’t I taken up flying before? Then the engine, which had been purring like a kitten, made a “Ptoo!” sound—like someone spitting out a watermelon seed. The purr changed to a hiccup. We began to lose altitude.

“Holy Mackerel!” said Charlie. “Must have blown a plug. Time to head back.” He sounded annoyed, and so quick with his diagnosis that I wondered if this had happened before.

The engine still chugged along, the propeller still spun, but we were no longer soaring in a graceful flying machine; we were strapped into a winged rock, being brought back to earth by gravity a lot faster than we would have liked (did I mention that we had no parachutes?).

It was ten miles back to the Compton airfield, and we were at about 2,500 feet altitude, but dropping fast. There were other small airstrips around, and plenty of flat open ground for an emergency landing, but Charlie seemed confident (from what I could make out from scrutinizing the back of his head) that we would make it back to our home field.

Once again, we were lucky that no other aircraft seemed to be in the vicinity. Skillfully, Charlie brought the plane around in a smooth glide, passed just over a tangle of power and telephone lines, and dropped the plane onto the runway in just the right position to allow us to coast to a stop in front of the hangar. 

“Sorry about that,” said Charlie. He unfastened and removed the inspection panel that covered the starboard side of the engine. Sure enough, where there should have been six spark plugs in a row there were only five, and a black hole in place of one of them, dripping oil.

“Guess she won’t fly on five cylinders,” I said.

“Nope,” said Charlie. “And sometimes she won’t fly on six either.”

This last remark was not comforting. But Charlie seemed so confident  (and his handling of the plane in its distress had certainly seemed skillful) that I felt reassured. If there was a problem, surely Charlie could deal with it.  Why, it was almost as though this little adventure was part of the expected everyday business of flying!

Ten days later, Charlie announced that Lulu had been repaired and was ready to fly once more. He was thinking of taking her up to the desert near Barstow, about 100 miles away. Would I like to come along? Of course I would.

Did I ask myself why no one else from the shop seemed interested in flying with him?  Or how he’d lived that long with his seeming ability to get into trouble? He was like Joe Btfsplk, the Li’l Abner character who traveled around with a cloud over his head, inviting doom. Or maybe more like the Roadrunner, who always seemed to escape disaster at the last minute. Somehow, I managed to excuse the two near-disasters I’d just experienced with him. Besides, I must have persuaded myself that the close calls we’d had were just part of the ordinary flying experience.

It did seem prudent to leave my family unaware of what I’d been up to. Best not to cause them needless worry, after all.

The following Saturday, our day off, we found ourselves flying cross-country, out over the San Gabriel Mountains and into the high desert country beyond. It was another spectacular day: we flew over and among small puffy clouds most of the way, looking down on brown desert punctuated by green where fields and orchards were irrigated by waters brought hundreds of miles from the north by aqueduct. To the left, stretching northward as far as the eye could see, stood the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Off to the south we could dimly make out the Salton Sea.

We landed at Barstow at about noon and stopped in the airport office to check in and pick up a sandwich. The airport manager said in passing, “Watch out for tumbleweeds,” but it was a still, windless day, and very pleasant sitting on a bench outside the hangar to eat our lunch, admiring the scenery and the collection of planes parked in the area. Charlie pointed out one that belonged to a friend of his.

“Ground-looped that one once,” he said. Not knowing what a ground-loop was, I assumed it was some kind of clever flying stunt. When I learned what it was later (it’s an uncontrolled horizontal spinning of the aircraft on the runway, just after landing. Often one wing tip will touch the ground, leading to much damage, possibly even flipping the plane upside down) it was hard to believe either he or the plane had come through unscathed. Or whether he was telling the truth.

Lunch over, we climbed back aboard Lulu. Charlie had me sit in the front seat this time, and said it was time to practice take-offs and landings.

With little coaching, I got Lulu to the end of the runway successfully, and started my takeoff roll.

As we gathered speed down the runway, out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of something moving towards the runway from the right. It wasn’t until we were just airborne, abreast of the control tower, that I realized we were about to run head-on into a swirling dust devil, or miniature tornado. Suddenly we were in the middle of it. The plane, totally out of control, spun around 180º, rose another five feet or so, and slammed down hard on the runway, facing the way we had come, its forward motion stopped cold. Both tires blew out simultaneously. Charlie killed the engine and we scrambled out of the cockpit to assess the damage.

“Holy mackerel,” said Charlie. “Whaddaya know?”

I knew. Without a word I walked the hundred yards to the airport office, went to the counter and asked when the next bus was leaving for Los Angeles.