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August 27, 2007
……..Continued
from July 24, 2007
Quitting time came promptly at five o'clock and I was out the
door and in my car in a flash. I drove as fast as I could, without attracting
police attention, to the airport where the Luscombe awaited me, tied securely
down in the back row of parked airplanes.
The old Stewart Airpark lay on the west side of the town, hard by the
banks of the Ohio River, and was one of the few old-time flying fields that had
survived into the 1960's. It was built in the twenty's, when airplanes had
little crosswind capability, and was constructed to enable a pilot to land into
the wind, no matter which way the wind was blowing. The landing area consisted
of acres of well-drained sod, some 1800 by 3100 feet in size, and from the air
it looked like a great, green velvet table cloth.
 As
I pulled my car into the parking lot, the airport lay glowing with the emerald
sheen of high summer in the slanting, late afternoon light. It was bordered to
the west by the great river and to the east by State Route 47. A flood wall cut
diagonally across the south end of airport property and a small neighborhood
marked the north end of the field.
Stewart Airpark in 1962 was home to fifty or so airplanes and was
operated by a busy FBO that was also a Piper distributor. The field was
uncontrolled, but had lots of traffic during the pleasant months, with 40 cent
per gallon gas fueling great amounts of aeronautical activity. Local pilots flew
the pattern and announced their movements and intentions on Unicom frequency
when their airplanes were equipped to do it. Everyone else utilized the Mark I
eyeball, and so far as I know no one ever got tangled up with anyone else there.
I quickly made my way to where the white Luscombe was parked. My
flying kit consisted only of an Esso road map, because in thinking about this
trip I was about to make, I realized that I knew US Route 50 like my own face
in the mirror and thought I could recognize it as well from 500 feet as I could
from the altitude at which my 1957 Chevy usually operated. On the other hand, I
knew nothing about aerial navigation or any of the normal skills that pilot's
use to get from one place to another, so why pretend that I did?
So that was to be my plan. I would follow the roads, the same roads
that I used to drive from my home in the middle of the state, to where I now
lived, on the western edge of West Virginia. I would not to try to emulate the
more seasoned pilots, which I certainly knew I was not, by navigating, doing
pilotage and reading aeronautical maps. I would just 'drive' home. The only
exception would be that my wheels would be dangling above, not planted on, the
roads I knew so well. This would work just fine, I knew.
The 5 o'clock traffic, the preflight of the airplane and getting fuel,
had taken much precious time and caused my departure to be much later than I had
anticipated. I glanced anxiously at my watch while doing the run up at the end
of the sod runway and took solace in the 56 minute estimated enroute time that
my friend had made for me. This would still work. I would still have time to
complete the round trip and make it back to the field before dark and that's all
the time I needed.
As I had been taught, I gently pushed the throttle forward and the
little airplane responded by accelerating down the green strip, the tail coming
up and the wings nibbling at the air. It bounced gently once or twice on the
gear, then eased into a slow climb through the warm summer sky. The evening
sparkled with the golden sunshine of a late summer's afternoon, and the broad
Ohio River fell away to my right as I turned toward the downtown area of the
city. I would pick up US Route 50 there, that famous strip of asphalt, follow it
east, and it would take me to within 15 miles of my destination. It would be my
compass.
I looked down on the city as I made my way across town and soon the
familiar pattern of 'Washington's Pike' appeared below me. I thought how easy
this was and wondered why anyone would want to navigate any other way but
following roads. The shadow of my little airplane leapfrogged over the sluggish
lines of evening traffic and I felt completely superior to all that crawled
about below me. How could I not, for I was a flyer now, and had no patience for
things that moved about on the earth?
Soon I was following the road through open countryside, and the
familiar hamlets of Ellenboro, Pennsboro and West Union passed beneath the nose
of the airplane. I watched the town of Salem appear, then the city of Clarksburg
loomed before me, a place I knew well and where I planned to hook up with route
20. That road I knew, wound through the hills to the southeast for several
miles, on its way to Philippi, the town that had served as our family's trading
center during my youth. From there, the Tygart River made its serpentine way to
the village of Arden, the target for tonight's mission. Finding my destination
was as easy as following the path from my bed to the bathroom in the house I
grew up in and which now awaited my unannounced and dramatic appearance in the
sky above it.
Finding Route 20 South, it was only a matter of minutes before I was
over Philippi, the old covered bridge passing beneath me as I joined the river
and continued downstream toward my home.
This seemed like a dream to me. After a lifetime of looking up at the
very sky I was now occupying, I was at this minute zooming through it,
announcing my passage with an important roar to all those below.
Since my mission plan called for minimum altitude over the target, I
had wound the trim forward and stuck the nose of the little airplane down, in
order to get to the planned altitude by my objective. A satisfying hiss of air
washed over the airframe and the little A-65 Continental engine took on a
serious note as the airplane slid down the slope I had created. The whole
airplane took on a vibration I had never felt before as the airspeed indicator
needle reached for the red line that marked 'this fast and no faster', and I
wondered if anyone had ever flown it at this speed before.
About a mile from my parent's house, the twisting river made an oxbow of its
meandering path toward the Ohio, and as I passed this point, centered between
the stream's grassy banks, something flashed by, close beneath my wheels, so
fast that I couldn't estimate by how much I had missed it. A power line, I
noticed belatedly, now spanned the river here, and was hanging from supporting
towers that crowned the tops of the hills bracketing the stream bed. How much I
had missed the heavy cables I couldn't say, but I the image of the windings that
were built into the cables during manufacture remained burned into my brain like
a photograph, and it shook me.
To be continued………
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