Winged poets have sung the rapture of flight, but who can put sweet lyrics to the groundling state?
Not me.
On my eightieth birthday, after a 74-year-old romance with aviation, I flew my treasured Mooney to a buyer, grounding myself because of a series of blunders. I wanted my fade-away to be voluntary before I pulled an actionable goof.
Now I'm trying, so far in vain, to find something good about being an ex-pilot. Maybe you can help.
I first flew as a 6-year-old in New Orleans in 1924. It was in a JN-4D, a Curtiss Jenny bought as surplus by a World War I flier, the husband of my aunt. I shrieked with delight as we banked, dove, climbed, and looped over the city. Speed! Wind! Smells! Noise! Delicious!
Chester, the pilot, and my aunt moved to California and there came my first ground hiatus. But when I was 15 I lucked into flying in a Waco with Jimmy, a 17-year-old grease monkey at Menafee Field, now long defunct, in eastern New Orleans. Sometimes when Jimmy earned the use of the airplane, he called me. He went on to fly the Hump in World War II and as a Pan American captain to South America and Africa. I went on to finish high school.
In the early 1930s I thrilled at the Pan American Air Races in New Orleans, during which Louisianan Jimmy Wedell in his stubby "45" became the first to fly faster than 300 mph on a calibrated course. I watched in horror as a parachute fouled the tail of a jump plane and two men died spinning into Lake Pontchartrain.
In 1937 I dropped out of college, went to California, and got a laboring job in Santa Ana. A fellow worker — my luck holding — had the use of a Lincoln Page and let me fly with him from a field that was later swallowed up by the Marine Corps' El Toro base. I got in an additional couple of hours' unofficial instruction.
The plant where we worked was at the edge of a long valley in which the winds were nearly constant in velocity and direction. Fast airplanes thundered on triangular courses almost daily through this valley. We learned that one of them was an improved version of Howard Hughes' Racer that in 1935 had set a world speed record of 352.46 mph. Every time I heard a howling aircraft engine I'd rush to a window and gyp my boss out of enough time to watch the show. Maybe Hughes himself was at the stick.
In San Diego I touched shoulders with Roscoe Turner — the foremost flying showman of the 1930s, noted for his aviation feats and for his spiffy military-styled togs; aggressive moustache; and Gilmore, the young lion (yes, the four-legged kind) that flew in Turner's forward cockpit. Roscoe and I stood side by side dipping our beaks at a bar in Coronado. I noticed him; he didn't notice me. Gilmore stayed home.
In 1939 I returned to New Orleans. No trains for me. I spent my saved-up fortune — earned at the grand wage of 25 cents an hour, 48 hours a week — on airline tickets. I flew from Burbank, the main Los Angeles airport, aboard a Transcontinental and Western (later Trans World) DC-3 overnight to Albuquerque; Braniff Lockheed 10 to Dallas; Delta Lockeed 10 to Jackson, Mississippi; and Chicago and Southern DC-3 to New Orleans. Eleven-plus hours.
I was in graduate school when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Two months later I went to the local Navy aviation cadet selection board and signed up. At my physical I was barred from flight training. Weak eyes. I became a ground ensign in Naval aviation. Brown shoes but no wings. My promotions (two) were held up a few weeks each time as Navy medicos pondered a waiver, which they always granted, bless their dear little proctoscopes.
After indoctrination I taught ground school at Naval Air Station Olathe, Kansas, a primary base where I mooched rides in Yellow Perils whenever I could. More unofficial stick time. I met movie stars Buddy Rogers and Robert Taylor, who ferried Navy aircraft. Prime excitement at the station was watching U.S. Army ferry guys land P-51s in 300 feet or so by hauling back over the numbers to what seemed to be 50 degrees nose up, sudden flaps, and crump! One transient was a B-25 with a 75-mm cannon buried in its nose. The pilot said that everything rattled pretty good when it fired.
After Olathe I went to the Pacific, serving aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hancock for the Philippine recapture, and the seaplane tender U.S.S. Norton Sound for Okinawa. Ashore and afloat I sneaked as close as a ground officer can to Helldivers, Avengers, Hellcats, Catalinas, Mariners, Coronados, R4Ds, R5Ds, Privateers, and other lovely things, wangling flights in some.
Aboard the Hancock, my battle station was flag bridge, from which I could look down at all the earsplitting feverish swarming of men and airplanes in takeoff and recovery. This was heaven, except for the days when our sky was black with shell bursts and kamikazes.
For three of my Navy years I was surrounded by and immersed in aviation but, alas, nary a stick or yoke to waggle as pilot in command.
There was a memorable meet with another famous aviator, this one Vice Adm. John S. McCain, commander of the Navy's fast carrier force in the Pacific. Hoping to fly off news copy from our carrier during the China Sea operation, I was told that only the head man could approve it. I mounted to the admiral's sea cabin and entered into the presence. I got the admiral's permission and also perhaps the only junior officer's viewing of three-stars-in-his-drawers. The admiral was preparing for a nap. Skinny legs.
Among the famous fliers on that staff was Cmdr. Jimmy Thach, later admiral. He had been Butch O'Hare's squadron skipper and devised the two-plane "Thach weave" that finally allowed Navy fighters to meet enemy Zeros on even terms.
After the Philippines I was designated a mobile correspondent and wrote pieces on Navy combat fliers and flying. I got bylines and nice letters from magazine editors telling me that the pay was being "given in your name to Navy Relief." What a thrill.
Then came a long hiatus. After the war newspaper work kept me away from ramps and runways until, by 1960, the itch grew so nagging that I took instruction in Cessna 172s, becoming at last a certificated pilot. From then until that eightieth birthday I put in 7,100 hours at the yoke, in seven different airplanes that I owned — three Mooneys, a Piper Apache later converted to a Geronimo, a Beech Baron B55, a Piper Navajo Chieftain, and a Piper Seneca III. I crisscrossed the territory bounded by Miami; Fairbanks, Alaska; San Diego; Vermont; Brownsville, Texas; and Green Bay, Wisconsin, loving every second of it. I wrote articles about flying, obtaining a long interview with Gen. Lester Maitland, who — as an Army lieutenant, with Lt. Albert Heggenberger as navigator — was the first to fly from the mainland to Hawaii a few months after Lindbergh's great flight.
The high point of the years between 1968 and 1974 was 12 months spent interviewing Noel Wien, the foremost Alaska aviation pioneer, the first man to fly year 'round in Alaska (1924) and the founder of Wien Airlines, now part of Alaska Airlines.
In the 1920s and 1930s Wien's almost incredible feats of Arctic flying were memorialized in the world's newspapers and National Geographic. He was called the "Lindbergh of the North." For Wien's biography I interviewed dozens of other intrepid Alaska fliers, including, memorably, Bob Reeve, the famous Alaska mudflats pilot who habitually flew the socked-in Aleutians — an area that even seagulls eschewed.
For six days during the month of March 1978, I test flew an experimental 172 with the great Col. Carl Crane in the right seat. Ahem. Crane won the MacKay trophy in 1936 for making "the first fully automatic landing in history," using instruments that he invented. He was an Army captain then.
Retired and well into his seventies in 1978, he had lost his medical and needed someone to test a remarkable instrument he had created — a three-inch-diameter device that was all a pilot needed for navigation, even blind landings. This wonder tool included on its small surface the readouts of direction, altitude, ADF, markers, VOR, localizer, glideslope, and a bar that indicated time to flare.
I'd fly down to San Antonio International before dawn, taxi out with Col. Crane beside me, and complete blind flights from takeoff roll to maneuvering aloft to landings to rollout and turnoff, while able to see nothing but that great instrument — three or four flights a session. This little private pilot was doing the big time with a history-making aviator as copilot.
All I know about avionics is how to spell the word, so I can't describe the wonderful tool that Crane had created. We tried to interest venture capitalists to support production of the device, but, of course, none wanted to buck the established manufacturers of flight instruments.
Now, I'm back where I started, wondering how do I shut down on a life like that. All those years, all those beautiful airplanes, all those great people — Chester and the Jenny, Jimmy and the Waco, my Santa Ana pal and his Lincoln Page, Jimmy Wedell, Howard Hughes, Roscoe Turner, Buddy Rogers, Robert Taylor, Adm. McCain, Jimmy Thach, Gen. Maitland, a dozen Alaskan cloud-busters, Bob Reeve, Noel Wien — and hundreds of people like you.
My perceived need to shut it down became acute when I began pulling goofs. Not all at once, but every now and then. I took off without flaps once; turned 60 degrees from a heading that departure had requested; realized 10 minutes into cruise that the landing gear was still down; once didn't write down an off-airways reporting point and forgot the point. I wrongly disputed a heading with approach; I landed on Runway 5R at Raleigh-Durham instead of the cleared-for 5L. Remarkably, I was never cited during this flurry of creeping stupidity. Kind (lax?) controllers.
Friends told me, "Heck, all of us do stuff like that every now and then." Not me, not before now. I'm a flying sissy who outwaited weather for maybe more than the 7,100 hours aloft; a perfectionist clasping checklists; an observer of every reg, even the nitpicking ones.
So I sold my plane and now inhabit ground-limbo, trying to find something good in it. No more weekend hops to resorts or to breakfast or lunch at strip-side restaurants, no more spur-of-the- moment launches "just to be flying," no more long trips to see the last few parts of the U.S.A. that I've not visited.
What's good? Well, I'm not slithering around on an oily hangar floor, fuel dripping down my forearm as I work the quick drains; no more back spasms while extricating myself from inflating the mains; no more huffing my plane in and out of the hangar; no more Center controllers saying "Call back in 20 minutes" for my void-time clearance; no more fretting about thunderstorms and icing. But all of those no-mores mean, sob, no more flying. One recent day I looked up from my AOPA Pilot and saw ground fog cloaking our airstrip; another day I saw boiling thunderheads streaked with lightning ready to bombard us — and I saw beauty there, not menace. I thought, "There, right in front of me, those visions of beauty — not peril — make up for being a groundling."
You and I both know that I'm lying.
Ira B. Harkey Jr., AOPA 235348, is a former newspaper journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for editorial writing. Among other works, he is the author of The Story of Noel Wien. He logged 7,100 hours of flight time before giving up his certificate last year.
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