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Old Mack's Flying Tales
Koerner’s Flying Field
In Kankakee
By OldMack©1990
There’s a large X across too many names in my old address book. The Xes remind me not to call them. Now there’s an X over Dell Koerner’s name. It’s painful just to look at it.
Chris came home from Office Depot with a nice new address book. I will not use it. I’m more comfortable with the names of all those friends in my hip pocket; even those no longer able to answer their phones and whose Christmas cards return unopened.
The man I’m talking about lived a long, full life. I doubt that he had much to regret at the end of it. He was one of the early air mail pilots. He built a ham radio station and was issued one of the first licenses to operate it, after the government began to control the air waves, and the airways.
Del bought a large tract of pasture land and built an airport on it. His was not the kind of airport with paved runways and a mile of fancy lights to guide you into it; his was a large rectangle of flat, mown grass with some hangars and shops and a warm cozy office. Koerner’s had the smell of machine oil, Egyptian Linen and Butyrated Dope mingled together.
Koerner’s flying field is still in operation. It’s run by Dell’s grandson, Steve. There’s another airport in Kankakee, northeast of town, with the fancy lights, navigation aids, paved runways miles long and a tower to control the traffic. But it is not a flying field.
If it hadn’t been for that old, Red Stinson Voyager parked facing the road, broadside to my line of flight, I never would have found Koerner’s flying field or met the old man who built the place back in 1927. I would be dead and Xed out of other peoples’ address books.
Very early that morning, I had rolled my boss’s Cessna 172 out of the hangar in Hammond, Indiana. The temperature was six degrees above zero, the wind out of the west and the wind sock full and stiff, indicating a head wind of 15 to 30 knots. I had used a dip-stick heater to turn the sludge in my crank case into something usable to lubricate the Cessna’s Lycoming engine, set the chocks and cranked her up. She warmed up while I walked around her, checking the long range tanks for condensate and draining it
I was wearing a sweat suit under my old Navy flight suit and my leather flight jacket had its fur collar turned up to meet the bottom of the black wool watch cap on my head. I would have given my seat in hell for a Mongolian Pisscutter that day, the kind we were issued in Korea. The cabin heat had been on while I did the pre-flight, so it was relatively warm when I climbed into the cockpit. I signaled the line man to pull the chocks, and taxied to the east end of the runway. The solid overcast bottomed out at around three thousand feet and I could see all the way to Chicago that morning. Chi was forecast to get snow later in the day, but the Explorer Pipeline that I was about to run a patrol on cuts the grid squares on the diagonal and I figured that by the time it began to snow I’d be well to the southwest of the arctic front moving down from Canada.
The mags checked out okay as I was taxiing. Ground control had switched me to the tower’s frequency, and I had the nod to take off whenever I was ready.
I’ll interject some science here, if you don’t mind. Cold air is denser than warm air. The denser the air, the more lift you get from your wings and the more thrust you get from your engine and prop. Cold air is good for flying patrol, so long as there’s no fog to obscure the pipeline right of way, and it makes the ride less bumpy. End of lesson.
I was airborne using less than half the runway, and had three hundred feet between my ass and the pavement by the time I buzzed over the roof tops of the towns. But something was going on that I couldn’t know until later.
Midway Airport was barely visible off my starboard wing tip when it started snowing.
My head was beginning to ache. The Plexiglas windscreen had fans of ice crystals building on its upper corners where air from the cabin heater wasn’t reaching it. But I could still see the hump in the snow cover where the pipeline lay and had the railroad tracks and a highway under my port wing strut as the snow came down in earnest.
Just north of Kankakee International, the snow had built up on the windscreen completely blocking my forward view. I was flying over the north side of the right of way, now, keeping my head out of the window in the left door of the plane. I was looking at the rotating beacon on the Kankakee tower and about to give them a call on the radio, when their beacon turned from green to red (indicating that their airport was closed to all traffic). That’s when I began to talk to myself; when things get hairy, I tend to do that.
Looking at the strip chart on my knee board, which had a street map of Kankakee looking up at me, I spotted an airfield labeled “Kankakee Koerners.’”
I picked a couple of check points off the map. “If you make a hard left bank at those grain elevators beside the track, then follow that street to the church steeple, that road should take you right to Koerner’s little airport,” I told myself aloud. The air coming in my open window was beginning to chill my cheeks; I worried about frost bite for half a minute. There were the grain elevators just under my strut as I made a pylon turn around them and dropped down low enough to read the street signs.
I could make out the church steeple, and feel the wind pushing me off my track. I had to crab the airplane into the wind. It’s lucky for me I did, or I wouldn’t have spotted that little red tail dragger parked by Koerner’s fence.
My altitude was less than 100 feet as I turned into the wind and reduced power. As the flaps came down. I flared, greased the wheels into the foot of new snow and came to a stop thirty yards from Koerner’s hangars. By this time my head is throbbing like someone with a power drill was in there boring through my temples. It was a sure sign that I had a dose of Carbon Monoxide poisoning. I shut down the engine, climbed out of the plane just as Dell, his son and grandson came out to help push my plane into their hangar.
Dell gave me a look all pilot’s like to see on a master pilot’s face. “Son, you did that just right,” he said. That is music to my ears even with a headache.
When we had the Cessna inside and the barn doors closed, Steve Koerner and his dad went back to work on the restoration of a Boeing Stearman Kadet. As Dell walked me into his office he told me that Steve’s sixteenth birthday was coming up and they wanted to have the Stearman ready so’s he could solo it and get his private pilot’s license on his birthday.
Dell gave me a moving tour of his machine shop and his old ham radio gear as we passed them. But he recognized the symptoms of CO poisoning and walked me out to his car. We drove to his house, where he put me to bed in a room with the window open to clear my head and warm quilts to prevent a chill.
When I woke up the next morning, Dell drove me to his airport. Our talk was easy, respectful and about things we had done, places that were good and of airplanes.
While I slept, Dell’s son had welded a patch on the exhaust pipe and replaced the heater muff; there would be no more Carbon Monoxide entering the cabin when I left Koerner’s Korner of Kankakee. Someone had plowed the snow off the turf and I had a full belly and a thermos filled with Koerner’s coffee as I made my take off. Three generations of Koerners were standing in the open hangar doorway to wave me off. As my wheels cleared the trees, I waggled my wings goodbye and continued my patrol in clear weather.
THE END.
The St. Louis Arch: A Magnet for Aircraft
By
OldMack © 3/29/06
Although I enjoyed the tale about the Arch-effect on the STL weather, I should point out to the young aviation enthusiasts in the surrounding areas that the Arch is an airplane magnet. This has been a closely held secret for many years; ever since the Arch was completed and opened for business in 1967, as a matter of fact. Lord knows how many young pilots have been sucked into it.
Mathematicians more familiar with slack chains attached to a pair of gate posts can tell you more about catenary curves than I can. The Arch happens to be an inverted catenary curve, and that’s partially responsible for the great attraction it had for old aviators who gave up flying for a living back in the days of aviation gasoline rationing in the ‘70’s, when due to scarcity it became too expensive to burn in our engines. Now, with the prices of airplanes gone sky high, and the gas prices tripled, it’s a rare, warm day in winter when we fly at all, much less get close enough to that Arch to feel its pull.
The catenary curve, has more uses than the design of monumental arches. The leading edges of old, slow airplanes had that shape, though it was structurally sound, it was inefficient and tended to gather ice when flown through sub-freezing fogs above the rivers that have their confluence near STL. That curve, inverted, may have influenced Gravity’s Rainbow, so cleverly written by Thomas Pynchon; who based a fine tale on the trail of smoke following the German V-2 rockets designed by Herr Werner Von Braun, a Nazi scientist smuggled into this country to design weapons for the Cold War era and vehicles for launching men to the moon.
Herr Von Braun didn’t invent the curve, he merely pushed its envelope a tad, which wasn’t all bad; certainly not as bad as building rocket propelled bombs to blast Britain.
It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see how the catenary curve, with a push and shove here and there can be bent into an hyperbolic curve, or tale, such as one I recently read. It is both the art and tradition of story tellers to stretch the truth a mite, while keeping their tale believable; I have no quarrel with that, and sometimes do it myself when writing fiction. But when it comes down to an article of faith, a straight line is always the shortest distance between the beginning and end, with just a taste of embellishment somewhere around the middle. All the talk about changing the weather around St. Louis with that Arch is just that sort of believable hyperbola that I enjoy now and then.
The folks who build arches have plenty of time, and oodles of money to spend on ornamental, non-functional, monuments. But folks who lay pipelines to transport oil and gasoline clear across the continent tend to prefer straight lines.
The Explorer pipeline, a monumental project itself, follows a path as straight as the terrain and the powers of eminent domain would allow. One of the Explorer’s terminals just happens to be in East St. Louis, just across the river from that exaggerated MacDonald’s arch which casts its spell on airplanes and pilots alike.
At a time in the distant past, I was so hard up for a flying job that I took one flying aerial patrols along the Explorer Pipeline for a company down in Texas. It was my job to fly from Hammond, Indiana southwest above the right of way to spot leaks, or disgruntled farmers whose lands had been divided without their consent to make room for the Explorer Pipeline. Not unlike the angry folks in Iraq who periodically blast the pipelines in their country, which our troops have occupied for the past three years, some of our own farmers, tired of having their pastures and corn fields split up into uneconomical triangular parcels by the government, had threatened to blow up the Explorer. Although no bombs ever went off to my knowledge, I had to keep an eye open, just in case. So I flew down the Explorer right of way as low as the law allowed (which I might add was a ton of fun on a cold winter’s day).
After crossing the East St. Louis terminal, I would fly down the eastern levee to the place where the pipeline crosses the muddy Mississippi submerged, looking for oil slicks where it might have been nicked by a passing vessel dragging its anchor. From the river crossing, the Explorer Pipeline was bent every which way, so that’s the way I had to fly the plane. From the ground, folks could look up and read the sign painted on the underside of my wings: “PIPELINE—PATROL.” Doubtless some of those folks on the ground thought the pilot flying the plane, was drunk as a sailor on shore leave.
One morning, just about sunrise, I felt something either pushing or pulling the old Cessna Sky Hawk to the west, just as I was approaching the East St. Louis refineries. Try as I might to control my direction of flight, I found myself flying across the mighty river and aimed at the dead center between the two leaning legs of that stainless steel Arch.
Well, it was nothing to worry about. The thing is more than six hundred feet wide at its base, and there’s six hundred or more feet of air space between the grounds of Jefferson Park and the top of the Arch.
Since I couldn’t seem to change the direction the airplane had chosen, as if flying on automatic pilot, I sat back and enjoyed the view. Of course it took only seconds, flying at 150 knots ground speed, and I was through the Arch and heading straight for the verdigris dome of the Old Court House.
Luckily for me and for that old monument to Dred Scott, the power of the Arch had relaxed its grip on my plane. But I had to shove the throttle to the firewall and haul back on the yoke to clear the cupola that stands on top of the dome. I reckon I had a hundred or more feet of air between the flagpole and the skin on the bottom of my fuselage, when I passed that pole.
As I flew on my way, toward the Ozarks and Oklahoma, I puzzled over the strange force of attraction that old arch exerted on my plane, which was made almost entirely of aluminum. But I never solved the mystery. I only mentioned it to give younger, more scientific minds something to ponder.
It only happened once, out of all those time I flew past the Arch. So I figured it must have been like a case of German Measles; once you’ve had ‘em, you are ever after immune. What ever affinity that plane had for the stainless steel of the arch that one time, its polarity had forever changed and the force of attraction became one of repulsion.
For the math on Catenary Curves visit this site:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Catenary.html
The End
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Climbing the Inner Gorge Wall
By
OldMack©8/4/2005 8:30 PM
Rose’s youngest son, like his father and elder brothers, was a general contractor. At the time, Elling was cashing in on the school building boom going on in California. He had schools going up, or coming out of the ground, in San Mateo and Redwood City. He also had a major contract with the Port Authority in his home town. He was so busy, in fact, that he was logging close to a hundred hours a month on his Piper Apache, which Elling piloted himself from job to job. Like most general contractors who have yet to win a bid on a job exceeding a million bucks, Elling tried harder than his competitors—two of whom were his elder brothers. The number of hours that Elling spent in the air were nothing compared to the time spent in meetings with architects, engineers, job supers, and in planning and zoning commission offices. In fact, most of his commutes in his twin engine plane going from city to city and from state to state were made at night.
Late one evening Elling called me at home in Salem, Oregon from the airport. He was bushed, but he had to be in Redwood City the following morning for a meeting with principals and bankers, but he wanted to stop at San Francisco International on the way down to talk to his superintendent on the San Mateo job that night. He asked if I would fly him down, while he caught a few hours sleep enroute.
My answer, of course, was yes. I needed more multi-engine time in my log book; I had slightly more than 500 hours in twins, which was the bare minimum to qualify for insurance and a corporate flying job. Those thousands of hours of single engine jet time were worthless, and no prospective employer gave a damn about those carrier landings either.
It was a perfect night for flying. Not a cloud in the sky between Salem and San Francisco, and the lights of the cities below us looked like jewels on a necklace laid out on a display counter. It was after midnight when I landed at SFO, and Elling’s man met us at the plane when we parked at Butler’s general aviation terminal. I was amazed by Elling’s ability to wake from a sound sleep and immediately begin looking at blueprints and discussing changes the school board had requested. In less than an hour we were in the air again heading for the Redwood City Airport.
“The runway is under construction,” Elling informed me,” and the field is officially closed to traffic. But I’ve been using the taxi way for a landing strip and you can too.”
“Roger,” I said, as I lined up on the parallel lines of blue lights.” The landing was smooth as silk. But seeing a six feet deep canyon where the main runway should have been raised my hackles as the gear kissed the macadam taxiway.
The following morning, after a few hours of sleep in a hotel bed filled with crushed corn flakes (His crew had a weird sense of humor) we took off into a blanket of fog. After climbing up through the low stratus layer, we headed south east. During our stay in the hotel, Elling had asked me to fly him down to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and I had agreed.
We refueled the plane and had breakfast in San Jose. I plotted a course for the Peach Springs Omni beacon and filed a VFR flight plan direct.
In the middle of Death Valley there’s a place called “Ash Meadows.” They have a dirt landing strip beside the Spanish style hacienda in the shade of a cluster of cottonwood trees. The place is actually a whore house, bar and restaurant combo just across the Nevada line. In the dining room there’s a sign which says “Beware of the Cats.” They served the best damned Chili Verde burros this side of my aunt Rene’s joint in San Berdoo. We dined, drank a couple Coronas, then flew on to the Grand Canyon.
When we landed at the South Rim Airport, Elling’s wife, Barbara was there to meet us. So were his kids. It was a delightful reunion for Elling, who hadn’t seen his wife or kids in several weeks. I was surprised, because their home was in Seattle, and thus far Elling had not said a word about our reason for flying to the Grand Canyon. Was this their vacation home, or what, I wondered as Barbara drove her station wagon away from the airport. The kids were so excited to see their dad the commotion in the car made conversation impossible. Yet Elling listened to each of them tell about something “super” that he’d discovered. His twin six year olds had seen coyotes, squirrels, and sidewinders. The older boy had trapped a Durango scorpion and had it at home in a jar.
Barbara drove through the edge of the Kaibab forest of stunted Ponderosa pines to their double-wide mobile home and parked close to the expanse of redwood deck on which stood a wading pool and an assortment of toys.
We hardly had time enough for the kids to display all of their “neat stuff,” before Elling and I were off again.
This time we were riding with his helicopter pilot, “Little Bob,” in a battered pickup truck that hardly had room enough for Bob. Elling and I got a boost from Betty shoe horning ourselves into Bob’s truck.
Bob’s truck was waived through the gate at the entrance to the Monument and he drove straight to his helicopter pad at Yaqui Point.
Elling had told me quite a lot about Bob during our flight from San Jose, without spoiling the surprise he had in store for me that day.
Bob had logged more hours in helicopters than any man alive at the time. He had bought a crashed Bell chopper in Phoenix that someone had been using for cotton dusting. The machine was not quite a “basket case,” it was actually a loose assortment of parts in a utility trailer when Bob bought it. In a short time, Bob had assembled the machine, installed a turbo charger and flown it out to Yaqui Point, where he was using it daily to ferry men and equipment down into the canyon. The G-47 Bell is the bubble nosed job we used for med-evac in Korea; that’s what they show you in “M.A.S.H.”
Bob climbed into the left seat, Elling got in the middle and I had the small space next to the open door. The elevation of Yaqui Point is 7200 feet above sea level. The Colorado River runs through the gorge a mile below; it looks like a thread from the Point.
Bob’s takeoff was a climb to three feet, a translation to forward flight, then a plunge into the canyon in what felt like a vertical dive bombing run. It took scant seconds to arrive at a sand bar on the south bank of the river.
Elling was laughing when he looked at the green shade of my face. He said: “Bob’s going to fly up the face of the gorge. I want you to take a good look at it and tell me whether you think you can climb it.”
The lowest part of the Inner Gorge wall is comprised of gneiss, schist and granite. No problem with that. Above the granite there are bands of fractured limestone that look like white books placed loosely in shelves. I figured if I could handle that part of the climb, the rest would be a breeze. The upper three hundred feet are sandstone capped with a layer of solid limestone at a place called Plateau Point.
Bob hovered briefly over Plateau Point, which overhangs the wall, giving me another perspective on the whole thing; all 1800 feet of variegated rock and the river into which one would fall if he peeled. It was awesome, but a challenge I couldn’t pass up.
Bob zoomed up the Bright Angel Trail, buzzed a mule train on the way, then flew us back to Yaqui Point.
“I can climb it,” I said, “But I’d like to try finding a partner.”
“Where?” Elling asked.
“There might be some climbers at Northern Arizona University,” I said. “When we get back to your trailer, I’ll call.”
There were two rock climbers at the school. They were planning to climb Courthouse Rock in Sedona that weekend and I was invited to come along.
Elling sprang for a pair of Pivetta rock climbing shoes and two hundred feet of good Perlon rope. The two kids from the university had a good assortment of pitons, biners and slings, so we went the next day and climbed the courthouse. The boys were pretty good climbers, but neither wanted to chance the Inner Gorge.
So I free climbed the damned thing solo, with a couple cans of Day-Glo orange spray paint clipped to my belt with bits of coat hangar wire. As I climbed, I marked my route with paint, keeping in mind that a pipeline would be hung from the cliff and had to be kept out of sight from tourists standing on Plateau Point.
Bob was scheduled to pick me up at the Point at 1300 hours. He arrived a bit early and hovered out over the river while I was working my way up a narrow, vertical crack. Cracking is fairly simple. You jam a boot and a hand in the crack and twist them to get a grip.
Something had happened that morning, just before Bob flew me down to the sand bar to begin my climb. One of Elling’s boys captured another Durango scorpion on their terrace. So every time I had to jam my hand into a blind crack, I was expecting to get stung.
Just as I was nearing the top of the pitch, something flew out of the crack and my heart nearly stopped. Attached to the rock by one twisted boot and a fist, I swung my body away from the rock face like a garden gate. The thing was nothing but a grass hopper, but it gave me a full shot of adrenalin straight into the pump.
When Bob picked me up on Plateau Point a few minutes later, he said: “I’ll swear you ran up the last three hundred feet of that there cliff.” Bob’s voice was high pitched and nasal, but when he got excited he squeaked. “And how come you did that swinging trick? I thought for sure you was a goner.”
“Well, Bob, that was the easy part. I thought you’d get impatient and fly off. I didn’t feel like hiking back to the top.”
Bob laughed his high pitched chortle all the way to Elling’s mobile home.
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A Two Hundred Year Flood
by
OldMack C 1-01-2005
Last week, as I was driving to the Bay Pines VA Medical Center to have my lungs scanned again, I drove slowly on the overpass. Below the roadway of concrete and steel men were replacing cracked supporting columns. This particular overpass swings U.S. 19 (Alt) onto an easterly heading; it is built in a banked turn, and I had the feeling of flying as I drove over it in my old Volvo. Maybe it was the lap belt and shoulder harness, as well as the banked turn that made me feel like I was flying, and brought this old memory to the surface.
A few days after Elling Halvorson and his partner, finished building the 13 mile long Trans-Canyon Pipeline that carries drinking water from Roaring Springs on the north wall of the Grand Canyon to Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim, a rain storm occurred which made the cliffs of the canyon resemble Niagara Falls. It was what weathermen call a “200 year flood,” or the chances of a deluge like that happening were only once in two hundred years.
This flood washed boulders the size of cars off the limestone cap above the Bright Angel Canyon. They bombarded the numerous bridges we’d built over the meandering creek. The rushing water carried away two thirds of the pipeline. In short, two years of construction mega bucks worth of shattered aluminum pipe went down the creek and into the Colorado River.
When the rain let up, Elling and Little Bob climbed into a bubble nosed chopper and flew down into the canyon to survey the damage.
During the construction phase, we had strung telephone wires all through that part of the canyon, and had emergency phones attached to poles at one mile intervals, for emergency communication with the Park Rangers on the South Rim just in case of accidents.
Elling and Little Bob began their visual survey from Roaring Springs, following the creek down towards Phantom Ranch at the north bank of the Colorado. Our camp,several miles below the springs was destroyed, as were all the phone poles and lines as far downstream as the “Box Canyon” area.
Only one wire still crossed the creek, and Little Bob hit the damned thing with his tail rotor and it flipped the chopper upside down. When they crashed, Bob’s seat belt held. Elling’s did not.
Elling was thrown bodily through the shattered Plexiglas bubble, breaking a shoulder, a bunch of his ribs and a hip. One rib, at least, had punctured a lung, and he was unconscious. By a stroke of fate, or “God’s Will,” as Elling later put it, the crash site was only yards away from the only phone in the canyon still working. Little Bob called the Rangers and reported their situation.
The Ranger at the main entrance of the Monument took the call. Just then a doctor was at his gate in a pickup truck loaded with large cylinders of Oxygen (they keep O2 on hand for visitors who can’t handle the thin air at nearly 8,000 feet). The Ranger held the doctor up for a moment while he dialed the Halvorson-Lentz construction base at Yaqui Point and told them to get another chopper warmed up and ready to go. Then he directed the doctor to Yaqui Point with the Oxygen cylinders.
Moments later, less than ten minutes after the crash, the doctor was in a helicopter and an Oxygen cylinder and breathing mask were strapped in the litter attached to the chopper’s skids. They dove into the canyon like a gunshot goose.
They carefully loaded Elling into the litter. He was breathing pure Oxygen, as they flew up to the South Rim. There’s an emergency hospital in the park where the doctor first stabilized Elling.
Later, Elling told me that as the helicopter rose from the crash site he could see both ways, from earth to heaven, that is. “All I had to do was relax and leave this earth. I was tempted to let go, after seeing all of our work washed away in the flood. But then, I thought of the mess my business was in and all the trouble Barbara would have collecting on the contract with the National Park Service. And there were the kids too. So I held on."
Elling made a full recovery from his injuries. After a year’s moratorium on the project, while the Feds tried to shift the blame from their engineers who designed the pipeline onto Elling’s shoulders, he was awarded the contract to replace the missing sections of the pipeline. When we talked about it, Elling was quick to point out that the section of the pipeline on the Inner Gorge wall,which I’d helped hang, was completely intact.
Elling’s helicopter crash was a long time ago. The pipeline was rebuilt and he was finally paid. Now Elling has a new business. He bought a fleet of Bell Jet Ranger helicopters and started a sight seeing tourist business. His pilots ferry tourists from McCarran Airport in Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon airport, then give them thrilling rides down in the canyon. (Elling’s daughter, Brenda, is now the President of Papillon Grand Canyon Helicopters Inc. See link on Home Page). In the meantime, I’d been divorced by my first wife, lost my real estate business due to boredom and lack of greediness. I had taken up the occupation of Gypsy Pilot. This part of the Tale happened more than a year after the great flood and Elling’s near death experience.
A Gypsy Pilot will fly anything with fixed wings, anyplace at any time, for a fee. It’s a tough row to hoe, and nobody I know ever got rich or even stayed solvent for long, doing this kind of flying. But it sure was a blast while it lasted.
I’d had a salaried job demonstrating new Beechcraft Bonanzas and Debonairs to prospective buyers all over Oregon and Eastern Washington; it had been fun for a while, but then it began to feel like riding a carousel horse. I logged a lot of hours in good airplanes, landed in countless farmers fields (wheat ranchers were our prime prospects) and at every airport on the sectional charts, but in the end I was getting nowhere fast. So I put out the word to fixed base operators that I would be happy to deliver airplanes for them, or take their buyers to the factories in Wichita, Kansas or Kerrville, Texas to pick up their new planes.
Ron Scott, the FBO and Mooney Aircraft distributor at Albany, Oregon called me one day. He reached me at Milt Ruberg’s airport in Springfield, OR, where I was consoling Milt for the loss of his son to cancer. Ron Scott said: “I’ve got three men who have to get to Kerrville to take delivery of their new Mooney Super 21s. Could you fly them down there?”
“Be glad to do it, Ron,” I said, “If I can get Milt to fly me up to your place; he recently lost his son, and is in a funk. Maybe I’ll talk him into flying up in his Boeing Stearman. Some oil smoke and wind in his face might get his head straight.” I looked at Milt. The old man had half a grin on his leathery kisser as he nodded.
“We’ll give you a call on the Unicom frequency, Ron,” I said. Milt was already shrugging on his leather jacket as I hung up the phone.
“This is the best notion anybody has had, Mack,” Milt said as he did a low altitude barrel roll with the Stearman over Coburg, Oregon. As we approached Albany, Milt’s voice came through my head set: “Thanks, Mack. Any time I can help you out buddy, just call me.” Milt greased the wheels on the macadam runway at Albany in a perfect three point full stall landing. He waved a gloved hand at Ron as I climbed out of the front cockpit. I barely had time to get out of the way of his empennage, when Milt hit full throttle and made a takeoff from the taxi way. Ron and I watched Milt put on a show of aerobatics before he headed south for Springfield. Sadly, Milt’s name, his airport and his son’s name are all Xes in my address book now.
Ron and I walked into his office. He poured two cups of coffee and sweetened them with old bourbon. We toasted all the men like Milt that we knew or had known. Then we got down to business.
“You’ll have to let these guys each fly a leg of the trip to Kerrville. None of them has much experience with the Mooney’s manual landing gear retraction and lowering mechanism, so let them get some practice landings along the way,” Ron said. He wrote the men’s names down on my knee board. One man was the FBO at the McMinnville airport, another lived in St. Helens and would meet us at the Hillsboro airport, and the third man wanted to be picked up at PDX.
As we walked out to one of Ron’s older Mark 21 aircraft, he pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and peeled off three C notes. “If this doesn’t do it, call me and I’ll wire you more cash,” Ron said. Then he added: “I’ll pay you your fee when you get back, if that’s okay with you.” I had agreed to do the job for twenty-five bucks an hour based on the time on the tachometer. I didn’t believe in charging for time I was on the ground due to crappy weather, or a hangover.
“I’ll lead them back here over the Sangre De Christo Mountains as far as Phoenix or Tucson. From there they should be able to get home by themselves. A buddy of mine is recuperating from crash injuries at the Grand Canyon and I plan to stop there for a visit before coming back. Will that be okay with you?”
“Sure,” Ron said, “The weather should be better down there. But be sure to instruct these guys about the rotor zones on the lee side of the mountains before you cross the Cascades with them; I don’t think they’ve had much mountain flying experience, except for the guy from McMinnville.”
“Can any of them fly formation?” I asked.
“I doubt it. They’re not former military pilots, so you’ll have to teach them after you all leave Kerrville.”
That old Mark 21 was a tight fit for four full grown men. The guy from McMinnville flew the plane from his field to pick up the other two passengers; he was an experienced flight instructor and had no problems with the throw-over bar that retracted and lowered the landing gear. I sat in the right hand seat, sweating just as I always do when I’m not controlling the airplane I’m in.
The guy from St. Helens had to get used to more than the landing gear; he’d never flown a high performance, low wing plane before. He got the gear down okay, but tried to land twenty feet above the runway at Boise, Idaho. I told him to take a “wave off,” but he didn’t comprehend. “Go around again!” I shouted into his right ear. Then I had him make three touch and go landings before making a final and swapping seats with the man from Oregon City whom we’d picked up at Portland International.
Oregon City guy did fine until we landed in Salt Lake City. He would have landed gear up, if I hadn’t reminded him. He too had to make several touch and go practice landings before we could all go in for lunch. After lunch, I put Oregon City back in the command pilot’s seat and gave him the Omni heading for Colorado Springs.
The damned fool tried to take off and climb directly over the mountains east of Salt Lake City. I could hear McMinnville in the back seat groaning as the mountain loomed ahead of us. I was determined to let the guy make his own decision, right up until the last minute. With four men and our overnight bags in the plane, it was operating at full gross weight. I explained that the Mark 21 didn’t have as much power as the Super 21 he had bought from Ron. He gave me a blank stare and continued on course, climbing at less than 100 feet per minute. When it was obvious that we couldn’t clear the mountain, I told him to execute a climbing 360º turn and get more altitude before trying to cross it.
While he was climbing, I lectured all three men on the danger of rotor zones on the lee side of mountains: “They can smash you right into the damned ground. So keep at least two thousand feet above the tops of mountains. Winds are lifted by the mountains and break like an ocean wave when the go over the top. On the windward side you get plenty of free lift, but when the wave breaks, its like being in an elevator with a broken cable; downdrafts of thousands of feet per minute lurk on the leeward side of the hill."
When we landed in Kerrville that night, I was exhausted, even though I’d flown the plane for only an hour during the trip.
A rep from the Mooney factory drove us to a motel and put all of us up for the night.
Before the three men went up with a check pilot from the Mooney factory, I briefed them all on the basics of flying formation, using a couple of model airplanes in the instructor’s lounge. I asked the check pilot if he would show these guys how to intercept my airplane as I circled over the field. He said that it was against company policy, but if I just happened to be circling up there within ten miles of their airport, he’d demonstrate the intercept maneuver. “How tight do you want these guys to fly on your wing?” he asked. I told him to feel them out. Wingtip separation and step-down would be up to him. “Just don’t bump into me, okay?”
McMinnville slid in on my port wing very smoothly, but then he got sucked. That is, he took off too much power and fell behind. After a bit of throttle jockeying he managed to hold a good position at a 45º angle, in a left echelon and twenty feet lower than my wing. Crossing him from left to right, under my fuselage was a bit nerve wracking for me and the check pilot, but after a few tries McMinnville got it. The guy from Oregon City would have nothing to do with formation flying; he said he’d take his time and fly VFR back to Oregon by himself via Wyoming and Idaho. The St. Helens dude tried like hell to maintain a formation after completing a rendezvous, but would not, or could not move in closer than 100 feet between our wingtips. That would have to do, as the check pilot couldn’t spend more time with us without catching hell from his boss.
Oregon City took off heading for Wichita, Kansas, but put the airplane down at Midland-Odessa airport and called it a day.
McMinnville took off first in his new Super 21 and orbited west of Kerrville, where St. Helens joined him in a very loose formation. I joined them and took the lead, moved them into position off each wing like goslings. Their airplanes could out run mine easily, so I set the pace for them.
It was a beautiful day. Clear all the way to Santa Fe, but beyond that there was a squall line. Both men were in a hurry to get home, but neither was instrument rated, or at least not current. They agreed to follow me through a notch in the Continental Divide west of Demming where the bottoms of the thunder bumpers were less than five thousand feet above the summits and lightning was striking the peaks on both sides of the pass.
We had to circle east of the pass to gain altitude, but just enough to keep our heads out of the clouds. Then we headed for the tunnel of light over the pass. Half way through that eerie green tunnel we met two Air Force fighter jets coming at us head on. Whether those two jet jockeys had us in sight or on their radar is doubtful. They screamed over our planes close enough to bounce us around in their wake.
We landed at Tucson International and had a drink together before they went on their way. I noted as we bumped our shot glasses together that all of our hands were trembling.
After a night in Tucson, I flew up to the South Rim and landed. When I called his number, I got the word that Elling was recuperating at the North Rim Lodge. I asked the FBO about the small air strip on the north side of the canyon. He told me that it was on a side hill with several humps and dips in it. “But it ain’t that bad,” he said.
I had topped off my fuel tanks at the South Rim airport. I planned to look over the strip on the north side and land on it, if it looked okay. I figured I’d have to hike to the lodge where Elling was holed up.
Hot air is less dense than cold air. The higher the airport, the lower the density;air density is porportional to the lift and airfoil can generate. Landing at an airport that's 8,000 feet above sea level on a day when the temperature is 90 degrees is like landing on the top of Mount Whitney; the density altitude is around 14,000 feet. You have to land at a higher speed, in order to keep from stalling at that altitude. That means that you need a longer runway than you’d need at sea level, or on a colder day. The landing strip draped across three fingers of a hill on the north side of the Grand Canyon was long enough, but only because it was tilted upwards from the north end to the south. The whole landscape tilts upwards from 7,000 feet to almost 9,000 feet on the plateau.
I landed okay, but the roll out was like riding swells on a surfboard. Heavy braking got me stopped short of some scrub junipers at the south end of the dirt strip. A jeep driver picked me up and gave me a ride to the lodge.
My reunion with Elling was interesting. He had been “born again,” and I’ve never been able to sit long for sermons. I cut the meeting short, saying that I had to make it to Las Vegas before dark. I concocted something about navigation lights, as I recall.
I got a ride out to the strip. The driver returned to the lodge. I debated with myself about dumping fuel. If I dumped most of my gas on the ground, I knew I could take off and land at the South Rim. But if I could get off the ground with full tanks, I could spend the night in Vegas. Dumb OldMack decided on the riskier solution.
I drove the airplane to the north end of the strip. The wind was dead calm, so that was my first mistake. I could have taken off to the north and it would have been all down hill. Instead, I sat at the north end, revved the engine and released the brakes. As soon as the wheels broke ground, I raised the landing gear. I climbed until the plane would climb no more, and then found that I had only fifteen or twenty feet between my butt and the deck. The landscape was climbing as fast as I was, and at the far end of a long meadow there were tall ponderosa pines that I knew I couldn’t clear.
I didn’t have enough altitude to bank the wings more than a few degrees without dragging a wingtip on deck. Yes, brothers and sisters, I was munching the seat cushion with my puckering strings.
Ah, there’s a glimmer of light reflected from the water in a brook flowing west through a break in the forest. I gently bank right and get between the trees and follow the water. When it cascades over the rim of the canyon, I follow it in a steep dive, gaining airspeed and feeling like I just made my point on a craps table.
Knowing that it’s my lucky day, I point the nose of the old Mark 21 at the shimmering surface of Lake Mead on the horizon, trim the plane and light a Winston. A cigarette never tasted so good before or since.
I turned on the navigation radio, tuned it to the Peach Springs Omni frequency and wondered why the damned needle didn’t move. I could see the Omni transmitter directly off my port wing and the Course Deviation Indicator should be indicating station passage, with the needle swinging to the 6 o’clock position. But it was stuck at 12 o’clock and didn’t budge.
When I landed at Thunderbird Airport in Vegas, I had a guy from the electronics shop check the instrument. He said the case was dented, preventing the needle from moving; he would fix it in the morning.
The tech guy drove me into town and parked at the Travel Inn. It was only then that I realized that all the cash I had left were four singles. I had blown the money on fuel, meals, and motel rooms for all four of us. I used my Mobile credit card to rent a room for the night, and then bought the tech guy a drink at the bar.
While he sipped his drink, I took the dime and quarter change and put them into two slots. I pulled the handles at the same time and hit a jackpot on both. There was a 200 year flood of dimes and quarters. After converting the change to bills, the tech guy suggested that we take a look at the new casino across the road which had “Grand Opening” signs fluttering behind some fantastic, illuminated fountains.
The place was called “Caesar’s Palace,” and it looked like one. Inside the dealers and waitresses were all replicas of May Britt, blond hair, long legs and short togas all in vestal virgin white.
I sat across from a lonely blackjack dealer with emerald eyes the size of quarters and bumped heads with her until my stacks of silver dollars were about to topple. My tech friend had gone home, and the dealer couldn’t leave her table, so I dined alone in splendor. After paying for the meal, I returned to the Travel Inn and hit the sack. The next morning, when the tech guy picked me up, I counted my winnings; it was close to three hundred bucks. Now that’s not a lot of dough, unless you were down to your last buck when you made it. Then it feels like a fortune, heavy yet comfortable in the pockets. I swapped the silver for paper, but it still felt good.
It took the tech guy only minutes to take the cover off of the CDI and straighten out the kink. The instrument worked fine all the way back to Albany.
Ron paid me off, and then flew me down to Springfield. I was living in a boarding house near the University of Oregon campus. That night I went to the “Down Under” night club in Eugene and listened to Monty Fisher and his band “Amazing Grace” play some fine mountain blues.
End
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