Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2021 i Air & Space

ASTRONAUT MICHAEL COLLINS, who in July 1969 piloted the Columbia command module while his Apollo 11 crewmates became the first people to walk on the moon, died last April, at 90. He was the pilot on the 1966 Gemini 10 mission, and as an Air Force pilot and test pilot, he flew the F-86 Sabre and F-104 Starfighter, among other jets. He later became the first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. In the introduction to his 1974 memoir Carrying the Fire, Collins explained that the three-word title defined for him the experience of spaceflight. In a way, his explanation captures the experience of all pilots and is an eloquent epigraph for this issue. Of course, Apollo was the god who carried the fiery sun across…

Let’s Just Take the Train JAMES WALKER, WESTMORLAND, CA I HAVE A COMMERCIAL LICENSE with multi-engine and instrument ratings, but the story I want to tell is about an experience that my dad had in 1918. He is no longer here to tell about it, so I’m going to do it for him. My dad, Lieutenant Clarence R. Walker, was a flight instructor in the U.S. Army in 1918 when he was ordered to survey the route from Taylor Field in Montgomery, Alabama to Arcadia, Florida in preparation for moving his unit to the new location. (The U.S. Army Air Service had established a primary flight school at Taylor Field with nearly 200 Curtiss and de Havilland trainers.) He and another lieutenant left Taylor Field in a Curtiss JN-4D Jenny…

As of July 30, the National Air and Space Museum’s main building in Washington, D.C., is welcoming back visitors. That follows the May 5 re-opening of the Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Visitors to either site must get free timed-entry passes before arriving. Full details at airandspace. si.edu/visit Most Events Are Virtual The National Air and Space Museum is reaching out to its friends through webcasts and online events. Look for this symbol to mark events that are online only.…

To Florida in a Whisperjet BRUCE F. BILLIG, PAWLEYS ISLAND, SC IT WAS EASTER WEEK OF 1967. Our greatest generation parents announced to my brother and I, still single-digit baby boomers, that we were going to Florida to visit our grandparents. And we were going to FLY! Quite the feat for a middle-class family of four in 1967. The day dawned snowing, cold, and windy. This was before jetways, so when the time came to board the Eastern Whisperjet, we trudged onto the tarmac at Philadelphia International. In the blowing snow, you could hear jets and turboprops and smell the exhaust. Awesome. The roaring and whirring seemed to accompany us up the stairs into the tail of the 727. Eastern’s advertising of the era called the Whisperjet “the most relaxing…

Getting Ready, Two Days After 9/11 JAMES C. GUNN, HORSESHOE BEND, ID September 13, 2001, my crewmate “Bait” and I were asked to perform an operational check flight on an F-15E. The aircraft had undergone major maintenance, which required an experienced crew to fly it. The squadron was getting ready to deploy to a still undetermined location and needed every aircraft available. We took off on a cool, cloudless morning and checked in with Salt Lake Center. The normally busy frequency was dead silent as there was not another aircraft airborne. It was very surreal. We climbed into the military operations airspace and checked as many primary and backup systems as possible. Engines, flight controls, electrical, fuel, and avionics. We checked the air-to-ground radar and targeting systems but were unable…

A Soft, if not Smooth, Landing KEN BROWN, VENICE, FL FOR MANY YEARS, my wife and I have been flying a Cirrus SR-22 between Massachusetts and Florida. It’s a 6.5-hour flight, so we stop for fuel midway, in central North Carolina. In early 2020 we set off from Massachusetts as we’d done many times.We flew right over JFK [Airport] and watched Manhattan glide by, then along the coast toward our fuel stop in Elizabethtown, North Carolina. I love the Cirrus avionics suite. Great navigation and engine information. The autopilot was keeping us straight and level, and air traffic control was updating us on traffic and directions. About 15 minutes from Elizabethtown, I heard a slight “pop” and the autopilot disconnected. Hmm, that was odd. The prop slowed to around 1,600…

The Kindness of Strangers GARRY ELLIS, INDIANAPOLIS, IN MY MOST MEMORABLE flight never got above 20 feet in altitude. What made it memorable was the kindness of the pilot, and the impression that he made on four strangers. Dennis Floden, former World Hot Air Balloon Champion, designed “The Great Tony,” a hot air balloon shaped like Tony the Tiger. Kellogg’s hired Denny to take Tony around the world as an ambassador for Frosted Flakes cereal. I met Denny in 1990 in Palm Springs, Florida. One evening, Denny was taking Kellogg’s employees on tethered rides in the parking lot of our resort. As I was about to climb into the basket, Denny asked me to wait, and he addressed someone beyond the crowd. “Would you like a ride?” Everyone turned toward…

Through the Rainbow ERIC NOEL WEILL, HATTIESBURG, MS I was a novice skydiver. Circa 2002. Moss Point, Mississippi. High noon in August, and partly cloudy. As we climbed in the twin-engine Otter, I marked the cloud bottoms at 4,000 feet. Cloud tops at about 7,000. During the jump run at 14,000, it was clear above, but a cloud moved in under us. I exited. With the sun directly overhead during freefall, I noticed rainbow colors near the edges of the cloud. The rainbow appeared to be moving as I freefalled (freefell?) toward the cloud. As I reached terminal velocity of 120 mph, I noticed that the rainbow was not an arc, but a perfect circle. Because the reflected light angle changed rapidly as I fell, the rainbow diameter shrank steadily.…

[In] 1965, the band had been on a trip to England. It was our first time on a plane, and I had the idea of writing a song about it. Gene [Clark] asked: “How high do you think that plane was flying?” I thought about seven miles, but the Beatles had a song called “Eight Days a Week,” so we changed it to “Eight Miles High” because we thought that would be cooler. When the song came out, some DJs did the sums and realised that since commercial airliners only flew at six miles, we must have been talking about a different kind of high. And all the stations stopped playing it. We put out a statement refuting those claims, but it was the end of our commercial success. The…

Enchanted by a Cub BRUCE SQUIERS, SALEM, NY “Hey kid,” he yelled as he walked across the grass runway of the local flying club. “Didya ever see your house from the sky?” With that, an excited boy got his first ride in an airplane. Still only a pre-teen growing up in the early 1960s, I couldn’t have been more thrilled than when the pilot said, “Get in. I’ll help you with the seat belt.” The encounter with the pilot of the yellow J-3 Cub wasn’t entirely accidental. A resident of a small upstate New York village, I often walked the highways and byways throughout the area, and those travels sometimes included following a pair of railroad tracks that directly passed a rural airport—really little more than a mowed field, a…

On April 17, 1964 at 9:36 p.m., Jerrie Mock landed a Cessna 180 at Port Columbus airport in Ohio and became the first woman to fly around the world. It had been more than 29 days since she had taken off from that spot for a 23,103-mile journey—and more than 27 years since she had been inspired to do it by Amelia Earhart’s attempt. Today the modest, single-engine, four-seat Cessna she flew, the Spirit of Columbus, is headed to a new gallery in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum devoted to the largest category of human activity in the air—general aviation. Scheduled to open in 2022, the Thomas W. Haas We All Fly gallery will help define the wide world of general aviation and, through interactive exhibits and audiovisual…

FOLLOW THAT HUEY MARTIN S. KLEINER, CARLISLE, PA | JOSEPH G. KAUFMANN, GETTYSBURG, PA At the Boeing-Vertol plant adjacent to Philadelphia International Airport, which produces the big CH-47 Chinook helicopter, my operations officer and I learned a severe snowstorm was developing enroute to our home base in Lakehurst, New Jersey. On March 8, 1984, we immediately departed in our UH-1H Huey on a special visual flight rules clearance due to icing in the clouds. Approaching McGuire Air Force Base airspace, we contacted the tower and monitored an emergency in progress. A student pilot flying cross-country in a Cessna 150 was caught in the storm, totally disoriented, and running low on fuel. Working with the U.S. Air Force air traffic controller, we were vectored to the student’s general location and began…

I love the hour before takeoff, that stretch of no time, no home but the gray vinyl seats linked like unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall be summoned to the gate, soon enough there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers and perforated stubs—but for now I can look at these ragtag nuclear families with their cooing and bickering or the heeled bachelorette trying to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s exhausted mother waiting to be called up early while the athlete, one monstrous hand asleep on his duffel bag, listens, perched like a seal trained for the plunge. Even the lone executive who has wandered this far into summer with his lasered itinerary, briefcase knocking his knees—even he has worked for the pleasure of bearing no more than…

Although novelist William Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Air Force toward the end of World War I and trained in Canada, the war ended before he had the chance to pilot airplanes (despite his later claims). Yet he had a lifelong fascination with aviation, and later became a licensed pilot. In this excerpt from a letter written in April 1943, he counsels his nephew Jimmy, who was then training to be a World War II Marine fighter pilot, and who referred to his famous uncle as “Brother Will.” MY DEAR JIM: ....You will be on real aeroplanes soon. You should be all right, a good man. Just remember always that flying is fine, and it gets better but you’ve got to stay alive to enjoy it. You will have two…

A Little Too Determined To Fly JERALD GARTMAN, MOREHEAD CITY, NC AFTER TWO YEARS of building every night, following my day job as the senior Marine and T-28 flight instructor in a Navy squadron, my homebuilt Bede BD-4 was almost ready to fly. I still needed to do ground runs and ensure that all the building debris was removed from the tanks and fuel system. On May 30, 1976, after attending church, I was driving back home with my wife and two small children when we passed the airport. It was a calm, sunny day so I decided I would stop for a few minutes and conduct a high-speed taxi test on the plane. I had no intent to fly, but as I taxied to the end of the strip,…

IN 1926, I WAS A FREELANCE PILOT flying out of Clover Field in Santa Monica, California. That morning I had enlisted the aid of a friend, Art Jensen, to help service my new Curtiss biplane in anticipation of the weekend passenger business. We had put in gas and oil and checked the Hispano-Suiza engine. “You grease the wheels while I grab a quick bite,” I said, heading for the airport café. Greasing airplane wheels was a simple process in those days. There were no brakes, no roller bearings—a single bolt and hubcap held the wheel onto the axle. Jensen was a conscientious mechanic, and as he was replacing the hubcap and bolt on the left wheel, he noticed that the bolt threads were damaged and would not accept the nut.…

The (Second) First Flight at Kitty Hawk KEVIN KOCHERSBERGER, BLACKSBURG, VA Winds 10 to 12 knots straight down the rail, temperature 15 degrees Centigrade and barometric pressure 29.92 inches. Not only was November 20, 2003 a perfect day at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, but it marked the 50th anniversary of Scott Crossfield’s Mach 2 flight in the D-558-2 Skyrocket. When I boarded the reproduction Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, I had already flown the 1902 glider 70 times and practiced hundreds of flights in the 1903 machine using an accurate simulator based on wind tunnel test data. Guided by Crossfield, a team of four pilots was now ready to show the world the significance of Orville and Wilbur’s invention, 100 years later. The view looking forward while listening to the…

….about the airplane we had known nothing and it was an extraordinarily natural and pleasant thing much more simple and natural than anything even than walking, perhaps as natural as talking but certainly more natural than doing any other thing. And so we liked it and whenever we could we did it. They are now beginning to suppress the noise and that is a pity, it will be too bad if they can have conversation, it will be a pity.... It was then in a kind of way that I really began to know what the ground looked like. Quarter sections [note: large plots of farmland] make a picture and going over America like that made any one know why the post-cubist painting was what it was. The wandering line…

Signing Off With Gratitude JAMES M. SNARSKI, SANTA ROSA, CA Back in the mid-1960s I was a full-time ticket agent for TWA at O’Hare International Airport and a part-time flight instructor at Sally’s Flying School, Palwaukee airport, Wheeling, Illinois. I owed my climb up the ratings ladder to Sally Stremple, legendary owner of said Sally’s. She knew I couldn’t afford flying lessons, being married with two kids, so she gave me a job as a line boy in exchange for flying time. Sally was famous for wanting the weather to be benevolent for her student pilots, to the point where we joked among ourselves that if there was a cloud over Kansas, we were walking. On the other hand, it gave us a wonderful excuse to cadge a few minutes…

AT THE AVON WOMEN’S SOFTBALL game, Denny Almendinger sat next to me explaining how he’d screwed up flying his Skye Ryder. “Power lines,” he said. “You can’t forget about them goddang power lines.” The week before, he flew low along Spotted Dog Road and forgot about the power line that runs up to Kertulla’s ranch. “The back wheel kind of bumped over the wire,” he explained. Several times recently I’d seen Denny up in this powered parachute. The Skye Ryder is a three-wheel go-cart affair with a motor and pusher propeller mounted behind the pilot’s head. In flight the whole thing hangs under a rectangular parachute canopy big enough to cover a trailer house. When I had gone to look at it the second time, I loaned Denny my skydiver’s…

What is an Engine Run-up? RON ROSS, CHATTANOOGA, TN IN 1944, AT THE AGE OF SIX, I experienced my first flight. We lived in Costa Rica, where my dad worked for the U.S. Public Roads Administration Aircraft Division. They had two aircraft: a Ford Trimotor and a Junkers Ju 52. These airplanes were used to supply the construction of the Pan American highway in the southern part of Costa Rica, flying supplies including tools, dynamite, food, and personnel. When not in school, I would go to the airport with dad and spend the day climbing into the aircraft and playing with old discarded parts. One day my dad told me to come with him to the hangar next to his to see Tito, who was one of dad’s best friends…

WE CLIMBED THROUGH 7,000 FEET and I was wondering if I could persuade my family to go see a movie that night when the Lear seemed to run into a brick wall. In that instant I felt sure we’d had a midair collision and that the three of us on the plane—both pilots and me—were going to die. The little galley flew open and vomited its contents. The cushions of the unoccupied seats shot into the air. The little jet tilted...tilted some more...then rolled completely over. I felt that part, but didn’t see it. I had closed my eyes. My life didn’t flash before me. I didn’t think But I had so much more to do. There was no sense of acceptance (or non-acceptance, for that matter). There was just…

PARKED TOGETHER on the grass at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s (EAA) aviation extravaganza in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the five strange airplanes look as if they might have flown in from the future. The Dyke Delta has no horizontal tail and the body is almost all wing—a very space-age, stealthy airplane. On the porch of a nearby cafe, a group of 25 or 30 people cluster around an older gentleman. The annual Dyke Delta “family reunion” is in session, designer John W. Dyke presiding. Despite the ultramodern appearance of the Delta, it’s been 50 years since Dyke put the first lines of the airplane on paper. His family of aviation enthusiasts has grown since then. “I know every Delta builder by name, and I know all their stories,” says Dyke. One of…

Why I Shoot LEONARDO LUNA, HONG KONG, CHINA IT’S A COLD MORNING. I try to keep my body outside of the airflow created by the removed door of my Cessna 170. Everything is dark except the dim red lights of the instrument panel and the occasional red flash of the rotating beacon. We are approaching San Francisco Bay, and I can see the first rays of the sunrise. A beautiful, timeless Waco UPF-7 is on our right wing in close formation. I get anxious as the sky’s colors start to change fast. I want to be in the proper position for the moment the sun rises behind the Golden Gate Bridge. I can see how the sun starts to reflect in the perfect red fabric of Ferdinand’s Waco. John, as…

Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart were both pioneering women in their fields, so it’s no surprise that they also became friends. Roosevelt admired the courage of women pilots, and aimed to become one herself, writing Earhart in 1933, “The question now comes as to whether I can induce my husband to let me take lessons.” But FDR objected on the grounds that it was too dangerous. When Amelia disappeared in 1937, Eleanor wrote her daughter Anna: “Heard about Amelia over the radio and felt even lower…I do like her and I’ll miss seeing her if she’s gone but perhaps she’d rather go that way.”…