A Gift of Wings Read online

  Gag. Ark. Foosh. We caught it in time the camera tower has flicked past and we’re in one piece and man I thought we had had it then what a way to start off a day and oh boy this ain’t fun this is WORK!

  “All right. That was all right, chaps,” comes the radio. “Let’s try it again, and this time could you come a little closer in to the tower and don’t get quite so far apart. Bunch it up a little bit more, please.”

  “Roj.”

  Dear God in heaven, he wants us CLOSER!

  Down we come again line-astern, jinking, swerving, guns popping, close as we can force ourselves to dare, slamming in propwash that grabs us like a big hand and torques us, if we don’t fight, all the way upside-down. The tower rises up at us like an Aztec pyramid of human sacrifice and then “SMOKE NOW, NUMBER ONE, SMOKE SMOKE!”

  The SE we’re chasing hits his smoke a hundred yards from the tower and it’s like flying into the side of a thundercloud. The plane rolls wild left and we can’t see a thing except a corner of blurred green that was the ground a second ago and we can’t breathe and somewhere an instant away is the camera tower with those poor dumb trusting slobs cranking away with their little Mitchell, taking pictures. Stomp the right side of the rudderbar for dear life, snatch the stick back hard and we come blasting out of the smoke twenty feet left of the tower. We miss them by twenty feet. It’s interesting to see how quickly a leather flying helmet can get soaked through with sweat.

  “That was perfect. That was absolutely right. Now let’s do that one more time …”

  “ONE MORE TIME? REMEMBER THIS IS A HUMAN LIFE YOU’RE DEALING WITH!”

  It was an Irish pilot who said that, and I remember thinking that his words were well said, my friend, well said.

  I kept seeing, the more the tower called for closer and closer passes, that comedian who stands with a banana cream pie while the other one shouts, “Let me have that pie! Let me have it! LET ME HAVE IT!” The temptation is to fly right straight down the center of that Mitchell, rip the thing to a billion pieces over the countryside, then pull up and say, “There! Is that close enough? Is that what you guys want?”

  The only one who gave in to temptation was Chris Cagle. He came at the camera in anger, from below the tower, and climbed full throttle, splitting seconds, into the lens. Pulling up at the very last quarter instant, he got the grim pleasure of a millisecond view of the camera crew diving for the deck. That was the only time in the month that they thought the airplanes might be real, after all.

  Most of the air-to-air photography in Von Richthofen and Brown was shot from a jet helicopter, an Alouette II. The helicopter cameraman wasn’t visited with quite the same death-wish as the tower crew, but a helicopter is an unnerving thing to fly with. Just because the machine is pointed forward, of course, doesn’t mean that it is moving forward—it could be stopped, or going straight up or down or backward. How does a pilot judge where to aim, to come a safe distance from an object of unknown velocity?

  “OK. I am hovering,” the pilot would tell us. “You can come in any time.” But closing rate on a stopped helicopter is just the same as closing rate on a cloud, and that can be alarmingly fast, in the final seconds. One keeps thinking, too, that the poor souls inside the Alouette don’t have parachutes.

  Bit by harrowing bit, though, we made the film. We got used to the airplanes, for one thing. Most of the replicas did well to climb two hundred feet per minute after takeoff, and on some days were pressing their luck to clear the canvas hangars at the end of the field. In the immortal words of Jon Hutchinson, “I have to keep telling myself, ‘Hutchinson, this is marvelous, this is lovely, you’re flying a D-7!’ Because if I don’t, it feels like I’m flying a great bloody Pig.”

  The four miniature SE-5s were not only at full power to stay with the other airplanes, they were at more than full power. On one flight I chased the Fokker Triplane with a camera mounted on the cowl of a mini SE, and just to stay in the same sky with the Fokker, eighty miles per hour, I was pulling 2650 rpm on an engine red-lined at 2500. Out of that fifty-minute flight, forty-five minutes were spent on the other side of full throttle. The film, like a war, was a mission that had to be accomplished. If an engine blew up that was just too bad … we’d have to land somehow and take up another airplane.

  Odd, but one gets used to this kind of flying. In time, even on the tower at Pigeon Hill, caught in propwash and rolling out of control thirty feet in the air, one thinks, I’ll save it. She’ll recover at the last second. She always has … all the while pouring the power of Charles Atlas into the controls, fighting to pull out.

  One day I saw an Irish pilot all alone, wearing a sprig of heather in the lapel of his German flying jacket.

  “Flying kind of low, aren’t you?” I said, by way of a joke.

  His face was gray; he didn’t smile at all. “I thought I had had it. I am lucky to be alive.”

  It was such a somber voice that I was caught in morbid curiosity. The leaves in his lapel came from the downslope at Pigeon Hill, and he had harvested it with the undercarriage of a Fokker.

  “The last thing I remember was the propwash and all I saw was the ground. I closed my eyes and pulled hard as I could on the stick. And here I am.”

  The tower crew confirmed it that evening. The Fokker had rolled and dived as it passed the tower, bounced off the side of the hill and back into the air. The camera was pointed the other way.

  One of the airplanes at Weston was a two-seater, a Caudron 277 Luciole, which was translated for us as Glowworm. It was a square sluggish biplane with a Lewis gun mounted in the rear cockpit in such a way that there was not quite enough room for the gunner to wear a parachute. Hutchinson, just down with the machine as I was about to take it up, described it for me in his pure British tones: “It’s a fine luciole, actually, but it will never be an airplane.”

  Thinking that over, I fastened myself into the front seat, started the engine, and took off for a mission in which I was to be shot down by a pair of Pfalzes. It was not an enjoyable scene at all. It was much too real.

  The poor Caudron could barely stumble out of its own way, much like the great majority of real two-seaters of the First War. It could neither turn nor climb nor dive, and the pilot sits directly between the wings so that he cannot see up and he cannot see down. The gunner blocks the view behind and the pilot gets what’s left over: a slice of sky ahead, and, sieved through the struts and wires, to the side.

  I thought I had understood that two-seater pilots lived a hard life in 1917, but I hadn’t understood that at all. They couldn’t fight, they couldn’t run away, they could hardly tell that they were being attacked until their little fabric coffin burst into flames and then they didn’t have parachutes to bail out with. Perhaps I was a two-seater pilot in another life, for in spite of myself, in spite of saying, “This is a movie, Richard, this is only a movie that we are taking pictures for,” I was frightened when the Pfalzes came in. Their guns sparkled at me, the director shouted, “SMOKE, LUCY, SMOKE, SMOKE!” I hit both smoke switches, slumped in the seat, and wallowed the Luciole into a low-speed spiral dive.

  That was the end of the scene for me, simple as that, but I dragged back to Weston like an exhausted snail.

  Turning downwind to land, I suddenly saw a flight of Fokkers turning toward me, and went cold in shock. It took seconds to remember that this was not 1917 and that I was not going to be incinerated in my own traffic pattern. I laughed, then, nervously, and got the airplane on the ground as fast as I could. I had no wish to fly the two-seater again and I never did.

  Nobody was killed in the time I flew with Von Richthofen and Brown; nobody was even injured. Two airplanes were damaged: an SE with an axle failure while taxiing, a Pfalz in a groundloop. Both were flying again within a week.

  The cameras rolled through thousands of feet of color film, hours of film. Most of it looked pretty tame, but for every time that a pilot was truly frightened, certain that he was going to be a mid-air collision, positive
that this time the plane was not going to recover at low altitude, there was another exciting scene caught in celluloid.

  We gathered in tight little knots to watch the previous day’s action on the six-inch screen of the Movieola. No sound save the whir of the projector; quiet as a small-town library. Occasional comments: “Move it in!” “Liam, was that you in the Pfalz?” “That’s not too bad, there …”

  As the filming went into the final week, painters converged on the drab German airplanes and brushed them into the flying rainbows of the Richthofen Circus. We flew the same airplanes as before, but now it was a point of fun to fly the all-red Fokker that would appear on the screen as Von Richthofen himself, or the black Pfalz that would be Hermann Goering’s.

  I drew the red Fokker once for the ignoble scene of having one of my wingmen shot down by the Englander. Then once again as the Red Baron to come roaring to the rescue of Werner Voss, shooting an SE off his tail.

  The next day I was Roy Brown, chasing Von Richthofen (a red Fokker Triplane, now) and shooting him down for the final scene of the film.

  I tried saying it when I climbed out of the cockpit after that flight, carrying my parachute through the quiet evening to our trailer. “I shot down the Red Baron.”

  I thought about that. How many pilots can make that statement? “Hey, Chris,” I said. He was stretched out in his half of the trailer. “I shot down the Red Baron!”

  His reply was incisive. “Hm,” he said. He didn’t even open his eyes.

  Which was to say, So what? So it’s just a movie we’re flying for, and a B movie besides and if it wasn’t for the flying scenes, I wouldn’t cross the street to see the picture, at home.

  That’s when it occurred to me that it’s the same in a real war as it was in ours of make-believe. Pilots don’t attend wars or films because they like the blood or the sex or the B-level plots of the things. More important than film is the flying; more important than war is the flying.

  It’s probably a shame to say: neither films nor wars will ever lack for men to fly their airplanes. I am myself one of a great many who volunteered for both. But surely someday, a thousand years from now, we can build a world where the only place to log combat time is in the lens of some director shouting, “SMOKE NOW, SMOKE!”

  All we need is the will to do it, some replica MIGs, some antique Phantoms with dummy guns, sawdust missiles … If we wanted to, a thousand years from now, we could really make some great films.

  Prayers

  “You’d better be careful what you pray for,” somebody once said, “because you’re going to get it.”

  I thought of that, twisting a Fokker D-7 hard through my little part of the Great Mass Dogfight scene in Von Richthofen and Brown. The scene had looked neat and safe when we chalked it out on the briefing-room blackboard, but now, in the air, it was scary—fourteen replica fighters crushed into one small cube of sky, each one chasing the other, a few losing position and diving blindly through the rest, rainbow paints flashing colored sunlight, the loud quick blast of a Pfalz engine as the plane flashed beneath without seeing, smoke trails and the thick smell of fireworks in the wind.

  Everyone survived that morning, but I was still shaking a bit when I thought about being careful what we pray for. Because the very first magazine article I wrote, twelve years ago, was one in which I prayed that those of us who learned to fly in closed-cockpit airplanes might have a place to rent an open-cockpit one, for the fun of it, “… and fly a Fokker D-7 airframe with one hundred fifty modern horses in the nose,” I had written. And here I was this moment in helmet and goggles and scarf, pilot of a yellow-blue-white-green airplane, Fok. DVII lettered authentically on the fuselage. I came home from the film with forty hours in Fokkers and Pfalzes and SE-5s, my prayers answered so completely that I had all that kind of flying I cared to do for quite some time.

  A few years after I had prayed for the Fokker, I had gone for a ride in Chris Cagle’s J-3 Cub, at the Merced Fly-in. Cagle had a thousand hours in that Cub alone, I guess, and as we flew across the afternoon he showed me how to fly at zero miles per hour and how to loop and roll the thing. I remember looking out the open door at the puffed yeast-doughnut tire, and past it to the ground way down below, thinking what a great little airplane, and some day, by God, I’ll own me a Cub! Today I own it, and it has big puffy yeast-doughnut tires and the doors open in flight and I look down and remember, Sure enough, it happened again: I got what I prayed for.

  Time after time I’ve watched it happen, in my life and the lives of people I know. I’ve tried to find somebody who didn’t get what he prayed for, but to date I haven’t found him. I believe it: whatever we wrap away in thought is opened for us, one day, in experience.

  There was a girl I met in New York, who lived in a tight-packed Brooklyn tenement, acred about by old concrete and cracking brick, by frustration and fear and quick wild violence in the street. I wondered aloud why she didn’t get out, move to Ohio or Wyoming country, where she could breathe free and touch the grass once in her life.

  “I couldn’t do that,” she said, “I don’t know what it’s like out there.” And then she said a very honest and knowing thing. “I guess I’m more afraid of what I don’t know than I hate what I have right now …”

  Better to have riots in the streets, better squalor and subways and sardine crowds, she prayed, than the unknown. As she prayed, she received; she meets nothing now that she hasn’t met before.

  All at once I saw the obvious. The world is as it is because that is the way we wish it to be. Only as our wish changes does the world change. Whatever we pray for, we get.

  Look about, sure enough. Every day the footsteps of answered prayer are ours to walk, we have only to lean forward and walk them, one by one. The steps to my Fokker were many. I helped a man with his magazine, years ago, and so came to know him. His prayers were in old airplanes and business deals and motion pictures, and he took his chance to buy, in a business deal with a film studio, the fleet of World War I fighters. When he mentioned this, I said I’d be ready if he ever needed a pilot to fly one; that is. I took one step that offered itself to be taken. A year later he needed two American pilots to join the group, in Ireland, flying the Fokkers. When he called, I was ready to finish the path I had begun with the first article, that first prayer about the D-7.

  From time to time, when I was barnstorming the Midwest a few summers ago, a passenger or two would say, “What a great life you have, free to go wherever you want, whenever … Sure wish I could do it.” Wistful, like that.

  “Come along, then,” I’d say. “You can sell tickets, keep the crowds behind the wing, strap the passengers into the front seat. We might make enough money to live on, we might go broke, but you’re invited.” I could say this, first because I could always use a ticket seller, and second because I knew what the answer would be.

  Silence first, then, “Thanks, but you see, I’ve got my job. If it wasn’t for my job, I’d go …” Which was only to say that each wistful one wasn’t wistful at all, each had prayed harder for his job than for the life of a barnstormer, as the New York girl had prayed more for her tenement than for the grass of Wyoming or for any other unknown.

  I consider this from time to time, flying. We always get what we pray for, like it or not, no excuses accepted. Every day our prayers turn more into fact; whom we most want to be, we are. It all sounds like justice to me; I can’t say as I mind the way this world is built, at all.

  Return of a lost pilot

  We had been flying north, low-level formation in a pair of F-100 day fighters out over the Nevada desert. I was leading, that time, and Bo Beaven’s airplane was twenty feet away at my right wingtip. It was a clean morning, I remember, and we were cruising three hundred feet above the ground. I was having some trouble with the radiocompass, leaning down in the cockpit, resetting a circuit breaker, clicking the control from ANT to LOOP to COMP, to see if the needle would show any life. Then about the time I thought that the probl
em was in the antenna itself, and that maybe I shouldn’t plan on having any help from the radio at all, there came Beaven’s voice filtered in my earphones. It was neither a command nor a warning … it was a simple calm question: “Do you plan on flying into this mountain?”

  I jerked my head up, startled, and there angled in front of us was a rugged little mountain, all brown rock and sand and tumbleweed, tilting, flying toward us at something over three hundred nautical miles per hour. Beaven said nothing more. He didn’t loosen his formation or move to break away. He spoke in the way that he flew his airplane … if you choose to fly straight ahead, there will be not one hole in the rock, but two.

  I eased the control stick back, wondering where the hill had come from, and it flicked a hundred feet beneath us and was gone, silent as a deadly dark star.

  I never forgot that day, or the way Beaven’s airplane faced the mountain wing to wing with mine, not clearing the peak until we cleared it together. It was our last flight in formation. A month later our time had run out in the peacetime Air Force and we were civilians again, promising, sure, we’d meet again, because people who fly always meet again.

  Back in my home town, I was sad to be gone from high-performance flying only until I found that the same tests waited in lightplane sport flying. I discovered formation aerobatics, air racing and off-airport landings, all in little planes that can take off and land five times in the distance it takes an F-100 to get off the ground once. I thought, as I flew, that Bo would be making the same discovery, that he was flying just as I was.

  But he wasn’t. He was no sooner out of the Air Force than he was lost, no sooner established in business than he was dead, the agonizing death of the pilot who turns his back on flight. He suffocated slowly, the blue-suited businessman had taken over, had mortared him into an airless corner behind a wall of purchase orders and sales charts, golf bags and cocktail glasses.