Kenneth W. Ford
H Bar Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
East Wallingford, Vermont
In Love With Flying
by Kenneth W. Ford
H Bar Press
729 Westview St. • Philadelphia, PA 19119
www.hbarpress.com
Copyright © 2007 Kenneth W. Ford
All rights reserved
Published by H Bar Press at Smashwords
Book design and cover photo by Adam B. Ford
Cover: Harris Hill, Elmira, New York.
Illustrations by Cornelia J. Cesari
Chapter 1: Ercoupe; Chapter 2: Aeronca Champion “Champ”; Chapter 3: SPTVAR; Chapter 4: Rolladen-Schneider LS-4; Chapter 5: Beechcraft Bonanza; Chapter 6: Airbus A300-600; Chapter 7: Starduster; Chapter 8: L-19 (Cessna 305A); Chapter 9: Cessna 172 Skyhawk; Chapter 10: Schweizer 1-26
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ford, Kenneth William, 1926-
In love with flying / Kenneth W. Ford.
1. Air pilots—United States—Biography. 2. Private flying. 3. Gliders (Aeronautics)—Piloting.
TL540.F67 2007
629.13'092—dc22 2007927519
To all the pilots I have met and all the passengers I have carried. You are one giant family.
And in memory of
Robert N. (Bob) Buck
1914 – 2007
Profile: Charles J. (Charlie) Boyd
Profile: Antonio (Tony) Sabino
Profile: Christine (Chris) Doig
7 All Kinds of Air, All Kinds of Flying
8 Buttoning Up and Getting Going
Profile: J. William (Bill) Bullock
Profile: Gerald (Jerry) Hoogerwerf
What motivated this book? First of all, my fifty-year love affair with flying. Second, my admiration, often tinged with awe, for the many people I met along the way who gave up whatever more lucrative careers might have been out there to do what they most loved doing, which was to fly. Since what I flew were small airplanes and gliders, out of small airports and landing strips, the professional aviators I met were mostly not airline pilots or corporate pilots. They were airport operators, flight instructors, weather flyers, environmental flyers, glider pilots, tow pilots, or just pilots for hire. And quite a few of them loved fixing airplanes almost as much as flying them.
So this book is partly a memoir of my own life in the air and partly a set of profiles of some of those remarkable flyers whom I came to know over the years. On the ground I have been a physicist and a teacher, in the air an earnest amateur. There’s no physics in this book, but I haven’t been able to resist doing a little teaching—for instance, about old and new ways to navigate, the different kinds of lift available to glider pilots, and the hazards of box canyons.
If you’re not a pilot but thinking of becoming one, whatever your age, you might enjoy this book. If you want to learn a little more about the lure of the sky that goes beyond anecdotes, scary or amusing, these pages might be for you. And if you’re a fellow pilot, you might like to compare my experiences and observations with your own.
There is something about New Mexico that beckons one aloft—endless skies, gorgeous mountains, mesas rising nearly vertically from the desert floor, cumulus clouds piled up like gobs of whipped cream (sometimes, when you fly through them, they feel more like potatoes not fully mashed).
That’s where I got hooked on flying. It was 1953. I was 27. I had had only one previous flight in a small plane. A year earlier, a sixteen-year old boy with a pilot’s license, the son of a security guard at the Princeton lab where I was working, invited me for a flight in a Piper Cub (Piper J-3, as it was officially called). I was entranced as he did spins (illegal with me aboard) and buzzed his girlfriend’s house (also illegal). The seed was planted.
I had just earned a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton and was spending the summer at the atomic laboratory in Los Alamos. A couple of years earlier, I had been a junior member of the H-bomb design team there, and had then worked at a satellite lab of Los Alamos in Princeton. So I had saved a bit of money. For $1,700—most of my savings—I bought a new Plymouth in Trenton, New Jersey, and drove west in it. But once I got settled again in New Mexico, something clicked in my brain. I needed to fly.
In nearby Española I found a buyer for my lovely new Plymouth, and parted with it for, if I remember correctly, $1,600 (the loss was not greater because at that time new cars cost more in New Mexico than in New Jersey). Then I invested $200 in an old Chevrolet, and looked for an airplane. A Los Alamos pediatrician wanted to sell his little two-place Ercoupe in order to buy a fancier four-place Bonanza. We negotiated a price of $1,100. I had enough left over to pay an instructor to teach me to fly it.
I had to keep my airplane at the Santa Fe Airport, some forty miles from Los Alamos. At the time, no private flying was permitted from the Los Alamos airstrip. That airstrip, long, wide, and paved, was located atop a mesa at an elevation of 7,171 feet.[1] From aloft, it looks a bit like a giant aircraft carrier docked against the Jemez Mountains. The only planes that landed at Los Alamos at the time belonged to a New Mexico carrier called Carco (founder and owner Clark Carr, an Albuquerque pilot and businessman), plus the occasional government plane. Carco ferried people back and forth between Los Alamos and Albuquerque, sixty miles away (ninety miles by road), in small planes, four-seaters and six-seaters, some with one engine, some with two. That meant that, for me, the best part of any trip from Los Alamos to the east or west coast was the half hours spent at the beginning and end of the trip in a Carco plane. I always graciously let others board ahead of me so that I could take the remaining seat up front next to the pilot.
Carco pilots, some of them grizzled Old-West types—including Clark Carr himself—did what they could to propagate the myth that landing at Los Alamos, with its thin air, gusty winds, and up and down drafts, was far too tricky for an ordinary pilot. Actually, it was probably the Atomic Energy Commission’s concern for security more than Mr. Carr’s influence that kept private pilots at arm’s length. Mr. Carr’s exclusive contract persisted, with or without private pilots. Eventually, in 1960, the restricted zone over the town and neighboring canyons was reined in to cover only the laboratory areas, and private pilots began to use the airstrip. From my first flight out of Los Alamos in 1970, when I was living there, to my last, in 1995, when I was visiting, I logged some eighty landings (and takeoffs), flying several models of Cessna aircraft as well as a Stinson, a Beech Bonanza, a Mooney, and a Bellanca Viking. It was manageable. One small problem was that almost all landings had to be made to the west and all takeoffs to the east on the single strip, to assure that approaching and departing planes didn’t fly over any lab buildings, and to take advantage of the west-to-east downslope of the runway. (Occasionally, in a roaring wind, takeoffs uphill or landing downhill were permitted.) In the late afternoon, landing at Los Alamos could be made interesting by having the bright southwestern sun full in your face. As one Carco pilot said to me after negotiating such a landing (as usual, I was riding in the co-pilot’s seat), “I couldn’t see the runway, so I had to feel for it.”
The Santa Fe Airport was managed by Charlie Boyd. He sold gas, ferried business people around the state, flew missions for the United States Forest Service in his Piper Super Cub, taught student pilots how to fly—and may have cut the grass, too. His airport had one paved runway and a couple of grass runways at other angles, used when the wind favored them. The Santa Fe Airport later became the Old Santa Fe Airport after the city built a bigger and better one a few miles away. The new one had three paved runways, one of them long enough to accommodate commercial airliners. (There was a time in the 1960s when you could board a TWA or Frontier or Trans-Texas flight in Santa Fe. After that, you had to drive to Albuquerque to get on a long-distance flight.) Still later, the Old Santa Fe Airport became an industrial park and State Police Headquarters. You would be hard pressed now to find evidence that it was once an airport.
My first flight with Charlie in my Ercoupe occurred on July 3, 1953, and lasted half an hour. This made for the first entry in my log book, under the heading “Dual.” Still sitting there on page 1 of the first of my seven log books is the signature C. J. Boyd and the notation C (for Certificate) 37769. (See end photos.)
The Ercoupe (usually pronounced AIR-coop) is a remarkable plane. Like most small planes at the time, it was built in a wave of airplane production right after World War II. More small planes were turned out in 1946-1947 than in all of the preceding years combined, and it’s likely that the 1946 single-year production has never been matched since. It was a gigantic peak. (And, as you might guess, most of the companies engaged in making planes then are no longer in business.) The Ercoupe was, for its time, quite advanced. It had a metal skin of shiny aluminum (I say “had” although quite a few of them are still flying). Most others of the period—the Aeroncas, Taylorcraft, and Pipers—had skeletons of steel rods covered with stretched fabric (many of those are still flying, too). The Ercoupe had a tricycle landing gear, meaning that it had two main wheels toward the middle of the plane and a nose wheel up front. On the ground, it sat more or less level. The competition had mostly “conventional” landing gear—two wheels further forward and a small tail wheel, or sometimes only a metal tail skid, at the back. Such a plane sits on the ground with its nose angling up toward the sky. This arrangement was the norm in the 1930s—thus the term “conventional”—but the tricycle gear has long since become the norm. The famous old DC-3, a workhorse of early airlines and of the military in the 1940s (and still flying, too!) had a conventional landing gear. Every airliner since has had tricycle gear.
And the Ercoupe was fast. With an engine of 75 horsepower (the earliest models had 65, later ones 85 horsepower), it could cruise at 100 miles per hour, thus easily passing automobile traffic below (actually, I have encountered headwinds so strong that freeway traffic on the ground was passing me). The fabric-covered “tail draggers,” as they were called, with similar engines, putted along more in the range of 80 to 90 miles per hour. The Ercoupe was designed—and eventually manufactured and sold—by a brilliant and little appreciated engineer named Fred Weick.[2] Back in the early 1930s he was an expert on propeller design and on the design of cowlings, the metal covers over engines. In the late 1930s he conceived the Ercoupe and had the savvy to make it as well as design it. His factory was located in Riverdale, Maryland, not far from the University of Maryland campus in College Park. Much later, when I was involved in selecting a site for a new physics building at that very place, I helped myself to a piece of the black pavement of the airstrip from which all the new Ercoupes had flown away from the factory, before that strip, on behalf of commercial development, was destroyed. That piece of runway, lacquered to keep it from blackening everything it touches, sits now on my desk as a valued paperweight. A colleague who was with me in 1992 when I asked that the car we were riding in stop so that I could get out and collect my piece of the runway said, “Ken, you’re weird.” He didn’t appreciate the romance of the air.
When learning to fly, the student pilot sits in the pilot’s seat but is not the “pilot in command.” Charlie had that honor. The rules of the sky are not unlike those of the sea; there is always a captain in command. Most of the two-place planes of the time—the “tail draggers”—had tandem seating. The student sat in front where the instruments and more of the outdoors were visible. Sitting behind, with at least a partial set of duplicate instruments in view, and ready to shout as needed, was the instructor. The Ercoupe, again ahead of its time, had side-by-side seating. The student sat on the left, the instructor on the right. Both types of airplanes had linked controls available so that the instructor could take over if necessary. Most tail draggers had a “stick” for each pilot, a vertical rod hinged at floor level between the pilot’s legs. Moving the stick fore and aft controlled the elevator on the tail to lower and raise the nose. Moving the stick left and right controlled the ailerons on the wings to bank the wings left or right. In the Ercoupe, and in many later planes, a wheel attached to a horizontal rod performed the same functions as a stick. The wheel could be pushed in or pulled out to control the elevator, and could be turned left or right to control the ailerons.
The tail draggers—and, in fact, every other airplane ever built, so far as I know, from Piper Cubs to Boeing 747s, except the Ercoupe—also had rudder pedals, linked together so that if the left pedal moved forward, the right pedal moved back. Rudder pedals control the rudder on the tail. Pushing the left pedal makes the rudder swing to the left, causing the flow of air past it to push the tail to the right, which in turn swings the nose to the left. Pushing the right pedal does the opposite. So, to go left, push left; to go right, push right. For a short time, this caused me a problem when I was introduced later that year to flying the Aeronca Champ, a classic taildragger. At first I couldn’t get out of my head my childhood experience with a kiddie car. In the kiddie car, the child’s feet rest on the two ends of a front axle that can swing. The rule is: To go left, push with the right foot; to go right, push with the left foot—opposite to the rule in the airplane. This short-term problem was postponed for me because of the Ercoupe’s lack of rudder pedals. This doesn’t mean the Ercoupe had no rudder. It did. Its rudder control was interconnected with the aileron control so that the wheel performed three functions, not two. This was an innovation that didn’t catch on.
Actually, the main function of a rudder is not to turn the plane. Turning is accomplished by banking, thus controlled mainly by the ailerons. What the rudder does is keep the controls “coordinated,” so that the direction in which the plane is moving through the air and the direction in which it is pointing are the same. Rudder pressure must be applied when entering and leaving a turn to keep this coordination. The problem is that there are times when the pilot doesn’t want the controls to be coordinated. This occurs when landing in a cross wind. In coordinated flight (mandated in an Ercoupe), the nose of the plane is pointing in the direction the plane is moving relative to the air, but not necessarily relative to the ground. Relative to the ground, the airplane is “crabbing,” with its nose tilted somewhat into the wind as it moves above the runway. So when an Ercoupe lands in a crosswind, it must execute a quick fouetté just after touching down, swinging its nose from whatever angle it had relative to the runway to alignment with the runway. With separate rudder control, the pilot can deliberately fly uncoordinated in the final approach to the landing (with crossed controls, as it’s called). Then the airplane, just before landing, has its upwind wing lowered a bit and its nose pointing along the runway. Now it’s crabbing relative to the air but not relative to the ground. (Years later, at La Guardia Airport, while I was waiting my turn to take off, I watched a parade of commercial jets landing in a cross wind. Their pilots maintained coordinated flight, with the planes’ noses not perfectly aligned with the runway, until just before touchdown. At the last moment, they kicked—perhaps literally—their planes into uncoordinated flight, pulling the nose around to point down the runway. The passengers got a smooth ride and a relatively gentle touchdown. No fouetté required.)
Once during my five weeks as a student pilot in Santa Fe, Charlie Boyd invited me to accompany him on a Forest Service mission over the Jemez mountains. I sat in the back of his Super Cub. (This plane is “super” in that it is a little larger than the old original Cub and a good deal more powerful. Like the original, it has fore-and-aft tandem seating and is a stick-and-rudder plane.) Charlie’s job that afternoon was to look for picnickers or campers who might be violating the current ban on camp fires, and perhaps incidentally to see if he spotted anyone who might appear to be in trouble. From aloft there wasn’t much he could do to enforce rules or to provide help, but he could report back and get someone on the ground to take action. Sure enough, before long we spotted a pair of what appeared to be consenting adults next to a campfire. Charlie decided to convey a message from the air. He lowered a wing, put the plane into a steep “slip” (achieved with crossed controls), and slid down into the canyon that sheltered the offenders. He flew low over them, waggled his wings, and then climbed out of the canyon. We didn’t have a chance to see if they got the message.
Charlie, had, of course, noticed before pulling off this stunt that he would have a way out. Among pilots, “box canyons” are famous killers. A pilot can find himself between canyon walls too close together to allow the plane to turn around, and with an end wall too high to outclimb. Charlie loved to fly, and looked for any way to add a bit of spice to a flight. On this one, after completing his reconnaissance, instead of descending gradually from his altitude over the Jemez toward the Santa Fe airport, he flew level, arriving directly over the airport about 3,000 feet above the ground. Without giving me any advance warning, he pulled the nose up steeply, holding it there until the plane’s speed fell below what was needed to sustain flight (a condition known as a stall—something determined by the aerodynamic condition of the plane, not the condition of the engine). Then, as the nose started to fall, Charlie moved the stick briskly as far to one side as he could, and at the same time pushed the opposite rudder as far forward as it would go. This is crossing the controls with a vengeance. The result, if it is executed properly, is a spin (sometimes known as a tailspin). With its nose pointing steeply downward, the plane corkscrews toward the ground like a winged maple seed. After spinning down 2,000 feet, Charlie stopped the spin, leveled out at traffic-pattern altitude, and turned around to flash me a big smile.
Spinning inadvertently, especially near the ground, and especially with an unseasoned pilot at the controls, is serious business. In the early days of flying, it accounted for many crashes and fatalities. Even now, spins ending tragically happen too often. It was precisely to prevent spins that Fred Weick left rudder pedals out of his Ercoupe. He didn’t do it just to make his plane easier to fly, but to make it safer. A meritorious goal, but in the end, the need to be able to cross the controls for useful purposes trumped this safety consideration. An airplane (or glider) without rudder pedals is now an anachronism.
I have known other pilots like Charlie. They give the impression of being daredevils, but they aren’t. They are skilled and they are careful. They always have in mind a way out if things don’t quite go as planned. They might want to be viewed as cowboys, but they are calculating cowboys. They are fearless but not foolish. They know what they are doing and they don’t risk their lives for no good reason. Mostly they die of old age, or at least some cause other than an airplane accident.
==========
1. This official elevation is for the highest point on the runway. Out west, where sloping runways are common, the difference between the high end and low end may be significant. Once, when gaining altitude after taking off from the airstrip at Eagle Nest, New Mexico, I glanced at my altimeter and noticed that I was well below the elevation where I had been when beginning the takeoff run.
2. Fred Weick tells his story with co-author James R. Hanson in From the Ground Up: The Autobiography of an Aeronautical Engineer (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988).
1895-1974
Photo courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (SI 2006-6849)
When Charlie Boyd was born, in 1895, aviation consisted of occasional ascents in hot-air balloons and short hops in primitive gliders. When he died, in 1974, jet planes were spanning oceans. The big event between those two dates that nearly everyone knows about is Charles Lindbergh’s non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. But Lindbergh wasn’t the first to fly the Atlantic. The first trans-Atlantic flight took place eight years earlier, and Charlie Boyd, although not part of the flying crew, had a hand in the success of that mission. On May 8, 1919, three giant flying boats, named NC-1, NC-3, and NC-4[3] (NC for Navy Curtiss), each with a crew of six, took off from the waters near Rockaway Beach, New York, close to the present site of JFK Airport. More than three weeks later, one of them, NC-4, touched down in the harbor of Plymouth, England, having hopscotched via Chatham, Massachusetts; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Trepassey, Newfoundland; Horta and Ponta Delgada in the Azores; and Lisbon, Mondego River, and Ferrol in Portugal. (NC-1 and NC-3 made forced landings on the ocean after covering most of the distance from Newfoundland to the Azores. NC-1 sank, but not before its crew members were rescued by a Greek freighter—embarrassing in a way because Navy destroyers were cruising in the vicinity to provide rescue services if needed. NC-3 miraculously stayed afloat despite damage and rough seas, and, more miraculously still, drifted two hundred miles to a harbor in the Azores, where the crew fired up its engines and taxied the last few miles. No air-crew lives were lost.)
In mid-March 1919, Charlie Boyd, a 23-year-old Navy Machinist’s Mate, was sent to Rockaway to help get the four (later three) planes ready for the great adventure. These were big planes. Each had four 400-horsepower engines, carried 1,800 gallons of gas, weighed 14 tons loaded, and stretched 126 feet from wingtip to wingtip. A few months earlier, one of them, NC-1, had carried fifty-one men aloft (a planned fifty plus one stowaway), a record at the time. On May 1, a week before the NC’s—affectionately called Nancys—took off, Charlie and other members of the ground support crew left New York on the converted mine sweeper Aroostook for Trepassey, Newfoundland, arriving there on May 3 as part of what the historian Richard K. Smith called the “great Naval invasion” of Trepassey.[4] On board the Aroostook were extra airplane engines and no end of assorted tools and equipment for the use of the support crew, as well as extra bunks and food for the larger-than-normal ship’s complement. Charlie and his crew mates were expected to work their magic on the big planes and their engines before their long hop to the Azores, and then later to tend to their needs in England.
On May 10, two days after leaving New York, NC-1 and NC-3 reached Trepassey, where, as Smith put it, “gangs of machinist’s mates” swarmed over them. NC-4 limped in five days later, on May 15, with one very sick engine and assorted other problems. Again the support crew “swarmed.” They worked all night and all the next day, installing a new engine and fixing other problems. By late afternoon on the 16th, the three planes were ready. They roared down the bay and were on their way to the Azores.
Some time that night—the night of May 16-17—the Aroostook’s captain weighed anchor and headed for Plymouth, England, intending to arrive there as soon as possible after the Nancys touched town. As it happened, he and the support crew, reaching Plymouth on May 23, had a week to relax before NC-4 made its triumphant if belated appearance. Talking to a reporter fifty years later, Charlie Boyd said that he and fourteen crew mates had been in Plymouth to welcome NC-4. When I first read that statement, before unearthing the chronology outlined here, I was mightily puzzled. How, I asked myself, could Charlie have serviced a plane just before its takeoff from North America and been in England to greet its arrival there? As Richard Smith put it, “An airplane was obviously not the quickest means of crossing the Atlantic in 1919.”
The task of Charlie and his crew mates in Plymouth was to make sure NC-4 was in shape for some ceremonial flights around western Europe, then to take it apart and see to its shipment back to America, and finally to reassemble it in Central Park in New York City for an admiring public. The historical record does not make crystal clear that Charlie was part of the Central Park exhibition, but it seems likely, for he wrote in one Navy document[5] that he was stationed in New York City for the month of July 1919, his last month of service in the Navy. According to a newspaper article at the time, the support crew of NC-4 served as security guards around the plane twenty-four hours per day while it was on display in Central Park.
After his honorable discharge from the Navy on August 7, 1919, Charlie set about trying to fashion a career in the still very new field of aviation. For a while, it was touch and go. He had to work on automobiles as well as airplanes, but eventually he gave up auto repair and became a full-time pilot and aircraft mechanic.
Over the years, Charlie was strangely reluctant to talk about his role in the 1919 trans-Atlantic flight. Periodically, reporters tracked him down: in 1929 on the tenth anniversary of the event, in 1939 on the twentieth anniversary, in 1944 on the twenty-fifth anniversary, and again in 1969 on the fiftieth anniversary. The 1929 report says that Charlie agreed to be interviewed only after a friend urged him to. The 1939 report says he had to be reminded about the event before discussing it. He was a bit more voluble in 1969, but several still-living friends of Charlie say that he never talked with them about his role in the 1919 flight.
Nevertheless, it was evidently meaningful to Charlie, for he carefully preserved two souvenirs that are now in the possession of his step-grandson. One is a 1919 medal commemorating the “First Annual Aeronautical Expedition New York,” attached to a red, white, and blue ribbon and mounted in a case that also contains a handwritten inscription by A. C. Read, the NC-4 pilot: “Presented to Chas J. Boyd by A. C. Read [who] Piloted the NC4, First Aircraft to Fly the Atlantic Ocean 1919.” Charlie’s other souvenir of that flight is a large barometer inside whose case is written, “Trans Atlantic NC 4 Flight May 16-31 . . .[with a list of en route stops] . . . C. J. Boyd M. M.”
Charlie Boyd was born in Clinton, Missouri. The details of his early life are lost in the mists of time. There’s no evidence that he attended college, although his later patents and his meticulous drawings in support of them suggest that he may have had some engineering training. In 1930 he secured a patent on an airplane with folding wings. Whether it was ever constructed I have not been able to ascertain. In 1936 he invented an automobile lubricator and, with the help of “several” traveling salesmen, sold more than three hundred of them around the Southwest: $7.50 for the large model, $3.75 for the small one. He reportedly made many other inventions.
Charlie joined the Navy in February 1918, some ten months after the U. S. entered World War I. His assignment as a machinist’s mate presumably reflected mechanical skills that he already possessed, although, in the ways of the military, it could have been unrelated to particular skills. After he left the Navy in August 1919, he went back to the Midwest in search of opportunities in aviation, and the following April went to work as an airplane mechanic for Harry Rinker in Salina, Kansas. Rinker, who described himself on his letterhead as “Aviator,” paid Charlie $45 per week to keep his one airplane flying. Through passenger rides, demonstrations, banner towing, photography, instruction, and lectures, Rinker hoped to make a living in his chosen profession of Aviator. When business slowed after a few months, he let Charlie go, and not too many months after that, folded up his operation.
I have not been able to find out when and how Charlie learned to fly. When he moved to Amarillo, Texas in 1927 it was to open a garage and filling station. By 1929 he was building an airplane in the back of his garage and by the late 1930s he was managing the Amarillo Municipal Airport. In 1938 he participated in a grand celebration called “National Air Mail Week.” On May 19 of that year, an overwhelming 1,700 volunteer pilots flew a total of 134,000 miles for the United States Post Office Department to make it possible for every American in every small town to post an airmail letter and have it winging its way toward a destination on that same day. Charlie’s assignment, in the course of a few hours that afternoon, was to fly from Amarillo to Happy, Texas to Tulia, Texas, to Silverton, Texas (serving also Quitaque, Texas), to Lubbock, Texas, and back to Amarillo, delivering and collecting mail pouches at every stop. (In Amarillo, commercial airliners took over.) In Happy, Charlie reported, “Field small and close to town; large crowd.” In Silverton, he reported, “Field looked like a lake so landed north of town.” Leaders of the towns with no designated landing strips furnished Charlie with drawings and instructions such as, “There is a small farm just west of the open space. This open space begins just South of the Section House and nearly even with the stock pens.
If the pilot will land along side of the little farm he will avoid the wires along the railroad track.” Speaking a few weeks later, Postmaster General James Farley was able to say that “not a single letter was lost nor a single pilot killed.”
As early as 1930 Charlie was supplementing his automobile business by working on damaged airplanes, but it was some years after that before he could make a living in aviation alone. He moved from Amarillo to Santa Fe probably around 1944 and managed Boyd Aero Services there for thirty years. (He was 79 when he died in 1974.) Like so many in aviation, he had to piece together an income from a variety of sources. He taught students (including me). He flew passengers with the means and the need to get somewhere quickly. He flew the noted nature photographer Laura Gilpin around her beloved Southwest. He flew for the Forest Service and for the New Mexico Fish and Game Department.
One of his jobs for the Fish and Game Department was “planting” fingerling trout (“trout fry”) in the cold, high-altitude lakes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (some above 11,000 feet). He practiced by dropping water from a special hopper on his Super Cub onto a small target at the Santa Fe Airport, and became widely admired for his precision in dropping thousands of the trout fry exactly where they should go in the middle of small lakes. Most of this work was done soon after dawn before turbulence and up and down drafts interfered. Even so, it was tricky work. I can see Charlie flashing his trademark smile at a drop done just right.
Everyone who knew Charlie has some story to tell. The manager of the airport in Las Vegas, New Mexico (not to be confused with Las Vegas, Nevada) told me one such story. On a dark and stormy night, Charlie was preparing to take off from Las Vegas to make his way back to Santa Fe. His friends in Las Vegas counseled him against it, urging him to stay the night and fly home in the morning. Charlie’s answer was, “If the trains can make it, I can make it.” What he intended to do was follow the Santa Fe Railroad line as it snaked through canyons and up and over Glorieta Pass on its way to the smoother terrain near Santa Fe. Charlie knew that there were signal lights along the track at one-mile intervals. He knew the country intimately and figured he could see from one signal light to the next and let them guide him home. It worked. He took off and he made it.
Another story I heard from at least two sources is the cat story. It seems that a wealthy woman had hired Charlie to fly her and her cat to a cat show in either Las Vegas, Nevada or Long Beach, California (memories differ). The cat was quite agitated in its cage as the flight got under way, but calmed down after a while. Somewhere over Arizona, the woman asked Charlie if it would be OK to let the cat out of the cage. He said, “Sure, but be careful. My upholstery is brand new.” The cat, once free, became agitated again and started to claw the new upholstery on Charlie’s Cessna 190. Not being able to catch the cat, Charlie rolled down the window on his side (this plane had windows like those in cars that were cranked up and down). The cat, in its rampage, leaped out the window and was last seen with all four paws stretched out as if anticipating a soft landing 3,000 feet below. According to one second-hand teller of this tale, Charlie, biting down on his unlit cigar, said, “Well, whadda ya wanna do now, lady?” She reputably answered, “Keep going. I’ve got to get me a new cat.”
Charlie’s obituary says he “was noted for his ability in stunt flying and in demonstrations as how not to fly an airplane.” What that tells me is that he simply loved to fly. He loved to make people think he was reckless. Once, for instance, when a strong wind was blowing he lined up his Super Cub at the hangar pointing into the wind toward the big tetrahedron that indicates wind direction, roared toward it, hopped over it, and landed beyond it, all within the space of a few hundred feet. Charlie died old and in bed. He is known to have had only one mishap, when he snagged a power line while landing at night in Santa Fe. He did some damage to the airplane but not to himself—if you don’t count the psychological impact.
Charlie was also noted among his flying peers in New Mexico for his abilities as a mechanic. He had no peer in repairing fabric-covered airplanes and had the unusual ability to weld aluminum. He had an A&P (aircraft and power plant) license that authorized him to repair planes, but not an IA (inspection authorization) license that allowed him to sign off on their airworthiness. For years he had an arrangement with Gilly de Baca in Las Vegas, New Mexico, whereby Charlie would do the work and Gilly (who had an IA license) would sign off on it. Gilly had so much respect for Charlie’s work that he just did a quick walk-around and then took care of the paperwork. When Gilly retired, Charlie was in a fix—or thought he was—because his cantankerous personality had led to friction with all the other people in the flying business in the Santa Fe area. Here’s the story of how things worked out all right after all, as told by Fred Duran, a mechanic and an IA who worked for, and later became the president of, Post Aviation, a principal fixed-base operator in Santa Fe.
“Charlie called the FAA and said, ‘How am I going to get this plane inspected? Cuss, cuss.’ And the guy at the FAA said, ‘Well, the closest person to you is Fred Duran.’
‘Where the hell is he?’ Charlie said.
‘Well, he’s over at Post Aviation.’
‘Well, how the hell is that going to work? I don’t like those SOB’s at Post.’
‘Well, you’ll like him. He’s nice enough.’
“Charlie called me and you could tell he was just mad as hell over even having to call me. He said, ‘You’re Fred Duran, right? Well, I’ve got a Pawnee here to inspect. I did a major repair on it and it needs relicensing.”
‘Fine, Charlie. What’s convenient for you?’ He was taken aback that I wanted to know what his schedule was. He said, ‘Well, I’d like to have it done by tomorrow.’
‘What time of the day?’ I said.
‘Well, can you be here at 9:00 in the morning?’
“‘Yeah, I’ll be there.’
‘Another thing,’ he says, ‘I don’t know how to do paperwork. Gilly always did that for me.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it for you.’
“So I went over and opened the hangar door and this beautiful Pawnee’s sitting there but it was buttoned up, not open as you’d expect it would be for inspection. And he says, ‘I suppose you’re going to ask me to open it up.’
‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘When a whippersnapper like me wants to insult you by wanting you to open your plane to look at it, if I were you I’d take offense at that. I just need to see the log books. And I’ll do a walk-around and admire your work.’
“Suddenly I could do no wrong. He was showing off all his work and how he re-covered the tail. It was a beautiful job. It really was. We got through the walk-around and went into his office. I did the paperwork. Nothing to do by then but I’d better go have lunch with him. Then after having lunch I had to see his shotgun loading equipment. Pretty much took me most of the afternoon to get away from him.”
All of Charlie’s flying compatriots seem to agree. He was a superb pilot, a superb mechanic, and an ornery cuss. But I guess he had a way with the ladies. According to Mary Lou Montgomery, the daughter-in-law of Charlie’s second wife: “Charlie Boyd was a wonderful, kind-hearted person. He had lots of young friends. He knew everyone in Santa Fe.“
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3. NC-2 was left behind as an unflyable “hangar queen.” She had graciously donated a wing to NC-1, whose own wing had been lost to surf when a storm had come up while she was at anchor in the bay.
5. In this same document, the dates Charlie lists for his time in Rockaway, Trepassey, and Plymouth don’t track exactly with the Aroostook’s log, but he does record that his embarkation for overseas service was on the Aroostook. Some of what I report here as fact about Charlie’s service are only my best surmises based on available evidence.
After about three weeks, Charlie Boyd either got tired of me or got too busy with other things. I was passed laterally to another instructor, who, in turn, handed me off to another (still under Charlie’s oversight). On August 8, 1953, five weeks into my flying career, I had logged eleven hours of dual instruction and was feeling about ready to solo. But events intervened, and that great moment didn’t occur until December, four months later. Another great moment was looming on the calendar, my upcoming wedding. I traveled back to Princeton, my bride-to-be traveled with me to Los Alamos, we were married, we honeymooned in Colorado and Utah (in the $200 Chevrolet), and we drove to Bloomington, Indiana, where I was to take up my new duties at the university there.
Once we got settled, I made my way to the local airport, Kisters Field. I explained my small dilemma to John Myers, the airport manager: My airplane was 1,500 miles away and I wasn’t authorized to fly it to Indiana. He put me in touch with a congenial undergraduate who had just earned his flying license and was eager to log more hours. For the price of a bus ticket to Santa Fe and gas money for the flight back, he was more than happy to do it. Come Thanksgiving time, he carried out the mission. In early December, an instructor in Bloomington took me through my paces, and on December 10, having logged twelve hours of dual instruction with four instructors, I soloed. After a short dual flight that day, the instructor said, casually, “I think I’ll have a cup of coffee. Why don’t you take it up.” He ambled over to the operations shack as if totally unconcerned, and take it up I did. I was pretty sure he was glued to the window watching my takeoff and landing, but he hinted at no anxiety. Afterwards, I got the traditional congratulations from the few people who were gathered, but escaped their scissors, probably because I was wearing a dress shirt. According to tradition, the newly soloed pilot has his or her tee shirt cut off (yes, even if it’s a her). With a marker pen, the shirt is labeled with the pilot’s name and the date, and hung on the office wall.
Dual instruction doesn’t end with the solo flight. By the time I took the exam for a pilot’s license in February, I had accumulated eighteen hours of dual instruction, on top of 25 hours of solo time. Fifty years later, my log book shows that out of my total flight time of 4,504 hours (I stopped flying in 2003), 159 hours were flown with an instructor. These flights with instructors were for many purposes—checking out in new airplanes, learning to fly gliders, learning to fly on instruments, taking instrument competency check rides, and taking annual check rides in tow planes and gliders.
Today the average student pilot, before taking the private pilot exam, amasses more time, both dual and solo, than I did. I did not have to take a written exam or submit to “ground school” instruction. I did not have to learn how to navigate by radio or how to keep the plane upright in a cloud. I couldn’t have: My airplane had no radio navigation equipment and had no gyroscopic instruments, which are necessary to retain control with no outside visibility. In fact, because I took my flight test at a small, uncontrolled, unpaved field in Franklin, Indiana, I didn’t even have to use my rudimentary communications radio.
I used the rest of that academic year to build time, flying to various destinations in Indiana and in neighboring states, sometimes with a passenger, sometimes in a gaggle of two planes when a fellow pilot would rather fly his own plane than ride with me. A couple of times, I flew into Meigs field on the Chicago lakefront, a field later made famous as the home base in the Microsoft Flight Simulator program. When a friend gave me that program and I tried it out, I kept crashing on the runway or in Lake Michigan. I gave it up, deciding that flying airplanes was a lot easier than flying a simulator on a home computer. Naturally, when I had a “business” reason to fly, such as attending a meeting or giving a talk, I tried to go in my own airplane. My Ercoupe carried me to Ohio State University and to the University of Michigan that spring.
And, as I am about to narrate, painful though it is to do so, I made one flight to Washington, D.C.
It is said that along about 100 hours of experience, pilots are prone to get overconfident and to do stupid things, sometimes not surviving their stupidity. My turn to exhibit astonishing stupidity came after eighty hours of flying. I had to attend a meeting in Washington at the end of April 1954 and decided to fly myself there—in an airplane with no navigational radio, no gyroscopic instruments, and a communications radio that was marginal at best. I found a graduate student who wanted to come along and we set out on April 28. After stops in Cincinnati and Galipolis, Ohio, we had to call it a day in Elkins, West Virginia because clouds sat low over the mountains farther east. We found a motel within walking distance of the field. In the morning we checked the weather. The clouds of the night before were gone and the forecast was for scattered to broken clouds east of the mountains over Virginia, with ceilings (distances from the ground to the bases of the clouds) of 1,000 to 2,000 feet. It sounded OK and we charged into the air. (It shouldn’t have sounded OK. “Scattered” is encouraging; “broken” is not.)
Then, as so often happens, reality didn’t match the forecast. As we cleared the higher mountains, we saw that the clouds to the east were neither scattered nor broken. They were solid, in a flat stratus layer that seemed to stretch indefinitely ahead of us. The sensible thing, of course, would have been to execute a 180-degree turn and fly back to Elkins. Instead, I pushed on until I was sure (pretty sure), according to the clock, that I was past the high ground and over the low country of central Virginia. I descended to just above the top of the stratus layer in order to get some sense of how thick it might be. My altimeter showed about 2,500 feet above sea level. Since I expected the ground in this area to be around 300 to 500 feet above sea level, and since the ceiling was forecast to be at least 1,000 feet, I reasoned (if you can call it reasoning) that the cloud layer could hardly be more than 1,000 feet thick. I thought (if you can call it thinking) that I should be able to descend safely through it without proper instrumentation. I leveled off just skimming the top of the cloud layer, then throttled back to a low power setting and held the speed to about 85-90 miles per hour, enough to assure a fairly brisk descent. Down we went. Indeed the cloud was only about 1,000 feet thick, but it seemed an awfully long time to get through it as we slid down through the murk. When green fields appeared mistily beneath us, we were not flying level anymore, but spiraling downward in a bank of about 30 degrees.
I quickly leveled out, giving no hint to my passenger that there was the least danger or that this sort of thing wasn’t something pilots do every day. “Well,” I said to him, “with this much haze and this low a ceiling, we should not try to fly on to Washington. Let’s look for an airfield.” Of course, I had only the sketchiest idea of where we were. I headed northeasterly and—good luck—almost at once an airport appeared, a small one with grass runways. We landed, tied down, and then learned that we were in Culpeper, Virginia.
By now, you can surmise that this tale of ineptitude and bad judgment has a happy ending. In fact, it has an amusing little twist.
A bus brought me and my passenger to Washington that afternoon. My passenger went his way (he had not planned to return with me in any case) and I checked into the hotel where I had a reservation. I learned that the first bus to Culpeper in the morning left at 5:00 a.m. I caught it. The bus driver was kind enough to drop me a relatively short walk from the airport, which was unmanned and unguarded at that hour. I made my way to my plane, untied it, did the pre-flight, and took off for Washington, intending to call Washington National Airport when I was about thirty miles from it and get clearance to land there. But my troubles were not at an end. My radio failed to work. No response. My map showed a little suburban airport in northern Virginia not far from Washington National. I landed there and found it, too, unmanned. Moreover it seemed to have no public telephone. I walked out to a neighboring road, stuck out my thumb, and caught a ride a mile or so to where a public phone was visible on a corner. From that phone I called the control tower at Washington National and explained my situation, asking if I could land in order to get my radio fixed. The controller could not have been more accommodating. “Can you be over the field at 11:00?” he asked. I checked my watch, and said, “Yes, I think so.” “Good,” he said. “Fly across the field heading west to east at 1,200 feet, at exactly 11:00 o’clock, and look for a light. Make a right-hand pattern to land on runway 3.”
I rushed back to the road, stuck out my thumb again, and was lucky again. I got back to my plane and into the air with a bit of time to spare, circled near the small airport, then headed east as directed. Looking down toward the tower, I saw, sure enough, a green light aimed at me, signaling that I was cleared to land. Once I was on the ground, a “Follow Me” jeep led me to a parking space. The radio got fixed and I departed two days later. To this day, I have never met another pilot who landed at National Airport without a functioning radio.
I guess you could call the return trip anticlimactic. It took seven-and-a-half hours in the air bucking a head wind, with fuel stops in Huntington, West Virginia, and Lexington, Kentucky, before settling onto the grass in Bloomington.
Descending through that cloud near Culpeper was not the only dumb thing I have ever done in the air, but it is probably the dumbest. I never tempted fate quite so blatantly again. One among my serious errors that day was trusting that the ceiling over Virginia would be about as forecast. It didn’t take me long to learn that weather forecasting, at least for a particular location, is full of uncertainty. Remarkably, although area forecasting improved greatly over the next fifty years, predicting conditions at a particular airport for a particular time is about as chancy now as it was then. The atmosphere is a complex and tricky system that can outfox the best computers. The butterfly effect is real.[6]
In the years ahead, I did become a pretty good and pretty careful pilot. Apart from the general accumulation of experience, the biggest contributor to safety (and sensible behavior) was earning an instrument rating, something I did in 1960, adding a commercial license a year later. The instrument rating, if kept alive through regular use and/or regular check rides with instructors, allows a pilot to fly through clouds under control from the ground, and to make instrument approaches to many airports. Needless to say, using the rating requires that the planes one flies have all the right instruments to make such flight practical and safe.
In 1958, before I had an instrument rating, I had an experience that illustrates well the difference in safety between flying (legally) through clouds and ducking under them. I was on my way from Bedford, Massachusetts, near Boston, to College Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, flying an Ercoupe, which, like my earlier one, had no gyroscopic instruments. Because ceilings were low in the northeast (not quite so low around Washington), I planned to make an end run around New York City, heading west across Connecticut, crossing the Hudson River well north of New York, then angling southward toward my destination. As I approached the Hudson, I was “scud-running” under a 1,000-foot ceiling with visibility of two or three miles. The Hudson, where I chose to cross it, was wide—too wide to see from one side to the other on that particular morning. Out over the river, the water, the horizon, and the sky merged into a single murky grayness. Descending quickly to 500 feet, I could make out the water surface well enough to tell which direction was up. I pushed ahead until trees and houses appeared on the far shore. I landed at the first airport I could find, in New City, New York, and waited for the weather to improve (which it did). Had I had an instrument rating (and a suitable airplane), the flight would have been safe and simple. Instead, it was pushing to the very limit or a little beyond the limit of safe flying.
There. Almost full disclosure. Now I have described two occasions when my poor judgment put me in grave danger. Descending through the cloud layer near Culpeper and feeling my way across the scarcely visible Hudson happened early in my career, a high-risk time for any pilot. A third near-brush with disaster came later, more the result of negligence than poor judgment—if there’s a difference—and fortunately ended without mishap, too. I’ll come to it in Chapter 7. Every close call remains vivid.
By the time I reached 1,000 hours a dozen years after my first flight (ten years of flying, actually, because of two leaves of absence for study and research in Europe), I felt that I had become a reasonably safe and a reasonably sensible pilot. When I stopped flying after fifty years, I estimate that I had made 8,000 landings, give or take a thousand, at more than 450 different airports and landing strips, from Burris Ranch in New Mexico (where the strip doubles as a driveway) to O’Hare International in Chicago, flying some 55 different models of airplanes and gliders, the biggest of the lot capable of holding six people, the smallest accommodating the pilot alone with no passengers. The airports and air strips where I touched down were in 42 states plus Mexico and Canada. Only once did I damage an airplane (actually a glider) on landing.
Another time, I came perilously close to landing a retractable-gear airplane with the gear up—the kind of event that has embarrassed many a pilot. On that occasion, I was just about to land at Washington National Airport (this time with a radio) when, at the last moment, the tower asked me to change to a different runway—probably because a following jet was getting too close. That entailed turning and climbing a few hundred feet before turning again and descending again. I raised the landing gear for the maneuver and was close to touchdown on the revised runway when at last I remembered that the gear was now up. I was saved by a little mental check list that I liked to run through on final approach. It’s called GUMP, and stands for Gas
(is the correct tank feeding the engine?), Undercarriage (is it down?), Mixture (is it set correctly for the airport’s altitude?), and Prop (is the pitch set properly in case power needs to be applied to go around?).
Then there is the hazard of an engine quitting in the air. This happened to me only twice—the same engine, actually, quitting twice for the same reason, the accumulation of ice blocking air from entering the carburetor. Since the plane in question (an Aeronca Champ) had no electric starter and had to be hand-cranked, having it stop in flight created a challenge. The first time it happened, I was high over the Indiana countryside practicing spins. (Why spin on purpose? To reduce the surprise and alarm factor in case of some future inadvertent spin. And because it’s fun.) So, for the first time in the air, I was looking at a stationary propeller. Fortunately, I had room enough to dive, causing the propeller to spin and enabling me to restart the engine. The second time it happened, with the same plane, I was in the traffic pattern at a small airport in Hinsdale, Illinois, on a frigid January day in 1957. I was able to glide down and land on the runway in what is known as a dead-stick landing. (It’s actually the engine, not the stick, that is dead.) Then I had to get out, spin the prop by hand, jump back in the plane before it left me behind, and taxi to parking. Glider pilots like to say that gliders are safer than power planes because they don’t have an engine to quit.
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6. It was the MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz who famously asked, in 1972, “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?”
1916-1991
Photo courtesy of Chuck & Dow Myers
“When John wasn’t at the airport, what did he do?” I asked John Myers’ sons Chuck and Dow.
“He went to the airport,” answered Chuck.
“And took us with him,” added Dow. “He needed the extra hands.”
“I can hardly remember a single vacation as a child,” said Chuck. “That airport was Dad’s life. We grew up there.”
Since Chuck is now a professional pilot and Dow, an enforcement officer with Indiana’s Department of Natural Resources, expresses regret that he didn’t complete his flight training, their father’s single-minded dedication to aviation must have drawn them toward flying more than it pushed them away from it.