I love airplanes. That includes little paper planes that you fold from a sheet of notebook paper right up to the Space Shuttle, and everything in between. When I was a kid, like 6 years old, a guy flying a Piper J3 Cub ran out of fuel and made an emergency landing in the field next to our house. I didn’t see it coming but out of nowhere, there it was rolling to a stop not a hundred feet from our back porch. It was yellow with high wings and a little tail wheel, no bigger than a donut. When he realized he was running out of gas, he shut the motor off and glided in. He was climbing out as I got there; asked me where my dad was. I pointed toward the garage but Dad was already stepping over the fence into the tall grass.
We had a couple of gallons in the mower's gas can but the pilot said that would do just fine. He offered to pay but Dad told him no, the excitement was worth it. While he was pouring gas, I looked inside. There were two seats, one in front of the other and not room for much else. I asked if I could go for a ride and he said we’d have to wait until another time. He picked up the tail and turned the plane around so it was pointed up hill, fooled with the controls and stood beside the motor as he pulled the prop through. We were all huddled by the fence when the engine sputtered and he jumped inside. He revved up the motor and the prop blast made all the grass behind him wallow in the wind.
The little yellow plane bounced through the grass a ways and turned around, pointed down the slope toward Blue Ridge Rd. Dad said, “He has to take off into the wind.” I asked why but the answer was lost in the excitement and the noise. It was a bouncy takeoff and on one bounce the plane just didn’t come back down; it stayed up. The pitch of the engine changed as it flew up and away, just like in the movies. Clearing the power lines and the road, he turned north and was soon out of sight.
It never occurred to me that I might become a pilot and life never took me that direction. But there was a time when I jumped out of perfectly good airplanes as part of my job (U.S.Army) and then just for fun as well. There is a saying among pilots; “Any landing that you walk away from is a good landing.” The same could be said about parachutes. I got the parachutes out of my system and I know why you have to take off into the wind but I still watch airplanes with the same eyes I first saw the J3 Cub.
Today I was taking photographs at Lake Hood Airport, Anchorage, Alaska, the busiest sea plane base in the world. Planes, mostly single engine, taxi across and down the far side to the east end of the lake, then roar up the chute with water spraying out from under the pontoons. As they gain speed the size of the wake and the pitch of the engine tell when they were about to lift off. Then when they landed, it was like rolling to a stop on a bicycle. Smooth and easy, no strain, just a touch of the brake and put your foot down before you fall over. They stretch the glide out until the pontoons kiss the surface, kicking up a fine spray mist and then settling; the airplane becomes an airboat.
I have a favorite airplane. The J3 Cub is special but I’ve grown up and so has my taste in aircraft. After WWII, the De Havilland Co. from Canada, built a single engine work horse to supply the needs of bush pilots in the Great North Country. The DH2 Beaver flew equally well off wheels, skis or pontoons. The U.S. Army used Beavers as light transports from the 60’ through the 80’s. We jumped out of DH2’s on both military and sport activities and they won me over, straight out. Both strong and reliable, they can carry 6 passengers or nearly a ton of cargo. Now, most of the surviving Beavers live and work in Alaska. When I see one come up off the water I flash back to another life and it's still good. I must have taken a couple of hundred pictures.
Too soon to go home, I still wanted to hang around so I stopped at one of the Flight Services. They fly freight and passengers all over the state. There were 3 Beavers at the dock along with 2 Otters. Otters are the next De Havilland generation after the Beaver: bigger, stronger and more efficient but they’re sleek, don’t have the throwback, retro look of the Beaver. They were loading one for a cargo flight to a remote destination, only reachable by air. The load included a 75 hp. outboard motor, a double-stainless steel deep sink, two 45 gallon barrels of motor oil, a fair size satellite dish and several large coils of electrical cable: too much for the Beaver. Then a party walked out from the office to the front Beaver, 4 or 5 guys with duffle bags, fishing rods and tackle boxes, climbed in and took off for a fishing rendezvous somewhere I can only imagine. I watched ‘em take off, climb into the sun and as I had to look away they banked away and I heard the engine change from a whine to a rumbly kind of thunder, just like in the movies.
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