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  I sat in the back and watched and listened as he taxied out; then I lifted away from the earth for the first time and felt suspended, completely dependent on the little airplane holding me. Piloting didn’t seem terribly complicated.

  I’D BE TRAINING AT the Raleigh-Durham Airport, where my mother had taken me all those years before to see my first airplane on the ground. The airport sits on land where my mother and previous generations of her family lived from the eighteenth century until the airport was built in the late 1930s. Less than a half mile from the airport boundary is a family graveyard with twenty-six graves. I’ve been there almost every year of my life for an annual grave cleaning.

  The Cherokee 140 and the Basics

  IN THE 1960S, CIVILIAN INSTRUCTORS hired by the government taught ROTC student pilots to fly. Mr. Vaughn (I don’t think I ever learned his first name), about fifty, medium build, dyed black hair with a bald spot in back, was in charge of me and several other student pilots. Not an exceptionally able teacher, he was consistent and very safety conscious. Occasionally Mr. Vaughn displayed a sort of self-congratulatory and awkward sense of humor. But only occasionally. In fact, rarely. Maybe twice. He usually seemed a bit nervous, which didn’t make me feel at ease. And he sniffed a lot: “If you’ll check under here”—sniff, sniff—“you can see exactly how much strut extension is normal.”

  As we walked out to the aircraft, a two-seater Piper Cherokee, for my first flight, Mr. Vaughn spoke as if he’d said the same thing many times, as he surely had. What he said about the external preflight check held generally true for all the airplanes I’d ever fly. While he talked, Mr. Vaughn held his checklist—a little book—in his hand, and he insisted on the importance of using the checklist, not memory, so that nothing would be missed. My checklist was open and I was ready to follow along.

  I’d studied the Cherokee 140 flight manual the night before, imagining how the real, live airplane would look up close in the morning.

  There it sat, waiting, dew on the wings and windshield.

  The first preflight went something like this:

  1. “Approaching the aircraft, you look for general condition: no flat tires”—sniff, sniff—“no leaks of oil, gas, or hydraulic fluid beneath the aircraft.”

  2. Mr. Vaughn stepped up onto the wing and opened the cockpit door. “Look inside and be sure there are no keys in the ignition and that all the switches are where they should be. Remember this always: the guy who flew before you”—sniff, sniff (and here he looked at me as if to announce the punch line)—“is the dumbest pilot in the world. He left all the switches in the wrong position. And guess what? He’s going to fly after you too, so you better leave everything just right for him.” I looked in at the instrument panel, which was familiar from my studying. The electric, leather, and fabric smell of the interior masked another faint smell: fear.

  3. “Now, back outside.” He walked to the front of the airplane, and I followed. “Open the cowling, like this, just like a car hood, and check the oil level and general condition of the engine. No loose wires and so forth. Check here and here.” The engine looked very clean. (I didn’t think about its operating mostly in the sky away from dirt and dust.) “Close and latch the cowling.”

  4. “Check the propeller.” Sniff. “Nicks in the propeller can really affect performance. It might not seem like they could, but they can.” My hand followed his along the smooth edge of the propeller.

  5. “Okay—now let’s check the extension of the front wheel strut, under here. This is where cushioning comes in on landing. That’s about what you want, right there, about four inches. Think of a pogo stick. Hydraulic fluid does that. Does other jobs too, like the flaps, so you look carefully for leaks.”

  6. “Now check the leading edge of the wing. Strong aluminum like the rest of the exterior. Be sure there are no dents or nicks that might interrupt the smooth flow of air over the wing. You’d be surprised how much drag a little dent or nick can cause.”

  Mr. Vaughn placed his hand against the leading edge of the wing and walked along sniffing and talking, and I followed, staring at his bald spot, trying to remember as much as possible.

  We, the student pilots, were also taking academic classes about flying. One book I did not read back in those days is Wolfgang Langewiesche’s classic Stick and Rudder. But I was absorbing some of its lessons. Langewiesche says,

  Get rid at the outset of the idea that the airplane is only an air-going sort of automobile. It isn’t. It may sound like one and smell like one, and it may have been interior-decorated to look like one: but the difference is—it goes on wings. And a wing is an odd thing, strangely behaved, hard to understand, tricky to handle.

  I was learning that when moving into the wind, the shape of a wing causes air to rush over its top faster than across its bottom, creating lift, a kind of suction from above. Langewiesche describes it as a pushing from below. As an aircraft reaches a certain speed along the runway, the wind pushes up the wings and the wings lift the airplane right up off the ground and into the air, and generally speaking, as long as the forward speed is fast enough, the airplane is held up in the air by the wings. The faster the forward speed, the more the wing is lifted. The propeller, turned by the engine, is pulling the airplane through the air whether the airplane is on the ground or not. An airplane propeller works, in principle, like a boat propeller. A jet airplane is pushed along by a kind of sustained explosion out the rear of the engine.

  I’LL LEAVE MR. VAUGHN for a minute and explain a few more fundamentals.

  To change the direction and speed of an airplane’s path through the air, the pilot moves controls inside the cockpit: (1) the stick coming up from the floor (or the yoke on the end of a rod projecting out from the instrument panel), (2) the rudder pedals beneath the feet, and (3) the throttle (usually a lever on a console or a knob located on the instrument panel).

  The stick: If the airplane is flying straight and level, then the stick is centered. Move it forward, and the nose drops. Pull it toward you, and the nose rises. Push it left for a left turn, and right for a right turn. In the Cherokee 140, and in most civilian aircraft built since about 1950, a yoke has replaced the stick. The yoke looks like the lower half of a small automobile steering wheel. You turn it left, as you would an automobile steering wheel (instead of moving the stick left), and it causes the left wing to drop and the right wing to rise. You push it forward and pull it back to lower and raise the airplane’s nose, just as with a stick.

  The rudder pedals: A vertical rudder (like a boat rudder) at the back of the aircraft, located on the back edge of the vertical stabilizer (the part of the tail that sticks up), is controlled by the rudder pedals and sometimes helps turn the aircraft left or right. The rudder can also help control the aircraft at slow speeds.

  The throttle: The throttle lever or knob adjusts a valve that helps control how fast or slow you go. Of course, pointing the nose up or down also changes speed, because gravity is always working for you or against you, depending on what is needed.

  Sit in the pilot’s seat for a minute. If the engine unexpectedly quits while you are high in the air, then point the nose down a little bit and you’ll pick up enough speed to provide lift for the wings, and the airplane will fly just fine, though it’s gliding downward. The steeper the glide angle, the faster you go. Level out just a foot or so above the ground. (I’m assuming you’re over the Nevada salt flats, a wide expanse of hard, level ground.) As airspeed decreases, lift decreases; but you can keep flying just above the ground by steadily increasing back pressure on the stick between your legs. Soon you reach a very slow airspeed and there’s not enough lift on the wings to keep you up. You’ll touch down gently and roll to a stop. No engine necessary—like a glider.

  On the other hand, if you’re flying along and the engine quits and you raise the nose or try to hold the nose up and not let it point down, there’ll be less and less wind flow under and over the wings, and the plane will get so slow that it finally
becomes uncontrollable. This is a stall, and after a stall the wings are ineffective, gravity takes over, and the airplane starts falling, regardless of which way the nose is pointing.

  You can demonstrate how a wing works by holding your hand stiff and sticking it out the window of a fast-moving automobile, as if your hand were an airplane wing. You’ve done this before, of course. Your hand is shaped like an airplane wing: flat along the bottom (the palm) and curved over the top, with the edge out front (the index finger) thicker than the trailing edge (the little finger)—a shape that creates lift. When your hand is at just the right angle to the onrushing wind, you feel your hand being lifted. Think of that as the angle at which the wing is fastened onto the fuselage (or body) of the airplane. If your hands were big enough and you could stick them out both car windows and hold them stiffly at just the right angle to the oncoming wind, then at a certain speed the car, with you in it, would lift into the air. But once the car wheels left the ground, the forward speed would quickly drop and you’d fall back to the road.

  MR. VAUGHN STOPPED along the leading edge of the wing. I picture myself, studying my checklist, walking into him.

  7. “Stall-warning lever check: Okay”—sniff—“here in the leading edge of the wing is this very small, flat horizontal lever, about the size of a nickle, see? It’s loose and it jiggles. Anytime you get too slow and there’s not enough wind coming over it”—sniff—“it drops and a stall-warning horn sounds in the cockpit and the red stall light blinks. So you want to be sure this little lever is free to move up and down. Like that. See?”

  8. “Pitot tube check.” Mr. Vaughn turned to look at me, then looked back beneath the wing, near the stall-warning lever. “It’s pronounced PEE-tow. This little bladelike object picks up the wind flow, see. It’s hollow.” He bends a bit and looks. “The wind flow through there tells your airspeed indicator how fast you’re going. So you want to be sure it’s not stopped up by a dead bumblebee, or mud, else you won’t know your airspeed.”

  9. “Static port check,” said Mr. Vaughn, reading from his checklist. “Here, on this same bladelike device, are several tiny holes not much bigger than pinholes. They’re called static ports, and the air that goes into them allows your altimeter to determine air pressure and then tell you your altitude above sea level. Be sure the holes are clear.”

  Air does not know how high it is above the ground, but it does know how high it is above sea level—and your altimeter records that height. If you’re sitting on the ground in Denver, Colorado, the altimeter says you are 5,431 feet up. If you then fly to Death Valley in California and land, your altimeter reads minus 282 feet up.

  10. “Now we walk on around to the back part of the wing,” said Mr. Vaughn. I followed along. “Near the outer edge of the wing here is a flipper that moves up and down. An aileron. We move it up and down to be sure it’s not binding. When you lift this one, the other one—over there on the other wing—lowers.”

  At times Mr. Vaughn confused me. But I was hesitant to ask questions. Our relationship didn’t allow a casual familiarity. But I knew not to go long without answers to questions. And sometimes after reading a confusing passage in a textbook or manual, I’d have to make my hand into an airplane, fly it around, and think.

  Next time you have the window seat on a commercial jet and the aircraft starts a left or right turn, look near the end of the wing along the trailing edge, and see the slightly displaced aileron. The aileron is always raised on the wing that is dropping and lowered on the wing that is rising.

  11. “The flaps,” said Mr. Vaughn, “are extended down with your flap lever in the cockpit, and they give the wing more lift at slow speeds. But they cause drag at high speeds, so they are only used at slow speeds, usually when landing or taking off. They help you get into the air more quickly and touch down at a slower airspeed. Be sure these rods are in place and secure.”

  12. “Okay. Main landing gear check.” Here Mr. Vaughn squatted near a tire, and I squatted beside him. “The tires should be checked the way you check a car tire—no bald spots, no visible metal along the treads. Then you kick it.” He stood and kicked it. Then smiled at me. First smile. “And you check your struts here, just like on the nose gear. We need about four inches of extension.”

  13. “Okay. Now we walk on to the tail section. This part, like a sail on a boat but not as tall, is the vertical stabilizer. You just reach up and grab hold of the trailing edge there—the rudder—and move it back and forth to be sure it’s not binding anywhere. Go ahead.” I could almost feel the cable move inside the hollow body of the airplane, and I imagined the rudder pedals moving in the cockpit.

  14. “The other part of the tail section here is the elevator. Looks just like a small wing, designed as one piece, see.” Sniff, sniff. He grabbed it. “We can move the whole thing up and down to be sure it’s functioning without any binding. When you pull back on the yoke, it pivots and the trailing end is raised into the wind flow. That blows the tail down, and the nose goes up, so you climb.”

  “Now we check the same things on the right of the aircraft as we did on the left.”

  MR. VAUGHN HAD MADE clear how the flight controls worked, showing me what caused (1) one wing to drop and the other to rise so that I could turn left or right: ailerons on the outer trailing edge of the wings, operated from the cockpit by the yoke; (2) the nose of the aircraft to rise and descend: the elevator at the tail section, also controlled by pulling the yoke toward you or pushing it away; and (3) the aircraft to go faster or slower: engine thrust, controlled by the throttle.

  Lessons

  STARTING LATE IN THE FALL semester of my senior year, and through spring semester, Mr. Vaughn and I spent almost forty hours together in the Piper Cherokee 140. Before flying each day, we’d sit at a table and talk about what we were going to do. He’d sniff and hold his hand like an airplane to demonstrate—and as I recall, Mr. Vaughn’s propriety made even this kind of gesture perhaps a bit embarrassing for him. I had a notion that he’d been flying a long time and that it was less fun than it had once been.

  Early in my training, before soloing but after I was taking off by myself, we were flying along one day when I became aware of a clinking noise that I must have been hearing for some time but ignoring. I looked and saw that Mr. Vaughn was tapping the metal end of my unfastened seat belt against his yoke. I took the belt from him and fastened it around my waist. He didn’t say a word, but I could tell he was proud of his method. And it worked. I’ve never forgotten to fasten my seat belt since. Other things, but not my seat belt.

  The Cherokee 140 seemed sturdy and stable. It always cranked as advertised and I came to trust that it would do what I asked of it. Consequently my attention came to rest on what I was able or unable to do as a pilot. Worries about aircraft failure receded to the background.

  In the air, when demonstrating a maneuver, Mr. Vaughn took control of the aircraft, showed me the maneuver while explaining it, then gave me the controls and let me practice.

  After the flight, I’d get a grade: Fail, Fair, Good, or Excellent. I made Goods on the first several flights, even though I felt I deserved an Excellent or two. Mr. Vaughn seemed to have learned the grammar school teacher’s dictum of rarely smiling before Thanksgiving. Finally, just before soloing, I got an Excellent.

  Along the way, Mr. Vaughn taught me how

  TO TAXI, TAKE OFF, AND LAND

  The Cherokee 140 steers on the ground by means of a direct mechanical linkage between the rudder pedals and the nose wheel.

  Taking off is relatively easy. You point the airplane nose down the runway, add power, and use the nose-wheel steering to stay in the center of the runway at first; then as airspeed increases, control reverts to the rudder; and then at fifty-five miles per hour you pull back on the yoke so that the nose wheel lifts from the runway. The airplane rolls on a bit and then lifts into the air. If the left wing starts to drop, you bring it back up with a turn of the yoke to the right and a touch of right rudder.
The nose is kept in a climbing attitude (but not too steep) with back pressure on the yoke.

  Landing is much more difficult. I remember the two of us on final approach the first time I landed. Not much talking going on—we’d been through this quite a few times, first with him flying the whole approach and landing, and later with me flying until close to touchdown, then turning it over to him. As I flew this approach, Mr. Vaughn lightly and slowly rubbed his hands on his knees. I could sense his readiness to grab the controls. I brought the airplane over the runway threshold and then I—tense, neck stretched to see over the nose cowling, holding my breath for touchdown—landed. It was not the best landing ever, but it was all mine.

  TO FLY STRAIGHT AND LEVEL

  On a clear day the flat line that separates land and sky—the horizon line—is visible way, way out there, all the way around. It’s like the line that separates sea from sky, and as you climb higher in an airplane, it does not get lower, as you might think. It stays way out there: you see it over the nose of your aircraft and near each wingtip when you’re flying straight and level. It serves as a reference, and I learned to keep the tips of both wings the same distance from that horizon line for straight and level flying, and I also learned where the nose—in straight and level flight—rested in relation to that line.

  TO PLAN FOR WIND DRIFT WHILE FLYING

  Wind drift is comparable to a river current taking you across the river bottom while you “sit still.” Mr. Vaughn and I would find a straight road on the ground. We’d start following the road. The wind over the ground would be from left to right, say. He’d ask me to make S turns over that road so that the imaginary line our aircraft made over the ground looked like an S with the road splitting it like the two little lines in a dollar sign. The degree of bank in each turn had to figure in wind effect. To make the loops of the Ss approximately equal in size was not easy in a brisk wind.