Learning to fly antique planes gives me a thrill or two and lessons in fear control. But the best part has been finding a through line to my father's wild heart.
I fly the old open-cockpit biplanes and single-wing planes that my
father flew, from the same airstrip 12 miles south of our hometown of
Athens, Alabama, where he first flew them in the 1940s. Such aircraft
are rare anywhere, but to have them in such strength—there are dozens
within 25 miles of my hometown—makes me a very fortunate man. I try to
deserve that by visiting my father and flying every chance I get.
These planes aren't replicas, they're vintage taildraggers, so called for the tiny wheels under their tails and their rakish, back-leaning cant. You know what I mean: real planes that landed at Idlewild and Rangoon and Orly, in life and in the movies, on the wild front side of the war-torn 20th century.
The Spirit of Saint Louis: taildragger.
The Enola Gay: taildragger. The last scene in
Casablanca, when Bogart is kissing off the Bergman babe in the fog: taildragger. All taildraggers carry this high-nosed silhouette, that of the first generation of the world's aircraft, from the beginning of motorized flight to the 1950s.
Now, before the violins swell and everybody starts generating movie projects starring Tom Hanks…flying these planes is not an exercise in nostalgia. It's an exercise in noise and sweat. First off, I'm half a century too young to have flown them when they were new. Second, these birds are tough: They don't leave room for gauzy reflection when you're trying to muscle them out of the shadow of cell-phone towers and power lines in a bad wind.
Although the principles of flight are always the same, these older planes have older aerodynamic profiles. They carry zero hydraulics; the stick you hold and the pedals you push are connected to the wing flaps and the rudder with wires and pulleys—literally—so the pilot has to understand what to ask the plane to do and when to ask it, with a different athletic emphasis than he would ask a newer plane.
All planes ask things from the pilot, but the taildragger will ask you what I would call the ultimate question, with a special manual resonance. Because life for men has been made so cushy over the past few decades, it seems there are fewer ultimate questions around. But let's say you're flying a taildragger in a heavy downdraft. The question would go something like this: "Dude, you awake? Here's your choice: Die in the next 15 seconds, or
pull up…RIGHT NOW."
Around these planes I have the luxury of inhabiting an earlier era: Corrugated metal hangars lining the ramp, the wind socks twisting, the rich green cotton fields, and the sprigs of johnsongrass caught in the wheels from landing on freshly mown airstrips were all part of the texture of doing this when these planes were young. This time capsule of early aviation remains sweetly in my hometown.
But the real reason I fly these old birds, is twofold: First, they're demanding in what they teach me about my instincts and what I should and should not do in the air. The other reason is that my father flew these planes as a young man, and at 80, he still does. I'm not the pilot he is by a long shot, but learning to do the things he did gives me a deeper fund of access to the old man—a through line, as on an aviator's chart, to the destination. The planes help me approach the athlete he was. It's important to try to understand that one's father was a rash young man at one point too.
