Page 57 of Nothing by Chance


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I opened the cockpit door for them when the biplane arrived. “Kind of a short ride, wasn’t it?” I said, sounding cool. It would have terrified me, if I were in the front seat when everything stopped.

“Oh, it was long enough, but we didn’t get very high,” the man said, helping his son down to the grass. It was a remarkable thing to say, and I was proud of him.

“You want to ride in Ship Number One?”

“No, thanks. We’ll give you a chance to fix this one … be back tonight and fly.”

I accepted this as a brave excuse, and crossed them off the list of passengers who would ever trust a biplane. When they had left, we got to work.

“Clearly, the thing isn’t getting any gas, to stop like that,” I said.

“Dirt in the gas?” Spence said.

“Sounds good. Let’s give it a try.”

The engine had been stored in Arizona, and there was a teaspoonful of sand in the fuel strainer.

“That’s part of the problem, anyway,” Spence said. “Let’s try it again.”

We tried again, but the engine would sputter and cough at full throttle, then cut out completely.

“How’s your fuel?”

“Oh, I got half a tank.” He thought of something and ran the engine up again. It worked perfectly. “Centersection tank,” he said. “It works fine if it’s running on gas out of the high tank.”

He experimented with it and found that there was nothing he could do to make the engine quit as long as it was taking fuel out of the big overhead

tank buried in the middle of the top wing.

“That’s it,” he said at last. “Float level or something in the carburetor isn’t quite right. She wants that extra pressure when she’s going full throttle.”

The problem was solved and we celebrated with a parachute jump. Stu was anxious to enter a “Travelair Jump” in his sky-diver’s logbook, and we were airborne in midafter-noon, flying formation on the way up to jump altitude.

I broke away at 2,500 feet and circled to wait for Stu to come down.

We could expect heavy business if the parachute jump went as planned; the drags trip crowd was out in force. But it didn’t go quite as planned. Stu missed his target. I followed him down, knowing that from my angle I couldn’t tell where he was going to land. But the lower he got, the clearer it was that he wouldn’t make the runway, and that he might end up in the telephone wires across the weedlot to the south.

He missed the wires by a few feet and was down in the weeds, then up again, waving that he was OK. Spence and I flew a formation advertising flight, broke apart and landed. There was a crowd waiting to fly, and Stu was just panting onto the field, carrying his parachute.

“Man! I thought I got those wires! I waited around too long before I did anything about the wind. Bad jump!” But that was it. We avoid disaster and we go on working.

He dumped the chute on his sleeping bag and was selling rides at once. I nodded here-we-go to Spence and we got into the airplanes. Again we didn’t stop flying till sundown. To my great surprise, Spence’s engine-failure passengers, the man and his boy, came back to fly again. This time the Continental kept on running for them, and they saw Kahoka from the air, a town sailing serenely across the flat green sea of Missouri.

I flew one clod who turned out to be drunk; after we were airborne he made as though to climb out of the front cockpit, and generally proved himself a fool. I gave him a few hard turns to smash him down in the seat, all the time wishing that it would be legal to let the blockhead throw himself out of the airplane.

“You give me another passenger like that, Stu,” I said after landing, “and I will part your hair with a crescent wrench.”

“Sorry. Didn’t know he was so bad.”

The sun went down, but Spence kept hopping passengers. To each his own, I thought. The Parks and I quit as soon as we lost ground detail in the darkness.

It was full dark when at last he shut down his engine. In fourteen years with Pacific Southwest Airlines he was conditioned to haul every person he could possibly fly.

We collapsed on our sleeping bags and broke out the flashlight. “How’d we do, Stu?”

Stu heaped up the money. “We’ve got quite a bit. Twenty, thirty, thirty-five, forty-five …” It did look like it had been a good day. “… one fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five … one hundred and fifty-six dollars. That is … fifty-two passengers today.”

“We broke it!” I said. “We broke our hundred-dollar day!”

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