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"We have about sixty," replied Mary. "So it will take four trips."
Pitt smiled. "I can handle it, but if I'm going to carry passengers, I'll need a copilot. My friend Al Giordino couldn't make it."
"No problem," said Kelly. "Mary is a pilot with Conquest Airlines."
"For very long?"
"Twelve years in seven thirty-sevens and seven sixty-sevens."
"How many hours in prop planes?"
"Well over a thousand."
Pitt nodded. "Okay, climb in and I'll give you a quick flight check."
Mary's face lit up like a child's on Christmas morning. "Flying a Ford trimotor will make all the male pilots I know green with envy."
Once they were belted into their bucket seats in the cockpit, Pitt lectured Mary on the controls and instruments. The forward instrument panel was a study in no-nonsense simplicity. Several mandatory switches and slightly more than a dozen fundamental instruments were spread strategical
ly across a large pyramid-shaped black panel. But only the nose engine's instruments were set in the panel. Oddly, the tachometer, oil pressure and oil temperature gauges for the two outboard engines were mounted outside the cockpit on the mounting struts.
The engine's three throttles were mounted between the seats. The control columns sported steering wheels with wooden spokes that operated the ailerons and looked like they came out of old automobiles. Never one to waste a dime, Henry Ford had insisted his company could save money by using existing Model T Ford car steering wheels. Trim was altered by a small crank over the pilot's head. The big brake stick that swung left and right to steer the airplane when it was on the ground also rose between the pilot's and copilot's seats.
Pitt fired up the engines, watching them shudder and vibrate in their mountings to the accompaniment of a series of pops and coughs, before the combustion inside the cylinders smoothed out into a steady beat. After running them up, he taxied to the end of the runway. He explained the takeoff and landing procedure before turning the controls over to Mary, reminding her that she was flying a plane with a tail wheel instead of a jetliner with tricycle gear.
She had a light and graceful touch and quickly learned the quirks of flying a seventy-two-year-old aircraft. Pitt demonstrated how the aircraft would stall at sixty-four miles an hour, fly without effort on two engines, and still have enough power left to make a controlled landing on only one.
"It seems strange," she said loudly, over the roar of the triple exhaust, "to see engines sitting out in the open without any cowling."
"They were made to take the elements."
"What is her history?"
"She was built by the Stout Metal Airplane Company in nineteen twenty-nine," Pitt lectured, "which was a division of the Ford Motor Company. Ford built a hundred and ninety-six of them, the first all-metal airplanes in the United States. This was the one hundred and fifty-eighth off the assembly line. About eighteen still exist, and three are still flying. She began service with Transcontinental Air Transport, which later became TWA. She flew the New York-to-Chicago leg and carried many of the celebrities of the day-Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford. Franklin Roosevelt chartered her to fly to the Democratic convention in Chicago. Anybody who was somebody flew in her. There was no better air transport in her day for comfort and convenience. The Ford trimotor was the first to carry a rest room and service with a stewardess. You may not realize it, but you are sitting in the airplane that ushered in modern commercial aviation. The first queen of the skies."
"She has an interesting pedigree."
"When the Douglas DC-3 came out of production in 1934, Old Reliable, the nickname she picked up along her career, was retired. For the next several years, she flew passengers in Mexico. Unexpectedly, in 1942, she showed up on the island of Luzon in the Philippines and evacuated a score of our soldiers on island-hopping flights to Australia. She disappeared in the mists of time after that. She next turned up in Iceland, where she was owned by an aircraft mechanic who transported supplies to isolated farms and towns. I bought her in 1987 and flew her to Washington, where I gave her a painstaking restoration."
"What are her specs?"
"Three Pratt and Whitney four-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower engines," Pitt elaborated. "She carries enough fuel to fly five hundred fifty miles at a cruising speed of one hundred fifteen miles an hour. If pushed, she can do one hundred thirty-five. She can climb at one thousand one hundred feet a minute and reach a ceiling of seventeen thousand three hundred feet. Her wingspan is seventy-seven feet and she is forty-nine feet in length. Did I miss anything?"
"That pretty well covers it," said Mary.
"She's all yours," said Pitt, as he lifted his hands from the controls. "She's strictly a hands-on plane. You have to fly her every second."
"I see what you mean," said Mary, having to use her muscles to twist the wheel and move the big ailerons. After a few minutes of banks and turns, she set up for a landing.
Pitt observed Mary land and touch down with just the slightest bump before settling the tail wheel on the asphalt. "Very nice," he complimented her. "Done like an old trimotor pro."
"Thank you, sir," she said, with a pleased laugh.
Once the trimotor was parked, the children began to come on board. Most had to be lifted through the doorway by volunteers into Pitt's arms, who then carried them to seats and buckled their seat belts. Seeing the severely disabled children showing such courage and humor despite their sad physical disabilities deeply touched Pitt's heart. Kelly came along to attend to the needs of the children, joking and laughing with them. After takeoff, she pointed out the sights of Manhattan from the air as Pitt headed across the Hudson River toward the city.
The old aircraft was perfect for sightseeing. Its slow speed and the big square windows along her fuselage offered unobstructed panoramic viewing. The children sat in the old wicker chairs with their padded cushions and jabbered excitedly at seeing the buildings of the city reach upward toward them.
Pitt made three trips, and while the plane was being refueled, he walked over and admired the triwing World War I Fokker that was parked next to the trimotor. At one time during the war it had been the scourge of the Allied air services, flown by the German aces Manfred von Richthofen, Werner Voss and Hermann Goring. Von Richthofen had claimed it climbed like a monkey and maneuvered like the devil.
