Free Fall

     First we heard the scream.  Then we heard the gunshot.

     Yes, I know, that’s backwards.  You should hear the gunshot.  Then somebody should scream.  This time, somebody screamed, a scream of terror, then there was the gunshot, not a high caliber gunshot, a gunshot more like a .22.  Pop!

     Like most things optional, not food or sleep, but things recreational, aviation ebbed and flowed in the community.  At the time of building Bill’s four-place hangar, aviation was at full flow.  The hangar stood a good chance of being occupied (with airplanes, not dilapidated vintage cars, motors, transmissions, anything that couldn’t find a place elsewhere, like it is now).

     Donated labor accounted for most of the construction of Bill’s hangar.  A former not-so-good student wrote on a rafter with an indelible felt tip marker, “This hanger was built by slav labor.”  His former teachers laughed and laughed.

     “Troy, you mean Bill is no longer Irish/German.  Now he’s a Slav?”

      I probably contributed as much “Slav” labor as anybody.  But it was not unrecompensed. As we packed stuff preparatory to making our move from the community in the spring of 2014, in one corner of the garage I started a pile of tools that had been on, shall we say, long term loan from Bill.  It was an embarrassingly-large load when I transported the tools down the hill to their rightful home.

     There were other more immediate rewards.  Bill had a financial partner, a banker, also named Bill.  Bill the banker loved to stock his motor home with Coors and drive up to the airport on a Saturday or Sunday to watch the hangar being built.  He was quite generous with his stock and I frequently honored his offer.  

      A glider ride constituted another immediate reward.  A friend of the airport manager, probably a fellow Viet Nam vet, spent a month or so taking advantage of the local heightened interest in aviation by selling rides in his glider.  We kept an eye on things as we worked on the hangar.  That included the glider trips.  

     I’m not sure of the details, but somehow, I was on the glider-man’s schedule and Bill had paid the fee.  The day for my glider ride was a beautiful fall day.  The only glitch in the way of a perfect afternoon was my schedule conflict.  I had to referee a football game at the local field at 6 o’clock, so I would need to be there about 5:30 or so. 

    It was about 4:30 when the glider wiggled its rudder back and forth several times and the tow plane hit the throttle.  I was in the front seat of the tandem-seated glider, the real pilot in the back seat.  The snug rope grew taut. In the first few feet of travel, the glider pilot rolled the glider upright off the left wing dolly wheel and we were off.

     The tow plane was an old workhorse, a 182 Cessna, one of the first 182’s ever built.  It was a community project, involving some local pilots and a source of capital. 

     The real persuasive force in the deal was a skydiver from a nearby community.  He was a jump instructor.  He charged for lessons and had a bunch of students, including high school students who could convince their parents that skydiving was safe, maybe.  Renting an airplane from which to jump cut into his profit.  A low-cost plane big enough to haul four guys up 4 or 5 thousand feet was a necessity.

    Skydiving is hard on an airplane.  The door has to be removed so the jumpers can exit.  Seating has to be modified or removed so that the jumpers can get to the doorway.  The plane takes off with a heavy load and bears it up thousands of feet.  When the jumpers have all exited, the much lighter airplane needs to get back to ground, usually in a hurry.  So the hot engine is throttled and the rapid descent super cools that hot engine.  

     The old 182 answered the call.  All necessities were there, enthusiastic jumpers, an instructor, everything but the capital to finance the plane.

     Kathy had graduated from the local high school with high honors.  She went on to earn her pharmacy degree and had returned to fill prescriptions in the local pharmacy as well as pharmacies in neighboring communities.  She was single, was making good money, and was adventurous.

    The aviation flow grabbed her.   The jump instructor persuaded Kathy to try skydiving.  She was hooked.  Kathy was persuaded to invest in the old Cessna. 

    Glider-towing was a sideline for the 182.  As our glider followed the 182 down the runway, the glider pilot gave me a few pointers about following the tow plane—most important, keep the same angle and direction as the tow plane even if you are not in the same path.  You do that with the foot pedals, the rudder.

     A few feet off the runway, he turned the controls over to me.  He complimented me on my rudder work.  I told him I had a few hours in an Aeronca Champ, and he said “Aha!”

     The tow plane pilot made big circles looking for the thermal that would lift the glider and allow us to break free of mechanical propulsion.  Sometimes the tow rope would go slack, followed by a gentle jerk when the rope tightened and the tow plane encouraged us to catch up. 

      After one of these jerks, while the rope was taut, the glider pilot pulled the release lever.  The tow rope dropped below us, still hooked to the 182, and we slowed.  He explained you had to release while the rope was taut because the tow pilot would feel the release.  If you released during slack times, the pilot would not know you were gone.  The old 182 didn’t have a rear window that would allow the pilot to turn and take a look.  The 182 turned one way, and we turned the other.

      We circled gently in the thermal.  The altimeter showed we were gaining altitude while the glider remained level.  The huge wing span gave us a great glide ratio—we could go a long ways on the altitude we had to sacrifice in order to keep up our airspeed.  The pilot said we could stay up all afternoon if we wanted.  But there was that dang football game.

     The pilot took me through several maneuvers, sharp turns, stalls, and such like.  He offered to do some acrobatics.  I knew he could do it, having watched the glider a lot while working on the hangar.  I opted for a gentle one, a hammerhead stall.  Anything more radical might relieve me of the contents of my stomach.  Barf bags weren’t standard equipment on this glider.

     Everything in the glider was much gentler than in a motor driven craft.  For one thing, there was no vibration from a power plant, and the only noise was the whistling of the wind in the hatch seals.  We could carry on a normal conversation without yelling.  So maybe I could have survived a loop or barrel roll with stomach in place,  but there was that football game.  Better be safe.

    In a hammerhead stall, you pull the stick back, nose up until you are vertical.  The bird will stall—that is it will lack the air movement under the wing that keeps the thing afloat.  It will stop flying and give in to gravity. 

     Aircraft that we amateurs fly have to be engineered so that when the wing stalls and the plane starts to fall back to earth, the plane will pitch nose down.  A fellow student pilot (he quit flying after his experience) stalled a Cessna 150.  He couldn’t get out of the stall.  The plane went into a spin.  He let go of the yoke and clasped his head with both hands in fear and despair.  The 150 righted itself while the pilot had his hands on his head.  He landed the thing on its wheels, parked, got out, and never went back.                   

     As we pulled the glider into vertical position for the hammerhead (I’m sure the pilot had to grab the stick and assist, as my muscles were flaccid at the thought of lying on my back in that glider a couple thousand feet above the earth like an astronaut on the launch pad), the glider slowed and the noise ceased.  We hung motionless.

    At this point I had probably four choices.  Fall left, right, forward, or backward.  If you guessed I chose to fall forward, you guessed right.  I jammed the stick forward and kept the wings from moving by using rudder and ailerons.  (If the wings turn into a propeller, the craft is in a spin.)  It was a gentle fall and recovery was equally smooth.  Had I stayed up there a while longer, I might have tried a loop.  But there was that football game.

     The only exciting incident came upon landing.  The pilot talked me through lining up on the correct runway.  He had me gently deploy the “spoiler” which destroys the efficiency of the wing by sticking panels up from the top of the wing and the glider loses altitude.

     As we approached the end of the runway, I started to “flare”.  That is, I pulled the stick back gently to raise the nose and lower the tail of the airplane.  That is proper procedure for landing a three-wheeled craft, but not a glider.  This glider has one main wheel under the body and you try to land on that wheel with the glider level left to right AND front-to-back.

    The pilot started to warn me not to flare just as I started to flare.  “I got!  I got it!” he cried.  I let the stick go and we touched down, seemingly doing about 20 miles an hour.  We didn’t coast a hundred feet.  He kept the wings level until we were near a dead stop.  He gently lowered one wing to the ground and we were done.  

     I couldn’t tell you one thing about that football game.

    

    The fall airshow was a big deal.  It attracted many spectators, many pilots flying in to enjoy breakfast, flour bomb contest, landing contest, display aircraft, the stunt pilots, and skydiving.  Bill wanted to get as much of the hangar completed as he could for the big show.  We were putting on the roof tin.  A crew was drilling holes in the tin, another boosting tin to the roof, the roof crew placing the tin sheet properly and nailing the tin down with washered ring shank roof nails.  (Bill’s son came in for ridicule  because he used pliers to hold the nail while he started it into the tin.  He’s probably the only one who doesn’t have an arthritic left thumb from off-target hammer blows.)

     In another hangar the boys harnessed themselves to the rafters, released, and practiced making correct landings on the old mattress on the floor.  Out on the runway the 182 lifted off with a load of divers. 

     In going about our tin business, I was on the north side of the structure when the plane reached altitude in the jump zone.  It was a little south and a little west of the runways.  As we watched, a tiny person fell away from the plane.  A second person fell away just about the time the scream began.  

    Both jumpers disappeared behind the hangar.  No chutes had popped open.  I heard the shot as I ran through the open hangar to the south side to get a look at what was happening.  We reached the other side of the building to see two chutes open.  From where we stood, it looked like they could get hooked on the power lines by the meat packing plant.  They were too close to the ground to practice any avoidance techniques.

     The two jumpers hit the ground and their chutes collapsed around them.  Nothing got caught in the power lines.  Well, ok, all’s well that ends well.  But that was close.  We could guess what the scream was all about, but who fired the shot, and why were there two jumpers in such a predicament?

     We went back to work.  It would be a while, a day or two, before we got the whole story.  The first jumper was Kathy.  The target was the airport near the grandstands that were being set up for spectators.  Her main chute failed to deploy.  She pulled, tugged, jerked, but the emergency chute would not open.  She screamed.  The jump master saw she was struggling to get a chute to open, so he jumped.  He free-fell in an attempt to catch up to Kathy.  He deployed at the last second.

    The shot?  The divers explained that a safety feature on the gear, a small shell in the .22 range was set to go off at a certain altitude.  Somehow, the exploding shell was harnessed  to the rip cord of the emergency chute.  It succeeded where Kathy had failed.  It opened the emergency chute in the nick of time.

     Kathy had some nightmares after that.  She never jumped again.  Her enthusiasm for aviation was extinguished.  She had no need for an airplane.  Without her support, the 182 club couldn’t survive. 

     The skydivers drifted away.  They found they would rather spend their entertainment dollar in some way  other than falling out of airplanes.  The jump master moved on to greener pasture.  The cold weather sent the glider-man south. Another year rolled around, another airshow, but it lacked the excitement of previous years.  Aviation had reached full tide and began to ebb.

      At one time there were five or six flight clubs, each club owning an airplane for its members to fly.  When members who wanted out of the clubs could find no one to sell their shares to, clubs sold their planes and folded.  Today, one club clings to life.