The Cannibal Queen Read online

  I plan to stop in Newton, New Jersey, for fuel, so I dial in the Unicom frequency, 122.9. Someone else aloft in this goo is lost—he and another airplane are talking back and forth, trying to find a familiar landmark.

  Listening now to the rising pitch in the voice of the pilot who is lost, I feel sympathy for him. There is nothing I can do to help. I know where I am but not where he is. The most important thing he can do is keep his wits about him and not panic. He can use electronic navigation aids to get a fix, if he has them and knows how to use them. Even if he doesn’t, he can ask one of the many approach controllers in this area for a steer.

  Apparently that is what he decides to do. He tells the other pilot he is leaving the frequency.

  In this soup my mere 84 knots is a blessing—I have time enough to study the roads and lakes, consult the chart, then recheck. That little village is on the south end of that lake, by the dam, and the highway runs off to the northwest. Hmmm. Yes, that makes it this little lake right here. Confident in my decision, I uncap my pen and X the chart. A glance at my watch for the time, which I scribble beside the X.

  Studying the chart requires that I look down into my lap, with my head bent, so I momentarily lose sight of the outside world. This is slightly disorienting, but I still have my right hand upon the stick and that keeps me in touch with how she’s flying. Writing on the chart with my right hand requires that I release the stick, and this is more disorienting. In that moment, with my head bent, my eyes focused on the chart, and the Queen flying as the trim and the wind currents dictate, I experience a touch of vertigo, or spatial disorientation. The sides of the cockpit completely block any glimpse of the outside world from my peripheral vision. For these seconds my entire universe consists of the chart in my lap, the sides of the cockpit, and the sensations of motion unrelated to this tiny visual world.

  Sometimes after I get my little X in precisely the right spot upon the chart, I must look up for a few seconds and put my hand back on the stick until I assure myself that all is well— until my body’s sense of balance stabilizes—before I can again devote myself to the chore of marking the time beside the X. Turbulence, or chop, worsens the vertigo.

  An artificial horizon on the instrument panel that I could keep within my visual scan would prevent the sensation of spatial disorientation since I have spent many hours flying instruments and am quite comfortable in that environment. But if I do this enough in the Cannibal Queen, I should become used to the sensations and will stop feeling that jolt of anxiety—twinge of panic?—that accompanies vertigo.

  The strip at Newton, New Jersey, is south of a small lake. I eye the wind sock, make an unanswered call on Unicom, then land to the south.

  The fuel pump is in a grassy area off the northern end of the runway. Several small airplanes are tied down nearby. There is no office, just a shed and two houses. I kill the engine and unstrap. When I am out of the plane and lighting my pipe, a man walks over from one of the houses.

  His name is Richard Jump. After I fuel and pay him, I learn that he is a financial printer by trade and is merely here for a week of business on Wall Street. This Sunday he is visiting his parents. Where’s home? Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. We visit awhile, look at the sky, then I get back in the Queen and am on my way.

  Going east toward the Hudson River, I fly out from under the front. The temperature at 2,000 feet cools markedly. Now I am on the cold side of this rascal and the visibility gets better quickly, a lot better, as I chill in the cockpit.

  With the wide river of Henry Hudson spreading under me, I turn north to fly up the river. Everything is green, luxuriant, and the scale of the river and valley is such that all the man-made items below appear miniaturized. I cross above model bridges and pass tiny cities and towns. The Military Academy at West Point goes by under the left wing.

  The guy in the control tower at Dutchess County Airport cheerfully allows me to fly through his airspace. I pass Poughkeepsie and boresight Rhinebeck, New York, where I know the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome is located. It is not on any chart, but I have read of Cole Palen’s flying circus of World War I airplanes for years and intend to stop. I’ll land at a public strip near Rhinebeck, Sky Park, if I can get there before I freeze to death.

  While I am scanning for the Sky Park airport, I spot a red biplane down low, just above the trees.

  This is the place! Aha! Two or three brightly colored biplanes, a grass strip amid tall trees, a grandstand full of people. Luckily I am still at 2,000 feet, so I am no hazard to the performing pilots. I fly over them just the one time and enter the Sky Park traffic pattern.

  The strip is narrow, bumpy, and the asphalt is coming apart. I manage to keep the Queen on it and pull up to the parking area.

  An elderly man comes over to stare at the royal persona on the fuselage and examine me. As soon as my feet hit the ground I open the baggage compartment and grab a sweatshirt. Over that I don my leather jacket. Beginning to warm up, I look around. The place is untidy, in disrepair.

  Soon a man comes out of the small hangar wiping his hands on a rag. I ask about renting a car. “We don’t rent cars. You want gas?” No. He nods once, glances at the yellow Stearman, then turns and walks back into the hangar.

  I resolve to fly back south to Dutchess County. That is a large airport with two big runways and a control tower. Maybe I can rent a car there and find a motel. Tomorrow I can drive back to the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome.

  But at Dutchess County my priorities change. The car rental places are only open Monday through Friday, and this is Sunday. There is a motel just a block from the FBO building. I taxi the Queen into the grass and tie her down. As I wipe the oil off her I find a broken piece on one of the two forward latches on the nose cowling.

  The cowling around the engine was a Skid Henley touch—it came with the engine when he bought the 300-HP Lycoming in Indianapolis and he installed it since he liked the look. It’s a clamshell affair, in two pieces, a top and a bottom. There are two leading-edge latches, one on each side. The left one is broken. Two other latches on each side. Obviously the latch with the broken piece is still holding and the cowling is still on the plane, but for how long?

  I stand there staring at the broken piece and wondering what would happen if that left front latch failed completely in flight. The strain on the forwardmost left side latch would increase dramatically, and it might fail. If that latch were to go, the remaining latch would probably fail instantly. At this point the pressure of the air entering the engine would force the cowling away from the engine and the prop blast would force it aft.

  If the bottom half went under the plane, that would be no big deal. But the top half … it might try to go between the top of the fuselage and the upper wing. Pounded and ripped by the prop blast, the cowling or a piece of it might tear off the fuel sight gauge, that glass pipe that sticks down below the fuel tank. If that happened fuel would pour out of the tank and soak me in the rear cockpit. Very shortly thereafter the engine would die of fuel starvation, if the plane hadn’t already caught fire and incinerated me.

  So I would have to make a quick dead-stick landing if I were lucky enough to avoid immolation. Slightly nauseated by my speculations, I resolve to get that latch fixed before I get very much older.

  Only two cars were parked in front of the motel, but it was indeed open. Two Chinese women sat in the lobby watching a Chinese movie on television. I registered as the singsong sounds of Chinese speech and the twanging of Chinese music poured from the boob tube. Only in America …

  The motel used to be a Quality Inn before it fell on hard times. Now it was merely the Dutchess County Airport Motel. There was a restaurant-beer joint next door and they fixed me a great sandwich, which I ate while watching the Mets lose one to the Philadelphia Phillies.

  After dinner I walked back to the airport and examined the Queen and her bad cowl latch again, then inspected every nut and wire and bolt that I could see.

  She looked to be in good
shape except for that latch. The Lycoming engine’s leaking more oil these days, maybe a quart and a quarter an hour, blowing it back all over the plane. I’ve been swabbing oil from the floor of the front cockpit that comes in through the gaps in the nose panels. Those panels don’t fit tightly—Stearmans were working planes, with little attention to cosmetics. I wonder if oil is shorting out the IFF antenna that protrudes through the bottom of the plane in the front cockpit floor area. Perhaps.

  I wander back to the motel and stand staring at the pool, which has been drained. Now it is just a concrete-lined hole in the ground without a diving board. No motel I have stayed at since leaving Boulder has had a diving board. All have had NO DIVING signs prominently posted. David was always disappointed. Too risky to allow the public to enter the water headfirst. Because the possibility of a freak accident cannot be absolutely eliminated, no one gets to dive. So no one can sue.

  It’s as if today’s Americans have collectively decided that safety is the highest social good. Even sex, the riskiest activity known to man and therefore one of the most rewarding, must be “safe.”

  Ultimately the question boils down to a judgment about how much risk makes life worth living. Success at a risk-free endeavor is impossible. Without some level of risk life has no meaning. Americans have traditionally believed that each person should be allowed to make the risk judgment for himself. Perhaps they sensed that such judgments were intimately related to that “pursuit of happiness” clause in the Declaration of Independence.

  Today more and more Americans seem willing to allow bureaucrats in some hermetically sealed office somewhere, usually Washington or its environs, to decide that the social cost of a certain activity is too high, so the risk must be lowered or the activity eliminated. And some political hack who believes government is Big Mother will be delighted to introduce the legislation.

  Rock climbing, motorcycle riding, sport aviation, skydiving, all the shooting sports, hunting, bicycle riding, sunbathing, nudism, and swimming in creeks and lakes are all activities that will attract more unwanted attention in the future. Sunbathing and nudism? Yeah, skin cancer.

  Although we all know that nobody gets out of life alive, we strive to avoid any possibility of a fatal or debilitating accident or dread disease so that we may spend our final—“golden”— years in a nursing home, senile, hugging a teddy bear, wearing soggy diapers, spoon fed by nurses and kept alive by machines, as long as technology allows and the insurance company can be forced to pay. Only then, stripped of all human dignity and too goddamn old to care, will we be willing to cross that threshold beyond life to find out if the preachers were lying.

  When I was a young man during the Vietnam War I thought it a good bet that a cockpit would be my coffin. Now, at middle age, I have raised my sights. I want to die at the age of ninety-five in bed with a twenty-three-year-old nymphomaniac, shot to death by her jealous husband. Alas, a more likely scenario is that I’ll be driven mad by an incurable case of diaper rash and be shot to death by a police officer trying to prevent me from strangling my teddy bear.

  Whatever, before I go I hope I don’t drool too much. I want to cry when I see old folks drool.

  Tom Cawley is a few years older than I am, but only a few. He eyes the Queen’s busted latch with a practiced eye and heads back into the hangar for his drill. The broken part is riveted on and the rivets will have to be drilled.

  No one at Dutchess County Airport could do the work on Monday morning, but one mechanic telephoned Tom Cawley at Sky Acres, an airport eight miles to the northeast, so I have flown over. The airport is a hilltop affair. To reach Cawley’s maintenance hangar I taxied to the north end of the runway, then up a paved ramp with a precipitous drop-off on the north side. He has the only aircraft maintenance facility with a view that I have ever found in my travels. Most airports are vast flat places, usually in valleys, and if they have a view it is upward at surrounding hills. From my position beside the Queen I can look across the hills of the Hudson River Valley and see the low mountains beyond. The Catskills are quite prominent to the northwest.

  I tell him I was worried about the latch failing and the cowling coming off.

  “Thousands of twin Beeches flying around with busted latches,” he says.

  “Does the cowling ever come off?”

  “Occasionally.”

  I tell him my fear of the top cowling breaking off the fuel gauge under the fuel tank.

  “If the cowling comes off, it’ll go forward,” Cawley says, “into the prop. It’s an airfoil.”

  I can visualize what happens next. In seconds the cowling will be chewed apart by the propeller. Inevitably some of the pieces will come aft instead of being flung outward. Even if there is no other damage to the plane, the prop will be trashed. I decide that I could leave the cowling here with Cawley for a week if necessary and come back and get it when it is fixed. The plane will fly five or six MPH slower without it since the engine is baffled, but what the hey—that’s a small price. I explain to Cawley that I can leave the cowling and he just nods. He’s busy.

  He soon gives up on drilling the rivets with the cowling still on the airplane, so we drop it off. He takes the lower half into the hangar to work on it, and I borrow a grease gun and set about greasing the knuckle-joint fittings on the landing gear. Some of the zirks won’t take grease, so I get my wrench and change zirks. In minutes I am filthy.

  Soon Cawley has the broken latch part off the cowling. I am still unsure if it can be repaired today, but he says yes. “Let’s ride into town and let Siggy weld this.”

  The trip is eight or nine miles, and soon Cawley and I are getting acquainted. He is a shy individual who doesn’t want to tell me much about himself until he hears about me. Finally he opens up. He has spent most of his adult life in civil aviation—hauled freight in Beech 18s, Aztecs, currently a twin Navajo, flies for an outfit that does infrared mapping, runs his own maintenance facility—basically done anything and everything that a person can do to earn a living around airplanes. And for recreation he has restored and flown old aircraft—he owned a Stearman for thirteen years—and skydives. He has over 800 jumps and likes to compete.

  And he has opinions. On Saddam Hussein: “I know that there were political complications, but we should have run a pipe into that bunker and pumped in crude oil until the scratching on the door stopped, then sent in the historians.” On New York City natives: “They think upstate starts at the George Washington Bridge.” On me flying over the Adirondacks: “Follow the roads. If the engine quits up there you won’t have an antique airplane anymore.”

  True, but … engine failure and the resultant emergency landing was one of the risks I decided to assume when I was contemplating this trip. If it happens, it happens. I wonder what Tom would have said if he had seen me this spring at 14,500 feet over the Rockies in the Cannibal Queen. I don’t say that, of course, but let him do the talking. He’s the guy fixing the Queen.

  Siggy has a large, well-equipped metal fabrication and repair shop, and he turns the broken aluminum part over in his hands and studies it carefully. In minutes he has the part braced down and his welding equipment rigged. I wander outside so I won’t be tempted to look at the arc.

  Ten minutes after he saw the part, Siggy is finished. The metal is still too hot to hold so he rigs a wire for me to carry it on. After I pay him I thank him. He follows me to the door, and I thank him again.

  “No need to thank me twice,” he says. “You paid me.”

  “Ah, but the money was just for doing the job,” I tell him. “I’m thanking you for doing it while I waited and for not telling me to come back and pick up my part a week from Thursday.”

  Outside in the car, Tom says that Siggy used to have a hundred men working in that shop. This morning there was just one other machinist there. It is a sign of the times. The deindustrialization of America and the rise of the information age cease to be academic trends in Siggy’s shop—the helper had a stack of aluminum equipm
ent tops arranged around him that he had fashioned for IBM, which has a big plant in Poughkeepsie. “For their equipment,” he told me. “Special order.” Enough work for one or two men, but not a hundred.

  Two hours after I arrived at Cawley’s shop, the cowling latch is repaired, the cowling back on the plane, and I am ready to fly. I ask him what I owe him. $60, he decides, then studies his watch. “It was less than two hours, so let’s say forty.”

  The people in aviation are like that. Aircraft parts are expensive, fuel is expensive, the government mandates that inspections be done, hours be flown, training be done periodically— it all adds up to money, usually a lot. So many people in aviation cut their profits, and consequently their wages, to the bone in order to stay in business that occasionally one wonders how they manage to survive. Many don’t. Yet they see so much pain in their customers’ faces that when it comes time to settle up, they usually approach the subject of money apologetically.

  I telephone my editor at Pocket Books in New York and ask him if he wants to go for a Stearman ride that afternoon. Yes!. He and his wife will meet me at the Westchester County Airport in White Plains about 3 P.M.

  As I leave Tom’s office, he hands me a T-shirt. The legend reads, “Cawley’s Aviation Service, formerly the largest aerospace employer in the town of Shawangunk.”

  Tom and his men help turn the Queen around so her prop blast won’t go into the hangar. I ask if anyone has ever rolled a plane over this hill. No. I don’t want to be the first. Taxiing a plane down a sloping ramp with a steep drop-off on the right will be another new experience. After handshakes all around, I climb into the Queen and give it a try.