The pilot of the Travel Air sat in the hay, his back against the left wheel of his airplane, and he watched me.įor half a minute I watched him, too, looking at the mystery of his calm. Throttle back, switch off, the soft clack-clack of the propeller spinning down to stop in the total quiet of July. Stick and rudder out of the slip, a nice little round-out above the land, hay brushing the tires, then the familiar calm crashing rattle of hard ground under-wheel, slowing, slowing and now a quick burst of noise and power to taxi beside the other plane and stop. Cornstalks a green-leaf jungle swishing close below, flicker of a fence and then just-cut hay as far as I could see. Wind in the flying wires, that gentle good sound, the slow pok-pok of the old engine loafing its propeller around. Throttle back to idle, a full-rudder slip, and the Fleet and I fell sideways toward the ground. I saw the biplane there, thought about it for a few seconds, and decided it would be no harm to drop in. Mine’s a free life, but it does get lonely, sometimes. In four years’ flying, I had never found another pilot in the line of work I do: flying with the wind from town to town, selling rides in an old biplane, three dollars for ten minutes in the air.īut one day just north of Ferris, Illinois, I looked down from the cockpit of my Fleet and there was an old Travel Air 4000, gold and white, landed pretty as you please in the lemon-emerald hay. It was toward the middle of the summer that I met Donald Shimoda.
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