Picture a cool mid-summer day in central lower Michigan. It is 1944 and I will be four years old in September. My mother and Grandmother are frantically looking for me — it was not like me to disappear. Then Grandma with her blue, Swiss eyes, saw a man and a boy

walking toward the house down the section-line road that ran along the west side of our 80 acre farm. The boy looked like me from a half mile away. New neighbors had bought the farm one-half mile down and on the other side of the section-line road but they were not home. The new neighbors had moved from Lansing, Michigan and two friends had landed a biplane in their field. I saw it follow the road from town, circle the farm several times and land in a newly mowed hay field. I headed straight for it across the fields of our farm with never a thought of telling anyone where I was going. In any case, I could point out where I lived and one of the pilots walked me home and asked my mother if he could give me a ride in his airplane. The answer was “NO, but thanks for walking him home.” I suspect the plane was a Stearman but never knew for sure. It had a blue fuselage and yellow wings.

As the years passed I made model planes, flew rubber band powered planes and day-dreamed about what it would be like to fly a real airplane. That was before getting into guns, reloading ammunition, making gunstocks and hunting. But the interest in flying never went away and during the summer after high school graduation, I managed to get my first airplane ride. There was a flying operation in a town about 20 miles away by road where I got a ride in a Piper PA-11. We flew back to my home which seemed very close by air, and looked over the farm. I got to fly the plane on the way back to the airport. I liked it but there was no money for flying lessons as I was starting college in a few weeks and what money I could earn had to be saved for that. Sometime in the early fall there was a notice in the college newspaper that a college flying club was being organized. I attended the first meeting and that began the process of getting parental consent and financial backing for joining the flying club. I had learned over the years that mother hated drinking and somehow picked up that she associated college fraternities with drinking parties. I evolved the strategy that I would either join a fraternity or the flying club and it worked like a charm. In mother’s mind, flying was a lesser evil than fraternities.

The airport operator had recovered a 1946 Taylorcraft BC-12D, installed a factory remanufactured C-65 Continental engine (the factory was in Muskegon, Michigan at that time) and it looked like new. Of course the plane was only 13 years old so this was its first recover since it left the Taylorcraft factory in Alliance, Ohio. It had a compass, tachometer, airspeed, oil pressure, oil temperature for instruments. It had a gas tank in each wing giving 24 gallons of fuel which is a lot of flying at 4 gph. Many T-Crafts had only one 12 gallon nose tank with the wire on a cork fuel indicator. The club bought it for $1600 and I was the first club member to get a lesson in it. That happened on January 6, 1959. I soloed on May 16, 1959 after 8:05 hours of dual instruction. By the end of 1959 I had 14:30 hours total time and 8:05 of dual. Things were different back then. But the lack of more dual did not mean I was not monitored as the airport operator kept close watch on the club plane and I soon learned that the best time to fly was in early morning or just before sunset. If there was any wind we could not fly. It was only after cross country training and crosswind landing training that you could go out and fly in the middle of the day.

I had learned to fly in the cold air of a Michigan winter. One beautiful spring day soon after I soloed, I had an experience that scared me away from flying for at least two weeks. I was doing takeoffs and landings. I was doing the drill that was familiar by then, on downwind, pull on the carb heat, opposite the end of the runway reduce the power to idle and hold altitude and heading until it slowed to 70 mph. I did just that, but the plane started climbing. Here I was with the engine at idle, 70 mph and the plane was going up. What to do? I kept gliding straight ahead trying to understand what was happening. I began to get a little scared. After what seemed like a long time but was probably less than a minute, the plane began to glide down instead of up and I turned base but was about a mile from the runway. In all my winter flying I had never had to add power other than to clear the engine on base and final. This time I had to add power and fly back to the runway on final. I did not like it. I did not know what had happened and I was blaming the airplane. I made the landing, taxied in, fueled it up, put it back in the big hangar and did not discuss what had happened with anyone. The club had organized an evening ground school and in a class on weather I got a hint about what had happened. After much thought and a new mental concept about “thermals” I got up my nerve and flew a few more times before going home for the summer. To be continued...

Copyright © 2001 by Gary Collins.  All rights reserved.

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