CHAPTER TWO

There it sat, bright yellow in the morning sunlight, looking as if it had just rolled out the door of the big green factory building on the banks of the Susguehanna River. A black electric stripe ran from just beneath the exposed cylinders of the 65 horsepower Continental engine, back to the tail where a slightly askew decal of a bear held the Cub emblem. Piper put their decals on in a strange way, they weren't straight either with the ship sitting on the ground or in level flight

            I ran my hand over the varnished wooden propeller and marveled at the excellent job that had been done in restoring the ship to its original condition. He had paid great attention to the most minute details. I was amazed to find that the ship was still fitted with the original fat, slick, bouncy tires and a tiny hard rubber tailwheel. I hadn't seen either of those on an airplane in years.

Rather than having twelve inch high registration numbers on the sides of the fuselage as is the accepted practice today, the numbers were in the same location as when the ship was built. It had huge 24" numbers on top of one wing and bottom of the other with small numbers on either side of the tail. The ship had a rather unique registration number, N99998. One more and it would have been all nines. For some reason, I kept getting the strange feeling that I had seen that particular number before, but I finally passed it off as simply being a killer poker hand.

The door on the Cub doesn't swing open like most other airplanes. It is split along the middle with the window half raising up to a hook on the lower surface of the right wing while the lower half simply drops down against the side of the fuselage. It has no outside handle and to open or close it from the outside, one has to slide open the window on the left and reach across the front seat to turn the handle from the inside. One of the benefits of a door of this design is that the window can be left open in flight for some ventilation or both it and the door for a lot. Opening the lower half gives the pilot in the back seat much better visibility when landing and was probably the first stall warning indicator to be found on an airplane. Just before the wing stalls, the increased angle of attack of the air flowing along the side of the fuselage will lift the door. Old time instructors knew of this and would always close the lower door to keep students from depending on it to tell them when the ship was about to stall.

The instrument panel was totally original, containing only the basic gauges required when the ship was built. To the far left side of the panel was the tachometer and to the far right was the combination oil pressure and temperature gauge. Both of these instruments bore the original Cub markings. The reason for separating the engine instruments to either side of the panel was so the pilot in the rear seat could see them around a person in the front seat. The compass, airspeed and altimeter were clustered together in the middle of the panel and totally hidden by a passenger or the instructor in the front seat. I can remember that it was on my first solo flight that I was able to see how high I was or how fast I was going. Pilots in those days were taught to control their speed by a combination of wind noise, stick pressure and nose attitude. The altitude was estimated by how large things looked on the ground.

The ignition switch was located above the left window so it could be reached from either seat and to make it visible to whoever was cranking the engine. It's a great comfort to a person pulling the propeller to be able to see the position of the switch rather than having to depend on what the pilot might tell him. Everything else in the cockpit was just as it had been in 1946 except that a fuel selector valve had been added just below the knob for the carburetor heat. Normally, the Cub carried only 12 gallons of fuel in a tank just in front of the instrument panel. With the original 40 horse engine burning less than three gallons an hour, they ship had well over four hours range. They didn't increase the tank size when they installed the larger engine and with it burning about four gallons an hour, you were going to be on the ground every three hours, one way or another. With a cruising speed of only 60 miles per hour, fuel stops could be no more than about 180 miles apart.

The fuel gauge on the main tank was simply a piece of cork attached to a wire which protruded through a hole in the filler cap. As the fuel level went down, so did the wire. The length of the wire was adjusted so that when it hit bottom, there was about 15 minutes of fuel left in the tank. During the Cub's 40 years of life, someone had installed an additional tank in the left wing, doubling the amount of fuel which could be carried. I still wouldn't consider 300 miles as being a long range for an airplane, but for something so slow it couldn't keep up with trucks on the highway, it would be just great duration. There are very few pilots who are old enough to have flown Piper Cubs and still have bladders which can last for five hours.

I finished the preflight, removed the tiedown ropes from the wings and propped the engine. It came to life on the first pull and ticked over smoothly. The Cub has no parking brake so I put a pebble in front of each tire to prevent it from rolling away when I untied the rope holding the tail.

Getting into either seat in a J-3 requires a certain amount of gymnastics and no two people seem to do it the same way. If one doesn't go about getting into the Cub correctly, he will usually find himself with one or both feet hanging out the door and no way short of breaking bones to get them inside.

I was thankful that the Cub is flown solo from the back seat because the front seat is extremely uncomfortable for anyone much over about five feet tall. One of the things that Piper did when they built the Super Cub was to move both seats back several inches to give the pilot in the front seat more leg room and comfort. Not only is there considerably more padding in the rear seat, the back extends higher and wraps around the shoulder blades.

The long control stick appears totally out of proportion with the rest of the ship. It s well over an inch in diameter and stands almost as high as the backrest of the front seat. It's fitted with a big, rubber grip like something normally found on the handles of a wheel barrow. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not where it came from. The stick is so long that the pilot's knuckles are against the backrest of the front seat when it is fully forward and tucked into his stomach when all the way back for landing. A pilot with much of a belly has quite a problem getting the stick all the way back. With the lack of any aerodynamic balancing of the control surfaces, that extra leverage of the long stick does come in handy at times.

I nudged the throttle forward and the engine responded smoothly. The fat tires rolled over the pebbles and we waddled off toward the runway like a big yellow duck. I left the door open so I could enjoy the beautiful morning. After a quick check of the magnetos, I pulled the carburetor heat on and the engine RPM dropped. Satisfied that the little ship was ready to fly, I pointed the nose down the runway and shoved the throttle forward to the stop. There was no surge of power and noise like the big 180 HP engines on the towplanes, just a comfortable increase in speed and soon the tail came up to where I could see over the nose. Before lifting the ship off the runway, I made my usual engine instrument check, both oil gauges in the green and 2100 RPM. The Cub is the ultimate in simplicity.

There was a solid feel to the stick in my hand. It took both pressure and movement to get results, not like the present crop of airplanes which are more like driving a car with power steering than flying an airplane. I had forgotten just how honest the Cub flies. It is totally predictable in that it does exactly the same thing every time. In steep turns, the nose tracks around the horizon with no tendency to rise or dive. No matter what attitude the ship is in when it is stalled, the warning and break are always the same. It spun with enthusiasm but would recover instantly when told to do so. The Cub is simply one of those rare airplanes which has no unusual quirks or surprises.

It was like shaking hands with an old friend as we danced with the puffy white clouds for the better part of an hour. I had almost forgotten what true flying is all about. I entered the landing pattern on downwind, pulled carburetor heat and closed the throttle. The engine was ticking over so quietly that I gave it a little shot of power on crosswind just to be sure that it was still alive. It responded instantly. I turned final and picked a landing spot near the hangars, no use landing at one end of the runway and having to taxi all the way to the other. My landing spot began to sink slowly as viewed over the nose, indicating that I would overshoot slightly. I lowered the right wing and applied a bit of left rudder, pushing the Cub into a slip to the right. The wind rushed into my face through the open door and the glide angle became steeper.

The nose rose slowly and the sound of air over the wings diminished as we slowed and sank to within inches of the ground. The open door began to rise, telling me that I was approaching a stall. With the stick tucked firmly into my stomach, I felt the tailwheel touch first then the fat tires kissed the runway with quick little chirps. No skip, no bounce, no hippity-hop; they just began to roll. Best landing I ever made in a Cub!

I checked the oil, filled both tanks with fuel then tied the ship down. It was ready to take me anywhere I cared to point it. The only real problem with flying this ship any distance is that it is so terribly slow. The factory claims that it will cruise 80 miles per hour, but there is no way that it will go a bit above 65, even with the throttle wide open.

I called Flight Service to check the weather between Colorado and Wisconsin and found that a slow-moving weather system was hanging around over the plains and it would be two or three days before it would move out and leave a window of good weather. It makes a lot more sense to wait at home while the system moves than to fly up against it and have to wait it out at some strange airport. I turned to have one final look at the beautiful little ship before I walked away and suddenly those four nines and an eight of the registration number came back to haunt me. There was just something about them that I couldn't get out of my mind. I began to wonder where that ship had been all of its life, so I removed the large envelope containing the log books and other papers from the baggage compartment behind the back seat and took it home with me.

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