CHAPTER FOUR

I called the Flight Service in Denver to get an update on the weather along my intended route. The forecast called for severe clear all the way to Oshkosh for the next two days with the only possible exception being a very weak low pressure trough laying on a north-south line across Nebraska. They added that it was so weak that probably the only result would be an increase in southerly winds along it. Other than that, winds were forecast to be more or less calm along the route.

I had a quick breakfast and was at the airport just as the sun poked above the horizon. The luggage compartment behind the back seat of the Cub is nothing more than a canvas bag covered by a hinged plywood lid with a hole about the size of a quarter in the middle of it. The hole is to stick your finger in and lift the lid. The luggage compartment was too small to accommodate my luggage and with no passenger, I wanted to get as much weight forward as possible so I put the backpack in the front seat and secured it with the seatbelt. Since it would take a circus contortionist to get anything out of the luggage compartment in flight, I stuffed my water bottle, two piddle packs and an apple into the pocket on the backrest of the front seat.

Everything seemed to be in airworthy condition as I went through a preflight of the airplane. Even though I had topped the fuel tanks before tying the ship down, I removed the caps and stuck my finger into the opening to be sure that the fuel had not leaked out or that someone hadn't put in a hose and siphoned off some of it. It is not totally unknown to have someone hose off a tank of gas from an airplane which is tied down outside. Both tanks were still full so I opened the drain cock on the gascolator to dump any water that might have accumulated in the system. After pulling the engine slowly through each compression stroke to be sure that there were no leaking valves or rings, I pulled the engine through a few times with the throttle closed to pull some prime into the cylinders. With the magnetos on, I cracked the throttle slightly and gave the prop a pull. The little Continental responded instantly and fell into a sweet rhythm. It's always comforting when an engine starts on the first pull.

After letting the engine warm up, adjusting the altimeter to 7000 feet, the elevation of Black Forest Gliderport, and checking the magnetos, I rolled down the runway. With an airplane as simple as the Cub, there is very little to do prior to takeoff. At about 200 feet above the ground, I cranked the trim to level flight and swung the nose to the east. There was no reason to gain any more altitude because the ground drops off in that direction and the further that I flew, the higher I would be above the ground. Crossing the airport boundary, I made a 30 degree turn to the left to put Pikes Peak at my back and established a heading for my first stop at McCook.

I had taken off with the fuel selector on the nose tank but as soon as I was clear of the airport, I switched to the wing tank. That would keep all the weight possible forward for better trim and possibly an extra mile or so an hour of airspeed. Since the wing tank had no gauge, I would burn out of it first. The 10 gallons carried in the wing should provide at least three hours of fuel. My plan was to fly on the wing tank for two hours and then switch back to the nose tank. By doing it this way, should I have to run the nose tank dry, I would have something like an hour of reserve in the wing. It's not exact science on fuel management but better than a wild guess. I scanned the simple instruments; 2100 RPM, 7200 feet of altitude, 160 degrees oil temperature, 20 pounds oil pressure and 50 MPH indicated airspeed. With the airspeed corrected for the altitude, it would be about 60.

I had recently received one of those computer generated form letters which said that my name had been selected by a computer, along with two others, and one of us had won a new automobile. The two people who did not win the car would receive a valuable alternate prize. All I had to do in order to claim the automobile, or other valuable prize, was to visit their delightful RV resort and take a short tour of the facilities with one of their pleasant hosts. What this really meant was that I would have to submit myself to half an hour of a high pressure salesmanship trying to sell me a membership in an RV camping resort. I would learn if I was the lucky winner of the new car only after my tour at which time the salesman would remove the seal on my letter and expose the secret number.

After listening to the salesman's spiel while driving past empty RV parking spaces and seeing the pool and clubhouse under construction, I told him that I wasn't interested in buying a membership. He ripped the seal off my letter to disclose my secret number and guess what, I had missed winning the car by just one digit, but had won the valuable alternate prize, a combination wrist watch and electronic calculator just like ones that the NASA Astronauts wore. It must be true because there was a picture of the Space Shuttle and "NASA" on the plastic face of the watch. I would estimate that their cost for the watch was something less than three bucks. It just happened that the battery in my good watch had expired and I hadn't gotten around to having it replaced, so I strapped on my valuable prize.

It's truly amazing the number of functions which can be programmed into a simple silicon chip which couldn't cost more than a few cents. That cheap plastic watch would not only tell time, but by pressing certain buttons, would give you the time anywhere in the world. Alternating with the time function; it displayed the year, month, date and day of the week. It had a stop watch function, an elapsed time and alarm. It could remember 25 telephone numbers and the same number of birthdays anniversaries or other special events. It not only contained an eight digit calculator with all of the usual functions, but for pilots and astronauts, it could also compute time, distance and speed. Having nothing else to keep me occupied while I puttered along at a speed considerably less than that traveled by the astronauts in the space shuttle, I decided to test out the time, distance and speed function of the calculator.

According to the instructions, I pressed the tiny button

marked "TDS" and "Distance" began to flash on the screen. I entered 1 mile and it began to blink "Time". As I passed over one section line fence, I pressed the "Start" button. When I crossed the next fence a mile away, I pressed the "Stop" button followed by the equals sign. Up came 59 seconds and a speed of 61 MPH. How about that, it actually works.

I checked the time in New York, London and Tokyo. It would have given me the square root of a number or multiply it by Pi had I asked. For the life of me, I couldn't come up with a single number for which I needed to know the square root, much less what it was when multiplied by Pi. No matter how little else one has to do, it's still awfully hard to maintain a high level of interest in a plastic watch with a picture of the Space Shuttle on it.

Flying three or four hundred feet above the ground at 60 miles an hour gives one a lot of time to observe things. I watched a man in a pickup truck chase a cow across the prairie. She crossed a deep ditch but he got stuck trying to follow her, so he got out and chased after her on foot. I don't know if he ever caught her. I saw a man riding a horse and he waved as I came closer. I rocked my wings in answer. Pilots used to rock their wings at people on the ground all the time but it had been years since I'd seen it done. I saw a woman hanging her wash on a clothes line to dry, but she didn't pay any attention to me. Either she didn't hear me or simply didn't care. There were sixteen white chickens and two red ones in her yard, they didn't seem to care either.

I checked my genuine NASA astronaut's watch and found that I had been in the air for two hours. I checked my ground speed, it was still 60 MPH. I had hoped for a tail wind to help me along but there was none. At least I could be thankful that there was no headwind. Even a little headwind really slows down a ship which is already going this slow. I'd swear that the seat cushion under me was a lot thinner and harder than it was when I took off. I shifted around, trying to find a more comfortable position, but it didn't help.

In late August, the whole world is brown. Wheat fields have long since been cut, leaving a brown stubble. The fields which have been turned under show brown earth and grass, which might have been green in the spring, has turned its own shade of brown. In Spanish, Colorado means a sort of rusty red color. Perhaps they should change the name of the state to Moreno, which means brown. The brown prairie rose over the horizon, marched slowly toward me and disappeared beneath my wings.

The sun had began to knock the chill from the morning air so I opened the door and latched the window against the bottom of the wing to allow the balmy August air flow in. I leaned my head out the door to sniff the hot air coming off the engine. It smelled of new paint. In the days of open cockpit airplanes, pilots learned how to tell the condition of their engines by how they smelled. The odor of carbon means that it is running too rich while a brassy smell means that it is too lean. Burning oil has its own odor and a rusty smell means that it is running too hot. The little Continental smelled just right.

Off to the north I can see the towns of Akron, Otis and Yuma. Behind me lay Deer Trail and Last Chance, and ahead was a place called Wray. The most prominent feature in each of these towns is the huge white grain elevator. I passed over a place called Beecher Island. How on earth could there be an island where there is no water? I puttered past by the towns of Cope, Joe, Kirk and Max; must have been settled by four brothers. I came to the conclusion that Eastern Colorado has more than its share of towns with funny names.

Total, sheer, abstract boredom is synonymous with flying cross country in a slow airplane. I could drive to Oshkosh in an automobile in about the same length of time that it will take me to fly there in the Cub. At least, on the ground, I would be able to read roadside signs advertising MacDonalds and the location of the world's deepest hand dug well at Oakley, Kansas. The Cub requires just enough attention to keep it level and on course to make reading a book out of the question. I've read a lot of books while the gyros, servos and gears of an automatic pilot tended to the flying chores. With a radar operator on the ground scanning the skies in front of me, there was little else to do. About the only thing to do in the Cub is give the trim handle half a turn about every half hour to keep it in trim as fuel is burned out of the nose tank.

I'd been in the air for better than three and a half hours when McCook, Nebraska finally came creeping over the horizon. I searched the landscape for the hangars which are always visible long before you can see the runways. Twenty minutes later I was entering downwind for a landing when the engine sputtered and began to windmill silently. I had forgotten to switch tanks after three hours. I moved the fuel selector to the nose tank and the engine came back to life. Looked as if my guess was right that four hours is the absolute maximum that I can get from the wing tank.

A young man, about the age that I was when I first soloed, walked from the office, "Put twenty dollars worth of 87 octane in the wing tank if it will hold that much."

"We don't have anything except 100 or Jet A," he replied.

"Then hundred octane will have to do, and please check the oil," I replied as I hobbled around on the ramp, trying to work the stiffness out of my knees before heading for the bathroom.