CHAPTER FIVE

                I called Flight Service for a weather update and was told that every station to the east of McCook was reporting clear. I asked about the low pressure trough that the Denver Flight Service had mentioned as being across Nebraska. They told me that it was so weak that it had been dropped off the weather map two hours earlier, however a pilot had reported a few scattered low clouds west of Grand Island.

                "Twenty dollars exactly filled the wing tank and the oil is OK," said the attendant as he walked in the door and handed me the fuel ticket.

                "Anything to eat around here?" I asked.

                "Crackers and candy are all, but you can use the courtesy car to go to a restaurant in town if you like," he replied.

                I went over to the map on the wall and stretched the string to Omaha; it was 280 miles or just under five hours flying time. Having that extra tank would allow me to do it in one long hop. Navigation would be easy, angle a little more to the north until I picked up the interstate and follow it into Omaha. There was a small airport on the north side of the highway at the west edge of town. I had lost an hour on the clock when I crossed into the Central Time Zone, but if I got into the air immediately, I should still be able to make it to Omaha before sunset. I paid for the fuel and bought a candy bar.

                "Could you give me a prop?" I asked the attendant.

                "The boss says that our insurance won't allow me to hand crank an airplane, but if your battery is down, I'll bring the fuel truck over with some jumper cables."

                "That wouldn't help any," I replied. "It doesn't have a starter either. Just stand against the elevator to keep the ship from rolling and I'll prop it."

                As soon as I was off the ground, I established a cruising altitude of about 500 feet above the ground and took a heading which would intersect the interstate highway somewhere around Kearney, then I switched back to the wing tank. I was no more than twenty minutes east of McCook when I began to spot a few scattered clouds ahead. They seemed to be rather close to the ground, almost like ground fog. Evidently, the low pressure trough should have been left on the weather map. Things like that usually aren't very far across so I began to climb to see if I could see the other side of the clouds. At three thousand feet above the ground, I could see nothing except a solid deck of clouds all the way to the horizon. Beneath me, the spaces between the clouds were rapidly closing together. My first thought was to simply stay above the clouds and set a compass course for Omaha. I was bound to pass over them within an hour or so.

                I hadn't even bothered to check the compass to see how it corresponded with known directions on the ground and decided that I should do so while I could still use section lines for reference. I headed east and the compass read East. I turned to the south but the compass remained on East. I finished the circle, leveling out to the west and then to the north, but the obstinate instrument refused to swing either way. It was immediately obvious why the compass would not respond; the heads of the attaching screws were silver in color, not brass. The magnets in the compass were locked onto those steel screws. Evidently the man who rebuilt the ship didn't know the difference and the mechanic who inspected it failed to notice them.

                Even without a compass, I could have maintained an easterly course by keeping the sun to my right, but should something happen to the engine and I was forced to let down through the clouds, attempting to do so with no directional reference could turn into a fatal mistake. If a pilot enters clouds with no way of knowing whether he is turning or not, his life expectancy is whatever amount of time it takes for him to reach the ground at a very high rate of speed.

                Had I flown the airplane long enough to come to trust the engine, I might have gone ahead, but with an unknown ship which had just recently been rebuilt, I was not ready to take that chance. The only other alternative, other than landing someplace and waiting for the clouds to burn off, was to see if I could get under them.

                By checking the movement of the clouds against the ground, I estimated that the they were moving northward at about ten miles an hour, so that would be the logical direction to go in order to find the best conditions. I turned north and began to descend toward a fairly good size hole in the clouds. Circling down through the hole, I found that conditions beneath the clouds weren't too bad, about four hundred feet of ceiling and a good two miles visibility. It was damp and chilly beneath the clouds, making flight much more comfortable with the door closed. I established my 30 degree angle to the section lines and resumed my course for Omaha. Scud-running isn't my favorite sport in an airplane but at least I was making progress toward my destination.

                I hadn't corrected for the wind drift to my left and reached the interstate sooner than I expected. I turned to follow it, staying directly above the right hand lanes, hoping that in case some other fool was coming from the opposite direction, he would be over the opposite lanes. There is one point of safety in flying directly above a road, you aren't likely to run into a radio tower.       Cars and trucks caught up with me and passed. Flying a Cub is one instance where it would be faster to drive than to fly. I hadn't progressed more than five or six miles before the clouds began to pinch closer to the ground and the visibility slowly reduced to less than a mile. It was getting too dicey to continue following the interstate and since conditions looked better to the left than they did straight ahead, I veered off in that direction.

                Flying two or three hundred feet above the ground and being able to see only a couple miles make navigation very difficult. I was no longer trying to keep track of where I was, but simply flew in the direction where the clouds looked the lightest. I could fly four or five miles to the north and then be able to turn and go three or four to the east. At least I was making a certain amount of progress and if the band of clouds wasn't too wide, I should reach the other side before too long.

                At one point, I flew over a farm airstrip and decided to land there, if for nothing more than to find out where I was and call for an update on the weather. I circled the house and burped the engine a few times, but no one came out. Even though no one appeared to be home, I began a short pattern to land when I flew through a flash of sunlight streaking down through a hole in the clouds. I thought that I must be getting near the eastern edge of the overcast, so I pulled up and headed out again. There is no use in landing if I will be in the clear before long.

                I hadn't thought to check my watch when I took off or when I went under the clouds, so could only guess how long I had been in the air. It seemed like hours but I estimated it to be something over one hour but less than two. I pulled out the Nebraska map and tried to estimate where 75 to 90 miles in the general direction which I had been flying would put me. But since I had been flying either straight north or straight east most of the time, there was no way of knowing.

                Droplets of water began to form on the windshield and a few seconds later, the engine began to lose power. Carburetor ice! I grabbed for the carburetor heat knob in an attempt to clear the ice from the intake manifold before it completely choked the engine. The outside air temperature does not need to be anywhere near freezing for carburetor ice to form once droplets of water begin to enter the system. Ice is caused by the cooling effect of the evaporating fuel in the carburetor and ice is most likely to form when the air temperature is around 68 degrees. All airplanes are subject to formation of carburetor ice, but the Cub seems to be one of the worst. It is probably because the heated air off the cylinders is routed outside of the cowling instead of around the carburetor.

                Heated air to clear the ice is routed into the intake from a muff on the exhaust manifold, but the instant that the engine begins to lose power, the temperature of the exhaust drops and it becomes a race to melt the ice before the engine dies. The engine began to sputter and the RPM sagged to less than 1400, not enough power to keep me in the air. I looked for a place to land because from 200 feet of altitude, one has about 15 seconds before he is on the ground if total power is lost. I suddenly remembered the old trick of pumping the throttle to help break up the ice and tried that. The engine shuddered as if trying to help rid itself of the ice and slowly came back up to 1800 RPM, the maximum that it would turn because of the added restriction of the heat being on. I now had two problems, no forward visibility due to the water on the windshield and a loss of a good ten miles an hour speed.

                I came to a paved road running east and west. It didn't appear to be a major highway of any sort, more like a Farm to Market road. Paved roads usually begin and end at a town of some sort so I turned to follow it. While I could see forward at an angle to either side, I had to swing the nose one way or the other to see where I was going. As I followed the road, I came to a pickup loaded with hogs parked on the edge of the pavement with a flat tire. The left front wheel was jacked up and the driver was trying to get the spare tire out of the wheel well in the front fender. The pickup must have dated to the mid-1930s because they never built one with the spare mounted in a front fender after the war. His head jerked up as I passed by a hundred feet high and I could see the surprise in his eyes. When I glanced back to see the grill on the pickup, I realized that it was a Hudson. The only place that sort of vehicle is seen is in antique automobile auctions. One in running shape, as this one obviously was, would bring up to ten thousand dollars. I wondered to myself why a person with such a rare and valuable antique would be using it to haul hogs.

                I flew on for three or four miles and a small town began to materialize out of the drizzle. The highway which I was following became the main street of the town but returned to a farm road again at the other side. I guessed that the whole main street was no more than six or eight blocks from one end to the other. A squat, brick school building was on the south side of main street at the west edge of town. Four yellow school busses were parked behind the school, next to the bleachers for the football field. Along the four or five blocks between the school and the main intersection were mostly single story buildings until you came to the downtown intersection where two story brick buildings stood on all four corners. Another paved road ran north and south from the main intersection of town.

                I spotted the courthouse which set a block off main street. It's always easy to pick out the courthouse in any small town as it is usually not only the largest, but also the ugliest building around. It seems that county commissioners are far more willing to spend tax monies for ugly buildings than they are when it comes to designing their own business buildings. I've never seen a bank, automobile dealership or any other private building which would match the average courthouse for lack of architectural grace. A water tower stood behind the court house and I could see that it had a name painted on it. I swung away from the main street so I could fly by the tower and read the name of the town.

                The first thing that I saw as I approached the water tower was scrawled in big black letters, SRS-46. I can remember that the big thing each year when I was in high school was what they called the Junior-Senior flag fight. The two classes had an annual contest to see who could paint their flags in the most places as well as in the most visible or unusual places. The year that I was a senior, I borrowed an airplane which was equipped for sky writing and wrote SRS in the sky over the homecoming football game. They must not paint their water tower very often, I thought to myself.

                SANGER, the name of the town, came into view as I circled past the tower. A sign on the red brick building across the street from the bank announced that it was a hotel and the decision was made, Sanger would be where I would wait for better weather. There is an old saying that pilots killed in bad weather are usually buried in bright sunshine. I had pressed my luck far enough on this day.

                I didn't bother to get the road map out to figure out where I was as there would be plenty time to do that later. The problem facing me now was to locate a safe place to land and secure the Cub. An airport would be the best choice but the Cub would be at home on most any level piece of ground. Lacking an airport, I would simply find a level field close to town where I could land, just like the barnstormers used to do.

                From the air, I estimated the population of Sanger to be about a thousand people, give or take a few dogs. I wondered if it was large enough to have an airport. If they did have one, it would probably be located within a couple miles of town and most likely along one of the paved roads running out of town. I hadn't seen one on the way in from the west so that eliminated that direction.

                I flew on past town to the east to check that direction and about a mile away, I saw three metal buildings which appeared to be airplane hangars on the right side of the road. As I came closer, I could also see a small office building, two parked airplanes and an orange windsock on a pole. I swung out, made a quick right turn and touched the wheels of the Cub down on the wet grass of the runway.

                There were no cars at the airport and no one appeared when I killed the engine. I climbed from the Cub and walked through the slow drizzle to the tiny office building. The door was locked but a piece of paper taped to the window stated that one should call the Texaco station for fuel or call Harley Sloan for flight instruction or rides. Since I had no need for either of those services, I looked around for a place to tie the ship down. Three old airplane tires placed in a triangle in front of the office suggested the location of a tiedown spot but all that was there was short pieces of chain sticking out of the ground. There were no ropes and that was one of the things which I had forgotten to bring along.

                The chilly drizzle was hitting me in the face as I walked to the two airplanes which were tied down on the south side of the hangars to see if there was anything there. I hadn't really paid any attention to the two ships when I landed and was rather surprised to find that one was a Waco Cabin biplane and the other was one of the nicest Fairchild PT-19s that I'd seen since the time when they were sold as surplus just after World War Two. A canvas cover was snapped in place over the open cockpits to keep the rain out. One of the greatest enemies to that particular ship was leaving the cockpits uncovered and allowing water to collect in the center section of the wing where it would begin to rot the wood and weaken the glue joints. The cockpit cover was usually one of the first things to be tossed aside by people when they bought the PT-19s as surplus from the War Assets Administration and they rapidly went from airworthy ships to airport eyesores. Deterioration of the wood in the center section of the wings is the reason why there are so few of that particular ship still around on the antique airplane market. The grass under both ships had been freshly mowed, indicating that they had been flown recently. There were no tiedowns other than the ones for those ships.

                A little rain wouldn't harm the Cub but I certainly wasn't about to go off and leave it unsecured. While the wind was very light at the time, one never knew when it might increase. It takes only about 20 mph of wind to place a Cub in danger of being blown over.

                I checked the doors on one of the hangars and found them locked, but doors on the second one rolled open easily. There was nothing in the hangar and the lack of any tracks on the dirt floor indicated that it hadn't been used for some time. With weather like this, it wasn't likely that the owner would be returning and need to use it, so I shoved the doors open and pushed the Cub inside. Just as a precaution in case the owner should return and want my ship out, I wrote a note which said, "Pilot of this ship will be at the hotel in town until the weather improves." I placed the note on the rear seat cushion, picked up my backpack and closed the hangar doors.

                Not a single car passed me as I trudged along the road toward town. A hundred yards or so west of the airport fence was a vacant house with a large barn behind it. The front door stood open and some of the windows were broken, but at least it would be dry inside. I considered stopping there to get out of the drizzle which was rapidly turning into light rain but decided that since I was already rather damp, I might as well go on to town where there would be a restaurant with food and hot coffee. It was now a little past two in the afternoon and had been a long time since breakfast.

Index | Next Chapter