Biplane Pilot

Split personality.  That's about the best way you can put it. 

In the air, she's a pussy cat - clean, lively, responsive, smooth and predictable.  Unless the engine quits, then you'd better dump the nose and start looking over the top wing for 100 miles per hour if you want any chance of putting her down without balling her up. 

Once those wheels bite the ground however, especially pavement, she'll go from Jekyll to Hyde in about two turns of the prop. 

Most Smith drivers will tell you things happen in a hurry and rarely the same way twice.  You need to treat the airplane gently because she doesn't like to be rushed and will voice her displeasure with immediate and potentially disastrous feedback.  She isn't a tiger by any means...she just doesn't take kindly to any sort of incapacity, neglect or abuse.

Once again, I've never flown one but I've heard enough stories, seen enough wistful smiles and distant gazes to feel as though I've logged an hour or two.

To my knowledge, the only pictures in existence of C-FFAM in flight.  This is a sequence taken in the summer of 1981 at Rockcliffe Airport - easily identifiable by the hangar and terminal from the Air Transit short haul operation (now part of the Canada Aviation & Space Museum). (Family Collection)

My dad prepared as best as he could to climb into FAM's pilot's seat.  Yet, in a single-hole biplane, you basically need to teach yourself.  There isn't a check pilot or instructor to coax you along or take control to avert disaster.  Pep talks and advice from other pilots familiar with the type are well intentioned but no substitute for strapping in and feeling things out.  At a certain point, you need to open the throttle and take the leap.

So, after about ten hours at the controls of the Mini plane, the vast majority doing take-offs and landings, my dad decided to bring it to the Ottawa area.

On July 18th, 1981 he left King City for Peterborough, Perth then finally Carp - just west of Ottawa - making the flight low and slow in two and a half hours.

My dad with FAM at Rockcliffe in the summer of 1981.  This remains one of my favourite pictures. (Family Collection)

The workload of pulse racing take-offs and landings would have been a small price to pay for the joy of the long legs between airports.  There's a certain romance to droning along at two thousand feet, without a radio, with just the clothes on your back and ten bucks and a credit card in your pocket, watching the patchwork fields of southern Ontario crawl by under the wings while the horizon stays balanced on the tip of the propeller hub.  It's easy to imagine the stubby wings rolling gaily left then right - commanded by gloved fingers resting lightly on a worn control column.  The  comforting moan of the little Continental and the static of the air rushing along the airplane's fabric flanks are your only companions.  Every so often, a Cherokee or 150 drifts by with a gentlemanly dip of a wing.

These are, unfortunately, just words - words that fall hopelessly short of describing what must have been complete solitude and the very definition of freedom.

Dad at the controls of C-FFAM at Rockcliffe in the summer of 1981.  (Family Collection)

One week later, after securing a tiedown at the eastern part of the field, my dad flew FAM from Carp to its new home of Rockcliffe.

Of flesh, fabric, birch and bone...

What are our lives if not a collection of moments? 

They are fleeting seconds built one on top of the other, interlocking bricks in a wall held together by the mortar of experience, feeling, relationship, success, failure, birth and death.  The result can be measured in terms of days, months and years.  They begin at a precise moment and end at a particular point in time.  And yet, all this is a massive and mind-numbing contradiction.  Life has finite book ends while the experience that lies between is both infinite and immense.

To pick just one moment is a challenge that chills one soul.  This story has one such moment.

June 11th, 1981.  3:00 pm.

The pilot only feels the air's whisper against his brow for it has been drowned, overwhelmed by the whine of the 85 horsepower Continental labouring only inches behind the spartan instrumentation. 

His right hand resting on the throttle, the left hand moves forward and the tail obeys, lifting the tailwheel off the grass at Collingwood, Ontario. 

Now, through the cabanes and down the button nose, the pilot sees the end of the field first inch, then gallop towards him.  His feet, at first nervously twitching, have grown calm and confident - buoyed by speed and stability.  Muscle memory dictates that the right hand must now move aft and then, once the rush of speed has subsided, the pilot should lower the tail and be ready on the rudder pedals.

This moment, however, was born differently than his brethren before.  Hidden in the wind's whisper is a shout, a scream that cuts through the mechanical moan of the engine and the concentration of the airman.

"Let's go."

The wheels leave the ground. The sanctuary of the cockpit is wrapped in secrecy. The next forty minutes are for plane and pilot alone.  Solitude isn't for everyone but it does have certain benefits.

My dad's first ever flight in C-FFAM was something of an accident.  He began the day by practising taxiing the biplane up and down Collingwood's grass strip - first at low speed with the tail down then at higher speed running on the main wheels alone.  On one such run, he decided to leave the ground in his new mount.

Notes from June 11th and 12th, 1980 - my dad's first 4 flights in FAM.  He scrawled them on the back of a message notice before entering them into his personal logbook and the aircraft's journey log.  I found this tucked into the moleskin jacket of his logbook 32 years later.  (Family Collection)

The page from my dad's logbook detailing his first flights in the Miniplane and the four flights he did in Aeronca Champ 7AC CF-MTG.  He erroneously called it a Scout and then used the registration CF-WEA - which was actually applied to a 172 on floats that he was flying at Orillia during this time.  (Family Collection)



The next day, emboldened by his first solo in FAM, he spent the whole day, three-and-a-half hours, doing circuits in the biplane. 

It is easy to see his enthusiasm even in the logbook entries.  Flying was an escape and, as a bachelor with few obligations outside his work, he had ample time and will to dive in. 

Three decades after these flights, Lee Heitman, his aerobatic flight instructor at Collingwood, remembered my dad as a natural pilot who loved flying as much as he loved life.

Dad with C-FFAM at Rockcliffe in the fall of 1982. (Family Collection)

In 1981, the company that employed my Dad won the contract to build the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa.  Given the success of the Harbour Square project, the general contractor asked that my father be sent to Ottawa as project manager for the build.  On weekends, he would return to Collingwood to fly the Miniplane...and then make the 5 hour drive back to the capital, a bucket of KFC on the seat next to him.

Such was his love of aviation and kinship with his airplane. 

Encounters

Charles Miller made his last flight in C-FFAM on September 18th of 1980.  In the aircraft's journey log, he dutifully recorded that the biplane flew true to its type.  Then, he hangared it for the winter.



Dad working on Toronto's 33 Harbour Square in 1979 or 1980.  The Royal York Hotel can be seen in the background. (Family Collection)

My father had rapidly turned aviation into an obsession.  Flying - and his work - became twin passions that fed off one another.  The testosterone-fueled, expletive-laced, grime, dust and grit-choked concrete landscape of a construction site contrasted in every way with the hour-long vacation afforded one by a romp through pristine powder white clouds and cobalt skies.  So, while he continued to fly out of Collingwood, my dad made a habit of dropping into local airports "just for the hell of it."

Just three of dozens of membership cards accumulated during three decades of flying.  (Family Collection)

One of these airfields would have been Brampton - where FAM was based under Miller's ownership. 

A biplane pilot will tell you there's just something special about having two wings.  They'll also tell you a biplane glides about as well as a grand piano...and that it will happily humble a pilot with lazy feet.  Yet, there's something else...and in a single-seat biplane, it's a secret shared only between airplane and aviator.

By the summer of 1980, Dad had made up his mind that he was going to buy Miller's biplane.  While he had some tailwheel experience, he had never flown a biplane.  To complicate matters, FAM's short couple and rigid gear made it somewhat challenging to handle during take off and landing.

On July 19th of 1980, in the middle of working on his float rating, Dad called on Canadian Aerobatic Champion and Pitts Special expert Gerry Younger.  They did two flights in Pitts S2-A C-GQSI.  The goal was to work on take offs and landings but they couldn't resist having a little fun either.

It was a story my dad loved to tell.

"Show me a steep turn," Gerry had asked.

My dad happily rolled to 60 degrees of bank and swept into a left-hand steep turn. 

After a few seconds, Gerry called from the back seat.

"I have control." 

The wings rolled to 90 degrees of bank and both men were pressed into their seats.

"Look at the left wingtip," said Gerry. 

The wing was pinned to a set of crossing roads cutting through the countryside below.  The landscape rotated smoothly, like a pin-wheel, around QSI's red wingtips.

"That's a steep turn."

The experience with Younger emboldened my father.  His next call would be to Ernst Muller.

Gerry Younger's business card - found among my dad's things.  Ernst Muller's address and phone number was written on the back.  (Family Collection)
 

After some prodding, Muller remembered the conversation almost 32 years before.  He recalled that my dad told him he had spent time with Gerry Younger to get ready for the Miniplane.  He asked Muller several questions about the airplane and then asked him to fly it to Collingwood.  Muller told me he politely declined because he was concerned about liability issues. 

The undated Aircraft Bill of Sale for C-FFAM.  It transferred ownership from Miller to my dad.  (Family Collection)

 

In April of 1981, my father purchased C-FFAM from Charles Miller for $8,000. Collingwood's chief pilot, Ken Richardson, flew the Miniplane from Brampton to Collingwood on April 16th, 1981. An Aviation Mechanic inspected it the same day.

FAM would sit idle at Collingwood for nearly 2 months.  My Dad spent the time tinkering with his new toy. My dad had changed the throttle from the left side to the right and installed a different tailwheel assembly to improve visibility over the nose.  Years later, I would find a letter detailing a step-by-step process to repair, dope and paint fabric.  All of these minor tweaks must have driven him batty.  I know he wanted to fly it more than anything else.  His training, however, dictated a cautious approach.

So, plane and pilot waited patiently for the right moment.