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.