Allure

Legend has it that Frank Smith designed his namesake biplane by chalking its outline on a hangar floor.  Another version has Smith sketching it out on the back of a napkin over eggs, bacon and black coffee.  It's easy to believe these stories because the airplane really does look like it was born as a chalk outline or a rough sketch.  The fuselage and tail group are welded steel tubing with wooden stringers lending shape.  The short, stubby wings are straight and flat and look like they could be built on a kitchen table.  The skin is doped fabric.  The airplane is exactly as Frank Smith intended it to be when he dreamed it up in 1956; cheap, fun and dead simple.

Author's self portrait.  (Author's Collection)

The Smith Miniplane emerged from a class of small, single-seat biplanes that included the Pitts Special and the Mong.  The Mong was built for speed and the Pitts for hard aerobatics.  The Smith falls somewhere in between the two as a fun, fuel-efficient giggle machine.  Hundreds were built in living rooms, basements and garages.  Now, there are six survivors on the Canadian Registry and only three that are flying.

You don't strap into the Smith - you wear it like an old sweater.  I often need to remind myself that C-GDSA was stretched by 6 inches from the original length of 15 feet, 3 inches.  An extra 6 inches of wingspan either side of centreline was added, builder Al Girdvainis told me jokingly, to improve the biplane's glide.

Ready to go. (Author's Collection)

Once you settle into the sanctuary of the single seat, the first thing you notice is the smell.  Old biplanes have a distinct odour - a comforting aroma of fuel, oil, varnish and dope.   It reminds me of my late grandfather's shoe store in Argentina. 

The panel is as bare bones as it gets.  Everything is within easy reach.  The stick came from a surplus CF-104 Starfighter.  The buttons once used to launch missiles or bombs now fire the starter and open a radio channel.  There's plenty of power for the 770 pound airplane with a Lycoming 0-235 pulling 115 horse power up front.  Full span ailerons give the airplane fantastic roll authority.  The bipe is a little heavy in pitch but that's easily forgiven.

The take-off roll is like trying to grab a tiger by the tail.   The relatively short distance between the tail the the wings make the airplane extraordinarily shifty in the longitudinal axis.  If you need rudder in the Smith (and you will), you'd better feed it in before you need it...otherwise, it's too late.  The end result is fit of frantic peddling from the pilot.  The cockpit floor is entirely yellow except for two small patches of shiny silver where 35 years of boots, first Al's, then mine, have worn the paint away like the relentless river smoothes a stone.

Once the wheels leave the ground, the Smith is light and lively.  The white-knuckled anxiety of the take-off run is washed away by the rush of the slipstream swirling through the cockpit, tugging at your shoulders and cloth helmet.  As the ground drops away under the twin white wings trimmed in red, it's easy to settle down.  You can fly the airplane with just two fingers.  She does exactly as asked. 

Frank Smith's specification sheet on the airplane says it climbs at 2,000 feet per minute.  I've never timed it.  The VSI, which I'm fairly certain served in World War Two, gives only three indications: level, 2,000 feet per minute up and 2,000 feet per minute down.  The compass is equally as delinquent - spinning drowsily in circles, daring the pilot to take an average and roll the dice on a heading.  I discovered very early on that I was better off following a road or shoreline than a compass heading.  There's another charming complication too - map reading is next to impossible in an open cockpit airplane.

So, one occupies oneself with getting lost at 100 miles per hour.  There's a great liberty in picking a river and following it to a little town with an old church at its centre and a collection of wilting farmhouses standing faithful guard around its perimeter.  There's a certain magic in pulling out your chart that evening, still tingling in the afterglow of flight, using a cup of coffee and a half-eaten sandwich as paper weights, and tracing an oil stained finger along that nameless river to that nameless town.  You might discover that you'd been there before, either by car or by airplane, and you might be shocked to realize how different it looked from that open cockpit wedged between twin wings.  You've never seen greens, golds, cobalts and rusts until you've seen them from a thousand feet, slowly wheeling around fabric wings that quiver in the early evening rush of air.  That feeling of wonder and admiration never fades, never grows old.  It stays with you until it's replaced by another.  Only then is it stitched into an ever-growing quilt of memory and experience.

At a certain point, an unseen hand guides you home; one last orbit of that town shimmering in the summer heat, a gentle turn to follow the river that carried you here, a dip of the wing or an s-turn every so often to see ahead.  You might be Bishop or Barker, Richtofen or Voss patrolling the western front in 1917. An enormous airliner slides overhead, ruining the reverie.  It must be thousands of feet above, although it's still so big it threatens to blot out the sun.  All 250 souls are completely unaware of your existence and that suits you just fine.

The little river bleeds into a bigger river and you roll into a sweeping right turn for home.  The flying wires sing a different tune with a slight discord.  A little less right rudder and the orchestra of wind and wires resumes its happy hum.  A quick glance reveals them to be trembling in harmony. 

As your home field crawls out of the glare of the low sun, there's a nervous shuffle of the feet.  The nose waggles from side to side in response.  This is necessary because the final approach in the Smith is akin to riding a baby grand piano down a water slide at 85 miles an hour - blindfolded. 

In fact, there's a guy in the States selling his Smith right now.  His advertisement reads:

"I'm 70 years old and I want to land slower."

Turning a long final for Rockcliffe.  (Author's Collection)

I keep circuits as tight to the field as possible and fly a carving approach from base to final at 100 miles per hour.  The Smith bleeds off energy easily so that I'm able to slow to 85 with 1700 rpm on as I drop over the trees towards the runway.  The airplane swoops into the flare, sunlight crashing through the propeller's disk and I push my head all the way aft against the headrest.  Blind out the front, I use peripheral vision to keep the airplane straight and centred on the runway.  As I slowly pull the power back, the speed spills from the wings and the little bipe settles onto the asphalt with a skip and a hop.  My feet resume their familiar dance.

It's a joy to fly the Smith but the possibility of sharing it is just as rewarding.  It is, after all, the same airplane that sparked my love of flight as a toddler and so I won't miss a chance to get a youngster into the cockpit.  For even the most seasoned pilot, however, the airplane has a magnetic draw.  Three or four new friends come by to introduce themselves and have a look each time I roll it out of the hangar.  Only one in four correctly identifies it as a Smith yet every one of them smiles as they poke their head inside the cockpit, or run a hand across the button nose or pluck at a flying wire.

When they walk away, there's a lightness in their gait.  I like to think the little bipe awakened something in them, a primal love of flight or a sense of wonder not unlike the one that convinced Wilbur and Orville to quit building bicycles and try their hand at airplanes.

Flying a "beat-up" of the field at Rockcliffe. (Photo Courtesy: Peter Szperling)

For me, there's nothing quite like flying a single seat biplane.  When the goggles come down and the left hand goes forward, it's just you and the airplane. 

There is no greater freedom. 

There is no greater escape.