Five Days in May

On May 2nd, I had an open booking in the middle of my day.  It was a gorgeous spring morning with light winds, temperatures in the high teens, clear blue skies and unlimited visibility.  I had already taken the Super Decathlon up to do Immelmann turns with a student and didn't have my next lesson - hammerheads - for a little more than two hours. 
With KXD tied up on the line, the Smith sat alone in the shade of the hangar.  I sat a few hundred feet away, watching, and chewing thoughtfully on a protein bar.
The Smith was imploring me to take us out for a quick rip.  There was no mistaking that.  You may think it isn't possible for a machine, in this case a collection of steel tubing, hand-planed wood and doped fabric, to give you a look - but, believe me, it is.  It's the same look a dog gives you when it simply must go for a walk this instant.  The Smith might as well have been sitting by the door, tail wagging, leash hanging from her jaws, whining softly.
With a sigh, I hop off the plywood box meant to house wing covers, engine blankets and tie-down ropes for a Cessna 150, and start walking towards the biplane.  It's a haphazard, circuitous root.  I stop to let the Cessna 170, that old flat 6 Continental clattering, roll by.  I casually wave to the pilot.  On the other side of the taxiway, I chat briefly with another aviator and, once the pleasantries and idle topic of the day are exhausted, promptly forget what the conversation was about.  With each step, my excitement builds.  The whining grows in volume and urgency.

The Smith in her corner of the hangar on May 2nd. (Author's collection)

A few minutes later, I've rolled the Smith out of her corner and into the bright sunlight.  I give her a thorough pre-flight inspection, lingering longer than usual in certain high importance areas.  I've noticed that I'm doing that with increased regularity and I'm fairly certain I know why.  Still, the anticipation prods me onward through a full circle of the bipe and her underside.  Everything is at it should be.
Not too long after, with the Lycoming growling in my ears, we're sprinting down the runway.  I've hardly touched the rudder pedals on this particular roll - save for periodic taps on the right pedal.  I've eased off on the forward stick so that the Smith adopts a slightly tail low attitude as we approach flying speed.  As I've planned, she calmly breaks ground of her own accord and we begin rising gently into the sky above Rockcliffe.
I haven't decided where we'll go or what we'll do.  I just felt like going up to have a look around, just for the fun of it.  The Smith and I consider the concrete carpet of Gatineau, the hills and the flat lands beyond as our destination but her little wings keep pulling us around onto an easterly heading.  Holding the leash, I let the biplane set the pace. 
We crawl along above the Ottawa River, chat a little with the flight service station at Gatineau, and keep pushing on to the east.  At Masson-Angers, we turn left to follow the Du Lievre River north past Beauchampville on the left bank and Buckingham on the right.
Beyond these small towns, the landscape settles into a narrow ribbon of puzzle-piece farmers fields centered on the river and flanked for miles by a sea of granite cloaked in green.  The river, once used move lumber downstream to the Ottawa, meanders north-north-west to the small town of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette.
There's something about this town.  We noticed it last season when we first flew out this way and loitered overhead for a little while.  We felt it again on our next visit but couldn't quite identify the allure.  It might be that the little town, known as Portland until the mid 1960s, is the only outpost for 15 or 20 miles in any direction.  It's beautiful but lonely up here and perhaps, this tiny speck of civilization soothes that feeling.  It might be how the town is nestled tightly around a set of crossroads nuzzled up to the river's eastern shore...or the way the sunlight glints off the steel grey roof of the church. 

A house destroyed the 1908 landslide in Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette. (Collection Bastien)

 

The feeling is also one of inexplicable sadness.  It washed over us each time we orbited overhead, on days much like this one - when we had absolutely no reason to feel this way. 

After our second trip out here, the feeling persisted and I did some research.  Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette has many reasons to be sad.  More than a century ago, in the early morning hours of April 26th, a landslide swept down the western shore of the river - taking 3 houses with it and killing 6 people.  With the river blocked by mud and debris, huge blocks of ice were carried across the town, destroying a dozen houses and 25 other buildings.  In the end, 34 people were killed, roughly ten per cent of the town's population - many of them in their beds. 

Two additional landslides, in 1900 and 1912, as well as a 1903 fire, ravaged this river town.

The scene of devastation after the 1908 Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette. (Collection Bastien)

And maybe that's what we feel, what makes the air heavy - that lingering echo of catastrophe, careening off the nearby hills, swirling around the town and rising gently into the sky above.

After a few more lazy spins around the village, we point our nose west and follow it through the hills to Poltimore, then south to Val-des-Monts before picking up a valley and taking it west to Wakefield. 
Here, we turn south again to follow the Gatineau River home.

At this point, I became aware of a faint headache.  It was after 1 in the afternoon and the sun was strong and high in the sky.  Sunlight leaked through the propeller's disk, bounced off the Smith's nose and into my eyes.  I hardly ever wore sunglasses when flying and I'd likely been squinting for most of the flight.  In order to take advantage of the warm air on my face, I'd left my goggles on my forehead and now the pressure points were burning and seemed to be centered on my temples.  All this conspired to force my mind from the business of flying to the urgency of landing.
The circuit is not our best.  We're pushed out long and wide by the busy Saturday afternoon circuit. The final approach features more power adjustment and speed chasing than I'd normally deem acceptable.  And yet, I pursue the approach.  I'm sore and flushed from the sun.  My head is pounding and my eyes itch.  I just want to put the little ship down.
We rush over the perimeter fence and into the flare.  I could bail out of the approach here but I don't.  Instead, I bring the power off, the plane settles onto the pavement and skips back into the air.  We slide sideways for a few feet and touch down a second time before galloping at once into air again.  I see the edge of the runway hovering into view as my hands and feet work to wrestle the biplane to the ground. 
An instant later, the little ship, tired of flight, sags to earth and the wheels chirp as I manage to finally horse the biplane into running straight. 
We roll clear of the runway at Bravo taxiway.  My mouth is dry and tastes of ash.  My heart beat is crashing around inside my cavernous head. 
I am an idiot.
The Smith's only reply is the admonishing rumble of the Lycoming at slow idle and the swishing sound of the prop. 
"A good approach is a good landing," I hear my Dad say, as clear as though he were standing next to me, leaning up against the cockpit rim and shouting advice into my ear.
He's right.  That was a lousy approach.  I had plenty of reasons and many chances to break off and set up again but I chose to press the approach and then tried to save the landing.  I broke every rule I incessantly hammered into the heads of my students.  In fact, and ironically, I'd echoed my Dad just this morning.
I tucked the Smith into the corner of the hangar, laid an apologetic hand on her cowl and went back to the Decathlon and hammerheads. 
The hammerhead is perhaps the most exciting and most difficult maneuver in the basic aerobatic repertoire.  It involves a brisk pull to the vertical - until the wing cleanly cuts the distant horizon in half.  One must lean on the right rudder to stay straight during the pull and, once the desired angle is achieved, slight forward pressure on the stick is required to keep the machine from slowly rotating onto her back.  At this point, it's a waiting game.  As the ship climbs the vertical line, gravity inevitably takes over and her heavenward progress slows and will eventually stop.  The slipstream tightens around the airframe and gives the pilot a buffet, a trembling of the stick similar to what's experienced during run-up when the machine is stationary with the engine at high power. This is the only real cue the aviator is afforded. At this point, some four to five seconds after the hitting the vertical line, the pilot must add left rudder to begin the pivot, right stick to hold the wing down and slight forward pressure to keep the cut even.  If executed properly, the aircraft pivots through 180 degrees and travels earthward again.
There's a lot going on in the hammerhead, most of it counterintuitive - and it all happens more or less at once.  In the novice, there's a terrific desire, fueled by borderline panic, to stuff everything into a corner and then get frustrated about the unpleasant result.  With experience, however, time slows down, the process crystallizes and the hammerhead grows into the sweet maneuver it really is.  Of course, time doesn't really slow.  The sand in the hourglass keeps flowing at the same rate but patience and experience make it much easier to count the grains.
"Patience is a virtue," my dad used to say.  He used to say it all the time.  He kept saying it after he'd passed. 
When my wife and I had settled on a venue for our wedding - a building that my dad had built, in fact - we were faced with only two available dates, one in May and one in October.  Given it was already March, I was pushing heavily for October.  Mel wanted May.  After some discussion, she relented.
"Patience is a virtue," she said. 
I wept.  My wife had met my father once, and only for a few minutes.  After I had calmed down enough to question her about the phrase, she admitted she never really used it and didn't know why she had at that particular moment. 
I did, however...and we were married in October.
Over the next week, I flew the Smith four more times.  For the first two flights, I flew only circuits - at first stop-and-go landings and then touch-and-goes.  I concentrated on the fundamentals of speed, energy management and power above all else.  Keeping her straight while blind out the front had become almost second nature.  I went around a few times - once because of traffic on the runway and twice because I just didn't like the approach.  On one or two occasions, I rolled out to a slow walking pace, taxied off and went back out again so that I could simulate full stop landings.  I sank myself into sharpening my skills in the most critical phases of flight, shoehorning the tutelage into short intervals made even shorter by the biplane's faster approach speed. 
The circuit flights were relatively short - no more than 25 or 30 minutes.  This kind of flying in the Smith was just as taxing as the time I'd spent in the Pitts - the only difference being I still had lessons to teach in the Super D.  The physical workload was significant but mentally, it was a marathon.  I'd emerge from the cockpit sweating from exertion but grinning in triumph.
The second pair of flights involved circuits bookending a short jaunt out of the airport's zone.  The goal here was to give me a break and an opportunity to just relax and fly the biplane.
With each flight, I became increasingly aware that I had been hurrying the airplane, forcing things to happen before they naturally should.  The May 2nd flight in the midday sun was a perfect example; I was tired, uncomfortable and anxious to land so that I could uncoil myself from the airplane, get some water, shade and rest.  The unplanned extension of the circuit exacerbated that impatience and I then punched through every warning sign in an effort to put the airplane down.
The Smith was teaching me to be patient again.  If I did things just so, she would reward me with a gentle touch down and a well-behaved roll out. 
It really was that simple.  Good things do come to those who wait.