GROW OLD WITH ME by Robert W. Duncan Recently I took my last flight as a pilot of a military aircraft. I had ranked and aged myself out of active duty. I would be less than human if I did not look back on my flying years and try to evaluate the factors which operated to keep me alive, as well as those mistakes that might have killed me. I also have an impulse to buttonhole the boys and girls just beginning to fly and say those magic words which will keep their bones intact and send them home after each flying day, a joy to spouse and children. I can say what I have to say without pride or arrogance because I was a mediocre pilot. I learned slowly; I was not by any stretch of the imagination a "natural". My awareness of my limitations, I am sure is one important factor to which I owe my life. I did not have the skill to toy with change and stretch my craftsmanship beyond its capabilities. I wouldn't slow roll at less than 5000 feet because I scooped out at least half the time; nor would I practice spins unless I had so much altitude that the ground seemed as remote as the moon. There are two kinds of pilots who get hurt; clever ones and poor ones. The clever ones gradually acquire a confidence which may mislead them to cross the safety margin once to often. The poor ones are merely incapable. They do have a common attribute - they lack imagination. They fail to consider the possible consequences of a breach of flight discipline or an over extension of their abilities. They assume at all times that conditions will be normal. They assume that the ground is flat and without obstructions, that the old altimeter setting is good enough, that there is no other plane in the air near them, that the weather will hold. These are foolhardy assumptions resulting from laziness and wishful thinking. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that change is constant; nothing is ever the same. You need only to consider that a man who knows he has only one life will offer it to eternity because he is too lazy to ask a mechanic how much oil was put in. Courage like that exceeds the tiger's. . . Where the hell is that other plane? I drop one wing then the other, turning left and right to seek it. "Nine zero four," calls the tower, "are you having difficulty?". Oh no, how can the thought of a midair at 1000 feet suggest difficulty. I make my voice calm. Nobody must know that I am afraid of a midair. After all, am I not a pilot? I press the mike button. "Tower from 904. I do not see the number one plane. What is his position?" "He is over the end of the runway on final," says the tower. "You are the number one to land." "And how did it go today?" asks Cynthia as my church key bites into the can of cold brew. "Very nice," I answer. "Do you think it is chilly enough to light the fire?" * * * * * I loved Casey like a brother. He taught me much about flying and was St. Exupery and Jimmy Doolittle rolled into one. But he couldn't subtract. He didn't know when his units of safety were reduced to a dangerous minimum. His skill was his murderer. He could roll at 200 feet and never scoop out. His aircraft was his own body. This is a fine thing. But there are possibilities over which your skill has no control. Engine failure is one of these, and it's failure at 200 feet when you are inverted is a troublesome event. A chute is useless and your choice of pasture is severely limited, even if you complete your roll. Casey didn't complete his. I mourned the death of Casey, but my grief didn't help him. He has been long gone, and here I am tonight, writing and watching the scarlet leaves of maple drift past my window in the moonlight. And yet, his craftsmanship far exceeded mine. A poet put it well 300 years ago: The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Don't misunderstand. I love to stunt. You should see my triple sequence; the split-S, loop, and Immelmann, coming out right on the original heading. I start it at 10,000 feet. I'm very proud of it. And there was another pilot (I'll call him Grant) who was a likeable youth, but who lacked humility. He wore his hat on the side of his head and made sharp turns to a landing. He'd argue aerodynamics with pilots who had more hours night flying than he had logged all together. One day I said to him after a particularly disheartening discussion (I think he was insisting that a plane in the air would weathercock). "Grant, it matters not to me whether I win the argument, but if you fly like you talk, you will kill yourself". Because I had no car, Grant used to pick me up every morning on the way to work. A couple of weeks after my melancholy prediction he failed to show. I hitchhiked and arrived at the CO's desk an hour late. He was on the phone waiting for someone on the other end. We were flying a tight schedule and I was nervous and furious. I started to babbling and pounding the desk. "That damn Grant didn't pick me up this morning! It ain't my fault!" The CO started talking on the phone, and, being versatile like Caesar, wrote a note for me on the pad: Grant was killed yesterday. He had a brother, a visiting cadet, in the rear seat when he pulled the wings off the trainer over Biscayne Bay. The only two boys in the family. What did his mother think, I wondered. And what did his father Say? When the hangar flying drifts around to hairy stories, be proud that your narrative is too dull to relate. Let nothing happen to you worth telling about. Go thou and grow old and stodgy. Get your kicks out of watching John Wayne on the magic silver screen. Titillate your wife with the story of the airport grill manager threatening your arrest when you tried to kick your money out of an empty candy dispenser. Now that I am a private pilot, I look forward to dancing the skies on laughter-silvered wings to my destination in a safe, straight line far above the twisting hazards of the highways. There are no toll roads up there, no billboards on clouds, no speed traps, no traffic lights. I distilled a simple rule from the potpourri of experience, a rule which contains all there is to flight safety. It is, however, a mere phrase unless we extend it through every flight activity. It is, simply: Never take anything for granted. There are plenty of things which we are forced to take for granted because we lean heavily on properly trained authorities for vital information, and if they fail us we cannot help it. But there are also those that we can check personally. I had an early experience in which I nearly killed, not myself, but another. It had a lasting and sobering effect: I was lined up on the runway centerline with a student under the hood in the rear cockpit preparing for an instrument takeoff. The plane ahead was lined up for the same purpose. My student was on the brakes ready for full throttle whenever I gave the order. I could not see over the nose of my plane, but I did observe the wingtips of the plane ahead disappear as it started down the runway. After a decent interval, I told the student to roll and stayed on the interphone to advise and correct him. He released the brakes, opened the throttle, and we started our run. A few seconds later my guardian angel stepped in. "Now look buttonhead," he said to me, "the first plane started rolling and you're figuring he is airborne at the end of the runway by now. But you don't see it - you're taking it for granted." I popped the hood, took over, hit the brakes, and throttled back. We were 20 feet from the number one aircraft, which had stopped dead ahead of us! (he had aborted because the student was veering off the runway.) Had I continued, we would have chewed through at least one cockpit. I would have had a memory very uncomfortable to live with. Dispite the famous dictum, your own experience is the worst possible teacher - it is too expensive. I enjoy the nasty habit of stealing that of other pilots. When I hear of an accident, I ask myself, do I fly in such a way that it could have happened to me? If the answer was in the affirmative, I did my best to correct my habits. Like a parasite, I stayed alive on the flesh and blood of others. I admit it without shame. I love the taste of hamburger with catsup and onions, and I love my wife's embrace in front of the fireplace on a fall evening. My imagination is a vivid one. And when I fail to see the other plane in the traffic pattern when the tower informs me that it is there, I panic. No more hamburgers? No more kisses? The cold sweat breaks out, the right hand crooks convulsively for the rip cord handle. No more baseball with my boys? My heart beats faster; the blood pressure rises. No more cans of beer on a warm afternoon? The breath comes short and hot. There is only the challenge to my imagination and to my good sense. . . I must finish now, the ashes are glowing in the fireplace. Cynthia has the coffee on, and I have marshmallows to toast * * * * * Finis