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Simpson
Field Days
October
25, 2013
The mid sixties is a time in my aviation
past that I look back on with great fondness. Although almost my
entire working life has been in aviation, the time of my casting
off into the world of flying is special to me. It was a sort of
total immersion of mind and perhaps of soul as well, in
everything aviation and I find the extent of it really hard to
describe. Although it would be several years before I would be
flying for a living, I think my interest and enthusiasm for
airplanes and the people who flew them was at its apex during
this era. Aviation consumed me, seeming to come pulsing and red
hot from my very core, and there was seldom an hour that I was
awake when I wasn't having thoughts aeronautical.
At
the time, I was employed as a rep for a national company and
traveled three states by automobile, selling their products. I
spent days and nights on the road, traveling from town to town,
and while I wasn't unhappy with my job, it was something that I
did in order to be able to spend time at the airport. Evenings
in fine weather and when I wasn't away from home would find me
either flying or tinkering with the Luscombe that I owned and
based at the Clarksburg airport, about a mile from my home.
But
it was a little sod strip that lay about 15 miles south east of
the Clarksburg called Simpson Field that became the place that
best suited me for the person I was then. My arrival there was
like stepping back in time since little was changed from the
year it was built and that after all, was the era that called to
me.
The airport was the dream of Wilbur Simpson, a
returning Air Corps pilot who wanted to train returning veterans
on the GI bill. Like hundreds of these little airports built
during the great postwar aviation tsunami, it was minimal;
measuring just 1,300 feet with little runway to spare, even for
the Cubs and Champs that peopled it then.
Almost
twenty years later when I a regular there, I only recall two
accidents, even with the higher performing airplanes that were
using it then. One was when the local college president landed
his Comanche gear up (thanks to the grass the only damage was
the prop and the exhaust pipe) and the other when a passing
Swift had an engine failure and dropped in from such a height
that the airplane broke at the windshield, much like an old
shotgun breaking open to be loaded.
I had moved back to
Barbour County from Parkersburg, in the western part of the
state a few years before and first chose to put the Luscombe at
Simpson, since it was closest to where I was living at the time.
My first landing there did not go well, since the part of the
airport I needed to land on kept disappearing behind me, and
with a total time approaching 15 hours I lacked the skill to
land on the short strip after the 3,000 feet of runway I had
trained on. After several tries I mastered the technique and
landed without accident, using the 'just in time' method of
skill acquisition that would be the hallmark of my flying
career.
As I made additional flights from the little
field I grew more comfortable and my natural tendencies to get
into trouble began to stir. Since Wilbur had by this time been
forced to take an outside job to supplement his flying income,
he was only at the field in the evening and on weekends. This
left the field unsupervised and consequently my flying
activities equally unsupervised. This of course meant that I,
now with the heady total of about twenty hours, should ask my
old friend Murphy to accompany me on a flight. After all, we had
spent hours flying paper airplanes together from the hill where
our grade school perched. And it was Murphy who, after we
decided to build an airplane during our second grade term,
reported to me one morning that the project was well underway
and he had the seat completed.
And so in was that on a
Wednesday morning, after a reconnaissance patrol to insure that
Wilbur was indeed absent from the field, we untied the Luscombe
and I proudly preflighted it, Murphy looking on with a mixture
of enthusiasm and wariness on his face.
We had had a
rainy spell of weather and while the morning had cleared nicely,
the ground was soggy and soft. I noticed when I taxied out that
it took more power than usual to keep the airplane moving and as
I did the runup I began reviewing the procedure for a soft field
takeoff. Hmmm, I hadn't learned that yet, had I? Well, I would
just use common sense and since I didn't want the airplane
skidding during the ground run, I would keep the tail extra
high, thereby exerting extra weight on the wheels and avoiding
the deadly skid.
Using this procedure we trundled and
splashed along the short runway without gaining what I thought
would be adequate speed, so with about 300 feet of runway left I
pulled the throttle and lowered the tail to the ground. The
airplane, which apparently thought it had plenty of flying
speed, then left the ground, sans help from the engine, floated
over the remaining runway, across the highway at the end of the
strip and touched down nicely, three point, in a garden.
If
the runway was soft the garden was a veritable marshmallow, and
without touching the brakes the deceleration threw us against
the belts. Probably the only things I did right were to continue
to hold the stick back when the airplane tail started to rise
and cut the ignition. The tail continued higher and higher and
when our momentum finally was sated we were staring bug eyed
through the windshield at the ground and the airplane was
balanced on the main gear with the tail almost vertical. We
paused in that position for what felt like a minute, and then
the tail wheel fell back to the ground with a crash.
Need
I say next that this was the moment that Wilbur came back for
the briefcase that he had forgotten that morning?
After
a move to the Clarksburg airport and the passage of a few years,
Wilbur had forgiven me and I started dropping in with the
Luscombe, now equipped with a Commercial License and a modicum
of judgment . Soon I was hanging out and spending most of the
time I wasn't working there. The little airport became for me a
refuge from the ordinary, from the stress of a job I didn't love
and from the debris of a broken marriage. I remember one summer
keeping a tent pitched there by the hangar and when the weather
was fine on most of the nights I wasn't traveling, I would fly
the Luscombe in and spend the night. Sometimes I would lie on
the grass until sleep came; looking up at the stars that my
heroes had flown under and feel a great peace settle over me.
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