HOW I GOT INTERESTED IN AVIATION

People used to ask how I got interested in aviation; I asked how fish get interested in swimming.  

My father grew up in Portland, where he was exposed to the then-legendary Tex Rankin’s flight school.  (Apparently nobody considered the contradiction of somebody called “Tex” building one of the world’s largest flight academies in Oregon). Rankin became a world-known aerobatic competitor and Hollywood “stunt pilot.”

In the late 30s Dad accompanied his father and some Sea Scouts on a couple of summer voyages to Canada and Alaska.  One of the tour outfitters operated a big Bellanca on floats, and that impressed my father no end.

Came the war: with some friends, Dad intended to circumvent U.S. neutrality (such as it was—FDR sent Americans to fight Germans and Japanese before Pearl Harbor) by joining the Royal Canadian Air Force.  But one of the co-conspirators neglected to bring the required documents so the group returned home to await events.

On leave from Oregon State College, Dad was working as a draftsman at Douglas Aircraft in the LA area when things blew up (literally) at Pearl Harbor.  Long story short: Dad passed the Civilian Pilot Training Program in Idaho, proceeding to Navy flight training at Pasco, Washington, and Corpus Christi, Texas.  He remained Stateside during the war. 

Still, aviation and airplanes were all around—atmospheric.  I spent my first seven or eight years in the folks' ranch house literally in the middle of a wheat-pea field.  "Crop dusters" were a constant in The Season, although by the early 50s aerial application of powdered fertilizers  was long gone.  The more common term was “ag flying,” shorthand for agricultural aerial application.

I remember when one of Marsh Aviation's modified Navy N3N trainers circled the house while our mother was bathing us. Three naked little boys ran outside to wave at Mr Friendly Pilot.

My mother's family owned what became Barrett Field on the north edge of Athena, Oregon (pop. c. 900 at the time). Marsh operated there for many years before we built the hangar complete with transplanted airway beacon from down near Baker City, mid 70s.  As a sprout, I spent mucho tiempo at the field, intrigued with the operation: takeoffs, landings, loading Malathion and 2-4D (more properly Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid), etc.  

Malathion, developed in the 1950s, is an organophosphate insecticide that kills pests feeding on farm crops as well as disease-bearing mosquitos.

Herbicides such as 2-4D (developed during World War II) kill weeds that can outgrow productive crops and choke off part of a farm field.  However, 2-4D became one of the elements in the Agent Orange defoliant of Vietnam War notoriety.

The Marsh crew had five-gallon glass mixing jars.  The guys would drain the residue, stick the hose in the jar, let it rise some, then swish it around for awhile before dumping it out. Then they'd refill with water, insert Lipton bags and brew sun tea on the ground. I never heard of any offspring with six fingers on a hand or a third eye...

My childhood ambition was to become a military pilot, but I was doubly or triply damned, depending on specifics.  First, I was born with hereditary asthma and then my vision went south in grade school.  Flat feet were the least of my problems.  But man!  How I savored the long-lean airframe that Vought produced in the F8U (later F-8) Crusader.  In 1980 it became the subject of my fourth book.

Still, I led a fortunate youth, and I was astute enough to appreciate it at the time.  I began flying lessons at Walla Walla, Washington, in 1965 and soloed Piper Cherokee N6053W that May.  The elation I felt with that familiar right seat vacant was unprecedented to me.  My instructor was graying, crew-cut Al Bixby who at 50 almost seemed a senior citizen to me.  Now I’m 25 years beyond his age at the time…

Two years later the N3N re-entered my life.

In 1967 Dad purchased a “project airplane,” a 1940 N3N-3 that was surplus to an ag operator’s needs in Colorado.  With a friend, he flew the partial restoration to Oregon where it was completed in wartime Navy colors with the “buzz number” 70 on the fuselage.  It was tacit tribute to our stylized seven-zero ranch brand though the seven was rounded to avoid an unwanted right-angle juncture of two heat sources on a hide.

Which undoubtedly is more than most readers will care to know.

Anyway:

While I got my private pilot license in Cherokees, I like to think that I learned to fly in the N3N.  Which was appropriate, as the “N” was built by the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philly to train student aviators from the late 30s onward.  Stable, predictable, and powered with a reliable 235-hp Wright engine, the N3N was built hell for stout, rated at nine G positive, as I recall.  Some 900 N3N-1s and N3N-3s were built, all adaptable to floats as well as wheels.

(Sidebar: in the Navy aircraft designation system, the first N indicated a trainer; the three showed the builder’s sequence; and the last N indicated N for the Navy manufacturer.  There were only three N2Ns in the mid 1920s.)

I graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Oregon in 1972.  And I was a terrible career planner: I’d concentrated in magazine writing when Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post were folding.  I’d first been published in high school, but en route to my diploma I aced a magazine writing class with my first paid sale, a whimsical Air Progress  article titled “Confessions of a Superstitious Aviator.”  I was oafishly proud and retain the check stub.

Later that year the Douglas SBD Dauntless entered my life.

With two friends, Dad purchased the only flying Dauntless from Multnomah Country, Oregon, which wanted a newer, cheaper spray plane.  To condense things considerably, Dad bought out his partners and we—with requisite help—began restoring the mosquito bomber to 1943 naval configuration.  Allies at McDonnell Douglas and rare parts scroungers provided what else we needed including representative tailhook and bomb-displacing “trapeze.”

I got about seven glorious hours in the gunner’s seat.  It was terrific timing because I started my first book, then the only operational history of the war-winning Dauntless, without which the U.S. would’ve lost the Pacific War in 1942.  The book was published in 1976 and remains in print today.  In 1992 I consulted much of the material and personal experience in Dauntless: A Novel of the Pacific War.

In 1974 Dad sold the Dauntless to the late-great Doug Champlin, for whom I worked in Arizona a decade later.  Another cherished friendship among so many that have blessed my time in aviation. 

So then: what’s the allure of aviation?  It can be mundane (a Tomcat pilot said, “It sounded like an interesting job”) and it can be sublime (check Richard Bach if you’re not of 1970s or 80s vintage).  But the satisfaction of controlling a platform in three dimensions, sharing the ambience with like-minded men and women, retains its special appeal.

Of course, I didn’t know that at age eight but I damnsure knew it by sixteen.  Yet I did not anticipate aviation’s unavoidable price, the sudden shock of violent death—I’ve seen two deadly accidents including a triple fatality—but that’s part of the bargain.

And like millions of others, I accept the bitter with the sweet, the incomparable sensation of Flight.