HOOKING A SKY RIDE

A kindly Providence was on the job—or this story would never have been told.

Throughout the summer my interest in aviation burned at steady white heat. I was thirteen years old at the time and lived just outside of San Antonio, Texas. A wire fence and the width of a dusty road were all that separated my father’s farm from Brooks Field, and Kelly Field was only two miles away. San Antonio was ringed about by huge army training camps and flying-fields. Everywhere you looked you could see khaki, and airplanes were as thick as crows. They buzzed overhead from daylight till dark.

With my brother Frank, younger than I by a year, I found the aviation field across the road fascinating beyond the wildest tales of Nick Carter or Buffalo Bill. Our eyes followed the planes all day. We talked of nothing but airplanes; we read of nothing but airplanes; we dreamed of airplanes at night.

Hundreds of flying cadets were in training at this and other near-by fields. They were all quite young, some of them boys not many years older than ourselves. And all of them were objects of our admiration and envy.

At Brooks Field the more advanced students received instruction in combat maneuvers and stunt flying. It was a small field with a group of hangars in one corner and a row of neat barracks where the cadets and soldier mechanics lived. Back of the barracks was the road, and across the road was our home.

When the field was laid out the year before, my father saw an opportunity to profit by it. He built an addition to our little cottage and opened a lunch-room and soft-drink place which soon became popular. Frank and I used to fall all over ourselves to wait on the young flyers when they dropped in after a soda or a sandwich. We listened to their stories with wide eyes and open mouths, and our hero-worship was repaid with an amused friendship.

Although the field supposedly was closed to all civilians, we boys in time acquired certain privileges. The guards would look the other way when we sneaked under the fence, and unless some high-up officer was around, we had the run of the place as long as we kept out of mischief.

From some favorite vantage-point we were observers of the exciting life that passed on the field. More than once we witnessed the result of a mechanical defect or a cadet’s instant of panic or bad judgment in the air. There would be a flash of hurtling wings in the sunlight; then a heap of twisted metal and splintered wood and torn cloth on the ground—and the ambulance racing out to collect its gruesome freight.

Or lying on our backs in the dusty grass, we watched the silvery specks high above us as they dipped and soared and looped, or came fluttering down in long, giddy tailspins. We knew the different makes of planes, their horsepower, their speed, their dependability. We knew the names of the instructors and cadets, and their nicknames. We knew each one’s reputation for skill and daring.

The possibility that sometime we might be taken for an air ride ourselves was a thing we often discussed. I would have given my right arm gladly for such a chance. The cadets would promise us rides easily, but when we approached anyone with real authority, we were summarily dismissed and threatened with being chased off the field.

I don’t remember how the idea of stealing a ride first came up, but it grew to be our most absorbing topic of conversation. Frank and I had hooked rides on the big army trucks that lumbered up and down the road. We had hooked rides on freight-trains down in the railroad yards. Hooking a ride on an airplane, while it was a hundred times more daring, didn’t seem utterly impossible to us.

One hot, dazzlingly bright July afternoon, Frank and I decided to visit the field. Coming around the corner of the hangars we saw there was something of special interest going on. A group of officers and cadets was gathered about a trim little monoplane standing headed out toward the field with its engine throttled down and running smoothly.

As no one stopped us, we soon brazenly pressed in closer. It was a new ship, a Vicker-Vimy pursuit plane imported from England which was about to receive a tryout. Two of the field’s best flyers were in the cockpit, coats buttoned and helmets strapped on, all ready to start.

We slipped around to the other side of the plane where nobody happened to be at that moment and crouched down under the trailing edge of the wing. The wheels and axle of the landing-gear were only a few feet away. No one was paying any attention to us.

“Now’s your chance to steal a ride,” said Frank, pointing to the axle. This was a stream-shaped wooden strut, flatly oval, about ten inches wide and six feet from wheel to wheel. There were bracing wires and struts crisscrossing above it that looked like good hand-holds.

“No,” I objected, faced with the actual chance to put my wild talk into action. “I’m scared to.”

“Dare you to,” Frank taunted me. “Double-dare you to!”

Trembling with excitement, I crawled under the fuselage and up onto the axle strut. I don’t know to this day whether I really meant to stay there or not—for the choice was taken out of my hands. That very moment the pilot in his seat above me opened up the engine with a deafening roar, and the plane commenced rolling down the field. Taken by surprise, I clutched the axle tightly and by the time I had my wits collected again, we were moving along at an alarming speed.

Beneath me the ground was flowing away in a dusty gray stream. I wanted to drop off, but I could see the tail skid bumping along behind, and I was afraid I might not be able to roll out of its way. While I was mustering up the courage to chance it, the plane took the air, and when I looked down again, a hundred-foot gap had suddenly opened between me and the earth’s surface.

The plane banked over, tilting sharply; I slid down on the axle until I could feel the toe of my shoe scrape on one of the wheels, which were still spinning. I got hold of a wire and pulled myself back, clamping the strut between my legs like a vise. I felt dizzy and horribly frightened. Then the plane straightened out and sailed over the hangars, at a height now of several hundred feet, and I forgot my fears in the spectacle which spread itself out below me.

The ring of the horizon had widened magically. I could see all of San Antonio, with the river winding through it like a green watersnake, and the Plaza and the old Alamo in the center. I could see Kelly Field two miles away and Camp Travers and Fort Sam Houston. Directly beneath me the group of men we had just left was scattered, running about excitedly like ants stirred up with a stick. My escapade had been discovered. They were trying in vain to draw the attention of the pilots, who were, of course, quite ignorant of the fact that they had a stowaway on board. The white canvases used to signal from the ground to the air were being dragged out,—radio communication was undeveloped then,—but the flyers were so interested in the performance of their new ship that they never looked back.

Just as the plane banked again, I saw my brother legging it for home at top speed, but for the next few seconds I was too busy holding on to notice anything else. I discovered my arms were beginning to ache severely from the strain I was placing upon them.

The next time we passed above the field, the scurrying figures on the ground were so tiny it was hard to believe they were men. The hangars and barracks were about the size of a kid’s building-blocks. The countryside reminded me for all the world of a big relief-map I had to study in school one time.

Ever so often the map would tip itself gradually up on edge until it was steeper than the steepest mountainside and it seemed a wonder to me that the houses didn’t slide off. I knew the plane was banking in another turn then, and held on tighter than ever, waiting for the ground to change back into level prairie again. We were climbing higher all the time. Hot as it had been on the field, I grew chilly from the wind which whipped through my thin clothing like a hurricane.

The queerest thing, though, was that the feeling of fear had left me completely. I felt exhilarated and happy, and immensely proud of myself. I began to sing and shout at the top of my lungs, while the engine thundered above me and the vibrating wires whistled and whined.

But with every passing minute my arms and legs were growing more tired from the task of keeping a stationary position on the axle. I remember thinking that soon I would be too tired to hold on any longer, and then I would go tumbling head over heels down through a few thousand feet of empty space. However, it seemed too fantastic for me to be frightened. Falling off the roof of our barn would be every bit as scary, I thought.

Suddenly the plane started back toward earth in a crazy, sickening rush, and with a speed that all but tore me loose from my precarious perch. It was surely all over with me, I decided, and shut my eyes, lost in a horrible swirling nausea. But instinctively, I hugged the strut in a regular death-grip. I dropped into bottomless abysses and suffered such terrifically violent changes of direction that up-and-down and sideways were all scrambled together into one hodgepodge of tipsy motion. When I opened my eyes, I found that the earth and the sky had changed places in an extraordinary sort of waltz they were dancing with each other, and once it looked as if we were falling straight into the sun. After that I kept my eyes tightly closed.

The pilots were testing out the ship, putting it through every stunt it was capable of. Maneuvers which had looked so graceful and easy from the ground left me feeling much as though I had been a handball swiftly batted through the air by a company of playful giants. And when the plane looped, I felt I was being whirled about at the end of a long string, and that the string was slowly slipping out of my grasp. In fact, my grasp on the axle was weakening. Terror-stricken, I screamed again and again, but the wind wiped out my voice, and the men only four feet above me might have been that many miles away for any chance they had of hearing me.

After what seemed long and intolerable hours to me, the pilots throttled the engine down for an instant, and in the comparative quiet they must have heard my shouts. I opened my eyes again to see the top of a leather helmet leaning far out of the cockpit to peer under the wing. Immediately the plane slanted back toward the ground, keeping as even a keel as possible. One of the pilots leaned over once more to wave an encouraging hand at me, and in a few moments we landed safely in the middle of the field....

It was none too soon. My arms and legs were quivering from fright and exhaustion, and before the plane could come to a stop, they abruptly gave way and I rolled off on the ground. The tail skid handed me a vicious bump in passing, and I lay there desperately sick, while everything continued to whirl madly around and my ears rang like a set of chimes.

The major in command of the field came driving up to me with his car, and I will never forget the mixture of relief and anger on his face when he picked me up. He took me home, where Father was trying to calm Mother and Frank, both of whom were nearly hysterical. They were so glad to see me alive and all in one piece that I escaped a scolding that day. But my father and the major agreed that if we boys were ever caught on the field again, we were to be marched home, there to receive a sound walloping.

Needless to say, these orders were strictly obeyed for a time, although the flyers patted me on the back and told me I was a “nervy little brat” whenever they saw me around home. However, I had lost all desire to steal any more airplane rides, or even to go aloft as an authorized passenger. In fact, since that day the farthest I have been off the ground was to take the elevator to the top of the Woolworth Tower in order to please some friends of mine who were showing me the sights of New York.