7 Nov 22 A View from Above: Flight

A View from Above: Flight #01

Today’s theme is Flight. I grew up on an airport, literally. My Father and his brothers built our family home so that he could raise up from bed and see most of the airfield. He was my Hero in Blue, the color of his Air Force Reserve uniform, and of the sky where he was always happy. He grew up on a farm in southern Wisconsin. The Janesville airport was a quick run away. (Ha!) As often as he could, my Father skipped chores to go to the airport to do chores there; he received one hour of flight instruction for every 70 hours he worked sweeping hangars, cleaning and fueling aircraft, and keeping the ramp free of debris. When he returned to the homestead, a beating awaited him.

But nothing could stop him. He made his first solo flight when he was sixteen. (So, did I on my sixteenth birthday.) He had worked so very hard to make that flight, and now the Blue One was his. Father went on to fly B17s and B29s in the Second World War. He never went to Europe because, it is said, he was a superior instructor, and was valued for creating pilots.

I love the flight theme so much that I may carry it on for two or three posts total.

Below, we offer three poems about flight. First up is John Updike whose poem, “Flight to Limbo” captures the “limbo” of a large airport terminal at night. A limbo between earth and sky, indeed.

The third and final poem of this post is one of my own, “Remembering Flight.” This is the first part of two. The second part will be posted next week. Together, the two parts pain a word-picture of my Hero in Blue.

Flight To Limbo

by John Updike

(At What Used to Be Called Idlewild)

The line didn’t move, though there were not

many people in it. In a half-hearted light

the lone agent dealt patiently, noiselessly, endlessly

with a large dazed family ranging

from twin toddlers in strollers to an old lady

in a bent wheelchair. Their baggage

was all in cardboard boxes. The plane was delayed,

the rumor went through the line. We shrugged,

in our hopeless overcoats. Aviation

had never seemed a very natural idea.

Bored children floated with faces drained of blood.

The girls in the tax-free shops stood frozen

amid promises of a beautiful life abroad.

Louis Armstrong sang in some upper corner,

a trickle of ignored joy.

Outside, in an unintelligible darkness

that stretched to include the rubies of strip malls,

winged behemoths prowled looking for the gates

where they could bury their koala-bear noses

and suck our dimming dynamos dry.

Boys in floppy sweatshirts and backward hats

slapped their feet ostentatiously

while security attendants giggled

and the voice of a misplaced angel melodiously

parroted FAA regulations. Women in saris

and kimonos dragged, as their penance, behind them

toddlers clutching Occidental teddy bears,

and chair legs screeched in the food court

while ill-paid wraiths mopped circles of night

into the motionless floor.

Flight

BY B. H. Fairchild

In the early stages of epilepsy there

occurs a characteristic dream .... One is

somehow lifted free of one’s own body;

looking back one sees oneself and feels a

sudden, maddening fear; another presence is

entering one’s own person, and there is no

avenue of return.

—George Steiner

Outside my window the wasps

are making their slow circle,

dizzy flights of forage and return,

hovering among azaleas

that bob in a sluggish breeze

this humid, sun-torn morning.

Yesterday my wife held me here

as I thrashed and moaned, her hand

in my foaming mouth, and my son

saw what he was warned he might.

Last night dreams stormed my brain

in thick swirls of shame and fear.

Behind a white garage a locked shed

full of wide-eyed dolls burned,

yellow smoke boiling up in huge clumps

as I watched, feet nailed to the ground.

In dining cars white table cloths

unfolded wings and flew like gulls.

An old German in a green Homburg

sang lieder, Mein Herz ist müde.*

In a garden in Pasadena my father

posed in Navy whites while overhead

silver dirigibles moved like great whales.

And in the narrowing tunnel

of the dream’s end I flew down

onto the iron red road

of my grandfather’s farm.

There was a white rail fence.

In the green meadow beyond,

a small boy walked toward me.

His smile was the moon’s rim.

Across his egg-shell eyes

ran scenes from my future life,

and he embraced me like a son

or father or my lost brother.

 

*My heart is tired.

Remembering Flight – Part 1

I had to wait until my feet could touch the rudders

My father said so, though I asked for wooden blocks strapped on

I had to wait until with a cushion, my nose peaked over the airplane’s

My father said the butt booster was FAA sanctioned

Many flights before this one, me wide-eyed in the right seat

My Father easy in the captain’s left

But this lesson – unlike others – my first genuine flying lesson

My first wing dip into the great blue beyond

Many times, Dad called me to the airport to sweep hangar floors

to clean wheel wells, to polish wings, to fuel travelers’ planes

rent them cars, sell them aeronautic charts and new plotters

and, I like to think, Dad liked my company as much as he did the help

When he did engine overhauls on the Beechcraft D18 – N80017 –

I sat left seat pulling levers, flipping switches, wearing U.S. Air Force hat . . .

(Just now, a memory rises hard and sweet of when my Father was old

By then I was a hotshot, thirty-years-into-corporate-consulting type

One week I flew to St. Louis to work with Boeing

I made it so my dad could tour the plant and “fly” the 727 simulator

but he quietly declined saying he had a chance to fly right seat

with a doctor who had a restricted medical certificate

not flying, mind you, just a right-seat passenger, a ride-along

To watch aircraft assembly, to sit in a grounded machine

had no appeal compared with flying the Blue One lifting his wings)

. . . As I was saying about that first lesson when I was eleven years old,

my father said we would just “fly around the patch,” practice a few takeoffs -

the easy part - and let me shadow him on the much harder part – the landings

He sent me out ahead of him to the tied-down Cessna 172 chocked and held

like a filly in the gates quivering, rocking wing to wing

me walking across the asphalt ramp with the butt booster cushion under my arm

jangling the keys to Daddy’s Cessna, not his T-Bird

He told me to go out, take the checklist, and begin to execute the steps . . .

(Because of all those checkpoints, I developed the habit of checking everything

throughout my life, checking twice and thrice – stove gas, car keys, house locked)

as if every movement and thing had a place and reason, to be confirmed

and checked again to be sure

to be certain

to stay alive

for these checklists’ purpose: to survive)

. . . My father loped across the hot tarmac apron 

tan baseball cap shading his olive face, wide feet slapping, heel to toe

I had barely begun the preflight checks, so I picked up the pace and tried to

look like I knew what I was doing – which I did – sort of – 

as an outcome of all those hours flying with him . . .

(The sounds of his feet and the propeller I was inspecting raised up

a memory of a different Cessna 172 on a day when the rain fell hard and long

on the metal hangar roof under which I swept the cement floor - 

the floor imprinted with my five-year-old feet, pressed by my father

despite my noisy protests while, like landing gear, I pulled my legs up to my bottom

until my uncle Arthur gave me an ice cream bar and thoughts of cement cracked away 

But as I was saying, the rain fell relentlessly – the Cessna pulled up outside,

engine idling, propeller turning one moment, the next ca-thunk interrupted the rotating blades

and a scream rose and drowned out the enduring, steady rain

I scampered to the hangar door, peeked out around the edge and saw a woman sprawled

on the tarmac, blood spouting from her right arm’s stump

her hand and forearm lay twitching some yards away

Later, her husband, the pilot, said it was her habit to hop out before he stopped the turning blades

but this time, the rain fell hard, and she raised her right arm to hold her coat above her head

Someone bound a tourniquet above her elbow, then brought her inside to wait for the sirens

I never heard if she lived. Her only story the dark stain on the semi-porous ramp’s surface)

. . . It seems strange to return to that first lesson’s brilliant day with its transparent clouds

in a near-pure blue July sky with my father jogging toward me in his khaki pants

his Air-Force-blue cotton shirt, and that flat-top baseball cap

The Cessna 172 checklist in my right hand, cushion placed left seat in the plane

Every inch of the aircraft had a place on that list; every item checked every time

A pilot who trusts her memory does so at her peril and that of anyone aloft with her . . .

(I knew a pilot once, Tilson, who skipped visually checking fuel tanks

He thought the pilot who flew another D18 just prior had surely done the fueling

Some of us happened to be watching as he sped down the runway

The tail wheel lifted off, and then the nose

At that angle, the remaining fuel in the tanks flowed backward 

quickly emptying the fuel lines – a stutter of the radial piston engines

then silence as the nose fell level and the nearly four-ton plane sank

hitting a house on the other side of Highway 13 across from the runway’s end

Tilson died for his checklist omission, but he took no one with him

only some freight – the demolished house was empty) 

. . . Thinking of that lost, twin-engine workhorse as my dad arrived for my lesson, I swore

that I would never assume full tanks, and always, always check, and check, and check again

My dad boosted me up to the top of each wing so I could unscrew the fuel caps

as I had done so many times for so many planes, the high-winged ones with a ladder

Peering in, I confirmed that the av-gas sloshed near the top

He set me down, and after the preflight check, we climbed into the four-seat cabin

settling down to the procedures that would spark the Continental engine to life 

All this and more my father walked me through impressing yet again

the consequences of just one omission 

     just one oversight

one of fifty-four plus fourteen undone

one pilot error

one death and accountability for more

It’s a chancy business, walking away from a plane crash, so my father said 

not including acts of war that he knew well from his days in the Army Air Corp

Not one check skipped – not one left undone, prime among them calling “CLEAR” before “IGNITION”

There’s no engine, wing, or fuselage fix in the air – just the grace of a “good” crash landing

Having taken our seats – me left on my cushion, anxious to perform and to please my father-teacher

this one who knew the sky and ground and the fragile things between

precursor to Apollo yet to launch – from the Wright brothers to Lindbergh and on to us

At last, movement: Ready to Taxi, we rolled out, headed onto the ramp, to the taxiway

We turned and smiled at one another for a moment – I was giddy high

Check, check, check for traffic – roll out onto the runway taxiing faster to its end

where we turned into the wind and did the run-up with its thirteen more checks

only thirteen on top of the sixty-seven prior, counting to a final one-hundred-twenty-three . . .

So many times, I sat right seat noting my father’s steady, measured moves

Especially in the D18 with its twin, Harley-rumbling engines, two props, and twice the checks

a sound to set hot blood coursing red, not unlike the mortuary transports - the last flights home,

corpses laid flat on their stretchers, their senses of ears and eyes and all the rest gone 

gone

gone

gone beyond the Blue

 

Background

Roy Shwery was deeply involved with aviation beginning in 1939 when he took his first solo flight at the age of 16. 

As a member of the Armed Forces in World War II, he flew medium and heavy bombers until his discharge in 1946.

Upon discharge, he moved to Marshfield, Wisconsin, and worked as a flight instructor. In 1948, Roy purchased the fixed base operation at the Marshfield airport. He provided charter flights as well as flight instruction, aircraft sales and maintenance.

In 1950, he received his Airline Transport Rating and acquired a of the pilot ratings available.

Three years later, American Airlines accepted Shwery as a pilot. He was in the process of selling the fixed base when Roddis Plywood Company approached him with a contract to fly their personnel and equipment. This allowed him to purchase a Beechcraft 18 which also allowed Marshfield to have air ambulance, business, and recreational flight service. 

I the early 1960s, the city of Marshfield acquired the services of North Central Airlines. Unfortunately, service at the time was inadequate. In 1964, to address the need, Roy brought into existence one of the first commuter airlines Midstate Airlines. Midstate offered one daily round trip for Marshfield, Wisconsin Rapids, Milwaukee, and on to Chicago O’Hare. With an increased demand for service, additional flights were added, as well as more cities. The fleet grew to six Beechcraft 18s. The 18s were upgraded to Beechcraft 99s, and eventually to Metroliners.

In 1978, Midstate Airlines was named Marshfield’s Firm of the Year

Roy is acknowledged as one of the pioneers in the commuter industry. He also served the Board of Directors of the Commuter Airline Association. Other awards bestowed upon Roy Shwery include State of Wisconsin Department of Aviation Person of the Year, Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame Inductee, and the Wright Brother Master Pilot Award, recognizing 50 years in the industry.

The Marshfield Airport was named Roy Shwery Field in 1998.

Not only did Roy accumulate approximately 31,000 flying hours in his career; he was also responsible for enabling numerous individuals to become part of the aviation industry,

Exploration 1: Do you ever dream that you are flying? How does it feel?

Exploration 2: When you are an aircraft passenger, how do you feel?

Exploration 3: Do you have a hero? This person or animal need not be a parent, of course.