It happened that I had flown the farthest, so I was. awarded about fifteen minutes of fame and glory, to which I responded with proper modesty and a minimum of swagger, and then enjoyed two days of unadulterated Bucker talk. I got a little unexpected dividend when I met some retired airline pilots who had some beautifully restored classics hangared there; Cabin Wacos, Stagerwings, Howards, etc.. Their hangars have all the comforts of home, and these people were perfect examples of the way pilots should grow old gracefully.
Any EAAer who gets anywhere near Santa Paula should drop in and see them and their planes. I’m sure you’d be made as welcome as I was. When I left I gave Joe (Krybus) a list of the items I wanted taken care of, and I told him that as I left the plane was his, and to use his own judgment about anything else he saw that needed fixing. There are still a few people around I would trust this way, and Joe is one of them. It took him about a month to get the plane up to his standards, and I used the time to figure out a new route home
When I was a kid I was fascinated by stories about the old airmail pilots, and now it occurred to me that if I could fly one of the early trans-continental mail routes the same way they were flown in the pioneering days of aviation I would better appreciate what they did. My plane was equipped pretty much like those old DH-4s and Swallows, and it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch of the imagination to put myself back into that era. The only problem I had was that I didn’t know where to find exact information about a route to fly.
If I was going to do it I wanted to make all the original stops, and relive, as much as is possible in a short period of time, the life of an airmail pilot. Within the bounds of prudence, of course. There is a long enough list of pilots who lost their lives flying the mail without me adding my name to it.
I decided that if there was anyone who could steer me to the information I needed it would be Hilbert. When I called him up and told him what I wanted to do he was all for the idea , and he passed me on to Dennis Parks’s office. Dennis was out of town at the time, but the young lady I spoke to said she would see what she could do for me. Three days later I received a packet containing everything I needed to know about the 1924 SFO~WR run; regular and refueling stops, stage lengths, and a profile drawing of altitudes for the whole route! For all this I was charged the outrageous sum of three dollars for research, printing, and mailing... My dues dollars at work.
When I looked over the route the first thing that struck me was that, because 211 BP was equipped the same as the 1924 planes, i.e., no radios, I wasn’t going to be able to make a lot of the 1924 stops. The problem was solved by using non-controlled satellite airports where possible, or other similar airports
enroute.
As it evolved, the route was San Francisco (Half Moon Bay), Reno (Truckee), Elko, Salt Lake City, Rock Springs, Rawlins, Cheyenne (Laramie), North Platte, Omaha, Iowa City, Chicago (Joliet), Bryan, Cleveland, Bellefonte, and Newark (Summerville).
When I made the westbound trip I wasn’t sure what kind of problems I might encounter, so I did it alone. I didn’t want to be responsible for anybody but myself, but by the time I got to California I felt confident enough to look for some company on the way back. My good friend, Carl Whittemore, retired Air Force and biplane nut, filled the bill on who I would like to have in the front seat, and he started packing almost before I finished asking him if he would like to go. I got charts for the new route, so that when Joe told me my plane was ready Whit and I were all set. The plan was that I would go to Santa Paula to pick up the plane and ferry it to SFO, Whit would get a ride on an Air Force C14l to Travis a couple of days later, and we’d rendezvous for the trip back.
N211BP immediately after she was restored at Mercury Air Center in Desbastian, FL. July 1990
I got out of Santa Paula and was heading up the coast for Half Moon Bay airport just outside the SFO control area when my weather jinx caught up with my brain. A warm front moving in from the Pacific and stacked up against the coastal range of mountains and closed the valley passes from Paso Robles north. I snooped around over Paso Robles for a while, and finally went back to a little airport at Oceano to wait for the stratus to burn off. It did, two days later! The time there wasn’t wasted, because, just like the other times I got sidetracked by weather, I made more friends. The local pilots saw to it that I was well taken care of. One-of them was working on his Part 135 rating, and when he found out that I was ex-airline he insisted that I overnight at his home. I suspect he might have had an ulterior motive, because he kept me up late at night demonstrating VOR approaches on his simulator. Another one had flown his ultra-light to Sun and Fun and back. That little jaunt made what I was doing look like a breakfast fly-in. I felt like asking him for his autograph!
When the front finally pushed through, the trip up the valley to Watsonville for fuel was a piece of cake. With low mountains on either side it was like being on rails. All I had to do was stay over the middle of the valley and it would take me right to Watsonville. The weather was absolutely perfect and, although I didn’t know it at the time, it was going to stay that way for the next five days. I had heard a lot about Watsonville, and I wasn’t disappointed. When I taxied to the terminal I saw two biplanes parked by the fence, a Stearman and a Travelair. They were owned by a couple of young pilots who were keeing alive a nice old tradition by selling sightseeing rides in the Travelair, and teaching aerobatics in the Stearman.
I figured that three biplanes would make a nice crowd, so I parked beside them and took their picture. It looked like a family portrait; Mom, Pop, and Junior. While I was there I saw a lot of other interesting planes, and I checked Watsonville as another good place to go back to for & longer visit.
The run up to Half Moon Bay was over the cliffs of the Pacific coast, and the scenery was the kind that could turn this account into a travelogue if I tried to describe it. The airport there is a little jewel!
Whit and I made contact and spent the evening getting our act together for the big adventure. We had flown together a couple of times before, and the only problem we had was in passing messages between the two two cockpits...no intercom. He was going to navigate from the front seat, and he thought he had the answer, a plastic pad you can write on and then erase by lifting up a little tab. It worked on the ground, but the first time he used it in the air the slipstream erased it before I could see what was written on it. I never saw it again. What we finally worked out was him holding up his fingers for the number of degrees he wanted me to turn, and then pointing the direction. It worked just fine.
As far as not being able to carry on any conversation was concerned, neither of us cared. We were both so absorbed by the sight of what we were flying over that conversation would have been a distraction.
Our first day, Half Moon - Truckee – Elko logged only about four and a half hours flight time, but it showed us a variety of scenery that couldn’t have been more striking if we had gone from one hemisphere to another. Deep blue Pacific, cities, the Sacramento valley, lakes and dark green forests in the Sierra Nevada, and then, just before Elko, some country that wouldn’t look out of place on the moon.
The first day also pretty well established the pattern we would follow for the rest of the trip. After landing, one of us would organize getting a fuel truck and new charts, if necessary, while the other one would do a walk-around inspection of the plane and get it ready for servicing. After servicing, one of us would settle our bill, and the other would pull the prop through eight blades. This seemed to alleviate the injected Lycoming hot-start problem. Our solar panel ,was doing a good job of keeping our battery charged, but we didn’t want to use the starter any more than we had to. Oddly enough, I don’t remember us ever having had lunch at any of these transits. I think we were too eager to get back in the air to waste time for it.
Day two, Elko - Salt Lake City - Rock Springs – Rawlins - Laramie.
Five hours. More changes, but much more gradual this time. We climbed to eleven-five to clear the Salt Lake control area, and then dropped down to skim the ridges and get a REAL birds-eye view of the Rockies. A word of caution: This kind of flying shouldn’t be engaged in unless you know the wind conditions for the area, because making a low pass over a ridge from the lee side isn’t conducive to long life. If you know what you’re doing, though, it’s exhilarating. On the other hand, a take-off from Rock Springs, elevation 6760’, on a hot July afternoon isn’t very exhilarating, or accelerating either, but the two hundred horses we had up front kept it from being too exciting.
We’d picked up a tail wind, so we overflew Rawlins and continued on to Laramie for our second night stop. This leg put us on the eastern foothills of the Rockies, and the high desert moderated into sloping grassy range land. This called for a closer look, and we literally hedge-hopped our way into Laramie. Again, we weren’t being reckless, because there wasn’t much of anything higher than a fence or a cattle feeder to clear.
The profile map from Laramie - North Platte - Omaha - Iowa City looks like a seven hundred and fifty mile ski-jump. The terrain falls away more than sixty-six hundred feet over this distance, and its character changed radically as we went east. In the space of a day’s flight we could see the changes from the eastern slopes of the Rockies through the Great Plains of Nebraska, and then Iowa farmland. Navigation got easier because there were more check points, and we could use section lines in case vIe wanted to get compass or groundspeed checks.
Day five called for Iowa City - Chicago - Bryan – Cleveland - Bellefonte, and Newark, weather and daylight permitting.
The warm front that had locked me into Oceano was ahead of the Pacific high we’d been riding across the country, but very slowly we were gaining on it and it was a toss-up whether we would catch up with it before we got to Newark. From Iowa City to Cleveland we started picking up the trailing edge of the front, and we settled for an overnight at State College, about five miles from the original stop at Bellefonte. Serendipity was still with me because during the two days we waited out the weather there we got to meet and know Ken Farwell.
While we were at the airport office making arrangements for our overnight, one of the office staff saw the Bucker parked across the ramp and remarked: “Ken would certainly like to see that plane.” We didn’t, know who Ken was, but the next morning we found out. Somebody had called him the night before and told him about us and our plane, and he was at the field to meet us when we came out to check the weather.
Ken has had a continuing love affair with aviation for over fifty years.....his pilot’s license has the suffix -40, which means he got it in 1940, and his stats are pretty impressive. He started ferrying Cubs out of Lockhaven to build up his time before W’W2, instructed during the war, and then went back to Piper after the war and stayed with them as long as they were in Lockhaven. He eventually went back to instructing around the State College area, and at the time we met him he had over 22,000 hours, 15,000 of which were instructing! He has probably turned out enough pilots to man a 3rd world air force. Furthermore, he’s still doing it. He teaches aerobatics in his Starduster Too! He got h s plane out and taxied it up and parked it beside the Jungmann for pictures, and it was interesting to see the similarities and differences between the two planes. They were surprisingly alike, considering that they were designed over thirty years apart.
By afternoon the reported ceiling still wasn’t high enough to let us out of the valley, so I suggested that he and I go up in the Bucker and check it out our selves. I also asked him if he would show me some of the passes in case Whit and I had to resort to some scud-running to get out the next day. We pretended that those were the only reasons for a local hop, but we both knew better. Ken was itching to get his hands on the Jungmann, and I wanted a ride with him. After going through the motions of ceiling and pass checking, we found a section of the valley that had good enough conditions for aerobatics, and from then on it was like two little boys in the schoolyard. We took turns running through the maneuvers, and the whole thing was one big frolic. I don’t think anyone on the ground watching this show would guess that they were watching a couple of gaffers with a combined total of more than a hundred years in aviation, and over fifty two thousand flying hours. Not bad, considering that the FAA has certified us as officially aged, infirm, and unfit for airline flying.
By noon the next day the weather had improved enough to let us fly the hour and a half final leg to Summerville. Ken was on hand to see us off with an aerial escort out of the valley, and the last we saw of him was when he pulled the Starduster straight up into the sun in a beautiful hammerhead turn and headed home.
Our arrival at the Somerset- Summerville airport ended what I like to call The Great Transcontinental Airmail Dash, seven incredible days after we lifted off from the little airport at Half Moon Bay. A cold front that had been following us caught up with us and kept us there for another two days, but history repeated itself and we were privileged to get to know another fine group of “fly for the sheer joy of it” pilots. Jack Glliott, aviation feature writer for the Newark Star Ledger, keeps his plane there, and he wrote a very nice article about us. I think he was pleased to learn that Whit and I had made the trip without any fanfare or publicity, but just for the private satisfaction of doing it.
Epilogue.
I’m calling this part epilogue because, although I sort of promised Buck I wouldn’t write a “how to” article, I have observed that writers use this device to add odds and ends of ideas to their writings, so I’m going to use it to sneak in a few “how tos.”
Let me begin by encouraging anyone who might be thinking of making a trip like this. Do it. It doesn’t have to be coast-to-coast, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be. If the idea of a long trip using just pilotage for navigation is a little daunting, work up to it with some short trips. Almost anybody can fly forty miles VFR from Podunk to Jones’s Corners without getting lost, and a long trip is just a whole lot of short ones.
Turn your nav. radios off, you can always turn them back on if you get in a box, and practice map reading. You’ll be surprised how much fun it is, like going on a car rally. You will also get a greater appreciation of the country you’re flying over because you’ll be studying it more, and this in turn pays a safety dividend. In directing your attention outside the cockpit you will be more likely to spot other traffic, and in keeping track of where you are you will also know where the nearest airports are. Most useful in case of an emergency.
By all means draw your course on your chart, and make it as direct as the terrain will permit. Don’t tie yourself to VOR stations. Flying zig-zag tracks across country is a great waste of time and gasoline. Make a simple flight plan with check points about thirty to forty miles apart, for a slow plane, and enter the estimated times between them. Log your times over them as you pass, because sometimes when you start to get a little panicky about where you are you can talk yourself into being where you aren’t. Your clock can’t tell you where you are, but it can sure tell you where you are not. Use it. Stay away from the big airline hubs. They’re no fun, and they don’t want you there anyway. Believe me, I know!
From the beginning of this story I have tried to tell it in such a way as to describe why I was, and still am, so impressed and gratified by the whole experience, but in looking back over what I have written it strikes me that I have wandered around verbally (even more than I did in 211BP) Maybe a summation would help.
The trip held a number of surprises for me. I had anticipated the pleasure I would get from flying the Bucker that far, but I was completely unprepared for the people I would meet, or for the scope and variety of the our country as seen from the cockpit of my little plane. The people I’ve described here are only a small part of the many good folks I met along the way. Space doesn’t allow telling about all of them, but they are a major part of my experience.
As to the land I flew over, the overwhelming feeling is of its vastness and beauty. In the western regions I enjoyed an odd feeling of solitude as I flew over the many miles of wild and open country, and it was here, I think, that I came closest to experiencing what I sought, the feeling of flying the mail. Those old pilots must have looked down on scenes not much changed to this day. My helmet and gogg1es are off to them!
Bob Pfaff.