Sunday, October 10, 2010

Da Plane! Da Plane!

 
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Yesterday I arose from my fitful sleep to go as quietly as possible from the house and drive below the speed limit to Vacaville's Nut Tree Airport. They were having a fly-in/airshow/not-so-static display of WW2 aircraft and many others. They promised P-51 Mustangs in quantities not to be less than 13 or so and it's one of my favorites. I'm an airplane NUT, I'm plain nuts about airplanes and have been since I was but a wee babe in the jungles of Panama. I built, with copious help from my Dad, a balsawood airplane of small dimensions with a rubber band motor when I was 6 years old. It had done what it always does during the rainy season in Panama, rain, especially in the afternoon, and while my Dad was off doing his Army business I was hot to see the little machine fly. We lived on Fort Clayton in military housing, very pretty it was surrounded by jungle and flowers of all kinds but there were few places big enough (I thought) for my plane to take to the skies. So toddled off...ran through the jungle trail to a large clearing adjacent to the Panama Canal.
Once there I wound up the rubber motor to just short of double knots all the way...pretty strong stuff this balsa wood, and let her go into the face of the slight breeze blowing in from the sea. Off she went with a slight turn to the right, then reaching the height of the tallest trees she began to glide...downwind! I ran after the wayward (now) plane only to see it sail out over the edge of the concrete canal and disappear! The canal was NOT protected from people by fencing along that stretch, being actually a part of the large lake that forms the canal proper. There the plane sat all forlorn floating along with the breeze a couple of hundred feet from where I was. Oh, woe is me! I watched as it floated out of sight then walked forlornly back along the trail home to face the music. All I recall after that was a long session of building model airplanes both in Panama and the US once I arrived in Selma, California. Now I watch them fly out of Travis AFB a few miles away and at events like this one in Vacaville.

Yes, as I grew up in Selma I built more models, not only airplanes, but boats, cars and homemade rockets, oh those rockets. My best friend at the time was David S. who lived in a near mansion across the alleyway behind our house. He lived on "D" street, we lived on "E" street. He and I were always up to something, CO2 cartridge rockets and others that more resembled pipe bombs than anything else! We used good ol' gasoline in the CO2 ones and they jetted along a wire strung between trees in each of our backyards shooting a trail of burning gas as they went. Good to watch! Hard on the lawn(s). The pipes that we used were filled with a combo of shotgun powder from shotgun shells and match heads from "strike anywhere" matches, plus whatever flammable or explosive materials we could drum up. Railroad flares were always to be found half burned along the tracks near the high school so were a convenient source of "good stuff". These hardly ever had enough thrust to lift themselves off the ground as we had not discovered the venturi-effect yet so no nice nozzles to concentrate the gasses through, but they did burn like hell's very fire! We damned near burned down his parents garage one day as we finished "loading" one of the rockets for another attempt. I just remember getting the hell burned out of my right middle finger and having to explain the fire trucks at David's house to my parents. Not an easy task liar that I was. So back to model planes I went.

I bought a plastic control-line plane that had a Wen-Mac .049 cubic inch engine that refused all techniques of starting attempted. Mostly not knowing enough and not reading instructions comprised the wasted Saturday morning flying sessions. Eventually after a few weeks I understood what good a fresh battery for the glow plug was for and never looked back. Then onto Atwood Shrieks and other engines more interesting and powerful. I built little speed planes to run against a "clock" and did pretty well in local contests with them. They were my pride and joy. Then I tried Free Flight...large wingspan planes, light structures that flew straight up in a spiral until they topped out at some height and glided back to earth slowly I hoped. Sometimes the flights did not quite gain a trajectory that worked and found Terre Firma far too soon...crunch! All of this by the time I was 14 or 15 years old and began to get interested in girls. That was the end of this chapter for years to come!