6 minute read
LEARNING TO FLY
LEARNING TO FLY MY SISTER’S FIRST FLIGHT WAS ALMOST HER LAST – AND I WAS THE PILOT.
By Lloyd Walton
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Lloyd Walton is a multi-award-winning Canadian director and cinematographer. His historiography, Chasing the Muse: Canada, is available on Amazon, Kindle, Chapters, Indigo, and Barnes and Noble.
In public school, the silence of the classroom was often shattered by an overhead roar. It was the thumping pistons of the float planes as they climbed with their heavy loads to service ranger bases across the north of Ontario. Our school was perched on a hill directly under their flight path. From my desk, I could watch the yellow bush planes disappear into the vast horizon of the distant hills.
To me, flying represented the ultimate freedom. I sketched myself, hands on the controls, floating through the puffy clouds into the deep blue northern skies. When my Grade 8 teacher asked me what my ambition was, I told him I wanted to fly with the Snowbirds. He bent down over me and said, “You of all people should learn to never set your sights too high. A pilot has to have excellent skills in arithmetic. You would really have to pull up your socks in that department.”
FLYING TO FREEDOM AND ADVENTURE
From my desk in high school, I had an even better view of the Lands and Forests air base. Beaver and Otter aircraft were constantly taking off and landing down below, on the river. They were flying to freedom and adventure, and so was my mind. My pencil flew, too, sketching airplanes in my notebooks.
Through diligence, dedication, and good teachers, I won a flying scholarship from the Sault Air Cadet Squadron. At age 17, I boarded a train for Windsor, where I would learn to fly. At ground school and in the cockpit, I learned that the freedom of flight comes with a great deal of preparation, planning, concentration, and practice. Two weeks after my arrival in Windsor, on a hot July evening, I got the nod for my first solo.
“OK, Lloyd, you’re ready. Take her up yourself.” Those few words led to immense exhilaration.
As the wheels left the ground, I kept glancing at the empty seat beside me. If only my Grade 8 teacher could see me now, scoring the championship goal, winning the lottery, falling in love, flying a plane. I practised a few steep turns, looking straight down over my left shoulder at the freighters heading up Lake St. Clair, then turned toward Detroit and radioed the Windsor tower that I was coming in.
LANDING WHILE BLUSHING
To enter the landing zone, my first instruction from Windsor Air Traffic Control was to begin my descent to 1,000 feet. Next, I was assigned the Number 7 spot in the landing pattern. (Wow, I had to find six airplanes in the sky!) I began searching the sky, counting aircraft, to slip in line behind Number 6, a twin-engine Piper. This was on-the-spot learning of another very valuable life skill: situational awareness. Off my right wingtip appeared a Canadian Pacific DC-8 passenger airliner in a wider circuit, inbound from Mexico City. When he radioed, acknowledging my presence, I blushed.
A year later, at home at the flying club on the river, I obtained a float endorsement to fly seaplanes. One windy autumn day, I took my little sister Brenda for her first airplane ride in a rented, underpowered Aeronca Champion float plane. It was the kind of aircraft you had to start by hand. To start the engine, you stand on the float and flip the propeller by hand. I hated doing that -- it scared me out of my wits.
This particular time, after Brenda and I were strapped in, to my relief, a dockhand flipped the prop to fire up the engine for us. We pulled away from the dock, headed upstream and, after control and engine checks, lifted off. I took her up and around the city, circling our house a few times, then turned back downriver toward base. A strong tailwind brought us back to base very quickly.
HITTING WHITECAPS
The landing spot, where the river narrows by the air base, was very short. Due to a strong crosswind, I decided to try a test landing on a larger open body of water, and began my descent. The Aeronca hit the whitecaps, clipping wave tops with a bang, bang, bang on the pontoons before settling down in a heaving, rowdy, rocking motion.
When I re-applied throttle, the engine sputtered and stalled. For the dreaded restart, I had to go out into the wind and walk along the wave-washed floats to flip the propeller. I opened the door and a blast of cold spray filled the cabin. Moving forward, hand over hand, heaving up and down, and carefully gripping all the handholds, I made it to the solid handle on the engine cowling and braced my feet. With my free arm, I gave the prop my best shot, and the engine fired up.
The wind from the prop wash sped my way back. Just as I buckled in, the engine stalled again with a clack, clack, clack, and hiss. Alarmingly, we were being blown closer to the looming rocky shore.
I reset the throttle to high so it wouldn’t stall out, and quickly climbed back out into the wind and the waves. I grabbed the prop and flung it. The engine fired up with a full-throttled, furious WHAAAAA! The sudden, more violent prop wash blew me out backward over the water, arms up over my head.
In an airborne zeptosecond, the first thing I saw was a flash of white sky. I watched sister Brenda take off in a plane with no pilot, while I hurtled into the abyss.
FLUNG LIKE AN ACROBAT
Wham! My outreached hands caught the oncoming wing strut as though it was a trapeze swinging up from behind to meet me. Instinctively my body continued the movement, using the rotational momentum like an acrobat to fling me through the
open side door and into my seat.
I turned the aircraft into the wind, took off, circled the base, and slid a picture-perfect landing on a small patch of calm water. While I was tying the pontoon to the dock, a stranger came down and said, “Nice landing.”
To this day I wonder why and how I was snatched from oblivion. Was it the lightning reflexes practised as a goaltender by snapping 90-mile-an-hour pucks out of the air? The acrobatics from performing a toe save at the top corner of the net? A life-and-death lesson from hockey? Was there an angel guiding me to a greater purpose?
THE PURPOSE
That purpose would not be with the Royal Canadian Air Force. I applied for a military career, but my math scores were too low for supersonic flight school. I was stunned for about a week.
Inside, it was still satisfying to know that I had done it. I can still say, “I’m a pilot.” Re-evaluating my future career, I would learn to adapt the skills of preparation, planning, concentration, practice, and situational awareness to another field: art.
