Cathy in the Wright

A flight of fancy

When I was in the Army, circa 1959-1961, I spent a lot of time riding as right-seat ballast while H-13 helicopter pilots practiced for VIP runs during firepower demonstrations. Their idea was to scare the hell out of visiting colonels and generals by flying a shoot-em-up run down a rocky crevice that ended with an elevator-like rise a hundred feet from tall pine trees at the end of Mattson Range at Ft. Rucker, Ala. To do this without crashing required practice, and that’s how come I got involved as a dead-weight substitute for senior-grade brass. Damn, it was exciting and, for years, I’ve longed for just one more ride in a military helicopter. Well, I got that wish Sunday, thanks to my daughter-in-law, Auntie S. She knows a crop-duster, “Crazy Eddie,” who has a Korean-War-vintage H-13 (the bug-like chopper on M.A.S.H.) as his toy. Eddie took me for a ride that was thrilling—although it was too high for me to make toothpicks out of pine needles and he wasn’t packing two .30-caliber machineguns. Darn; but a guy can’t have everything. The grandsons, M and J, were there to watch—green-eyed with envy—until Eddie motioned them aboard, too, one with each parent. We all got the full Monty of helicopter flying—hover close to the ground, back up, make a 360-degree turn and shoot upward to about 500 feet and around the corn and sugar-beet fields near Hector, Minn. By the way, Eddie wasn’t crazy; he’s an excellent pilot. The H-13 was meticulously maintained, which was a comfort, since a copter that loses a rotor blade in flight has a glide angle of 180 degrees. He reputedly got the nickname of Crazy by occasionally flying his fixed-wing crop duster UNDER telephone wires. The airport at Hector also housed a number of ultralight craft, and M and J, got to sit at the controls of one. Talk about primitive! The gas gauge consisted of crayon markings at “2-gal" and "4-gal" on a pellucid plastic tank. The air-speed indicator looked like a test tube with a pipe sticking forward, out of the bottom. Air rushing in the pipe raised a red plastic disc inside the tube to indicate approximate speed. Two ultralights took off while we watched, and that certainly looked like fun. Since I’m forbidden to buy a motorcycle, I suppose there’s no use asking about this equally economical substitute, even if highway traffic is not an issue.