Building Time
by Captain Wayne (Rusty) Baker
There is freedom waiting for you, on the breezes of the night sky. Night Flight
My duties as a line boy at the Olney-Noble Airport were various if not always glamorous. I fueled the airplanes, swept out the hangar and office (swept it out again when Earl would come in from quail hunting and track mud across the floor), and cleaned grease off the bellies of airplanes. I washed and waxed airplanes. I vacuumed the interior of the airplanes. (Whenever Earl would clip his fingernails in flight, leaving the clippings in the carpet of a plane that I had only hours earlier vacuumed, I would of course have to do it all over again.) I cleaned bugs off the windows and leading edges of the wings. I put the airplanes in the hangar at the end of the day. I mowed the grass along the runway and I climbed up the rotating beacon to replace light bulbs. I fed Earl’s hunting dogs and answered the UNICOM – a radio used at uncontrolled fields to provide incoming aircraft with winds and altimeter settings, advise them of any known traffic in the area, and the active runway in use.
I took flying lessons every chance I got. I loved everything about being around the airport. The pilots, the airplanes, the flying stories, watching other students solo for the first time. It was always nice, I thought, when a newly soloed pilot would have his picture taken and sent in to the local newspaper, the Olney Daily Mail. The same was done for everyone who got their private or commercial license, or instrument rating.
Occasionally, the windsock on the hangar roof would need to be replaced. Texaco, the company that Earl purchased fuel from, provided them at no charge. Naturally, it was my job to take a stepladder onto the arched hangar roof, climb to the top of the stepladder (yes, the top of the step ladder, not the next to last step like you are supposed to do – the ladder was too short for that) and remove and replace the windsock.
I completed the task and was relieved not to have fallen off the stepladder and rolled off the roof. Then, after I had put away the ladders and tools, John Schnepper, our chief pilot, came in laughing. I had managed to put the windsock up in the inverted position. The Texaco logo and lettering was upside down. Everyone had a good laugh about that. Everyone except me, that is. I was 19 years old and far too sensitive about having others laughing at me. I was of course required to go back up and take the windsock off its hoop and put it back on – right side up. I don’t know now why I didn’t see the humor in it and laugh along with them. It was funny. The only explanation I can offer is that, as I said, I was 19 years old and still had not learned to laugh at myself.
Chief Pilot John Schnepper was in his mid-thirties, medium height and build. He had a receding hairline and wore wrap-around sunglasses. He was funny and likeable, yet at times a bit arrogant. When I say that, I don’t mean it in a bad way. John was then and is to this day one of the best pilots I ever saw. Never mind that he was only flying Piper single and occasionally twin-engine airplanes. He could land the space shuttle if you put him in the pilot’s seat. So a bit of arrogance is okay if you can back it up. He wasn’t one to go around bragging. He was good, and he knew it. And we knew it, too.
If I had one wish for John, it would be that he would have been blessed with the opportunities that later became available to me as I progressed in my flying career.
Every chance I got, I rode with John Schnepper, Ed or Earl Smith, and occasionally Tom Rodgers, our other pilot, on trips they were flying. Most of the trips that Triangle Air Service flew were to St. Louis or Indianapolis for business executives making airline connections. With passengers on board, I would observe and soak up as much as I could. On the empty legs, they would let me fly and log the time. It helped me build up my hours for free, with the added advantage of giving me an opportunity to fly in and out of some fairly busy airports. I learned to fly IFR – Instrument Flight Rules – and got some real-world exposure to weather that a typical student pilot would not ordinarily encounter.
On one particular night, John Schnepper was flying out of St. Louis back to Olney-Noble in a Piper Cherokee. I sat up front with him, and the passengers were in the back. I asked John what the procedure was in the event of an engine failure at night in a single-engine airplane. John held a finger to his lips, indicating that I should not ask such questions so loudly in front of paying passengers. Then, he leaned toward me and said in a hushed tone, “You go through your emergency check list to try to get the engine restarted, then you descend to one hundred feet and turn on your landing light. If you don’t like what you see, turn it back off!”
Less than two months from the day I started working as a line boy, I soloed. I was excited and proud, but I felt a bit let down when no one took my picture for the Olney Daily Mail. Then a few weeks later I tested successfully for my private pilot license at the Mt. Carmel, Illinois airport. I was more than a little proud of myself. I was disappointed when once again, no one took my picture for the newspaper. Looking back, I can not understand why I didn’t just remind them and ask them to do it, rather than choosing to let it bother me.
To celebrate, Ed Smith, my flight instructor, his then-girlfriend and later-to-be-wife Susan, and I flew over to Flora, Illinois to pick up Marsha, my girlfriend and future bride. From there we flew to Mattoon, Illinois Coles County Memorial Airportf or dinner at the airport restaurant. It would be a good opportunity for me to officially get a night checkout and at the same time show off for my girlfriend.
The landing at Mattoon was not the best of my career. In fact, it was so bad that Marsha screamed because she thought that we had crashed. I was embarrassed, but what can you do?
Marsha and I continued dating, and against all common sense, she agreed to marry me. We tied the knot on a sunny February day, barely three months after our first date. The following morning, we were up with the chickens and flying to New Orleans for our honeymoon. I was excited. I had the most beautiful girl in the world as my new bride, and I was flying an almost-new Piper Cherokee 180, N16458, on a long cross country. I remember John Schnepper telling me that if I was worried about getting lost to just fly west to the Mississippi River and follow a barge all the way down to New Orleans.
We stopped about halfway down for fuel and a bathroom break, then were off again. Approaching the Big Easy, I was very concerned about flying VFR (Visual Flight Rules) over Lake Pontchartrain. I had heard numerous stories about pilots becoming disoriented when flying over water due to spatial disorientation when they no longer had a horizon to help them maintain a sense of up and down, or knowing when the airplane is in a turn. Within a year, I would have a much more dramatic experience with the phenomenon – commonly referred to as vertigo – that would nearly claim my life.
On this day, however, I asked New Orleans Moisant Airport approach control for vectors around the lake. Although I was still a bit nervous, perhaps even intimidated about flying into a large airport, we had an uneventful arrival into Moisant.
We had a great time in New Orleans. It was the week before Mardi Gras, and we actually saw a parade or two, had a portrait of us made by a street artist on Jackson Square in the French Quarter, and ate at a really nice restaurant on the lake called The Bounty. The waiter had a (fake?) French accent, and he smiled approvingly when Marsha asked for her choice from the menu. Whatever she ordered sounded good to me, so I asked for the same thing. “Oh, no, no, no!” he shook his head disapprovingly, and then more or less told me what I would be eating. Being a young country bumpkin, I went along with his suggestion if only to avoid looking like I didn’t know what I was doing.
When it came time to return home, we hopped back into the Cherokee and flew back to Olney. Back in our real world, we both went to work at building our new life together – Marsha working at Kentucky Fried Chicken, me as a line boy for Triangle Air Service. How could we ever have known the adventures and misadventures, the good times and the bad, that were to follow?