Books › Blue Book v055 n01 [1932-05], 1932 › scan 6
Scan 6
Blue Book v055 n01 [1932-05], 1932
30 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Years ago, before there were airplanes, Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous story of the air-mail as he imagined it would be. Here Mr. Jamieson gives us a memorable story of the night air-mail as it actually is.
3But when the volume of the beam began to increase rapidly, he throttled back a little and eased down through the "soup" until he reached five hundred feet; and at that altitude flew level, his head out at the side from time to time while he searched for a light. He found none. When his radio assured him that he was near the field, he dropped still lower, until he was at three hundred feet. And here, presently, he saw the first lights of Spartanburg, and came on down a hundred feet and saw, ahead in the misty darkness, the dim wink of the field beacon. From then until he reached the field he flew under the ceiling, and at last landed easily on the muddy field.
5"Proud Papa!" Tom Walker cried, when Johnny had taxied to the gas pit. "Just heard about it on the tape. Congratulations. Sorry you can't get on through to see them."
7Johnny, grinning—the grin had, it seemed, become a fixture of his face by this time—climbed stiffly from the cockpit and lighted a cigarette. When Walker got the gas hose out, Johnny stepped to a respectful distance to avoid the danger of fire.
9"What'd'ya mean, I can't get on through to see them?" he asked jovially. "I got this far. Atlanta's got five hundred feet on the last report—dropped two hundred in the last hour—I can beat it in."
11"That's up to you," Walker, from his position on the plane's wing, responded. "But if it was up to me, you couldn't get me off this field in a wheelbarrow for a dollar a mile!"
13Johnny chuckled and walked into the office and sat down at the teletype machine. He called the dispatcher in Atlanta, and while waiting for a reply examined his weather card. Anderson, he saw, had dense fog. Jefferson, the other intermediate weather station, was likewise. But Atlanta still had five hundred feet, with the dew point and temperature three degrees apart. As long as they stayed apart, there would be no fog. Even if they "got together" there would be some ceiling as long as it was raining. And Atlanta reported light rain now.
15The Atlanta dispatcher replied, and Johnny asked about the weather. He had the dispatcher call the weather bureau there, and obtain a special forecast for the next four hours. The forecast was, "No change."
17So that settled it. Johnny climbed into the plane and gunned it from the gassing ramp onto the field, ran it up carefully on the ground to test both the engine and the instruments, and took off with a rush. He went blind at a hundred feet, and pulled up rapidly. That, he thought, was nothing to be alarmed about. What did he care about the weather? He was going home! And never in years had he wanted as much as now to get home. He was warm with magnanimity toward the world, and he even included the weather in this feeling. It had left him some ceiling to get in under at Atlanta.
19He was running late, because he had gotten out of Richmond late. At 12:45 A.M., forty minutes out of Spartanburg, he received the first broadcast of the line. Anderson and Jefferson were still zero-zero with dense fog. Spartanburg had closed in behind him. But the radio operator chanted:
21"Atlanta, Atlanta, overcast, ceiling five hundred feet, visibility one mile, wind northeast three, temperature forty-nine, dew point forty-seven, barometer thirty-seventeen. Double-U—Aitch—Zee, Atlanta, Georgia."
23Johnny grinned again, and lighted a cigarette and flew on comfortably.
25THAT cigarette almost cost Johnny Lee his life. He had put the packet in his inside trousers pocket while on the ground in Spartanburg, and to get to it in the air he had to unbuckle one leg strap of his parachute and scrouge around upon the seat. He did this, and got fire to the tobacco. It was minutes later that he saw a white streak lying in the seat of the airplane by his leg. He reached down—and found that somehow in his effort to get his cigarettes he had tripped his parachute! Part of the canopy of silk already had escaped from the pack; any additional movement in the seat might release more of it.
27The danger of this was that it removed the customary safety of a 'chute as a last resort, should the motor, while he was flying blind, stop running. And still another hazard, a thing more likely to happen than engine failure: If the parachute slipped out of the pack enough, part of it would billow up into the wind, catch in the propeller blast, and drag out the rest of it, taking Johnny bodily along. The shroud lines would entangle in the tail. . . . The remainder of the story would be written in stark tragedy.
29So Johnny Lee sat very still, and flew on into the black fog of night, listening to his beam signals, wishing that the time would hurry, that he were there already and could land. He heard the marker beacon at Jefferson. Sixty miles to go! Some of the frigid tension left his mind and body. Engines were pretty reliable these days. He wouldn't need a parachute to jump. The only thing, now,
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