CHAPTER ONE

           The glowing numbers on the clock radio on the bedside table read 11:57PM as I hung up the phone but being half awake, half asleep and totally confused, I wasn't sure whether I had just talked with a friend in Wisconsin or if it was just a dream telling me that I needed to wake up and go to the bathroom. I thought about calling him back but decided that if he hadn't called, he would think that I must be drunk or crazy, or both, to wake him up in the middle of the night. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough and I would be in better condition to understand what he had said about needing a restored Piper J-3 Cub delivered.

           At an age where most men are just hitting their peak, I suddenly found myself among the gainfully unemployed, otherwise known as retired, after having been given the golden handshake by a company which had extracted the best twenty years of my life. However, one of the good things about no longer being tied to a nine to five schedule, I was now able to pursue the fun things of life which I had been forced to place on hold for many years. One of the activities that I enjoyed, but one which would hardly produce the income necessary to support a family, was flying. I now had the opportunity to spend as much time in the air as I wished by flying towplanes at the local gliderport and ferrying airplanes around the world.

 I made my first solo flight on my sixteenth birthday in 1944 in a Piper Cub, and having begun flying at that particular period of time, I was able to build up a considerable amount of experience in airplanes which today's pilots know only from photos or in museums.

Piper Aircraft began building the Cub in 1936, right in the middle of the worst of the depression years. With all the other aircraft companies building heavy biplanes powered by engines of 200 or more horsepower, the frail looking Cub appeared almost as a joke. It was powered by a Tinker Toy four cylinder engine advertised as producing forty horsepower. The little engine had two rather highly debatable points: horsepower and dependability. When it was running at top efficiency, the Cub would putter along at about fifty miles an hour. With the price for a brand new Cub at $699.00, it became the Tin Lizzie of the air and within the affordable range of a lot of people.

           Gasoline was selling for nineteen cents a gallon in those days which meant that one could fly a Cub for an hour for about half a dollar. Even during the depression years, this put the cost of flying within the reach of many people. Two years later, a much more dependable sixty-five horsepower engine was fitted which boosted the speed of the Cub to sixty miles an hour and making it an instant favorite for training purposes. Piper produced a steady stream of bright yellow Cubs from their Lock Haven, Pennsylvania plant until the war began, at which time they changed the color to Army Drab and began shipping them overseas by the thousands where they were used by forward observes to direct artillery fire. They built the last of the venerable J-3 Cubs in 1948. With a slightly larger engine, it was produced as the PA-ll for a couple more years.

Piper reintroduced the basic design in 1956, calling it the Super Cub. The new version was considerably heavier and powered by a much larger engine. Other refinements made it able to fill the need for an airplane which could be used for spraying crops and towing gliders. At a time when every other airplane on the market had sprouted nose wheels for much easier ground handling, the Super Cub remained a "Taildragger" and was just as demanding to fly as had been its grandfather. Due to the level of attention needed to fly the Cub, there grew an old saying that if one could fly a Cub well, he could fly just about anything.

            Most people who have learned to fly in the past 40 years have done so in airplanes with a nose wheel and controls much like a car. One of the main differences in these airplanes and those like the Cub is as soon as the wheels are on the ground, the flight is over and all that is left is to "drive" it to the ramp.

            Getting the wheels on the ground on a ship with a tailwheel only begins the landing process, they must be controlled all the way, because having a center of gravity behind the main wheels, they are somewhat unstable and require constant attention to keep them rolling straight. Also, taxiing requires use of both rudder and brakes.

            Many pilots who learned to fly in a nosewheel airplane have a great amount of difficulty in making the transition to one with a tailwheel. The other disconcerting aspect is that they are no longer sitting on the left like in a car and steering with their left hand but in a tandem arrangement and flying with their right hand on a stick.

           When I called John the following morning, he apologized for having called at such a late hour and said that indeed, he had bought a restored 1946 J-3 Cub from a man in western Colorado and needed it delivered. The former owner would arrange to have it brought to Black Forest but he needed someone who he could trust to fly it on to Oshkosh. We agreed on a price for the delivery and the deal was set.

           This was going to be a fun trip, flying along a few hundred feet above the ground with the door open, enjoying the fresh air in my face and waving at people on the ground. It would be just like the old days when I was a kid and people flew just for the fun of it. Flying had now become either a job or a way to get from one point to the other and most of the pure enjoyment of flying had been lost. These days, when a pilot lands he simply rolls the ship into the hangar, closes the door and goes home. No longer do they stand around the hangar and talk about the experience. Hangar flying is a lost art.

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