The Cannibal Queen (39 page)

The airport at Bryce Canyon, Utah, has the only log hangar I’ve ever seen. Built in the 1930s by the WPA, the big hangar is visible for many miles if you have a good angle on the sun.

I like this airport and the location, 7,500 feet above sea level on a great mesa. The east side of the mesa is composed of soft pink stone that forms the spectacular cliffs of Bryce Canyon National Park. The south end of the mesa, which is in the park, is a high pine forest. Yet the gentle swale north of the park where the airport is located is treeless. A couple miles farther north the land rises and is covered with trees again.

Elevation is the key to life in this rugged country. The tree line is a contour line—only a few feet in elevation means the difference between enough water to sustain trees year after year and mere prairie grass. Lower still is the desert.

I cross above the national park shivering at 11,500, still flying in a short-sleeve shirt after my day in the desert, and slip the
Cannibal Queen
onto Bryce’s 7,000-foot strip of asphalt. After taxiing forever I arrive at the little mat in front of the log hangar and maneuver the
Queen
into a tiedown spot for the night. The air temperature here is a mere 75 degrees.

Two men are sitting on a log bench in front of the hangar. One is elderly, the other I soon learn is the FBO man. I am barely out of the cockpit when they wander over to inspect the Queen. I have a reservation tonight at Ruby’s Inn, the biggest of the three motels hereabouts, and they advertise they will send a car over to pick up folks at the airport. I call them from the phone inside and they say they’ll be over in a bit.

So I sit on the log bench and talk to the old man. From Florida, he is living in an RV parked beside the hangar, has been here since July 7 and is going to stay until the desert down below cools off. Then he’ll probably go down to Bullhead City, Arizona, on the Colorado River. Laughlin, Nevada, is right across the river. Every evening boats ferry people across the river to the gambling joints. But it’s hotter than holy hell down in Bullhead right now, so the old man is whiling away the summer at the airport in Bryce.

“I’m an airport bum,” he tells me. “Been one since 1946. Like to hang out at the airport and watch the planes come and go.”

The daughter of the FBO man sits with us and plays with her cat. She talks to it and won’t let it escape. Finally it jumps down and runs for the trailer behind the hangar where the family lives, the girl running after it.

The old man and I talk about airports and planes and Bryce Canyon. A half hour passes, then forty-five minutes, and I’m still waiting. Ruby’s van is taking its time. But the company is pleasant, the sun is low on the horizon and, all in all, it’s been another great day of flying, a fine day to be alive.

“They’ll want five bucks now for the ride to Ruby’,” the old man informs me. “When they get around to showing up.”

“They never used to charge.”

“They quit giving free rides from the airport the first of the year. Now they want five bucks a head and two dollars more if you have luggage.”

“It’s only a couple miles over there.”

“I know. Ain’t right. Some of the people arriving here have been arguing with them about it.”

I can understand that. Flight Guide says Ruby’s offers free airport pickup.

The van shows up an hour after I called. The sun is just setting. As we drive away I look over my shoulder at the lonesome log hangar and the
Cannibal Queen
sitting in front. The old man is still sitting on the bench.

The young woman driving apologizes for the delay and tells me cheerfully that she won’t charge me tonight for the ride since she was so late.

Five dollars! The whole subject irritates me. Welcome back to earth!

Friday morning when I arrived at the airport a man and woman were preflighting an American Eagle biplane parked beside the Stearman. I visited a moment with the old man, who was back on the bench, then packed the
Queen
and taxied her to the fuel pump. The Eagle pilot and I started engines at about the same time and were soon ready to taxi. I got on the radio.

“Eagle, this is the Stearman. If you want to taxi down the runway behind me, you can swing around and take off first.”

They took me up on it. When the smaller plane was safely airborne, I rolled the Stearman.

The
Cannibal Queen
climbs into the thin morning air at a pace suitable for a dowager. The Eagle slashes in and settles on my right wing as I swing the
Queen
southeast across the cliffs, then turn south.

Now the Eagle crosses under and surfaces on the left side. I snap a few with the camera. After a minute or two the pilot goes back to the right side. He’s three or four wingspans away at all times, which I appreciate. I have no idea how good a formation pilot he is and I don’t want him in tight trying to show me.

The Eagle is a snappy, fully aerobatic biplane much smaller than a Stearman. The two people sitting in tandem are covered by a bubble canopy. With a conventional, horizontally opposed flat engine, she has good performance and excellent economy. The paint job on this one is uninspired, but you can’t hold that against the plane.

Finally the Eagle crosses under to my left wing, then turns away to the east as the pilot says good-bye on the radio. Soon she is tail on to me. In moments she disappears into the bright blue eastern sky and the
Cannibal Queen
is once again alone.

The Grand Canyon, which is Spanish for “big ditch,” is a stupendous jagged tear in the earth’s crust that mere words cannot describe. It must be seen and felt to be believed.

Of course nature displays her finest masterpiece to best advantage. Oriented east and west to catch the morning and evening sun, the canyon must be approached from north or south by man the insect. On the ground this journey is a gradual climb through pine forests as the land swells gently upward toward the rim. Then, like a curtain being raised, there it is!

Even jaded teenagers who have been everywhere and seen everything are stunned into silence by their first look. At the rim overlooks people point and whisper.

This morning as I fly south toward the north rim the rising terrain also obscures my vision. Under me is the pine forest and the twisting, winding road that leads up to the lodge and the overlooks.

I have the chart spread on my left knee and am watching it carefully. The National Park Service has been busy here. In the last eighteen months the Park Service, an outfit that really knows and cares about airplanes and the problems of the people who fly them, has managed to create a mandatory overflight system of such Byzantine complexity that even Odysseus Yeager couldn’t figure it out. Which is what they intended. If you can’t positively identify the turnpoints on the VFR tour routes or the boundaries of the segments with their varying altitude restrictions, you’d best avoid the place and leave canyon flying to commercial tour operators hauling planeloads of Japanese and Germans. If you want to keep your pilot’s license, that is.

To avoid the hassles you need to fly over the Grand Canyon at an altitude above 14,499 feet above sea level. Better make it a good bit more than one foot higher because the thermals and downdrafts over this colossal ditch can be vicious.

The
Cannibal Queen
might stagger up to 15,000, but I’m not going to try it today. I’m at 10,500 feet coming up over the forest toward the north rim.

I can see little arms of the great canyon off to my right and left, but the main gorge is ahead and obscured by the rising terrain. I look longingly to my right at a finger of rim that I can see coming up from the south. There is a VFR corridor there that can be traversed above 10,000 feet, but only if you can hit the narrow north-rim entrance right on the money, and to do that you would need to acquire the FAA’s new special chart that includes photographs of the waypoints. Then you should take a few flights with an experienced canyon pilot to ensure you know what you’re looking at when you’re looking at it. Today I decide to play it safe and forget the whole thing.

I turn eastward. I will fly around the eastern end of the canyon and then along the southern rim to Grand Canyon Airport. I dial in the radio frequency required for flight in the adjacent section of the canyon and listen to the tour pilots report their position and altitude.

“Over the dragon at ninety-five.”

The dragon? Why not points A, B and so forth, points labeled as such on the charts?

I’ll be honest—I resent the government’s insistence that I avoid overflight of national landmarks so that environmental activists won’t have their “wilderness experience” disrupted by aircraft noise. You and I carefully give national parks two thousand feet of clearance when overflying while the commercial tour operators are right down in the weeds with the paying customers. This system has been carried to the point of absurdity at the Grand Canyon as a direct result of political pressure by environmental activists on Congress, which decided to let the National Park Service make the rules. The fact that general aviation is getting a raw deal delights the “environmentalists,” some of whom want jets rerouted so that
they
won’t have to look at contrails.

There are a lot of people in this country who would like to see every private aircraft recycled into beer cans. The restrictions are only going to get worse unless the people who own and fly noncommercial aircraft fight back. According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, some state officials want
state parks
protected from overflights.

Are you listening out there? Do you care? Or are you going to wait until general aviation is stone cold dead, then tut-tut about the swine politicians and wax nostalgic?

This morning I do the only thing I can. I turn the damned radio off and sit looking at the view with just the engine for company.

The view is something to look at. Reds, yellows, grays, all shades of pink highlighted by the morning sun and contrasted by stark shadows. If God ever takes a vacation, I’ll bet He comes here.

Visibility today is good, about 60 miles. I can see Navajo Mountain 60 miles away to the northeast across the Painted Desert.

It isn’t always this good. There are days now that the smog from Los Angeles and the emissions from the Navajo Power Plant near Page, Arizona, combine to reduce visibility to the point that you can’t see from one rim of the canyon to the other. That distance is about 12 nautical miles, call it 14 civilian miles.

In the humid east 12 miles visibility is terrific; out here in the great west that’s the equivalent of a London fog. Things are bigger out here and the air is dry.

Yesterday an agreement was reached to clean up the emissions from the coal-fired Navajo Plant, a process that will take twenty years and cost $2 billion. But don’t expect to see any improvement in the air until the next century. If the cleanup happens at all. And all that money will do nothing about those 14 million people in the L.A. basin.

Once again I get the feeling that I am seeing something that my grandchildren may not be able to see. If people keep moving to California the magnificent vistas of the west may become hidden in smog. What the Grand Canyon will look like then is something to contemplate the next time you are drunk. At least there won’t be any airplane noise.

People say that birds don’t do aerobatics. You’ve always heard that, I suspect. I have been told that by flight and aerodynamics instructors since I started in this game. And they’re wrong. Someone in the FAA forgot to give the birds a copy of the rules.

A couple years ago I was standing on the south rim staring at the canyon and thinking big thoughts when I noticed some kind of swallow come shooting out over the canyon into the rising air. He rolled neatly upside down and did a one-G pull for a few seconds, then rolled upright. I saw another bird do it while I was getting the camera ready. Then I sat for an hour with the camera in hand, waiting, but the show was over.

An attraction on the south rim that’s worth your time is the IMAX theater in Canyon Village, right near the airport. The show there is a special about the canyon. On that giant screen the great canyon is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The best part of the film is a segment filmed from an ultralight flying down a gorge into the bottom of the canyon. That is flight as you dreamed it on those warm summer nights when you were young. The final moments of the film are scenes of an ultralight flying above the canyon as the sun drops lower and lower. This scene will bring tears to your eyes.

As you leave the theater, ponder the fact that the flying the film depicts is now illegal.

Heading southeast out of Grand Canyon Airport, Humphreys Peak north of Flagstaff is at one o’clock. The
Queen
floats above the pine forest of the highlands as the Grand Canyon recedes to the north. Then finally I look and it’s gone, hidden from view.

An old volcano, Humphreys Peak at 12,633 feet is well above me and today is hosting rain showers. Dark clouds obscure the peak. Here is a graphic illustration of the advantage that elevation bestows on living things in this desert country. Ahead of me and on my left in the lowland is the Painted Desert, and it’s not getting a drop. Oh, there are clouds out there, most spawned by Humphreys, and rain is falling from some of them. Yet the hot dry air absorbs the raindrops after they have fallen just a couple thousand feet. Nowhere today but on the big mountain is liquid water reaching the ground. So the slopes of Humphreys are covered with trees.

Soon I am flying over a landscape that shows graphic evidence of a volcanic past. The Strawberry Crater Wilderness and Sunset Crater National Monument are two areas named after the biggest cones, but there are dozens, as well as numerous black lava flows.

I pick up I-40 going east from Flagstaff and follow it on the south side. The desert underneath the
Queen
is extraordinarily green this year, as green as I have ever seen it in August. Yet it is a hard, desolate land all the same. Even the names give you a taste of it. Canyon Diablo—Devil Canyon—is normally dry this time of year—its watercourse is San Francisco Wash. The village of Two Guns sits where the highway and railroad cross Canyon Diablo. Not Gloversville or Cooperstown, but Two Guns.