Flying Through Life

By Robert Firth

This is a story written by a pilot who followed his father into commercial aviation. It is, on one hand, the biography of a professional pilot and, on other levels, provides us with insight into the mental disciplines necessary to follow such a career path. The story begins with a description of his life as a kid in rural New Jersey and follows him from his first flight to his last, some fifty years latter.

As each passage of life ends, a new begins. The author provides us with an understanding of what it means to be a professional aviator and what he has learned along the way about his profession and about life. We see him grow as a person and as a pilot. We see the world through his eyes and gain an appreciation of his accumulated experiences both funny and those no so.

Anyone who has spent years looking down on the world most certainly develops a different view of things than those who meander along the surface. This is certainly true of the author who provides the reader with a sense of his understanding along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456601256

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1

FLYING THROUGH LIFE

FLIGHT

Boys had boats, their favorite toy

Not I -

When I was just a boy.

I dreamt of wings for soaring high

And cutting wakes in yonder sky.

And where my father’s footsteps went-

I’d follow,

Into the firmament

Gaula Wiedenheft, 1987

Three years after Hitler blew his brains out my family moved to Island Heights. Dad rented Mrs. Black’s summer cottage on the east end of the small town where my Mother had grown up and where my parents first met 30 years earlier. The house was a block from Barnegat Bay which is part of the inland waterway to Florida.

It is 2005 as I write these words and the world is in some ways pretty much the same as it was in 1950 - at least in the important things. The sun comes up, the rivers run, the moon is there and the poles haven’t yet switched, the oceans haven’t swallowed Florida, the Antarctic ice hasn’t flooded the east coast, polar bears aren’t yet using sun blockers and greenhouse gas and holes in the ozone haven’t killed anyone that I know of. I went back to visit Island Heights a few months ago and it also, thank God, hasn’t changed much.

I remember that first summer. I built a boat, Mom made the sail. I had to get in carefully or it would sink. At first, it went in small circles- this led to my discovery of the keel, two boards nailed to the sides. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

I registered at Island Height’s grade school, a wooden two story building constructed in 1889 - first through forth grades upstairs, fifth through eighth downstairs- each in a row. This was a two room school house and may have been one of the very last in America. It had a basement with a coal furnace- The eighth grade boys shoveled the coal.

Fayette Slimm, tall and thin, a life-long spinster, was in her sixties. She had been my Mother’s teacher thirty years earlier. We had square dancing every Thursday and opened each day with a song. Patsy Huhn played the piano and Ms. Slimm led us from the Little Golden Book of Songs. One of our songs had lyrics that went A Nigger Won’t Steal- way down yonder in the corn field, but I caught one the other night, way down yonder in the corn field Imagine, singing that these days, positively boggles the mind. Times in some ways have certainly changed.

(On Fridays, Ms. Kier came in to teach art. There was a large galvanized pipe fastened to the second floor that had two little red doors with a brass rod over the doors. The idea was that the little guys upstairs would use this as a fire escape- Every week we got to ride the chute sitting on wax paper to keep it slippery. (photo Island Heights school right)

We had Palmer penmanship three times a week. This consisted of making small repetitive lines and circles like the letters R and S over and over, on lined pages in little red books supplied by the Palmer pen company. Every year, Ms. Slimm would send the completed books off and every year nothing came back… turns out that the company had been out of business for years… was this some kind of cruel joke or what? We were supposed to get little medals or something…never got any….

The town was built alongside Toms River, which ran into Barnegat bay. They both froze solid every winter I lived there…Cars and trucks drove on the ice, going as fast as they could, slamming on the brakes… spinning around for miles…most of the drivers were drunk or drinking… nobody ever got hurt… as far as I know…this was a miracle. Once, riding with Russell Whitman in his 1956 two-seater T-Bird, we hit the brakes at over one hundred miles an hour, almost wiping out a bunch of Nuns from St Joe’s on ice skates. They scattered, looking more like a pack of penguins than real penguins.

When I was in the eighth grade, we took our shotguns to school and hunted ducks at lunch time… Imagine doing that today…! I had muskrat traps and had to get up in the cold dark mornings before school and go out into the swamp to tend the line. I took the dead rodents to school and hung them on the coat hooks in the cloak room. About ten o’clock, when they warmed up, some of them came alive and started thumping on the wall. Ms Slimm said, Robbbert better wack them kats the girls would squeal and I had to thump the side of the gunny sack with a short Billy until the almost dead ones were really dead…

Going home in the afternoon, I would clean the snow off the picnic table in the side yard and skin the critters. By this time we had moved into the big house on the corner of Jaynes and Ocean Ave. The place had twenty-five rooms and a huge basement. Dad built a pine paneled game room. We had a pool table a bar, fireplace and a nickel slot machine. There was a dumbwaiter connecting the old kitchen in the basement to the dining room. What a great place to hide with a good book and a flashlight. (photo right)

School was different in those days. Billy was the only kid I knew who drove his own car to grade school. He was Fayette’s special pupil and she was determined not to let him out of the eighth grade until he could read, write and do his numbers. I think he was seventeen when he finally had enough larnen to satisfy her. Billy was well over six feet and graduated along with me. He sat in the front of the class and was head and shoulders taller than anyone else. Billy married Judy Eagar and, as far as I know, retired few years ago from the gas company and still lives in town. I heard he got up to about four hundred pounds and doesn’t do much of anything these days. For a guy who the world might judge as slow, Billy knew the names of every plant, flower, tree and all the birds and animals that lived in the woods, rivers, and swamps around Island Heights. So, I guess that shows you, don’t label people, he learned what he was interested in and Chaucer and Shakespeare just weren’t his bag.

Anyway, back to the swamp rodents. After skinning them, I put their little hides on metal stretchers and hung them on the basement water pipes… when they were semi-cured I‘d pack them up and mail them off to Monkey Wards who paid $1.50 each and used them for God knows what… maybe liners for Gloves? Hey, come to think of it, Billy taught me how to trap and skin the Muskrats in the first place. Billy would trade me a shotgun shell for every skinned muskrat, he called them swamp chickens and swore they were good to eat………I never tried.

ISLAND HEIGHTS STORIES

THE POINTED END

I was reminded of the story of, well let’s just say a boy I once knew, who became the only person I ever heard of to shoot himself in the head with a bow and arrow...a remarkable feat when you think about it. Many years later I did know a night guard who was working for me in Nigeria…this fine gentleman in fact did shoot himself in his foot with a crossbow… so, I guess such things are not so terribly rare after all. … I doubt that they were related but, one never knows… the universal human gene pool being so remarkably diverse… but, I digress.

Our young genius lived in the small house just to the south of ‘Bogger Ayer's’ General store (on the corner of Ocean and Central.. During his twelfth year, one clear summer day, he was in his back yard with his Dad’s deer hunting bow... thinking naturally of where to shoot it... the yard is today as small as it was then and, opting for maximum distance, he decided to shoot straight up and see how far it would go....

This was a classic mistake as even he soon realized  ... the arrow streaked into the hot blue sky, higher and higher, until he almost lost sight of it...then, as he had belatedly figured out, it slowly reversed direction and came earthward faster and faster, pointed end down. Joey, panicked, running in small circles trying to hide. He was hugging a large tree whimpering like a kitten when the arrow entered the branches...thankfully somewhat slowed, implanting itself directly in the top of Joey's crew cut blond head.....

He ran screaming to the back door and his mother, seeing the arrow protruding like a TV antenna, screamed and fainted... ....Now, in a complete panic.... figuring he had likely killed himself the clever lad ran to Booger Ayer's store... Booger who had polished off his usual bottle of Old Grand Dad before noon was behind the counter when Joey ran in crying with the arrow sticking insanely out of the top of his head..... 

Booger just reached over the counter and pulled it out... The Genius ran home where his Mom had recovered...and never went to the doctor... his Mom put a patch over the hole and his life went on.. like before... That's one of the old Island Heights stories.... I thought you might like to know .. in case you ever drive through the town it’s something to remember.

SUMMER DEATH

It was on that day in 1954 just before school got out for the summer.. always the first day of June and we were free for three whole months…but, this was a school day… albeit the last one and we were standing around outside for lunch break…when…

The old Ford station wagon that had been turned into a makeshift ambulance by the Island Heights First Aid Squad, pulled up in front of the tiny green cottage across the street from the school. My best friend’s Mom and her neighbor got out wearing white painters coveralls with a red cross sewn on the back and carried a black bag up the stairs…

Miss Slimm, our teacher and sixty-five year old spinster schoolmarm, had called them because the beagle had been howling all morning. The dog belonged to the old man who had lived in the little house for many, many years… We all knew him, just to say hello… the way the very young know the very old... casually, if at all.

Standing there, under the clear early summer sun, with the tall oaks shading half the street, the kids of the last one room school house in America bought ice cream from the truck that jingled to a stop…and we waited… not knowing for what…and certainly not for death…

We all were oddly silent… hearing the thumping,,, bumping , thumping .. as something was being dragged down the narrow stairs The door opened and the ladies came out with dust masks over their noses, dragging a long black bag…and, backing the station wagon that passed as an ambulance and in this case a hearse, under the stairs wrestled the bag into the back and drove off… We knew.. this was how death visited us at the start of that summer…..

Licking Popsicles under the tall oaks and blue skies, we watched the wagon disappear around the corner…silently ,strangely, we all understood and the beagle, who had always known, stopped barking … looking at us and back at the empty, open door…I don’t know who took care of the beagle… That was my last year at grade school - after that day I didn’t return for many years… The little house is still there but the old school building has been replaced…you really can’t go back, can you?

Why they call it Island Heights

Once, long ago, the town really was an island. My Grandfather used to say so at least. He said that the river ran through the part of town that is today and has been in all of my memory, just called long Swamp. And in fact, was and still is today, a swampy wetlands.

THE RACING TURTLE

Gilford Park, the next small town to the north was separated by a shallow warm stream that emptied the swamp into the bay. I was to get to know a strange guy named Ed Feaster who lived in that town but, at that time, that summer, I had never heard of him. Later, years later, in high school, we met. Ed became locally famous for owning a real racing turtle Ed’s racing turtle once set the speed record for land based turtles.

The poor critter, which had probably been the biggest snapping turtle in the swamp, was imprisoned in Ed’s garage for weeks. Ed had forgotten about it. The starving beast had eaten every mouse and insect in its prison. When he finally remembered it was down to a trim shadow of its former glory.

Red-eyed and starving, the rabid turtle came hissing and charging out into the sunlight looking for 15 year old boys for lunch…We tossed a garbage can over it and managed to move it to the paint shop in preparation for its racing debut.

With a green stripe and the number 10, which had no significance whatsoever, painted on its black shell, we were ready for the tortoise land speed record. The problem was how to get it to run in a more or less straight line and not to have it chasing us for dinner.

The schoolyard on this cold November Saturday morning was perfect. The beast was red eyed, hugely pissed off and properly motivated… Ed had glued a ten inch length of balsa wood from his model plane kit onto the turtles shell so that it extended just out of reach of his extended neck with its sharp killer beak. He tied a small green frog to the stick and holding the turtle back against his straining legs, we counted down and let him GO!

After weeks of starvation and at his prime all time running weight, the racing turtle took off like a rocket… straining with every fiber of its short powerful legs, to reach the succulent green frog dancing just out of reach of his ferocious snapping beak.

Running flat out for several minutes along our measured course, with our stop watch, we estimated his speed at least at fifteen mph. After exhausting himself and thoroughly disheartened, the crazed critter had an epiphany of sorts and headed for a concrete wall at flat out full speed. The stick splintered and the frog was snapped up in a flash… We had witnessed a stunning performance, the world’s all-time fastest turtle! We left the turtle to wander back into the swamp where stories and sightings of a huge snapper with the faded number 10 painted on his shell became another one of the local legends.

After graduating from Ms. Slimm’s school, I went to Toms River High… the years there were predictable…I played a little football, ran track and learned about girls. I won every race that I entered, being big, fast and strong for my age. I was just shy of six feet and weighed a hundred and seventy five in the ninth grade and could run the one hundred yard dash in a little under ten seconds, which is a respectful time even today. I tossed the Javelin two hundred and twenty feet standing still and ran the hurdles fast enough to win all the track meets for four straight years. I beat every one in arm wrestling and still can…Just a trick of nature…My grandfather was the same- in his seventies he could pin my arm like butter- amazing how strong he was. (ISLAND HEIGHTS YACHT CLUB above)

While still in High School, I started my second company, repairing bulkheads and docks along the river. Before that, I ran a clamming company, hiring 18 or so of the Island Heights kids too young to drive, buying them state clamming licenses and taking them 30 miles south to Tuckerton where we had four rowboats…and one outboard motor. (photo of clammer’s shack on the marsh)

We, the Clam Commissioners, me and my pals, would put the kids in the water and not let them out for lunch until they filled a bushel basket. The baskets were stuck inside automotive inner-tubes. Cars don’t have inner-tubes these days but back then they all did- by the way, gas in those days was twenty five cents a gallon.

So how do your catch a clam? First you tie a pair of old socks on your feet then you feel for the shells and duck down in waist deep water for each one. After you put about two to four hundred clams in your basket it’s time for lunch. We paid the kids one and a third cents per clam and sold them for five cents…some days we had eighteen thousand clams so, you do the math…we made good money for not dong much.. Huge hungry horse flies bit the kids drawing blood and they had to pull wet t-shirts over their heads for some kind of protection. The crabs and oyster crackers, ugly little fish with immense jaws, would try to bite your feet and the occasional shark would swim around the shallow lagoon so, the work had some hazards. We wouldn’t let any of the worker-bees in the boat for lunch until they all had filled their baskets. Around noon, the faster kids had to help the slower ones and the same in the afternoon- we would stay there until the last basket was filled- cooperate and graduate.

Over dark winter nights, I went fishing for stripped bass with gill nets on the river rowing a fifteen foot boat through skim ice … cold north west winds blowing down the dark river, ice freezing on the oars,,, waves lapping over the boat filled with four hundred pounds lbs of fish, hands, feet and noses frozen. George Washington didn’t have anything on us. The buyers were waiting for us at three am, parked near the beach with scales hanging from their trucks. We made a dollar a pound when the stripped bass were running… my share was a hundred a night- not bad for a fourteen year old, then or now!

As kids, one of our principal things was shooting ducks. We shot ducks almost every weekend during the season and sometimes out of season. I had a Remington pump with a 32" barrel and still have it today. That gun chambers three inch magnum twelve gauge shells and reaches out a hundred yards easy. I must have fired ten thousand shells through that gun and it never jammed, not once. Oh yes, we ate the ducks. Island Heights was the best place for a kid to grow up - not so good if you were a duck.

CHAPTER 2

One can get a proper insight into the practice of flying only by actual flying experiments. . . . The manner in which we have to meet the irregularities of the wind, when soaring in the air, can only be learnt by being in the air itself. . . . The only way which leads us to a quick development in human flight is a systematic and energetic practice in actual flying

— Otto Lilienthal, 1896

When I was a little older, I went flying with my Dad. He was a Captain for Eastern Air Lines. We flew out of New York to San Juan on the night flight called the vomit comet, because of all the Ri-cans puking their guts up. The flight was an over water eight hour night run which was a senior money maker. Dad was flying the Super Connie’s when I started flying with him. These four engine graceful aircraft were the queens of the skies at the time… they flew about 340 miles per hour. The plane carried perhaps 110 passengers. The story was that not every pilot could fly them because most guys couldn’t handle three pieces of tail… an adult joke that I didn’t get for years. Another change in the times; that joke wouldn’t fly today- too many women pilots. All the airlines today put their pilots through sensitivity training you know- the PC world. Good Grief! Thank God none of it rubbed off and it never will. Just like the dammed communists failed miserably, the entire PC concept has failed along with the liberal establishment- you can’t change human nature. I mean, they do call it a cock-pit and not a box office. (Lockheed Constellation, above)

We would take off at ten pm and fly south for eight hours at 25,000’ and three hundred miles an hour over and through the Bermuda triangle to Puerto Rico. I got to fly the aircraft. Dad would sit behind me in the Jump seat and the other pilot and the Flight engineer would go to sleep. Just my Dad and I and that big starry sky… We pointed the plane at the Southern Cross and let it go… The four Wright 3350 turbo compound engines rumbled faintly fifty feet behind the cockpit, the gauges trembling behind their glass lenses. It was an aluminum magic carpet speeding through the night into the new dawn.

We would land just at first light. We always stayed at the Caribe Hilton (in the old stucco building which was reserved for the Eastern crews. These days, I don’t even think that section is open and in fact, by now, it may have been torn down. We had breakfast, heavos, fresh pineapple, bacon and fresh juice, afterwards we would lay around at the pool or drive up to the Dorado Beach Golf Course… Evenings, we went to the casino where I once won five hundred bucks and met Abby Lane and Xavier Cougart in the elevator…Elizabeth Taylor too - she was disappointingly short, I thought. (Lockheed Constellation cockpit, right)

Dad always told me to forget being a pilot- He saw nothing but trouble in the coming years and ultimately he was right. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and studied civil engineering. I joined the Navy ROTC and they paid for my tuition, books and gave me all my uniforms. I worked as a surveyor in the summers and went on two week cruises from the Philadelphia Navy yard.

My Girl Friend in those days was a phys-ed major in a near-by school. We had been dating since high school. My first experience with sex was in the front seat of my Mom’s 1955 Buick Century- where else?

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In those days I wasn’t totally a one gal man by any means. The Navy used to pimp for us middies, making arrangements at the local girl’s colleges. One such memorable institution of higher learning was aptly named Beaver College. This place, as you can imagine, suffered decades of torment before the board finally voted to change the name.

I was on the track and diving team, having tried football for one semester. That year the school won the Ivy League championship. This was no thanks to me as I learned immediately that this wasn’t high school. Penn won that year because they imported ringers from a semi-pro ball club somewhere in the Deep South. Moose Wammock and Monk Miller, two brutes who stomped all over the little kids stupid enough to play against them. This lop-sided victory immensely pleased the alumni – and that year their contributions proved it.

My very last football experience was on a particularly cold and windy November day, I was smashed into the frozen ground so hard my teeth shook. For some moments I had no idea where I was. Moose, so called because, for all his two hundred and fifty pounds and six and a half foot frame, could run faster than his namesake had just ran me over. My entire right side, from shank to shoulder, was purple, black, blue and yellow. It took until spring for the bruises to go away. I have never even watched a foot ball game from that day to this.

My idea about team sports, especially professional sports, is that whoever has the most money wins. If team A wins the supporters of team B are unhappy and visa versa- adding up to absolutely nothing. If every game ever filmed was cut up into single frames and spliced together at random the fools in the sports bars would still hoot and shout just as loudly and double up on the instant replays trying to get even- idiots all.

Today, Penn is infested with Asians, thousands of them, all five and a half feet tall and a hundred pounds- smart as hell , study like hell but no more football and no more rowbottoms What was and what happened during a Rowbottom? In its more benign form Rowbottoms involved the heaving of basins and pitchers from the windows of the dormitories. Hundreds or even thousands of students took to the streets. Trolley and automobile traffic came to a halt when students set up barricades and lit bonfires in the streets, jumped on passing vehicles, overturned cars, and in general, just raised hell. Students broke windows and pelted police and firemen with snowballs and eggs. Of course, the call of Rowbottom" was associated with panty raids and the burning of professors in effigy.

When did Rowbottoms occur? More than fifty Rowbottoms occurred between 1910 to 1977. Rowbottoms occurred at Penn every month except July and August. At least thirteen took place in April, a popular month for Rowbottoms. In 1956 and 1957, the University administration thought they would announce the end of student riots. Of course, who listened to those idiots…Rowbottoms continued anyway. The University and the city began working together to give the University more responsibility for controlling the students- city police were to be called only when the University could not handle things. Today, the well behaved little Asians wouldn’t dream of participating in such fun and, of course, they don’t play American football.

After school, I got a job with Charles Simkin and Sons from Perth Amboy New Jersey. We had a contract to build a new sewage treatment plant on top of the old one for the city of Trenton on Duck Island, a nasty place just south of the city. Simkin was the general contractor and his engineers had drawn the blueprints. We were working off revision forty seven. My job was to set line and grade, interpret the prints and figure out where the myriad pipes, buildings roads, and structures were supposed to go.

Some days we had as many as a hundred and fifty cement trucks parked outside waiting to start dumping. The forms were complicated to build and harder to figure out. The foreman always wanted to check the measurements and elevations. There were many heavy electric motors that would eventually be fastened to the floor of the structures with three inch thick bolts that had to be set a foot or more into the concrete. The tolerances were about 3/100’s, so, no mistakes! It was a nerve wracking and difficult job that was made more difficult because my boss was a drunk and lived at the Town Tavern swilling boilermakers and eating smoked eels. He got the job because his Dad had ,at one time, been the mayor of Trenton. Only because I had been working there in the summers, was there hope that I wouldn’t make some horrendous mistake- the kind of mistake that, at best, takes a week of jack-hammering to correct and at worse, a lot of dynamite.

Simkin got paid by the cubic yard of concrete so, figuring this out was an important part of the job. The engineers who drew up the plans had of course done this but we engineers in the field had to submit figures after each structure and building was done. I guess, as a check on the estimates. Many of these structures had short and curving stairways, oval sections of hollowed out concrete for fluids to be pumped though, doughnut shaped areas void of cement and other oddities that all had to be figured out using a variety of geometric formulas and factored into the calculations to tally, more or less, with the cubic yards of concrete actually poured.

The city engineer, a Princeton grad named Imhoffe, was a prick of the first order and thought he was God’s gift to the engineering world. None of us liked him and used every opportunity to torment him. We would spend evenings getting the figures exact on the concrete quantities and give him out of date prints, changing the dates so he would think they were current. He would spend hours sitting in his office figuring out the cu/yds for payments by the city to Smikin. We always challenged his figures and make him justify them from actual measurements. We had the formulas all figured out and could do the numbers a hell of a lot faster then he could. We used to tease and embarrass him when he made mistakes- saying "well, this just goes to show you how dumb engineers from Princeton really are. He would get infuriated that some wise ass punk kid like me could solve for yardage faster then he could with no mistakes and show him up. The teasing was getting to him and he started to get careless.

On his last day he was messing about in one of the existing (old) settling tanks, a 200’ x 40’ concrete structure with a vee shaped bottom. It was mostly drained except for five feet of solid residue that had settled in the deepest part of the vee. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to imagine what this residue might actually be. Imhoffe slipped, ending up in deep kimchee- figuratively and literally- the perfect ending for a perfect ass. They had to haul him out with a cherry picker and clean him off down wind with a fire hose. He was done- he left and I never saw him again.

One cold miserable day, I was knee deep myself in some nasty stuff trying to set up for topographic measurements when, looking up into the clear blue skies, I saw the contrails of a DC-8 heading to the sunny Caribbean with my Dad and four lovely gals to spend a relaxing weekend on the beach.. That was it! What do they call it, an invidious comparison? The next day I put my notice in and never looked back on engineering, at least not for a long while.

I was going to follow my Dad and be a commercial pilot. In 1962 I moved to Florida and worked at a variety of jobs while learning how to fly. The Navy gave my class a choice to join the reserves which we mostly all did. Vietnam was still distant thunder on summer day.

CHAPTER 3

After years of observation, it has occurred to me that, indeed, the safest way to fly is not to return to the earth with any more force than one left it.

-Robert Firth

LEARNING TO BE A PROFESSIONAL PILOT

In 1962, I moved to Florida. Dad had rented a place on a canal in North Miami with an attached Guest room where I stayed for several months. The next door neighbors had a daughter, a lovely sexy gal who liked to wash her car in Daisy Mae cut-off jeans and loose T-shirt tops- good grief !

I signed up with Sunny South Aviation at Fort Lauderdale airport. They were located exactly where terminal four is today. My instructor, Mark Ayers, a retired navy Pilot would crank up a Cessna 150 and we would fly up to Pompano Airport, about fifteen miles north of FLL (Lauderdale) and practice flying around the pattern. After nine days and nine hours of training, on the 16th of June 1962, I flew my first solo flight.

Forty hours later, I got my Private pilots license, then a commercial followed by my multi-engine and instrument rating. For each license, you have to take a written and oral exam and then demonstrate your proficiency in the aircraft. This took a few years during which, I taught water skiing, worked as a surveyor, delivered rental beds and TV’s to small motels, flew single engine planes across the everglades and anything else I could to make a buck to pay for the training.

They say there are two flights that any pilot will never forget- his first and his last.

I remember clearly, even today, when Mark jumped out on the east end of the runway, slamming the door and waived me off. I eased the throttle forward and took to the air. I remember looking ahead and to my left but not to the right- I