Adventure With A New Lone Eagle

Flying the ocean has become so routine these days that it scarcely merits a "safely arrived" postcard from the other side; but to a select small group it is still a major adventure, and occasionally an ordeal. These are the transocean ferry pilots of small airplanes, and their unofficial leader is Max Conrad, songwriter, ex-high-jumper and grandfather, who at 56 has amassed, in 30 years of flying, the astonishing total of 36,000 hours in the air. A man who in the jet age still epitomizes the traditions of the Lindbergh era, Conrad, at various times a barnstormer, mail pilot, one-man-airline operator and proponent of a national youth program for flying and fitness, began his transatlantic ferry career in 1954 with the delivery of a twin-engined, five-place Piper Apache from New York to Paris, the first nonstop, solo flight over this distance since Lindbergh's historic feat in 1927. Last month he set a new distance record for small planes in a single-engined Piper Comanche (SI, June 15), of which he tells on pages 64 and 65. The adventure of an ocean Right with Conrad starts below, as told by Sports Illustrated Editor Percy Knauth, who not long ago flew as copilot in an Apache from Boston to Paris.

Monday, February 16: After waiting all weekend at Norwood for the weather to turn favorable this day dawned bright, clear and cold. Saturday's storm moved northeastward Sunday morning, leaving the Boston area already clear yesterday afternoon; by now, Monday morning, Max surmises, it will be well out of our way. Conditions right now look ideal for the crossing. We are up at 6, out at the airport by 7 after a good breakfast. We pack our things into the airplane, pull D-GARY out into the frosty morning air and by 0728 are ready to take off for Logan Field in Boston. There we will fill all tanks, get the latest weather reports, file our flight plan and check through customs before starting on the long leg over the sea.

Quick goodbys, door closed and locked, engines started, and we taxi down to the end of the runway. We line up there and check out both engines. Then into position for the takeoff. "You might as well start working now," says Max, and motions to me to take the throttles and the wheel.

I am slightly petrified by this. Holding an Apache on course when you are three or four thousand feet in the air is one thing; taking it off is quite another to a student still learning on single-engined planes. But now I get a demonstration of the Conrad no-talk instruction routine, a method which over the years has put a lot of pilots into the air. He folds my fingers over the two throttle handles and motions me to push them slowly forward. I do so, and the Apache starts to roll. At two-thirds throttle he motions "that's enough"; by that time we are speeding smoothly down the runway, and I can feel the lift begin to take hold of her wings. Now a slight, gentle, beckoning motion of the Conrad hands—lift her off, feel her off the ground. I pull back slowly, and up she comes. "Gear up," says Max, and I fumble for the handle that will raise the landing gear, holding the ship straight and level meanwhile to build up flying speed. I can't get the catch released; my fingers work around on it; finally, up it comes. We climb out slowly, turn left at about 1,000 feet and head for Logan. Max gets his landing instructions—runway 22—and down we come in a wide spiral, losing altitude fast; full flaps as we cross the fence; she balloons, slows, sinks, and we are down, 14 minutes out of Norwood.

There is lots to do at Logan. First, we fill out papers for customs, and Max presents his various documents—export license, ferry permit and so on. Next a quick stop for Max at the chapel of Our Lady of the Airways; then we go over to the control tower building for Operations and Weather. There is a full briefing ready for Max at Meteorology—a forecast folder with weather chart and forecasts all the way to the Azores. (The chart will be our navigational map for the trip over—that and no more.) Air Route Traffic Control gives us our flight instructions—we are cleared to the EEL intersection, a point in the sky about 120 miles out where Boston Control ends and New York Oceanic Control takes over. We file our flight plan in another office: Boston to Santa Maria, Azores, VFR at 7,000 feet, estimated time of arrival 0540 Greenwich time—something over 15 hours from now. Then back to customs again. Max wants five minutes undisturbed to go over the airplane once more—"there will be no place to land between here and Santa Maria, so I want to have one more look at everything"—so I wait, chatting with the customs officials until I see him wave. Then I shake hands, hitch my cameras onto my shoulders and, with a strange sense of elation, anticipation and fatalistic acceptance of what is now my inevitable lot, walk out to the airplane and climb in.

Fueled and ready, we have 152 gallons of gas in the two big tanks in the cabin. We have 36 gallons more in the auxiliaries, 72 more in the mains. We have two one-man rafts, a Gibson Girl emergency radio, two Mae Wests (they are lying at our feet, where we can reach them quickly), a paper bag of sandwiches and cold chicken, fruit, candy and two thermoses with coffee, one regular, one black. We have our luggage: Max's briefcase, my overnight bag, my camera bag, my heavy jacket. The back seats are piled on top of the cabin tanks; with our blue-and-silver interior trim and all this stuff, we look incongruously like a suburban station wagon inside.

We are heavily loaded, but we have fuel enough to go all the way across if necessary. The air is bright and calm; two airliners are poised on the runway ahead of us as we taxi out. D-GARY looks small but capable, and she feels good. We run up our engines one last time and get take-off clearance from the tower. Max motions for me to take over—"full throttle this time"—and in what seems like an immense silence I push the throttles forward and we start to roll.

The take-off is surprisingly easy. I watch the air speed, but when it gets to 80 I switch my attention to the runway. Max beckons, ever so gently; I ease the wheel back. She is a bit reluctant; I ease it back some more. A few short bumps and we are airborne. I hold her level a foot or two off the runway and reach quickly for the gear handle. The gear-up lights blink on: one, two, three. I am coaxing her up into the sky. It is 1424 Greenwich time, which is our time from here on in; 0924 Eastern Standard Time, an hour and three-quarters since we arrived at Logan.

Climbing slowly, I try to hold her at 120 mph. For the first time, I really begin to sense how delicately an airplane can be handled—should be handled. The least little tug or relaxation on the wheel is immediately reflected in the air-speed needle. Max motions me to start a gentle turn to the left, to get on our heading; at once the air speed creeps down toward 115, 110, until I have found the right amount of bank to push the wheel gently forward and bring it up again. Slow and gradual as this climb is, it has the added feeling of peculiarity of climbing with the wheel held forward instead of back: we have such a load of gas in the cabin behind us that Max trimmed the stabilizer to full nose-down position before we took off, and even at that the tendency of the airplane is to climb.

In half an hour we have reached our cruising altitude of 7,000 feet. We are now far above a field of scattered clouds; ahead of us they thicken into a solid floor. The ocean is occasionally visible below, a distant, steely blue. Off to the right a jet contrail arcs through the sky, fading to fuzziness at its landward end. Otherwise there is no sign of any living thing, and for the first time I feel that little stab of sudden realization of where we are and what we are doing, and how utterly alone we are here in this little plane above the empty sea.