The Flying Reporter

by Lewis E. Theiss

As he left the earth, Jimmy glanced at his clock. It was exactly seven. He looked aloft, into the night. The sky was a deep, dark blue. Stars shone dimly through a slight haze. He could see quite well. “If it stays like this,” he thought, “I won’t have a bit of trouble to get there. But I sure do wish I had my own ship. These open cockpit planes certainly are back numbers.”

Jimmy centred his attention on his instruments, and was soon satisfied that everything was working perfectly. His plane seemed to function better than he had expected it would. He covered the thirty-five miles to Hadley Field in a fraction more than twenty minutes. “That’s almost 105 miles an hour,” thought Jimmy. “I didn’t believe the old boat would do it. But it will be a different story when I turn west and face the wind. There’s only a twelve-mile breeze blowing, they said, but even that will cut me down to ninety miles an hour.”

He flew along the old familiar airway. The visibility was good. Beneath him he could see the clustered lights of town after town, as he roared across New Jersey. He knew every town as he passed over it. He checked time and distance as he flew along. It seemed almost no time before he was approaching Easton. He thought of Rand, and the latter’s effort to trick him; and he was glad it had happened. It had resulted in Johnnie Lee’s getting the job he was so eager to have.

Westward Jimmy roared along, straight as the crow flies. Beneath him, on hill and meadow, shone the beacon lights, stretching out before him in an endless row of revolving lights. For miles ahead of him he could see these friendly beacons.

Before he knew it he was over Sunbury. He noticed that the haze was increasing rapidly. He thought it might be fog rolling up from the Susquehanna. Soon he was at the Woodward Pass. There was the lofty beacon on the brow of Winkelblech Mountain. Jimmy was high above it. Now he was past the mountain and soaring over Penn’s Valley. A very few minutes would put him into Bellefonte. He glanced at his clock. He had made amazingly good time. He was going to reach Bellefonte in close to two and a half hours after all.

Now he was passing Millheim, with its blazing beacon on the crest of Nittany Mountain. The mist was increasing. It bade fair to be bad. But it could not gather quick enough to interfere with him. In no time he would be in Bellefonte. But suddenly his struts and wires began to hum and vibrate. The vibration rapidly grew worse. The humming grew into a screech. Jimmy’s blood began to run cold. His plane was icing up. The thing most feared by airmen was happening to him. Along the edges of his wings, he knew, ice was forming, as the mist froze fast to the fabric. If it continued to form, it would destroy the shape of his wings. They would lose their lifting power. Then nothing under heaven could keep him aloft.

And his wings were icing up rapidly. He could tell that from the feeling of the plane beneath him. It no longer slid through the air with its smooth, hawk-like passage. Its flight was becoming uncertain. It trembled and shook. The ship responded but slowly to his control. Desperately he strove to climb. If he could reach either a colder or a warmer stratum of air, the ice would melt. He dared not descend, for beneath him were these terrible mountains. He found it impossible to climb. The ship had utterly lost its power to do so. Yet Jimmy fought with all his ability to force the craft upward. He tried every trick he had ever heard of, to lift the plane higher. He could not gain an inch.

On the other hand, Jimmy knew full well that he was coming down. His altimeter showed that he was losing altitude steadily. He had been flying at 5,000 feet elevation. Already he was down to 4,500 feet. The mountain beneath him towered up to 2,000 feet. If only he could make the next few miles, and get over the high crests near Bellefonte, he would be all right. The landing field was at an elevation of only 1,200 feet. He believed he could glide down into it in safety.

But suddenly his plane began to spin. It was absolutely out of control. Frantically Jimmy kicked at his rudder, shifted his ailerons, tried every trick he knew of to get the ship out of the spin. He could do absolutely nothing with it. The plane was beyond all control.

With dismay Jimmy realized that he was in a flat spin. He thought of Jack Webster, the mail pilot, who had been caught in exactly the same way just a few miles farther west only a few months previously. The thought made Jimmy’s heart stop beating. For the centripetal force of that spin had held the mail pilot fast in his cockpit, and he had fallen with his plane and been cruelly injured.