Come with me. Let's break the heat wave with a pleasant cross-county flight in a new airplane.

Thermometers were straining their slender resources at 104 in the shade. Jim Snodgrass phoned me: "How about flying my Ercoupe to Lebanon and back?" sounded as cool as ice cubes tinkling in a glass.

Jim spends this time alternately legalizing and abstracting, is a pilot on the side. His two-place Ercoupe is one of those low-winged advance-design ships with only one control. Has a steering wheel like your car. That's all!

I've been itching to get my hands on one.
At Municipal airport, we fastened safety belts under a sun that would have made "eggs-over" on the wing, no joke.

With canopy pulled down on both sides (equivalent of car windows), we hope to be cool. Throttle open, the tiny ship gathers speed on the runway. Gently the ground moves away and we are air-born.

 

 


Comes then that sensation enjoyed by every pilot. Trees, poles, roads and obstructions move away slowly, leaving us the freedom of the air. We are alone now in space. No sensation of speed or height. Just the steady hammer of the motor, the cabin solid around us, sturdy wings to our right and left.

At 3,000 feet it is cooler. A 105 mile per hour gale blows just outside our window. We are no longer sweltering. Folks in the ant-like autos crawling along the spiderweb of highways below must be suffering.

I wish you could enjoy the same light-hearted happiness we do. Ours was a view painted by God, reserved especially for airmen. The fields this time of year show a thousand shades of brown and green. From deep, lush greens, to mild dusty tan. Deep rich brown, contrasts with light bright green. They all blend into a concise and beautiful quiltwork below. Here and there a river snakes its way, breaking the pattern by the darker trees along its banks. In less than one hour, we have seen the great white runways of Bunker Hill airport slide by. Observed the smoky smudge of Kokomo pass under the left wing. Now Frankfort is a blur to our right. Lebanon, our destination, seems to hang on the nose of the ship for several minutes as we approach.

Gliding in to a landing, again we feel the blanket of heat pulled over earth-bound critters today.

Words are not adequate for me to convey to you the pleasure of cross-country travel by air.

Let it be sufficient to say we started from Warsaw at three o'clock. Spent an hour on the ground at Lebanon and returned from this point west of Indianapolis in time for six o'clock dinner.

We hurried at 105 miles per hour, yet felt we were traveling lazily, leisurely, relaxed. We were cool. We were comfortable. We saw sights no man with both feet planted on the ground will ever see.

(For practical souls with dollar signs installed where poetry oughta be, we were in transit only half as long as we would have been by ground travel, burned slightly less fuel than the average passenger car would have used.)

(Next: Koscko-Land Airports.)

Warsaw Daily Times Friday Aug. 8, 1947

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