The Cannibal Queen Read Online Free PDF

musing along these lines when Yates Center looms into view. The grass airport is easy to spot—the grass appears short and there is an ag sprayer parked at one end. No hangars or other buildings though.
    I make a pass over the field and study the wind sock. Now a left downwind and power back, airspeed at 80. We touch down in as nice a landing as I have made in a while and taxi to the end of the field, up a gentle incline, to where the ag plane is parked.
    The ag pilot is pumping chemicals into his plane from two big tanks mounted on a trailer. We get acquainted and study the wind sock. The wind is out of the southwest, about eight knots. “We’ve been waiting to see if this wind is gonna hold,” he tells me. “Been trying to spray the weeds in this pasture west of here for two days.”
    After a bit he decides to give it a try. He climbs up into the Cessna Ag Truck and straps in. The engine comes to life with a rumble and he taxis away without preliminaries, his prop blast raising a cloud of clippings from the fairway-short grass.
    In a few moments the Ag Truck comes over the swell in the runway at full throttle climbing gently. He’s got a load on that plane. He levels at 50 feet or so above the ground and lays the plane into a right turn, then levels the wings heading west. He is soon out of sight.
    I sit on a rail and talk to the pilot’s son, a boy of sixteen or seventeen. “Nice plane you got there,” he says, nodding at the Queen. In a moment he continues, “We got a plane, an Aeronca. Rebuilt her last year. Painted her three colors.” He looks me in the eye and grins shyly. “That’s hard to do, you know, putting on three colors. We had a heck of a time getting it right. But she looks real good now.”
    The sun on my back is very pleasant, as is the smell of cut grass carried on the warm Kansas breeze under this blue June sky. I sit soaking it in as the young man tells us of his Aeronca and how she flies. The wind sock is steady. The smoke from my pipe rides away upon it.
    Sitting in the grass, caressed by the sun and wind, the Queen patiently waits. The sun gleams on her polished prop.
    It is difficult for us today to imagine the excitment that our grandparents and great-grandparents felt the first time they saw an airplane fly, actually saw the miracle performed.
    That this insubstantial stuff we call air would actually support the weight of a heavy machine—well, the thing defied reason.
    You read about the flights and the daredevil flyers in the newspapers and magazines, but when your chance came to see the miracle with your own eyes, it was probably at a field much like this—a pasture on the edge of town. And the plane was much like the Queen, an open-cockpit affair with two wooden wings and canvas stretched taut. If you were lucky you got a chance to touch it, which didn’t strengthen your faith. Canvas? Stretched over a framework of wooden ribs?
    And then it happened. For every person there was that moment when the wheels of the double-decked canvas contraption lifted out of the grass. The spokes spun slower and slower as the machine continued to accelerate and climb.
    It flies—my God, it flies! And I have lived to see it!
    I have never tired of it. Airplanes taking off have fascinated me ever since I can remember.
    With David in the front cockpit and me in the rear, the Cannibal Queen performs the miracle yet again. She lifts her wheels from the grass and soars on the prairie wind.
    We eat lunch at the Coffeyville, Kansas, airport, also an ex-military airfield. Next to the FBO is a short-order lunch counter that has a table full of back issues of Sport Aviation, the Experimental Aviation Association’s publication. I peruse an issue from 1972 while we eat hamburgers.
    This issue has a story about a fellow who flew a home-built single-seat aerobatic plane to all of the lower-48 states to promote the EAA. A map depicts his route, which is filled with right angles. It looks as if he hit most