Author: William Wynne

Builders;

If you want to know the advantage of working with a fifty year old design, think about going to Oshkosh this year and looking at a new engine, super high-tech, purpose-built. Who knows what issues are yet to emerge by the time they make the 500th unit. Yet your old Corvair engine has 1,800,000 examples and half a century to say that GM did get it all right. That is a track record that counts more than some nifty cad drawings in a brochure.

Our house has it share of broken or semi-functional items in it. Most of these are electronic devices. I understand that electronic stuff should be inherently reliable, no moving parts, etc., but they suffer from being made in the disposable era, and seemingly their designers don’t have any personal fascination with studying examples like Soviet military equipment.

I don’t really have an ax to grind against technology, I am using it right now to type this. However, I think there is a lot to be said to simplicity when the continued operation of the system has high consequences. I have observed that the items in our house that will outlive me, (some of the tools, the trucks engine, 90% of the firearms, and my Corvair) were all designed before I was born. If they were animate objects, they would view my whole life as an era in theirs that passed with time.

The Whitney-Jensen box and pan brake worked in a factory for a decade before I was born; the 1928 .30-06  fed a family in the depression; Graces Taylorcraft was built in Ohio by people who are just about all gone now. It used to disturb me if I dwelled on it, but today I think it is just a good gauge of what pieces of machinery in my life are worth spending time with and getting to know well.

It’s a good thing this laptop can’t read and doesn’t have feelings, because it would be hurt to know that it works today, but I am going to take it to the landfill long before anyone types my obituary on it.-ww.

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Part #1 Redux:

I am typing this on a Dell computer, a model they probably made 5 million of. This computer could be called a machine, but for all intents and purposes it isn’t. A computer is another thing entirely. It is an appliance. Is there anyone reading this who thinks that there will be a single 95-year-old laptop of this model working in the year 2105?

To me, the most basic division between a machine and an appliance is that a Machine is understood by a skilled operator and it is made to be maintained and rebuilt. Conversely, an appliance is likely to have a sticker that says “no user serviceable parts inside.” Almost no consideration was given to maintainability. When it stops working, almost all appliances are discarded by the consumers that used them. Note the wording: the owners were “consumers,” and the item was “consumed.” Virtually none of the users of appliances understand how they work, and the people who market them have no interest in informing them.

By my perspective a Corvair engine is truly a Machine, and a Rotax 912 is really just an appliance. Our goal is to have every Corvair operator really know his engine. Contrast this with the fact that almost no 912 owner will ever overhaul his 912. If they break or wear out, the most likely outcome is that another 912 will take its place.

My oldest friend runs one of the largest on-line automotive test drive and review services. He packages the reviews into broadcast quality segments that are picked up by the major news services. Because of the popularity of his product and his location in NYC, he has access to virtually any car made. This can be fun, I was with him last new years eve when he plowed a $175,000 AMG into a huge snow bank and got it stuck overnight. We have been friends since we were 13. We have never thought alike about cars: in high school he had a Datsun 280ZX, I had a V-8 Vega. In the last 35 years we have had endless discussions about cars, and by extension, Machines. The type of vehicles he likes have morphed with every new model year ever closer to being just moving appliances. It’s hard to look at them closely and see any single part that shows evidence that it was touched by a human hand, not a robot. They essentially ceased making vehicles that I would consider owning. But I have no complaint; this has driven me to develop enough craftsmanship to build my own. It has made me a happier person.

Machines have a very important quality that appliances never have. You can really grow to love a machine, especially if you built it with your own hands, like your Corvair engine. It becomes a physical reflection of what you understand, can make, and know how to operate with precision. It isn’t the metal that you love, it the part of you that went into creating it. real builders, maybe 15% of the people in the EAA today,  reading the above statement understand immediately.  For the other 85%? Well, I guess that’s why they make appliances.-ww

Builders,

I spend a lot of time reading, and my first choice in reading is always biographies. I will often read two on the same person, at the same time, to compare the writers’ take on the person. I don’t have to agree with the writer to get a lot out of it, biographies can be subjective. I rarely read about one-sided people, and I avoid the work of writers who want to portray complex people as either all good or all bad. People and life are not comic books like that. The word “dilemma” is of Latin origin, involves a decision which cannot be easily made. My interest is mostly about how complex people face issues that have no good or easy solution. That is where character is revealed. The insane and the zealots never doubt their own path, their stories reveal nothing. The life of the person who has questions and doubts is worth reading.

Bono is very clear on one point: The young, youthful, beautiful Elvis, was not the real person. This was the media image, the one that was easy to love and simple to understand. You can go to YouTube and look up “Elvis Unchained Melody 1977” and see concert footage that Bono felt was the man actually revealing himself; his appearance has devolved to match the self-image he always had, he has experienced enough pain in life that it pours out of him with the sweat. It’s not nice, but it is very real. Consider the following comments from Bono:

“Jerry Schilling, the only one of the Memphis Mafia not to sell him out, told me that when Elvis was upset and feeling out of kilter, he would leave the big house and go down to his little gym, where there was a piano. With no one else around, his choice would always be gospel. He was happiest when he was singing his way back to spiritual safety. But he didn’t stay long enough. Self-loathing was waiting back up at the house, where Elvis was seen shooting at his TV screens, the Bible open beside him at St. Paul’s great ode to love, Corinthians 13. Elvis clearly didn’t believe God’s grace was amazing enough….. I think the Vegas period is underrated. I find it the most emotional. By that point Elvis was clearly not in control of his own life, and there is this incredible pathos. The big opera voice of the later years — that’s the one that really hurts me. Why is it that we want our idols to die on a cross of their own making, and if they don’t, we want our money back?”

All of the above is a long lead in to my point. To my perspective, Elvis was not the first global superstar created and then attacked by society and media. Charles Lindbergh was. The pattern was the same, only in the case of Lindbergh, it was amplified many fold, it involved the murder of his child, and his public adoration being quickly converted into hatred over his alleged pro-nazi feelings. It was a long way to fall in a short time, especially for a man who foolishly believed that honestly speaking his mind would protect him against very skilled publicity people in need of a scapegoat or a tabloid story. This brings out the question, who was the real Charles Lindbergh?

It took one week for Lindbergh to go from average airmail pilot to world’s most famous human. How do you prepare for that? If it happened to you, would every action of yours hold up well under a microscope? Would the things said about you be true and accurate representations of you? How smart and valid was everything you thought when you were 25? Are you glad no one was there to record it?

I have read a lot of books about Howard Hughes, and I think he was a very interesting person and a great aviator. The interesting comparison between the lives of Hughes and Lindbergh: Both had the before/after event in their lives. With Lindbergh it is the kidnapping and then the murder. With Hughes, a number of skilled biographers have made the case that he had two massive head injuries in plane crashes (1943 & ’46), either of which could have been fatal. His personality was altered and/or exacerbated by these injuries.

Today, people are just beginning to understand the long reaching effects of Traumatic Brain Injury. For Hughes, empathy and understanding, far less treatment, didn’t yet exist. Although he was never “normal,” he declined dramatically in his ability to function in the years following the crashes. When I think about Hughes, it is mostly of the early years, flying around the world or chasing Jean Harlow. My contention is that Hughes had a massive physical trauma, and Lindbergh had an emotional one. I don’t have to like the later things they did, but it gives some understanding of the forces that changed them.

After the “Crime of the Century” Lindbergh’s life goes on, but I have a hard time believing that he ever felt he was in control of it. A series of things happened that worked against the public ever understanding him. Many people today say they are disgusted with the media. No human on earth ever had greater claim to this than Lindbergh. Once he no longer sold papers for them as a hero, they were glad to have him as a victim, and then they got some mileage with him as a traitor. He was never able to effectively counter this, and after the murder it led to fleeing to England. After December 7th, 1941, there was nowhere he could go to avoid many people accusing him of being some sort of traitor. It is not exactly fair that on December 6th, 65% of Americans were against entering WWII. They were all allowed to change their minds without repercussion. Lindbergh was given no such latitude.

Many people expected that Lindbergh’s opinion on a wide variety of subjects outside of aviation would have some special significance. Why was he expected to be clairvoyant on world politics by age 35? His father was one of the very few politicians who voted against U.S. entry into WWI. This was no small matter; after the Sedition Act of 1918, many prominent people in the U.S. were jailed for simply speaking out against U.S. involvement. This is very ironic because Wilson won the presidency in ’16 with a promise to keep the U.S. out of the war, reversed this 180 degrees in 20 months, and went along with jailing people who held true to his campaign promise. The freedom we have to protest conflict did not exist yet. Lindbergh’s father felt that international banking interests made money off conflicts, and his son largely utilized his father’s opinions in the absence of his own developed ones. In many families this is a method of honoring one’s father. Lindbergh also was befriended and influenced in the 1930s by industrial titans like Henry Ford. The things Lindbergh said on behalf of staying out of WWII were things he really believed. Ford held and anonymously published in his private newspaper anti-semitic beliefs that were PG versions of the Third Reich’s propaganda. When war came, Ford made vast sums on government contracts. No one ever called him on this except Alexander P. de Seversky. It didn’t stick, and Ford skated into icon-hood and Lindbergh, who didn’t have a publicity machine, went down in flames.

In recent years, it has been revealed that Lindbergh had post-war German mistresses and fathered children there. His wife was not the saint the public demanded either. The posthumous release of her diary hinted at a love affair with French aviator/writer/hero Antoine de Saint-Exupéry before his death in 1944. If the Lindberghs didn’t have a storybook marriage, then maybe they were just humans. I have a hard time imagining most marriages living through what theirs did in the 1930s.

Today, celebrities and athletes talk about how hard it is when their 15 minutes or few seasons are up. Nothing that has happened to such a person can compare to Lindbergh’s going from hero to zero between 1939-41. There are many things to admire about FDR, but his use of political power to make a public pariah and an example out of Lindbergh, and his moves to block Lindbergh from rehabilitating his public standing, are not his finest side. Later, Ike treated Lindbergh very differently, but time had passed, and America largely didn’t care about Lindbergh any more.

One of the things that Lindbergh wrote that caught my attention was his private thoughts about the Japanese who fought to the death in the islands of the Pacific. He saw this up close and personal. In his diary he mentioned that no one wanted to consider it, but the doomed island defenders were something like the 300 Spartans or even the garrison of the Alamo. He wrote this 60 years before the film “Letters From Iwo Jima” explored the same idea. I grew up in Asia and was well aware that the Japanese military frequently committed atrocities without the slightest remorse; Lindbergh knew this but could also see their other actions. He did not admire them but could understand how their own countrymen would.

Divide his life as the period before his child is kidnapped and murdered and afterward. I think he is fairly easy to admire before the “Crime of the Century” was inflicted upon his family. Afterward, perhaps the man could be judged less harshly in light of this. He never really wanted to be the most famous person in the world, he didn’t crave attention, fame nor money. He got those things for flying the Atlantic, but it also made his family the target of a sociopathic murderer who killed his child. In the wake of it, even the harshest critic would concede that Lindbergh would have given up everything achievement brought him to have had his son grow up instead.

In the end, he was none of the exaggerated personas the public wanted or needed him to be. He was just a human. He was granted wealth and fame, the things most people’s dreams are made of, in unfathomable quantity by the ripe old age of 25. In five more years he learns that neither of these are going to do a damn thing to bring his kid back. It was the first of a long series of bitter lessons, where Lindbergh, a naive optimist at heart, would learn that there was little a man could count on in life. His beliefs in peace and war, love and marriage, justice and law, politics and public friends all had bitter days ahead. I don’t think he ever thought of himself as a hero, and maybe this was a blessing that lowered the height of the fall when he found himself far short of being the ideal husband.

Out of all of this, a very vital message remains, something Lindbergh can directly share with you, and I think it is the most important thing to understand about his life: The only real peace he knew in life was aloft and alone. His faith in the simple magic of flight never wavered. The quote from the previous story is really him, it is the essential truth of a very far-reaching and dramatic life, and ironically, it is one of the few things that you can explore for yourself. Lindbergh never gave up on flying, it was the only thing in his life that was never poisoned, manipulated or corrupted. Let him teach you that this, the truth that flying is one of the few things you can count on. Understand this and you have learned something that cost that man very dearly. -ww

Builders:

A hangar photo from last night; Grace was out in town with her parents, I stayed home with the dog. The dog spends 23 hours of an average day within 10 feet of Grace. You can distract him for a little while, but for the most part he is miserable when she is away. The house and hangar are only 12 feet apart, and he will cry if he is left alone in the house and he can still hear you in the hangar. For this reason, I always try to bring him out to work with me when Grace is out. He sits in his dog bed and keeps one ear open to the driveway. This consoles him somewhat, but he still makes faces like the one below.

Above,  a 48″ shear, a 100-year-old slip roll, a Jensen box and pan brake, engine hoist, Wagabond, ’46 Taylorcraft, bandsaw, belt sander, Detroit 3-53, ’65 Greenbriar and 9 pounds of sulking Dog.

 

Meanwhile, Grace’s Dad took the photo above of her congratulating a 2013 member of the Hall of Fame on Induction Night.

A few hours later (an eternity if you are a little dog), he perked up, because he can hear Grace’s car long before I can. He jumped out of the chair, ran out to the driveway, and was overjoyed.-ww

Builders,

A week before last Christmas, I spent a day in Manhattan with my brother-in-law Col. John Nerges. One of the things I wanted to go find with him was the excerpt from one of Lindbergh’s quotes. I was pretty sure it was emblazoned on the wall of the lobby of the Empire State Building.  We walked all through the restored art deco lobby, but couldn’t find it. 

Tonight I cannot sleep, so I picked a book off the shelf,  “Reuben Fleet and the Story of Consolidated Aircraft.” Thumbing through it for the first time in years, I stumble over a photo of it.

“Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved.”

The quote was actually put on the wall of Rockefeller Center, 15 blocks north of the Empire State building. Reuben Fleet, a great admirer of Lindbergh, had added a statue to the words after Lindbergh passed in 1974.

The whole quote is much more revealing. As you read and consider it carefully, ask yourself just one thing: What branch of aviation can lay any claim to understanding and appreciating this, the greatest of all aviation quotes from the greatest of all aviators? The only branch that can make that claim is Experimental Aviation. Airlines, FBOs and even the military all have their reasons for flying, but they are not the ones Lindbergh was speaking of.  Today, someone went flying in a Cirrus, spent an hour aloft, and their experience was largely staring at a screen and speaking on a radio. Another pilot flew a B-767 coast to coast, but spent much of the free moments thinking about bidding his next trip and the rumors of a merger with another airline. A military pilot walked out to the ramp and thought about how long his deployment would take him from home.

None of these experiences brought the pilots close to what Lindbergh found to be the absolute fundamental core of flight.  Yet today, somewhere out there, a builder got in his homebuilt, a plane that he built with his own mind and hands, and went out and experienced exactly what Lindbergh was speaking of. In the 86 years that have passed since Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, almost everything in aviation has changed. Almost. The hardware, the electronics, the capability, they are all radically different, and these are the elements that matter to the person seeking transportation, distraction or commerce. The one element that has not changed at all is what Lindbergh was speaking of, the element that traditional homebuilders are seeking. This never changes:

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“Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.

I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground; one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.”— Charles A. Lindbergh