AD ASTRA ( PER ASPERA )

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Spring-Time. April. Far Eastern Tennessee. United States. America. 1957. Anno Domini. A soft and gentle sort of day. Temperature in the 60s. Tulips, daffodils, dandelions and daisies scattered about the countryside. The sky a misty grey-white ceiling of diffuse sunlight and vapor, two or three thousand feet up there. I'm seventeen.

The big square window here at my jeans-jacket left shoulder is slid all the way down wide open. If I reach out, I can take hold of the aileron cable running up behind the strut and move the aileron up and down with it that way, and the stick wag back and forth inside here between my knees all by itself. The run-up checks -- mags, carb heat, wide-open -- complete and AOK, (as they always are), the quiet sound of the easy-idling engine, just ticking over now, drifts in around me, the wooden prop a blurred, swinging blade up front.

I move the stick from side to side, full left-right a few times, the ailerons waving up and down, to signal to the tower that I'm ready to go, and wait and watch, and in a moment a bright green beacon-flash from the light-gun in the tower responds. I wave the ailerons again for a roger-back, then ease the throttle forward with my left hand just enough to rev us up enough to start us rolling. Push left full rudder to turn the tail wheel and rudder, press the left heel brake enough to drag the left wheel a bit, a bit more throttle, and we turn slowly about to face the downwind end of Runway Two-Seven.

She's a PA-11 Piper Cub, my little cloud-horse here, an evolved version of the famous original J-3. She doesn't have a name. Herself. Really. She's just one of the Cubs to the folks at Appalachian Flying Service, who have two of them, and she's referred to in the particular by her government registration number -- NC4673M -- which makes her ' Seven Three Mike ', for short. I call her Baby.

She isn't very big, really, on the universal scale of things. But then she's not really all that small, either. Her wings reach out 35 feet from tip to tip. But she is slim, and although there's plenty of room in here and I'm quite comfortable, the cockpit walls on either side are just inches from my elbows.

In science, and engineering, and aeronautics, form follows function. They say. They say it because it's true. In art, and emotion, and desire, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They say that, too, and that's true as well.

Look at her.

Her wings, horizontal tail, and the upper half of her fuselage are a Goldenrod Yellow. The lower half of the fuselage, her vertical tail, and the registration numerals on the wings are a deep True Blue. Her engine is an air cooled, opposed-4-cylinder, 65 horsepower Continental. She has no starter. You have to hand-prop her to start her, and shout ' Contact !' and all that stuff, just as with a Jenny or a Spad.

I look carefully into the sky out to my left off the end of the runway for possible traffic, and we roll on out and turn and point straight west down the center of Runway 27 at Tri-Cities Airport, Tennessee.
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