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This story is another one
from when I was growing up, which was originally related to me by my step-dad,
a wonderful man that reminded me more of Mayberry's Sherriff Taylor than any
other human I ever met. Later on in my life, I had a chance to verify the story
with some people who were there that day, so I can relate it to you with a
certain amount of honesty, if not direct quotations.
We were riding across the farm in his truck when I heard the sound of a big
turbo-prop plane flying over. Ever the plane buff, I hung my head out the
window to see what was flyin'. Typical for our area, it was a crop-duster,
coming over us at about two hundred feet of altitude. I watched it zip
overhead, and as it retreated into the distance I saw something amazing.
"Dad! That duster tore his vertical off!" I exclaimed. My dad stopped
the truck and looked, and verified that he too, saw it. Dad laughed.
"It must be that crazy guy from outside of Fort Valley.
He keeps flying under the power lines at the end of his fields and tearing them
off."
"He's done it before?" I asked. For those of you who do not know, a
'vertical' on an airplane is the fin that sticks up in the back of the airplane.
It's primary job is to keep the airplane from slewing to either side as it
flies, and it also houses the rudder of the plane, which is very important for
controlling a turn. This guy had torn off over half of his vertical, and that
also meant he no longer had a rudder that worked. To sum up his situation at
the time, he had a plane that was full of chemicals and overweight for landing,
and he'd lost half of his controls. He made it that day.
My daddy chuckled again. "Yeah, I've heard of it twice before." He
eased the truck forward from where we'd been parked as the plane cleared the
treeline and went out of sight. "That guy is the one that did that thing
at the Flint River
Bridge out on 96."
"What thing?" I asked. I loved talking about planes, and the fact
that my dad had a plane story that made him laugh before he told it only fired
me up to hear it. Dad was free with a laugh, but not so free with a joke, so it
was a moment in itself. But the story!
"You didn't hear about that?" My dad asked, cutting his eyes at me to
see if I was joking. "I thought everyone knew about that."
"No, tell me!" I said enthusiastically. "The only duster pilot
in the area that I know is the one we use from out of Perry. I never knew there
was another around here."
"Okay. This guy, I'm not even sure of his name, but he was a fighter pilot
in the Vietnam War. What I heard, and I don't know, was that he got kicked out
of the military for drinking. His wife left him a while back because he
wouldn't stop. He won't fly unless he's drunk."
"Really?" I asked. I was youthful enough to not understand the nature
of addiction at that point, I remember quite clearly thinking that flying drunk
would have to be impossible.
"Oh, yeah. He's tanked right now, I guarantee it. That was what got it
started. The time I was talking about, he had to take some farmer up to view
his fields from the air so he'd know for certain where to spray. So this farmer
shows up and climbs into the plane, a little Cessna or some such, and they take
off from the guy's strip. On the way there, this farmer realizes just how drunk
this guy is, and starts telling him to turn around and land. They get into an argument,
apparently a bad one, and somewhere in there the farmer tells the pilot that
he's too damned drunk to fly. This offended the drunk pilot, who decided
through drunken logic to once and for all prove the farmer wrong." Dad
broke the story to chuckle again. "The guy looks down and sees the Flint River Bridge, so he just drops the nose of the
plane and guns it. He pulls out of the dive about ten feet off the river, and
shoots the bridge doing about 120 miles per hour, then pulls up out of it and
gently flies away on the other side."
Now, the Flint River
Bridge has about a
forty-foot span, and your typical whatever Cessna had a twenty-five to thirty
foot wing-span, and if you factor in the 120 miles per hour you begin to see
what happened. He MAY have had fifteen feet of height if the river was down,
but he had an eight foot tall plane as well. And the river bends not a quarter
mile from the bridge, so there is no room to correct any mistakes at 120 MPH.
It just so happened that this incident happened on a Sunday afternoon in the
summer, and the Flint River bridge is a
gathering spot. There's a boat ramp, and some sandbars close, so people go down
there and hang out, barbeque, and get plastered. But there were at least
fifteen people there at the bridge itself when this drunk guy shot under the
bridge. Here is that part of the story as related to me by another guy who
frequented the bridge and was there that day. He had the benefit of wearing
beer goggles at the time of the incident. I've tried to keep it in the spirit
in which it was told to me.
"*BLEEP* yeah, I was there! That was the craziest *BLEEP* I ever seen!
This plane just comes screamin' outta the sky, see," *gestures wildly with
hands* "and we thought that it was gonna crash, but it just barely cleared
the trees at the bend in the river a quarter mile up, and drops down on the
water like a bat outta hell. All of us took off running in case he hit the
bridge. I don't know where the *BLEEP* we thought we were going, we hadn't made
it two steps when he went through the *BLEEP*. He was doing about a
hunnerd-fifty, two hunnerd miles an hour. One dude was curled up in a ball like
a baby on the far seat, and the other guy was flippin' us a bird. Then he just
flew away down the river, man."
It should be stated that the farmer was so scared that he loaded his pants and
so refused to drop the charges, and the pilot got arrested for that one and
served a little time in jail. But he was soon back to drinking and flying. I
have no idea how he managed to keep his pilot's license, but he did. Last time
I went home his strip was closed down, his airplanes gone. It made me sad,
there's nothing like a genuine character to keep things interesting. And being
a plane buff with a counter-culture streak a mile wide, I can't help but root
for a pilot that did what this guy did, drunk or not. I mean, this is a *BLEEP*
little bridge I'm talking about!
Anyway, hope you liked it.
Copyright 2008 J. Brown
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