The other flying friend I had when living in Florida was a fellow who owned an Ercoupe. He, Perry, didn’t make much more money than I did but I had four kids and a wife staying home raising them. Perry and his wife both worked, and she made pretty good money...and his Ercoupe was not much of a airplane...but it was certainly a unique, fun one.

I have often wondered about my experiences in that airplane and I cannot reconstruct any sense of what I must have been thinking during that time. Perhaps I was not thinking. Maybe I was only enjoying life – in an irresponsible way, yes, but that whole period was one when I have thought, ‘I was not myself.’

Perry’s Ercoupe was an earlier model with fabric covered wings but all else aluminum. It had fixed tricycle landing gear and it had a twin tail – but it didn’t have rudder pedals. The yoke controlled pitch, and when turning the yoke the ailerons provided roll control and this also moved the rudders for coordinated directional control. And the yoke turned the nose wheel as well, so it could be "driven" on the ground in the same manner as a car and also in the air.

It was a spin-proof airplane and it had a gentle stall...meaning that when it was flying too slowly to maintain lift, before the wings stalled and dropped the nose, it would just mush straight ahead.

Why didn’t all airplanes have this sort of coordinated control?

The reason is that there are many times that the aircraft’s nose needs to point a different direction than the one that it is flying...like in a crosswind. Not all winds are conveniently blowing straight up the runway or in the direction of the pilot’s desired air-route.

So the aircraft needs to "crab" to take off and land in a cross ind, or to track in the shortest route to the destination. Once the wheels touch the ground, it is no longer an airplane but more of a car and can be driven.

Still, by careful manipulation and landing approach, there are methods to land and take off in a crosswind...of some extent.

The only pedal on the floor was a brake and it was in the center so either person could reach it. It was a cute, two-place airplane with a low wing and short landing gear. The wheels were behind the landing gear strut because it had what is known as "trailing arm" suspension. These are very good. The VW Beetle had front trailing arm suspension though with the VW it is not obvious because of the size of the wheels.

The airplane was easily entered by stepping on the wing walkway at the root, then stepping over the edge of the cockpit, and easing oneself down into the seat as legs and feet slide forward under the instrument panel.

Once in, there were two flexible clear plastic "curtains," or side windows, that could be pulled up from inside the fuselage. The aluminum rim of this sliding clear plastic would follow in tracks at the front and back cockpit canopy. When one side window edge was pulled up and over the head, then the other side could be pulled up to meet it. Now the cockpit would be fully enclosed. It was a nice arrangement.

However, in time, with the enthusiasm of pulling them up and over, the stop at the bottom of the flexible plastic would break or bend or in some manner become inoperable.

This was good.

I often thought that the owners jerked on one of these windows until the mechanical stop didn’t work anymore.

Now, with the stop no longer functioning, a side could be pulled up, but when its top lip got to the top center, it could keep going until the top edge was well past overhead center. This was the good part.

This left both sides open but the top closed off to the wind and prop blast.

It was easy to rest your elbow on the edge of the fuselage, and have that hand on the yoke.

Thus it was more like the cars of the 1950s except one is now cruising the airways rather than the highways.

But Perry’s Ercoupe was different...he had gotten it used and cheap and he had little money to maintain it. He had flown it quite a bit and it had problems:

(1) The radio had never worked since he got it.

(2) The compass became frozen to point at East...regardless of the aircraft flight direction.

(3) The fuel pump is in front of the right bank of cylinders and the fuel hose was looking shabby.

(4) The nose wheel bearing/bushing was badly worn and the nose wheel shimmied if landing very fast on a hard surface – on grass it was fine.

(5) There was no Turn-Bank Indicator (TBI) or Directional Gyro (DG).

(6) Before Perry had purchased the Ercoupe, it had made an emergency landing on a golf course and slid into a sand trap. The results were that the right wing was slanted back some and a few rivets were missing a couple of places on the aluminum skin under the cockpit.

Perry figured that he didn’t need the radio to just take off a little dirt strip in Florida and fly only in good weather well after sunup and before sundown.

He would liked to have the compass replaced, but he could buy fuel with that money and continue to fly by using a state highway map. This was true – generally.

The front wheel had a single ball bearing supported by bushings and because the plane did not have rudder pedals the nose wheel would sometimes get a good jolt to the side; this wore the bushing at the edges more so than in the middle. Consequently, there was some slop both left and right in the nose wheel.

Perry flew off grass mostly and this shimmying was not a problem...but...if landing a little fast on pavement, the wheel would shimmy so badly that the instruments could hardly be read because of the shock-mounted instrument panel vibration.

The rivets could be replaced under the fuselage but he thought that once someone started replacing rivets, there was no telling what else they would find needing attention, so he would just tolerate the result of those missing rivets; we often experienced this result.

When flying in bumpy air, on occasion there would be air directed from under the plane into the cockpit under the seats. This would blow a lot of dirt up into our faces. A quick pull and push on the yoke would close the little slit and keep the wind from coming in there.

I could take care of the TBI and DG absence though. I got an external venturi from another aircraft and put it on the left side of his Ercoupe just behind the engine cowling. I ran tubing from that to under the instrument panel. The vacuum generated by the venturi was equivalent to 7" of mercury. I got a used TBI and a used, but like-new DG.

The TBI needed 3" of vacuum to operate, and the DG needed 4" of vacuum.

I mounted both instruments in the instrument panel in holes already there and from a Piper Tri-Pacer, I got a three-way pneumatic valve. I connected the input to the venturi and on each of the other two valve ports, I connected tubing to the TBI and DG.

We made an adjustment flight and while Perry was turning and banking and changing directions, I was bent over with my head almost between my knees and looking up behind the instrument panel where I had mounted the valve. I was adjusting the valve so the vacuum would be split between the TBI and DG.

I could get the TBI working good but the DG would hardly move. Then the reverse would be the case. Finally, I got the valve set so that each instrument was getting the vacuum it needed to operate properly.

By this time, I was getting very sick!

I must have turned white...or green...because when Perry looked at me and he said that if I was going to throw up, to take off my glasses and lean my head out but get the side of my head against the rear canopy edge so everything would go down the side of the fuselage rather than blow back into the cockpit – and all over us, instruments, and upholstery.

I asked him how he felt because I had decided that engine exhaust was coming through that sometimes-vent in the under skin of the aircraft.

Perry started down as fast as an Ercoupe could go with a sick man onboard.

We were over Kissimmee and they had a strip.

We landed and just taxied further off the grass and killed the engine.

I somehow slithered out of the plane and into the shade under that really low wing. The grass was cool and there was a little wind, and this was accelerated coming under the wing. I started feeling better immediately. Besides, the ground was being real still.

I was still thinking about the inhalation of exhaust...and then it occurred to me – I had never been airsick. That is what it was! I was just airsick.

After an hour to recuperate, we took off and flew lowly and slowly straight back to our strip.

[I was only airsick one other time and that was during a NASA remote sensing mission in a twin Beech. What I was doing would promise air-sickness...and it delivered. I almost passed out, but I only went blind for a few seconds, yet I continued operating the equipment. Looking at the acquired data later, only I could tell that I had "lost concentration" for a bit.]

In the process of setting the valve for proper operation of TBI and DG, Perry might suddenly break away from a turn and fly level for a bit and then start another turn another direction. If he had kept a constant turn, I could have set the valve more quickly – and maybe not have gotten airsick.

I later asked him about this "unanticipated" maneuvering and he said that the airplane design was spin proof...but it had been maltreated and he got the impression that in the turn to the right, it wanted to stall and drop that wing into a spin. An airplane that is designed to not spin may not get out of one should it get in one of the things it was designed not to get in.

This made perfect sense and we decided that we really ought to know what it was wanting to do, and then put some mapping tape on the airspeed indicator so that would be the Ercoupe’s new minimum airspeed.

The next time we were out flying, we decided that would be a good time to test this. We paid attention to altitude, heading, wind, etc., and Perry started easing back on the yoke. The nose went up some and we started climbing a little. He pulled back further and the climb stopped and I could tell by the buffeting air coming in the cockpit sides that the airstream was way off what would be a normal trim and flight attitude.

The plane started mushing as the elevator was starting to run out of throw. The design had a limit to how much up elevator the pilot could give. As we were just mushing along at a very slow speed...the right wing started to dip. Not both wings...just the right.

I yelled "Stop!" just as Perry pushed the yoke forward and increased power.

That wing’s dropping was the first indication of it losing lift and falling. We would either do a quick-turn spiral as the airplane gained airspeed and controllability – or we would not spiral and gain speed, but just rotate in the same attitude and all control surfaces would be stalled in dead air – as would be case in a flat spin.

With altitude, there are ways to stop this...but it takes rudder control...there were no rudder pedals and no independent rudder control...they were connected to aileron movement. It took power, as well. This was a small, old, high-run-time engine and it just didn’t have a lot of power left in it. It had only been 75 hp when new.

We thought that we might continue spinning until we hit the ground.

We marked the airspeed indicator for a little higher minimum speed.

Having written all this...the Ercoupe is an amazing design and is safe and fun – when the aircraft is properly maintained. And when the right wing has not been forced back.

I had never figured out how far it was out of alignment, but I will now.

There is a fairing that goes over the gap between wing and fuselage. This is held in place by little screws. If the screws are removed, that faring comes off to reveal the bolts holding the main wing spar to the fuselage – there is a false spar to the rear but is is more for alignment than wing support.

The bolts can be removed, and then by removing control cable linkages and the wires to the clearance light connectors, the wing can be removed. This fairing was in place when the plane got its final paint.

However, I could look over the right side of the cockpit and look down at that fairing. There was an area that had no paint. This would be the area that was hidden by the fairing when it was painted but was then exposed when the wing was kicked back in the golf course landing.

At the wing leading edge, there was about 1/4" of non-paint. This became 0" at the wing trailing edge. The wing chord (width) was 60". Therefore, this area was exposed when the wing tip was pushed back 0.24 degrees. This does not sound like much but that wing is about 13.5' long, so that "small" degree change means that the right wing tip could be back as much as 3/4" more than the left wing.

So I can see where this can explain the propensity for that plane to want to drop the right wing and (maybe) go into a flat spin.

It was imperative that this Ercoupe have an indicated stall speed above that of a similar Ercoupe but one without one wing pushed back. We were diligent at low airspeeds.

The little plane cruised at about 100 mph and burned maybe 4 gallons an hour doing it. So this 25 mpg is fine for this age plane.

It held 24 gallons of fuel and this plays into one of our Ercoupe experiences.

There was a 9-gallon fuel tank in each wing and the fuel pump raised that fuel up into a 6-gallon header tank just above and behind the engine. The fuel in the header tank was fed to the engine by gravity.

The amount of fuel was indicated by cork floats in each fuel tank and each cork was attached to a stiff wire that protruded through a small hole in the top of that tank’s fuel cap. The tops of the wires were bent at a right angle so when the cap was removed for filling the tank, the cork came out with it.

When the tank was full, these wires extended the maximum amounts. These indicators were within view of the pilot during flight. Particularly the main header tank that fed the engine directly; that wire was right in front of the pilot’s face when he was looking forward. The tops of the wires were painted red to improve visibility.

When on the ground, the three fuel tank caps were removed with their cork floats and these were laid in a clean place behind the seats and then fuel caps without wire holes were put in their place. This kept the recurring Florida rains from running down the wires and into the fuel tanks.

Perry and I were working second shift at the Martin Company, so we had a lot of nice days to fly. Since we needed to be at work at 3:30 p.m. we could fly some in the mornings and then land, race to work, and get there just on time.

In the summer, this easily gave us six or more hours to "be in the plane."

We flew on some weekends also.

******

One morning, we were a good distance to the southwest of Orlando and I do not remember why. I was generally the navigator – if one was needed – but Perry knew the highways better than I did because he was from that area.

I had an aerial chart but I generally relied on a road map.

We had flown down to the West coast of Florida and on the way back we had a little head wind, and we were over a lot of swamp and lakes...no roads.

I was doing OK directing our flight by looking at the lake sizes and shapes and another lake would be in sight before we left one behind...so I guess we were just "lake hopping" back.

However, a little rain can make a lot of changes to the shape of a shallow lake in a marshy area. I was heading for another lake but I could not see it. I figured I would see it after about 20 minutes of air time.

Then the lake appeared and we went over it and I pointed the pilot on a little different heading to the next lake. After that one, we would be crossing some north/south highways and we would pick one to fly back to Orlando.

I realized that the last lake had come up a lot sooner than I had expected. We were not flying that fast...and it wasn’t quite the shape I had expected.

Then, where there was to be no lake, there was one...and it was not a small one. I looked at the map trying to see a bigger lake and all I found were well off the course of where I thought we had been flying.

Perry saw me with my eyes on the maps more than paying attention to where we were flying and wisely assumed that his copilot/navigator was lost.

He asked if I knew where we were.

I told him, "Not at the moment."

He said, "Then at this moment, we are lost. Right?"

(Perry had brilliant deduction skills.)

We had left Orlando with full tanks but now, the wing tanks were definitely getting low, while the header tank that fed the engine was being maintained at near full – being filled from the wing tanks.

There were no roads and if we got higher for a wider view, we would be in haze and not be able to make use of the altitude – besides – we needed to conserve fuel and climbing was not the way to do it.

No matter where one is lost...Plan A is "Conserve Fuel."

There was nothing on the ground as far as we could see that corresponded with what was on the paper in my hands and being buffeted around by the wind.

We had stopped looking for lakes and were now looking for any road and any town. We had been known to buzz road signs to see what highway we were following. Once we learned that, I could locate us on the highway map and happily fly us home and to work.

Our day was not working out like that.

This was the only time I have been lost in an airplane.

(I am reminded of the comment of an SR71 Blackbird pilot who said that a pilot has not been lost until he is lost at 70,000 feet and flying 2,000 mph.)

We were truly lost. We had no radio, no compass, decreasing fuel, and we were over what looked like the Everglades but we knew wasn’t. The sun position was not obvious with the haze above us.

It seemed that the plane started sucking up the fuel in larger gulps and now the wing tank level wires were sometimes bouncing on the top of the tank caps. Neither of us had any idea how much fuel would be in a tank when the fuel level was below the float and the wire was resting on the cap top.

At least we had a full header tank.

We did agree that when the wing tanks were empty, we would still have at least an hour of safe flying before an emergency. At near 100 mph we could cover a lot of Florida, and Florida is about 150 miles wide where we thought we were.

Time passed very fast as more and more swamp went under our wings. I really prefer to fly in a high wing aircraft because I can get tired of looking at the top of a wing when I really want to see the ground. Whether right-side up or upside down, I prefer a high wing.

In a while the wing tank wires were rattling on the tops of their respective gas caps. I had not seen a splash of gas move that right hand wing tank wire for the last 15 minutes. Perry said the tank on his side was "dry."

We thought we had about 30 minutes of safe flying in the header tank when we started seeing some houses near the edge of the swampy lake area!

We considered going lower to see about a sign on the two-lane highway, but if we were going to run out of fuel, we would like to do that with altitude.

Then we both saw a large clearing and knew we could land there. We could worry about getting gas from a filling station later. There seemed to be no wind at that time.

As we got closer, danged if the clearing wasn’t an airstrip!

It was near a more built-up area, but we knew we had to land at that strip...whether they had fuel or not.

I looked on the aviation map and found the strip. We were well south of where we thought we should have been.

It was a private airstrip.

We didn’t care. We landed.

They had a pretty good, long, paved runway and I surmised that it was one of the many WWII training fields that were now in private hands, or closed with big white "X"s on the ends – meaning "Do Not Land."

As we had landed, I saw some gas pumps and I started relaxing.

We taxied up to the pumps but as we got there, a guy from an office came out with his arms crossed and stood in front of the pumps.

We cut ignition and started climbing out of the plane. The noise in our ears for the last hour or two partially blocked what the guy was saying to us, but it was, "This is a private airstrip and you are to depart immediately."

We told him our story. I didn’t see what was so private about that airstrip. They had a little parking lot with maybe ten cars there, a single floor glassed office where the Fixed Base Operator would have sat, and they had one overly large hangar with doors at the other end. There was one ramp to the back of the hangar.

He wanted to get rid of us and the quickest way was to give us fuel. It was Texaco aviation gas. We convinced him to let us fill up the three tanks and he complied. All the while he stood with folded arms and aviation sunglasses the size of dinner plates. (There is an old airport joke about the guy who wears big sunglasses to make up for his diminutive size elsewhere.)

As we got through with the filling, I asked Perry how much money he had. He had enough to eat in the cafeteria at work and not much else. I had about the same.

We told the guy how much we appreciated his courtesy and we would do him a favor and tell no one that we got fuel there, or had even landed there, but...we do not have enough money to pay for the gas. I volunteered, "But that is OK. I have my Gulf credit card! Here, put it on this."

This was when these credit cards were issued by the companies and the cards could only be used to buy that company’s products. I knew this but acted like I didn’t.

Now the guy had to try to get the gas money for Texaco gas from Gulf – or get Texaco to bill Gulf, or ...

He took the card, wrote the number in a little pocket note book and said for us "to git."

We got in, fired up the happy engine, and we started taxiing back to the strip. The taxiway had three main strip entrances...the end we touched down on, the middle where we were, and one at the other end. There was no wind, so we just kept taxiing to the opposite end from that we had approached on.

As we made our turn from the taxi way to the end of the runway, we looked back through the open hangar doors and saw why it was a private field. We could see at least three WWII B-25s being serviced. They had guns in the turrets (!). They looked like all the combat images of these medium bombers in WWII.

To put this in historical context...at this time there were multiple revolutions in Cuba, and various places in Central and South America. I am sure those B-25s still had bomb racks in them, or reinstalled in them.

We knew where we were and returned to Orlando and got to work more than an hour late. It might have been one of the few days that I was really happy to punch in at work.

*****

This period in world history was very unsettled. Castro had come to power, declared Cuba to be a Communist country, established ties with the Soviet Union, and there was the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs. Then there was the Cuban missile crises. Air Force reconnaissance planes were flying in and out of McCoy Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command station near our residence. If there was going to be a strike on the U.S., that base would have to be a prime target.

And in this scenario the little Ercoupe was involved by default.

It was blue and white. It had fabric covered wings. A lot of the later Ercoupes had aluminum skinned wings. This would prove important later.

Flying in Southern Florida at this time was an old coot who also had a blue and white Ercoupe, but his did have the aluminum wings. At a distance, the two Ercoupes looked a lot alike. (He had a lot more antennas on his Ercoupe!)

Another time, we were out just tooling around in the Ercoupe and we had heard of an old military strip out in the swamp/jungles. We decided that would make a nice flight destination.

This is a problem for people who like to fly. It is simply, that they enjoy flying but they run out of places to fly to. They will fly four hours round trip to eat a bad breakfast in a bad café at a bad airstrip just to have some place to fly to. Yes, they will bad-mouth the place as being as terrible as they had been told but, what the heck...it was a beautiful Sunday and they had had a week of rain and this was the first good weather in a long time, and so we decided to fly over to...etc., etc., etc.

So Perry and I had someplace to fly to...a closed WWII airstrip.

We would have missed it had it not had a crushed oyster shell road to it. We couldn’t tell where the road came from but there was one old, open hangar and the remains of some sort of ready room. There was a lot more growth than just palmettos. There were some decent-sized palm trees and all sorts of mossy things growing right to the edge of the strip.

Over the years, the rains had moved a lot of mud to collect on one end of the strip and a place or two in the middle. We figured that with the absence of hard rain lately, that dirt would be hard enough for us. Besides, we preferred soft airstrips to hard paved ones.

Once we could see the strip, we saw that it did have a big white "X" painted on one end and we had to assume that there was another "X’ under the layers of dirt at the end we were making our approach to.

With the dirt, we knew the nose wheel would not go crazy shimmying. It would just sort of wobble on the dirt and then run smoothly.

As we landed and were slowing down, we could tell that there was nothing there worth seeing and we would likely just put on power and depart – making it a long touch-and-go.

But from seemingly nowhere, a danged white sedan drove out onto the runway, stopped, and two guys (in big sun glasses) stepped out and leaned on the car waiting for us.We came to a stop about 100' from them and we sat there looking at them and thinking about what we should do. One of the guys took a couple of steps toward us and then pointed at us, slid his finger across his throat, and then pointed with two fingers back to us and emphatically pointed at the ground at his feet.

This meant, "Kill the engine and both of you come right here right now!"

And that is exactly what we did.

He asked us if we knew that was a closed airstrip. Perry was sometimes too honest for his own good so I quickly said, "We do now but we landed from that direction" (pointing) "and if there was an ‘X’ it must have been covered up by the dirt that had been washed over it."

It is easy to play dumb and innocent if one often is.

"Where did you two come from?"

"Orlando."

"Why did you land here?"

He was talking to me so I told him. "We were just flying around and thought we would do a quick touch-and-go. We can’t do that where we are based in Orlando."

He understood but didn’t like it.

He assumed that I was the pilot.

This was good. He was making an error that could help us later.

He said, "Show me your driver’s license."

I handed it to him. He handed it to the other guy and he took it to his car and got in.

Then he asked Perry for his driver’s license. It was given to him.

(We didn’t see any point in asking to see his.)

He was presenting himself as an authority figure and he certainly had us convinced that he was one.

He told us to stand there and he went to the car where the other guy was.

It is good that he didn’t ask for my pilot’s license, which of course, I have never had...and it is good that he didn’t ask Perry for his.

Perry only had a student’s license and this prohibited him from carrying passengers (me) and he was often way, way further than 25 miles from his home strip.

They came back and as we stood there, they took our picture, pictures of the plane, and then went over to stand on the wings and look inside.

Then they got down and felt of the wing surfaces and each time they would look at each other, make disgusted faces, and then shake their heads "no."

Then they came back to us and asked us if we knew any other Ercoupe pilots. We didn’t.

Then he asked if we knew James Curtis.

I immediately said, "I have never seen him but I have heard of him. He has an Ercoupe like this one but hopped up. He flies down around Miami I think." This was all true.

This Curtis was quite a character and had had trouble with the Coast Guard, Immigration, and all other agencies who do not want people flying out of U.S. airspace and then flying back in...even if it was only for 10 minutes.

Curtis often went back and forth, weaving in and out down the zone limit.

It was alleged that he flew to Cuba and threw out "Save Us From Castro" circulars which informed the reader how to contact counter-revolutionaries in Miami. He was thought to run guns in his Ercoupe. He didn’t have a right seat but had the rear cockpit bulkhead modified to strap down longer things there. The cockpit design of the Ercoupe permited long things to be stuck in.

The guys told us to leave and speak to no one about our being interrogated. We left and flew back to Orlando...and told everyone at the airstrip about our being questioned.

We decided that Curtis had been using these strips to pickup loads of stuff that needed to surreptitiously go somewhere else.

We knew a couple of guys who lived and flew further south than we and they knew Curtis and said he was a flying legend. He would not hesitate to light up one of the world’s biggest and most expensive (and banned) Cuban cigars, and he was always selling good rum. One time, at a hangar party, he flew in and handed out expensive bottles and then lit a cigar and got back in his Ercoupe and left.

Those security guys must have seen our blue and white Ercoupe and started licking their lips at the prospects of catching Curtis in the act.

I have no idea what happened to Curtis in the long run. We heard that he sold his Ercoupe. I bet whoever bought it got hassled a lot.

*****

Because of the nose wheel shimmy, we didn’t often do a touch-and-go, but Perry wanted to do one at the Orlando Municipal Airport. I thought nothing of it. He said that it would give him a chance to test his radio. A guy had messed with it and said that he thought it might work again.

[This was before McCoy Air Force Base, Strategic Air Command, was demilitarized to become Orlando International Airport. The local (downtown) Orlando Municipal Airport later became Orlando Executive Airport.]

As we flew into that airspace we were getting dizzy looking out for commercial air traffic – National and Eastern air lines used this airport.

Perry was making all sorts of "tuning efforts" and calling the airport...to no avail.

So we just slid into the traffic pattern and acted like we belonged there.

Perry made a good approach and got really slow by the time the nose wheel was touching down and the instrument panel only shook for a couple of seconds, but that was enough.

When landing, we would hold the nose wheel off the ground for as long as we could, but it helped ground steerage to have that wheel on the ground. It never shimmied taking off.

Just as we touched down and were making a pretty fast roll, I looked toward the control tower and saw a bright red light flashing at us. I know what such a light with a lens on it looks like. It was very directional and it had to be meant for us. I told Perry and Perry said that he saw it also.

We slowed down and a field maintenance car came out in front of us with blinking lights and a "Follow Me" sign on the back of it.

The Ercoupe drives like a car on the ground so it was no problem following it. It came to a stop well off the ramp and near an office building. A guy came out and gave us the kill-engine signal and we did.

Two other guys came out and looked at the airplane. As we were getting out, Perry told me that we were going to be in big trouble this time and for me to be quiet and let him do the talking.

I remember thinking, ‘You are going to be in big trouble. I am just an ignorant passenger. What? I am flying with a student!? He never said nothing about being a student!!!!’

One of the guys started lecturing us. We had entered the pattern without radio contact and – he listed a lot of things we had done and not done...most of them I would have guessed at, but Perry knew. Perry had thought the radio might work.

He did not volunteer anything about an inoperative radio, shimmying front wheel, or any plane problems. He acted like a country bumpkin with "Golly...I never thought of that...well, I will never do that again...etc.,etc.

The guy summed up with, "We are too busy to call the FAA. That would make us do a lot of paperwork and I am sure it would ground your plane here for rework. Here is what you are to do...follow the vehicle and do not enter the runway until you see a green light – then leave immediately. Do not fly any pattern...just depart straight out and never come into this airspace again!" He was really emphatic on the "never."

Perry was commenting all this time with "Yes, Sir! I understand, Sir! No, Sir!" and there were a few "I am very sorry, Sir."s.

The term "abject submission" would have applied.

We started the engine and the vehicle pulled in front of us and we followed it...stopping when he did and advancing when he did. The vehicle got to the end of the taxiway with the runway ahead of us and came to a stop. We were all looking back at the control tower.

We pretty quickly got a solid green light. They really wanted us gone. The driver made a hand signal and turned off his lights and "Follow Me" and turned from in front of us and started back toward the buildings.

We did as we had been instructed. We flew straight back to our airstrip and were happy that nothing came of it.

Again, I do not know why they didn’t look at Perry’s pilot’s license. Perry was just living right, I guess. He did not have the money to correct everything, or even half of what the FAA could find wrong with that Ercoupe.

Perry had been using an old guy for the maintenance Perry couldn’t do. The guy was authorized and licensed, and he was also very lax. He made more money that way and did a lot less work to get it.

I do not actually remember ever doing a touch-and-go in that Ercoupe. The two times we had thought about it got interrupted.

*****

Another place we heard about that was worth a flight to was a private sandy strip where a guy collected old airplanes, cars, motorcycles, and such, until he had accumulated an open-air museum. He would sell anything and he never minded people just flying in. Landing fees were something like $5 or $5 worth of gas. If you had to get $5 worth of gas, you might as well fill up...as he was well aware.

So we flew there. It, too, was out in marshy, palmetto country. (Note: The difference between a "swamp" and "marsh" is that a swamp has trees; a marsh has grass and lower plants.)

The strip was hard to see as a strip. It looked like a road through a junk yard...but there were two modern planes sitting there so he already had company.

We landed and as soon as we touched down, Perry let out a "Oh...No-o-o-o!"

We were forced to lean forward as that Ercoupe just came to an abrupt stop. That had to be the shortest landing an Ercoupe ever made without running into something..like a golf course sand trap.

This strip was short and we touched down as soon as we had cleared the palmetto bushes – and this was with our wheels in deep sand.

We struggled with full throttle and taxiied our way out of it. (Rudder control would have been nice at that time.)

We taxied up to the shade of the trees and where all his tarps had been stretched between trees to give some more shade and to protect the area from the daily rains.

His $5 landing fee signs were everywhere.

We were not about to put any gas in that plane. We didn’t want it any heavier than it already was. We were not sure we could even take off with that sand there. We wondered about letting air out of the tires.

There was a little wind and it meant starting the take off roll from the sand.

No way!

We suggested to a couple of other pilots that we knew where the guy got his old airplanes – they were planes that had flow in but couldn’t fly out. We said that he probably put that quicksand at the end of the strip for that reason.

They agreed that might be a possibility.

When the old coot heard this, he laughed and said that we didn’t have anything of value so he would help us out...after we paid our landing fees.

We gave him $5 and he turned to the other two pilots...one of whom was an attractive lady.

He said that in an hour or two, the wind would quit and it would get still and it would get very hot, so if we took off as soon as the wind quit, we could be airborne before the place really started heating up...which would also lengthen our take-off distances.

We didn’t look around much at his collection, but rather just sat in the shade, drank his overpriced soft drinks, and talked with the other airplane people – and we watched Spanish moss hanging in the trees and hoping it would stop moving in the wind.

Sure enough...the wind went to nothing and it was stifling. We figured which would be better – take off toward the sand pit while we had a tiny tail wind or to try to use that little bit of wind for better airspeed and try to take off starting from the edge of the sand pit – which would shorten our takeoff distance.

We finally decided that if we relied on the head wind for airspeed and it quit as we started our takeoff roll, we could be in trouble.

But if the bit of wind quit while coming from behind, that would help us.

We took off and we barely got the gear off the ground as the sand pit went under us. I am sure that our gear was no more than five feet above the tops of the palmettos. As the vegetation grew higher, we were gaining altitude at the same rate.

We never went back and advised everyone at the Orlando strip to not go there.

*****

Once we decided to fly across to Sanibel Island near Fort Myers on the West coast. This was about 150 miles south-southwest of Orlando. It was a pretty place with lots of shells and beaches and nice water. It was also not crowded and it had, we were told, an airstrip right beside the water.

We went. This, for us, was a long flight and we were more careful this time. The last time we had been down that direction we almost ran out of fuel and had to land at an un-welcoming private airstrip.

That area is much built up now but then it was sparsely populated. We had on our swim suits under our jeans.

It was pretty and we enjoyed flying low around the area and enjoying the sights of the water and beach people. We had seen the airstrip but hadn’t paid much attention to it.

But flying down the beach, the wind was from the Gulf and it was pushing us away from the water toward the palms.

This airplane didn’t have rudder pedals so it could not crab as would be customary in other aircraft.

We got a little altitude and flew down the strip. The strip was parallel to the beach and there was a narrow strip of palm trees between the beach and strip. That was not much shielding from the wind.

Perry made three passes down the strip, but at no time could we have approached the end of the strip and landed; the wind would have moved us off into more palm trees. Had we landed, taking off would have been easier than landing.

We didn’t land there but we were determined to go swimming.

There was a little hook of land that turned out toward the wind, and as we came down the beach we saw it was long enough for us to land and take off, but was it hard enough?

We came by again at speed and just barely touched the sand with the main wheels; it was perfectly hard.

The next time by, we landed, stripped down to suits, and had a nice swim. It would be no trouble to take off into that brisk wind.

We decided to keep just our suits on rather than get our jeans wet as we flew back to work.

We almost froze flying in those wet swim suits. We had our shirts off and they and our jeans were pressed into our laps to try to keep some things warm.

The air was bumpy so that would be a time that the under skin of the fuselage would pick up air and blow all the sand and dirt in the floor and under the seats up onto us.

And it all stuck to us.

We tried to wash the stuff off of us at the little Orlando runway restroom. We got to work an hour late that day also.

We didn’t fly down that direction again...at least we hadn’t got lost that time. This might have been because we took no "short cuts" across marsh and swamp land.

*****

I do not remember the details but I was invited to go for a morning flight and I passed it up. Perry would be leaving a little later than we usually flew and I just wasn’t in the mood.

I got to work and after an hour, security came by to tell me that I was wanted outside and my supervisor had OK’d it. This was strange but then Martin’s security was that way.

There was a security car at the gate and I was told to get in and then I was told what the mission was...I was told that my pilot friend’s engine had quit and he had landed on Martin property. Perry had asked for my help.

This was a very big facility and had acres and acres of pretty, mown lawns ... to be plowed under as more assembly buildings were needed.

Sure enough. We drove up and there was Perry sitting on the leading edge of the wing. The cowling was up. A guard was watching him.

Perry said he knew that something blocked the fuel line and with a little assistance, he would have the engine running and he could leave.

Security said, "First things first. Fix the fuel line."

One of the cars had some wrenches so we removed the old fuel line from the fuel pump. I wondered why it didn’t break rather than flex. We took the fuel drain and a couple of other tubes and hoses off. We would blow through the line with a handkerchief over the end. Finally, we got a gob of stuff out of a line – and all other lines were clear.

We reassembled everything and the engine started immediately. The Perry played with the throttle and magnetos a while and then killed the engine and told the guards that he was going to taxi down "that way and then turn into the wind and take off this direction" so we had better move.

Security’s response was, "You have violated federal law landing here. Do not think you are going to be permitted to take off from here."

Bordering this big lawn was a gravel road used by Martin maintenance. It was straight and reasonably smooth.

We told security that we were going to use that road and that it was technically not on Martin property. We didn’t know this to be true but we hoped that they would plead ignorance and say it was OK to take off there. This would be the easiest way to get rid of Perry and the plane.

They were concerned with the plane moving under its own power on the property-proper, so a rope was put over the prop hub and it was towed by a security car for a few hundred feet to the gravel road.

Perry had me, with security, drive down the road so I could determine if he could take off there. I decided that even I could have taken off from there.

We went back and I told Perry what I had found; he fired up and made a nice take off from a very narrow gravel road. Each wing was about three feet over the edges of the small road with the wing tips over small bushes. But he got the necessary flying speed and left.

*****

I often wondered what happened to Perry and particularly, what happened to that bent-wing, maltreated little Ercoupe.

After some recent research, now I at least know about the Ercoupe. Perry still owned it when in early 1977 – at least 14 years after I had last flown in it – the last FAA action was recorded. This could have been some required routine inspection. In the fall of that year it was still in Perry’s possession when it was de-registered and it fell off FAA records.

It is possible that more work was needed for it than it was worth, so it was just forgotten about and disappeared...either intact or in pieces.

This Ercoupe was a Model 415C and manufactured in 1946. This made it 20+ years old when I was flying in it. It had a 75 hp Continental engine which flew it at 95 mph on 75% of its cruise throttle setting. No one owned it after Perry.

(A very nice Model 415C is currently for sale at $24,000. It has been beautifully restored and well maintained. It has been fully updated to modern standards.)