"Make your approach to the right of that big white pine, toward the School house. Plan your final approach so you can make your flair out just after you clear the fence. Don't hesitate to go to full power and go around if you don't feel good about it."
I was giving some suggestions to Doug, one of my students, for making a landing at Santa, Idaho, a small logging town about twenty miles Southeast of St. Maries.
During the summer of 1949 a couple of our students lived in Santa and requested that we give them instructions from there so they wouldn't have to drive to St. Maries as often. They told us that there was a field just back of the grade school large enough to land and take off a J3 cub safely and they had received permission from the owner to use it. Bill Gage, our manager, and I decided to fly over to Santa and check out this field to confirm that it was satisfactory for the operation. We made a couple landings and decided it was all right for full stop, but was a little short for "touch and go" landing.
Giving Doug dual instruction from the field in Santa was a win-win situation for each of us. He lived close enough to the field that he could walk over to meet me. I was overjoyed to have the solo time flying to Santa and back two or three times a week.
Although I remember almost nothing of the actual dual time we spent together, some of my solo flights back to St. Maries will never be forgotten.
The St. Maries River flows through Santa and some pretty wild country on its journey to St. Maries. The Milwaukee Railroad follows along the river most of the way. About five miles down the river from Santa is a place called Mashburn landing, where the Railroad has a spur for parking flat cars for loading of logs and transporting them to the mill in St. Maries. The highway crosses a bridge here and a power line is strung across the valley.
After a couple trips to Santa the flights to and from to St. Maries became a little boring, so to spice up the time I decided to fly back by imitating the river. Starting from Santa I climbed to just above the treetops and started following the river. It seemed like a good way to improve my coordination and find out just where the river goes. At first there were gentle curves, which were easy to follow, but as I got closer to Lindstrom Peak the turns became a little more violent and taxed my ability to follow very closely. Then the river took a sharp turn to the left and the railroad went through a tunnel. I couldn't bank steep enough to make the river turn and I sure couldn't fly through the tunnel, so the only way was up. Full power and a steep climb barely took me over the ridge the tunnel went through. The sixty-five horses on the nose were really struggling to get me over the top. The rest of the flight was sort of an anticlimax. After a couple flights down the river, the course was pretty much routine. I thought, "maybe I shouldn't fly quite so low," not that there were any places for a forced landing anyway. On the next trip down the river I climbed up a couple hundred feet higher and was going merrily on my way, but when I arrived at Mashburn Landing I almost ran into the power lines strung across the valley. They passed by about twenty feet above me and looked like they were a "foot" in diameter. I thanked the Lord for my good luck and said to myself, "I'll never fly that high again, at least when going down the river". Later my friend Bob Conway and I took a drive to Mashburn Landing and observed the lines from the ground.
When the blast of artic air blew in from Canada the first part of December, one of the methods used to warm the engines was to use a steam hose from the furnace boiler. It was effective, but had its drawbacks. Water would collect on various parts of the engine controls and freeze.
I had an appointment with Doug so; the steam bath treatment was necessary to get the engine warmed up on 98280 so it could be cranked up. My take off to the east was almost in the direction of Santa. After taking off and climbing to about a thousand feet, I throttled back to cruise power and made a slight turn to the South. About half way to Santa I decided to climb a little higher, but when I moved the throttle forward a little, the engine did not speed up. I moved it full forward, no engine response. Full aft movement resulted in the same response. The engine controls were frozen at cruise power. I was startled at first but then my train of thought went something like this; abort your flight to Santa, turn around and go back to the field in St. Maries, turn off the mag. switch to kill the engine and make a dead stick landing, thaw out the controls and start all over. Since there were other students scheduled for the day, I decided to call Doug and ask him to schedule another day.
Later in the month it started snowing, the landscape was turned into a white world of beauty with about a foot of snow. We installed skis on the planes and started winter training. The flight training in Santa was suspended temporarily until Doug could come down and be checked out on skis. This happened a few days later, after that Doug would drive down and our time in the air was pretty much routine with the time divided between solo and dual, but one day on one of our dual flights he suggested we fly to Santa to check out the field there. He indicated there was about eighteen inches of snow, but it really looked good.
Doug made the landing, using the White Pine tree and the Schoolhouse for guides. It seemed the wind was always blowing that direction. He came over the fence and flared out a little high so the plane dropped in, it would have bounced, but the snow absorbed the shock and it made a rough landing look smooth.
The next half hour would have made a good movie if there had been someone there to film it as we went up and down the field trying to get the plane back in the air. Doug made the first attempt after we taxied around to the edge of the field. He started toward the schoolhouse and hardly got moving in the deep snow, however he did make a path to try to follow on the next attempt. I took over and tried to follow the trail, but was not very successful as I wandered back and forth across it, however we did get up a little more speed, but not near enough to even get the tail to lift. On the next try Doug did not have any more luck than I did. We were just getting the snow packed a little. After one more attempt without a take off, we stopped and had a conference about what we should do next. Our final decision was that the plane was just too heavy to get off with the snow this deep and soft. We decided one of us would have to get out and I decided it would not be me. Doug could walk home from here. Even with his 175 pounds out of the plane there was still a lot of drag, but on my second attempt a euphoric feeling came over me as the controls came to life and I could feel the plane transferring its weight from the skis to the wings and I knew we were going to fly. It sort of floated into the air and as it picked up speed I was able to lower the nose slightly and gain precious flying speed. I circled the field gaining altitude as I watched Doug climb through the fence and start the short walk home.
When I landed in St. Maries without my student, I had to give an explanation as to where he was. Then I was known as the only instructor to come back without his student. All is well that ends well.