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THE LAST CRASH

Most aviation stories are just good stories with aviation in them. We have no objection to yarns of that sort. Those that we have published have been decidedly good reading. This aviation story is different--just how different you will realize as you read it. "The Last Crash" is something new in fiction--a real air story. Its author is a man who knows not only the technique of the airman's trade but also its spirit. --The Editor

John Norris, whom you will remember as the man who flew the first straightaway from Langstrom Field to Cristobal, had a touch of the mystic in him, for all he was the sort of a man that good men favor. And in this, it may interest you to know, Norris wasn't different from most men of his calling. He was different, however, in this respect, that he was outspoken with his ideas about unearthly matters whereas most airmen keep their mysticism to themselves.

Being a fatalist is one of the characteristic peculiarities of the flyer which he shares, perforce, in common with other men whose professions keep their spiritual elbows raw with constant rubbing against the harsh specter of sudden and violent death.

"There must be an explanation for the things that happen in the air," Norris once affirmed. "The papers call them 'accidents' but don't you believe it. They aren't accidents. They are consummations.

"I think this: A man is given a course to run; he runs it; and then he is wiped out. The manner, the time and the place of each man's last crash is already marked up on somebody's office tickler at Cosmic headquarters.

"Otherwise--why? Why should men like Hawker and Alcock, with all their biggest risks behind them, wash out on puny little expeditions that they undertook with no more thought than they would have given to drinking a cup of tea? Why should a ship running free and smooth catch fire in the air, for no good reason that is earthly?

"There is a reason, of course, but it has nothing to do with physical or mechanical flaws, if you ask me. The flaw is not the cause. You've got to look for the cause in something behind the flaw. Did you ever hear of 'Last Crash' Cobb?"

The story of Billy Cobb, and how he came to his last crash, was one of Norris' classics. There is no denying that it points a moral if you want to look at it that way.

This is what Halliday, the old crew chief, told the accident-investigating officer.

The crew chief was heading across the field, calling "Ambulance!" as he went, before the tangle of ripped canvas, splintered spars and tortured wires came to rest on its back, quivering.

"Well, sir," the crew chief deposed, "like I said, I stopped when I seen the captain was starting to crawl out. I thought he was all right. I seen officers crawl out o' lots worse'n that, in my time, an' start cussin' as healthy as you please.

"But the minute I got a good look at Captain Cobb I knew different. You couldn't see his face for blood, an' by the way he put out his hands, kind o' feelin' ahead of him, I knew he was blind. His goggles, like you seen, was all crushed into his eyes.

"Well, sir, he staggered a step, or maybe two. Me, I was sort o' paralyzed. I just stood an' watched. The captain was a good friend o' mine an' it was my ship done it. I seen him stiffen up all of a sudden. Then he laid himself down careful, just like he was easin' into bed, you might say. He didn't fall, sir; he just laid down like he meant to be comfortable.

"Well, sir, it might 'a' been a second an' it might 'a' been ten minutes the captain stays that way, propped up, starin' at nothin' my eyes could see, an' smilin'. Then he speaks. I could hear him plain. His voice was as strong as mine right now and I could tell by it he was awful glad about somethin'.

"This is what I hear him say: 'Hello, Jennie, sweetheart. It's the last crash and you kept your promise. Let's go!'

"He said that. You won't believe it. Nobody believes it. But he did. An' when it's said he lays down again, flat on his back an'--an'--reaches up with both hands. He seems to find somethin' to take hold of there in the air. For a minute I can't make out what he's doin'. Then I get it. He is holdin' somebody's head close to his face--at least he thinks he is--an' he is--he is--well, he is kissing somebody!

"After that, sir, his hands drop an' he lays there an' never moves again. When I get to him he is dead as far as I can see. He'd got the machine-gun butts in the head, the way they all do.

"I don't know nothin' more, sir, except that a little ways back from where the ship crashed I found a bit of wood with a big nail in it. Which might explain how that tire come to bust."

How much of the old crew chief's deposition actually found credence with the members of the crash board and the personnel generally of Langstrom Field, all of whom, of course, came into possession of more or less elaborated versions of the story, cannot be definitely determined. Publicly the old mechanic was scoffed out of court. The C. O., who was worried for the state of his pilots' nerves, took occasion to call the talkative witness into private session and threaten certain unspeakable consequences if he let his tongue grow any longer.

So that the affair was a three-week sensation, with everybody talking about it and everybody proclaiming intrepidly that it was all damfoolishness and very bad medicine for a flying field. There are certain things that flying men always affect to disdain--and always take more seriously than anybody else.

There was one particular discussion of the case, on the night of the crash, in the lounge at the officers' club. But to appreciate what passed between the three, Norris, Weyman, and Crawley, who held that quiet conference you must know many things that went before.

Three years intervened between Billy Cobb's first crash and his last. He had three crashes in all--which, as any pilot will tell you, is not a high score for so long a time, particularly when you consider the amount of flying that Cobb packed into those years.

He was a man who originally took the dangers of his profession philosophically.

"Sure, there's always got to be a last crash," he would say when the question of hazard came up, "but it won't be today." Hence his sobriquet.

And having satisfied himself that all the cotter pins were clinched in place and the controls well greased at the bearings he would swing into the cockpit, buckle his safety belt, and command "Contact!" with the perfect assurance of the pilot who knows that barring an act of God he is safe in his own hands.

Some pilots fly on faith, others fly on nerve, but Last Crash Cobb flew on skill which was consummate and knowledge which was complete. It was no fault of his that tragedy entered his life by way of the air.

He was an aviator neither by chance nor by interest. He was an aviator by vocation. And fortunate it was for him that he first saw the light of day in a flying age for had he been of an earlier generation it is difficult to imagine what would have become of him. He had gone to flying at the first opportunity as the steel goes to the magnet.

There was something ascetic about his devotion to his profession. He wore his wings as a priest wears the cloth--reverently. What the air might bring him he never questioned. Advancement, power, gain he never considered excepting as they might be turned back to the profit of the air.

"I'll tell you what," he said one day to an heretical upstart who was talking about flying pay and trying to prove the candle not worth the risk; "this is no game for a brainy young business man like you who's going to be a major general some day. Clever boys don't thrive on the air. What we want here is men with hearts. Go back to the school of the line, sonny. You'll be a great man in a few years. But you'll always be a bum flyer!"

And again he was sent before a general court and deprived of ten files for bearding a lieutenant colonel of the technical section with the following sally:

"The asphalt is all cluttered up with kiwis like you. You ground grippers are set to make the conquest of the air if it costs the last flyer. Did you ever fly? No! Why don't you join the tank corps then?"

That was Last Crash Cobb. He was of the same breed that makes the sea leaders. Narrowed to his own sphere he was, without a doubt, as the sailor is; and indifferent to all that lay outside it, impatient especially of ignorant meddlers who tried to dictate and interfere. He could abide the man who was frankly not of the air and approached him without pretense, but the airfaring dilettante, the "expert" whose vicarious knowledge was always on parade, he could not tolerate, nor would he. However, that is beside the point excepting as it gives some vague index to the character of Cobb and his type--a type that will live some day in tradition as the type that won the sea now lives.

With airplanes he had a way and an understanding that might be likened to the way and the understanding of certain men with horses. To Billy Cobb an airplane was a sentient thing, with life and personality. The sailor has the same feeling about ships. He would appraise a craft at a glance and in that glance instantly catalogue its faults and its talents, knowing with a knowledge that is not promulgated in the manuals of the technical section just what might be expected of that ship--whether she were sluggish on the level, fast, or very fast; whether swift on the climb, long on the glide, tricky on the turns, treacherous on the landings, and all the other points that a pilot must canvass in his ship before he may invest her with his confidence.

He never asked more of a ship than was built into it, either. And it outraged him to see anybody else do it.

"Hinky," he said to his roommate one evening--this was during his first detail as a tester at McCook--"if you treat that bus of yours the way you're doing any longer I'm going to lick you. It's fiendish cruelty. She ain't made to zoom like that. What's more, she's got spirit and she's going to take it out on you some early morning. You watch. You'll try her patience an extra degree too much and we'll have to pick the dirt out of your teeth before we plant the daisies on you."

And the records show that "Hinky" Morse did not live to get his licking. For he rode in a baggage car the next night, inside a long white box.

Billy Cobb, sitting on the floor beside the casket--he refused the comfort of a Pullman berth--blew his nose frequently, and to the baggage man pronounced Hinky's brutal epitaph, between stations.

"I feel pretty bad about this," said Billy. "I don't mind about him so much," indicating the pine box; "he asked for it and he got it. But you should see what he did to the poor little ship. It's birds like him that give the service a black eye. Gosh darn it all!"

He blew his nose eloquently.

"I've got a fierce summer cold," he explained.

"Oh, sure," said the baggage man tactfully. "This flyin's a mighty risky game, anyhow."

"It's a damn lie!" exploded Billy Cobb, and put his handkerchief away until the argument was over.

All of which may seem like a great deal of bootless rambling. And rambling it is--but not bootless. The only way to illumine a portrait properly is to light it from various angles.

The important thing to know about Billy Cobb is that he was intensely earnest about the craft of which he was a master. He loved it and revered it and lived for it only. If you believe that you may then understand better how the things that happened to him came about as they did, and perhaps--perhaps--you may think you perceive why.

It has just been said that Cobb lived only for his profession. That should be qualified. There was a brief period when he lived only for Jennie.

Until Jennie appeared Cobb had regarded women with the same indifferent toleration that bespoke his attitude toward everything else outside the level frontiers of the airdrome. But Jennie was of the air herself. She commanded devotion the minute he set eyes on her. He was born to Jennie just as he had been born to the air.

It was on a bright May morning at Langstrom Field--this was three years ago, remember--that they discovered each other and for all spiritual purposes were instantly merged into unity. Billy had just come from officers' call at headquarters where he had met the new C. O.--not for the first time in his life. The old C. O., a man named Weifer, to Billy's intense gratification had departed to a staff detail with the D. M. A. the night before.

"Staff is right!" mused Billy, reflecting on the demerits of the departed. "But cane or crutch would be more accurate. He needed one to keep his wings from limping. The big kiwi!"

Now a kiwi, "for the information of all concerned," as the technical bulletins put it, is the human counterpart of a certain type of training plane with reduced wing surface which roars like a lion but never leaves the ground.

Billy was still thinking anathema on the score of kiwis in general and Weifer in particular when he reached the hangar and was confronted with Jennie. His own scout ship was standing just outside the curtains with the blocks at the wheels and the engine idling gently. The crew chief, Hansen, was in the seat, holding back the stick. A little cloud of dust eddied in the mild backwash of the propeller and blew outward across the green expanse of the field. The little ship was straining at her blocks and vibrating just a trifle along her stubby fuselage as a whippet strains at the leash and trembles at the haunches on the scratch line. She was settled back taut against her stocky tail skid, with her landing gear gathered in a crouch beneath her stream-lined belly and her nose lifted eagerly toward a perky white cloud that drifted temptingly across the blue of a tender spring sky. Her four varnished wings--she was a biplane--stretched out, it seemed to Cobb as he came up, in a pathetic gesture of appeal to be off.

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