The Aviator

I just watched this movie about pilot and innovator Howard Hughes. He was one smart dude who went through a lot of kleenex.

When I was 15, I got a brilliant idea related to flight.

We lived in an old beach house up on an open hillside in Playa del Rey. Since then, rich people have built houses all around that 1906 house. The following photo will help put you in the right place for the following story. In particular:

• Find the hillside between the big reddish building (by the beach) and the whitest "cube" house back on the hill (the house we used to live in now dwarfed and squished in the tiny gap between the white cube and the house beyond it)
  
• Find the telephone pole at the top of the hill, next to the quaint little house
  
• Find the road at the base of the hill
  

Some trivia...

My Dad once worked for Hughes Aircraft, and there is a Hughes airstrip in the flat area just to the left of the cliffs.

Okay, while you're distracted by photos, let me toss in another one that's unrelated to the current story. Our house overlooked Marina del Rey (my gosh, what a view). The opening scenes of Gilligan's Island show their boat making its way out of a harbor. That was filmed in that harbor.

So, at 15, I was a brilliance factory. Like tossing kleenexes out of the upper floor window to watch the wind carry them way up to the houses on the hill behind us. Or throwing dirt clods down the cliff toward cars on the road below and inadvertently hitting a cop car and running back to my house in time to see the cop pulling into my driveway.

On this particular day of brilliance, I looked at the pile of scrap wood and peg board by our house. I thought of the cliff with its steady updraft, perfect for an excellent stadium-quality paper airplane that my brother taught me to make. (Paper airplanes would hover really well and slowly make their way forward. I even got one to land in the parking lot beyond the road. Planes that landed on the slope were easy to retrieve with a quick run down the slope and back.) Having actually learned some key principles of aeronautics from my own experiments with the excellent paper airplane, I considered that I might be able to make a small glider out of some of those wood scraps.

So, I slapped together the basics (2x2 for fuselage, long rectangle particle board wing, little tail and aileron) and tossed it in the yard. Okay, so it looked like a grade school drawing of an airplane, except that it was uglier. And it didn't fly. But I didn't expect it to fly on first attempt. I anticipated that I'd need to add wood here, bend particle board there, etc.

I took it to the cliff, near that telephone pole, and released it into the updraft. It went pretty much straight down, a few feet in front of my feet. I rushed back to the house to tweak this, chop that. I made three or four such round trips. I delighted in observing how my adjustments were improving the plane (Frankenplane, albeit).

The updraft at the cliff was steady. I held Frankenplane over my head with one arm and began a gentle motion forward to establish some momentum while helping the plane find its balance in the updraft. As much it could be called "flying," the plane flew. While prior attempts had invariably resulted in nose dives just ahead of me, this time, it didn't dive. Now, understand that my recent tweaks of the plane were never designed get this thing to *hover*. No! I was merely trying to solve the immediate problem, that of a plane nose-diving into the slope.

So, congrats to me, the nose was up. The plane was now flying parallel to the slope and picking up speed. The limit of my brilliance became instantly clear. It was irrelevant whether I was able to get the nose up a little or get it up a lot: the whole time, I had been directing this thing toward traffic. My wooden creation was now heading swiftly toward lane #2.

I now watched helplessly with sheer panic in my gut, the plane now about 2/3 of the way down the long slope. I suspect I made several heartfelt and every-last-cellfelt pleas of God at that moment. He was kind to answer in a way that I approved of. The plane lowered from two feet off the slope to a foot, then finally skimmed along to a stop on the slope, about 10 feet from the traffic. I rushed down the hillside with thankfulness bursting out all over, fetched Frankenplane and made my way immediately home where I tore up the plane. I didn't try that again. (Other brilliant ideas came along to keep me busy.)

I remember that story every once in a while. A story of momentum. A story of momentum of my making. A story of thoughtless momentum of my making. GASP--I could have trashed some car, something that was never in my mind at the start. How is it that I never considered the range of space between the distant lot and the nose-dive slope surface? I was spared of consequences.