“Planes,” a memoir by Dave Moores

 

When the rubber motor goes splat and shreds the fuselage to muffled sniggers from your mates, you know you’ve overdone it. Hang on, you say, who ever heard of a motor made of rubber, and what’s a fuselage, hello?

Let’s back up. The Downs in Bristol, England, the town where I grew up, is a wide grassy expanse, bordered on three sides by elegant Victorian residences. The southern boundary overlooks the cliffs of the Avon Gorge which is spanned by the landmark Clifton Suspension Bridge. An avenue called Ladies’ mile crosses the Downs and the ladies of Clifton rode horseback there in the Jane Austen era. I picture Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennett side-saddle on docile chestnut mares. A century later, “Ladies Mile” had a less genteel connotation. Ladies of the night plied their trade there in the depression times, but we’re getting off-track here.

The Downs remains an unparalleled blessing to the city.  People fly kites, go for a run, dogs chase around, and soccer is played during the winter season. In my youth, schoolboys and adults alike gathered on Sunday mornings to fly model planes.

Most of these balsa wood and tissue creations had a propeller upfront, driven by what is best described as the mother of all rubber bands hooked to a peg at the rear end of the fuselage, hence the term “rubber motor”. You wound it up by turning the prop with your finger, or if you were into this stuff big time, you’d wind the motor with a hand drill. Overwind and it would go splat with strands of brown rubber and bits of your plane flying everywhere.

An interest in things that flew came, I reckon, from my Dad. An artist at heart, he’d served as an engineering draftsman in the Royal Air Force during World War 2. A memory that has stayed with me is cycling with Dad up the Gloucester Road in  Bristol to Filton Aerodrome, north of the city, to witness the first flight of what was then the largest aircraft ever built, the Bristol Brabazon.

This monster was intended as a luxury transatlantic airliner. The magnitude of the occasion gripped me. The deep drone of the plane’s eight engines shook the air, and me as well, as the Brabazon accelerated down the specially-built runway. Would it fly? Could something that huge take to the air? It could and did, to cheers and sighs of relief, a moment I never forgot. I was seven years old.

Here’s another of those moments. Following my stint at university, my teenage sweetheart and I married and my first job turned out to be with British Aerospace, right back there at Filton where “the Brab” as Bristolians named it, had left its mark on my  juvenile mind years before.

In a gigantic assembly building down a slope from the office where I worked as a trainee project planner, the prototype Concorde supersonic airliner was taking shape to the stutter of rivet guns. On lunch breaks, along with Brian and Sid, a couple of co-workers, I’d wander down the hill to take a look. 

The year was 1969, the moonshot was in final preparation and this felt like Britain’s aerospace equivalent, pushing boundaries in the same electrifying way. Came the big day.  Everybody was invited to leave their desks and watch the maiden flight. The Concorde, moving gingerly like a slender white bird, stalked to the end of the runway and made a careful turn. Minutes passed, the spectators grew restless, was something amiss?

The rising whine of turbines silenced our speculations. The Concorde rolled forward and gathered speed. I swear nobody breathed. With a rumble of crackling thunder, it raised its nose and took to the air, orange flames winking in the four jet pipes, a moment to remember.

Back to The Downs, more modest dreams of flight, and rubber motors. “The Model Airport”, a shop downtown, sold model airplane kits. A couple of weeks’ pocket money would buy one. It contained plans, balsa wood sticks and balsa sheets on which were printed the shapes of wing ribs, bulkheads and such, which you’d have to cut out with a very sharp, pointy knife. It was a good idea to have bandages handy for this step.

The plans got unfolded and laid on a board so that wings, fuselage sides and other parts could be constructed by pinning spars, ribs and frames over the plans and sticking them together with heady-smelling balsa glue. Once assembled, the frames got covered with model plane tissue, painted with cellulose dope, and the model was ready to have its motor and propellor installed and be carted off to The Downs in hopes it would fly.

Rubber motor wound, you’d stand for a couple of seconds facing into the wind, getting up your nerve, then release the propellor which made a fluttery sound like a flock of birds as your plane climbed away to face the elements. No radio-control of course, you hoped you’d trimmed it to climb and circle. Some models did and some didn’t. You pretty quickly learned basic aerodynamics, fine-tuning the thrust line, centre-of-gravity, wing and tailplane angles-of-incidence and more besides. Failure to do so resulted in unfortunate contact with the ground.

We made gliders as well, towed into the air like a kite and then released. One of mine caught a thermal and flew away for good.  Jetex engines arrived at The Model Airport, little rocket motors burning solid fuel-pellets. They made an awful-smelling exhaust that came out with a hiss like an angry snake. A fifteen-second engine-run would send a small model whizzing about doing loops close to the ground so people’d have to duck.

There was something about model planes that took hold of us as kids, and as young men too. Soon, we’d be designing our own, no more kits. It became a friendly competition to see who could produce the coolest flying machine on The Downs next Sunday. Watching your model climb into the air for the first time and circle above, in the knowledge that you’d constructed this with the care and skill of your own hands and brain, felt special. Perhaps, in some small way, special like those first flights at Filton Aerodrome. Is that a stretch? Maybe, maybe not.

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Dave Moores has a couple of novels out there, Attitude (YA) and Windward Legs (commercial fiction) published on Amazon in the last couple of years by Middleroad Publishers of Toronto. Several of his short pieces have appeared in the online journal CommuterLit. He's a strong believer in one of Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules for Writers: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. He enjoys playing with language but will jump through hoops to avoid prolixity. Dave is retired from a career in information technology and lives in Oakville, Ontario.

 See Brian Henry’s upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and weekend retreats here.