Contrails: Looking for Bubba

By Steve Weaver

He was, way country. I was a West Virginia country boy too, back there in the late ‘60s when I met Bubba, but this guy was light years ahead me. He exuded the aura of his mountaineer heritage, and you could hear his roots in his speech and see ancient times in his countenance.   

In age, he was a few years beyond my own late 20s when I met him. He had been raised by his grandparents on a mountainside farm, where the folds of the Appalachians first rise up out of the foothills of Central West Virginia and begin their march to the Piedmonts.

He had enlisted in the service after high school, more to have a job than as a career choice. In those opportunity-starved years, the old West Virginia saw of ‘coal mines, moonshine or movin’ on down the line’ applied to almost every boy unable to go on to college after high school. And so Bubba moved on, into the blue uniform of the U.S. Air Force, and after basic training was stationed at a Strategic Missile site in North Dakota.

The three years of cold loneliness at that forsaken outpost made the mountainside farm in West Virginia seem to Bubba warm and sociable by comparison, and so while thus employed, he decided two things. He wanted to learn to fly, and he never wanted to leave West Virginia again.

After being mustered out and returning home, Bubba, true to his word found an instructor near his home who would teach him to fly. This on the installment plan too, which the meager salary he was earning post Air Force required.

The instructor came in the personage of a crusty WWII flyer we’ll call Joe. Joe had returned to his native West Virginia and built an airport on his family’s farm, after spending the war years teaching basic flying to Army Air Corps students in Texas. 

As a basic instructor, Joe had no equal. He would pound the mastery of the flying machine into his students until the airplane became an extension of their own bodies, and they flew like the birds fly. Stalls, spins, forced landings and exactly coordinated flight were part of every lesson; no slips or skids allowed thank you. As their hours built up, they progressed in flying skill far beyond the average student at the same point and Bubba was no exception. At 10 hours, Bubba was flying the Aeronca Champ like a pro.

I always wondered how Joe got his Stearman back home to West Virginia. He had purchased it surplus in San Antonio with his mustering out pay at the war’s end, and it was very apparent by this time that Joe regarded cross-country as alien territory. Having spent his entire flying career in the same cubic mile of Texas airspace, he was very suspicious of traveling out of sight of the airport. In all the years that I knew him, I never heard of him going beyond a 40-mile radius of his airport, other than the obligatory cross-country that he had to give his students. He gave the mandatory dual 90-mile cross-country, always to the same destination and only with great reservation and trepidation, which of course his students picked up on.

As is often the case with flight instruction, the student turns out very much like the instructor, absorbing and displaying the good and the not so good methods, habits and attitudes of the teacher. Most of Joe’s students turned out to be very good on the stick and very uncomfortable when the airport disappeared behind them. Bubba was no exception.

The very nomenclature of “Cross Country” inspired fear of the unknown in Joe’s students. The house they grew up in would become sinister and foreign if it was involved in the route of their “Cross Country.” It was almost as if Bubba and most of Joe’s flying students expected not to return from these flights, and the hours that Bubba accumulated in his logbook seemed to be no cure for this. His fear of getting lost became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he never quite mastered the art of going directly from one place to another in an airplane without landing somewhere unknown for reorientation and further directions.

This part of flying haunted Bubba his entire career. Watching him, even years later as an experienced aviator, you could see that each time he sallied forth to embark on that great and mysterious region known as “Cross Country,” he did so as if “Monsters be here” was printed on the edge of his sectional as it was on the maps of ancient seafarers.

But Bubba finally earned his Private License, and by that time, he had decided that he wanted to make flying his career. His VA benefits would cover the cost of his Commercial, Instrument and Flight Instructor tickets, and he enrolled in such a course offered by a large flight school in the Midwest.

He disappeared from our view for a few months, but soon he was home with the newly inked ratings in his pocket. The world of aviation was now Bubba’s oyster, but he needed experience to flesh out his ratings. The “Help Wanted” section of Trade-A-Plane was examined in detail each time his latest copy of the Yellow Sheet arrived, and in a couple of months, he had located the perfect job. It seemed that down in Texas there was a crop dusting/spraying outfit that needed qualified pilots. Qualified in this case meant young, desperate and minimum time pilots that no one else would hire. It meant pilots who would gladly come to the plains of Texas and fly PA-18A Super Cubs for starvation wages and live in a dormitory with similar wretches’ in exchange for experience that would always live in their logbook. Bubba was the perfect candidate. He called them and was hired over the phone, pending personal interview.

Once again, Bubba disappeared from our view. It was summer, I was busy, and I hadn’t thought of him for a while, but one day, a couple of months after he had left for Texas, he showed up at the airport. He seemed reluctant to discuss the reason he wasn’t down in Texas killing bugs, and I didn’t press him, but after a while the story slowly unfolded.

The job had been great, he said. The Super Cub was easy to fly once you got accustomed to flying it with a full load of chemicals, and Bubba’s skill with the nuts and bolts of flying an airplane had served him well. The fields were big and flat and there was nothing to hit and the job was going well.

Then one morning, Bubba’s boss handed him a map with an X marked on it. This would be a little different mission he said. Instead of working the big field with the trucks close by and located a minute’s flying time from take off, he would take one load over and meet his flagger at a small field about 15 miles away, which was marked by the X on the chart, dump the load and return. Uh oh, I was thinking, this does not bode well.

Thirty minutes after takeoff, Bubba was as about as lost as he had ever been, and this was impressive, considering the experience he had at being lost. He was at 500 feet peering gloomily over the edge of the cockpit, searching for anything that matched something, anything, on his map, when the F100 streaked under him at 400 knots or so. Something about an Air Force gunnery range in the area popped to the front of his cerebellum and Bubba headed for the deck. He leveled out at about 50 feet over the plains, his head rotating like a Gatling gun as he frantically tried to get a glimpse of the next fighter that was going to swallow him like Jonah’s whale.

He had the stick in the death grip of his right hand, the throttle firewalled and equally squeezed by his left hand and he was looking frantically back over his right shoulder when he flew into the ground doing about 100 knots.

He didn’t get a scratch.