1945 to 2003, Illinois

By Sue-Ellen Davison

The obituary column in United Airlines’ magazine for retirees was titled “Flown West.” That annoyed my father, a retired pilot. He said he was going to “fly east” just to be contrary.

According to his flight log (Volume I of VIII), he gave me my first airplane ride on April 23, 1950, when I was eight weeks old, in a Cessna-140. We took off from the family farm west of Minonk, Illinois, and landed where we’d started.

I’ve since been told that he expected me to exhibit some sign of enthusiasm and was disappointed when I fell asleep on taxi-out and snoozed through what should have been the most thrilling 55 minutes of my brief life. I was probably just quietly biding my time, waiting for him to invite me to take the controls.

When my father completed his first solo flight in 1945, he earned the right to wear the U.S. Army Air Corps cadet wings. When I soloed 34 years later, he had those wings made into a necklace and mailed them to me along with the following letter:

Dear Sue-Ellen,

Back in the really big war, this insignia was worn on the uniform collar by all aviation cadets. At primary flight school, however, it was put away and did not again appear on your uniform until you had soloed.

Each night at retreat (a required evening formation), you’d look around to see who had the collar insignia on again – even though it was usually obvious by the smile and puffed-out chest.

Of course, the sad part was that some never got to put it on again, and the formation dwindled a bit.

Anyway – here’s a memento of a proud moment in my life, passed along in recognition of an equal one in yours!

Happy landings,

Father

While my father, Harry Davison, served in the Army Air Corps, his elder brother, John, flew for the Navy, and their dad worked the family farm alone, a job all three men had shared before “the boys” enlisted.

I imagine Grandpa plowing and planting with the song, “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree),” playing in his head. When the boys came home, he bought them an airplane, built a hangar, and turned a perfectly profitable crop field into a landing strip, hoping that it would hold them there.

It held my father for five years, until he went to work for United in 1952. He retired in 1984 as a DC-10 captain and, six years after that, bored with land life, bought a little geriatric white-and-yellow Cessna-150 that he called BG, short for Bottom Gun.

Meanwhile, John stayed on the farm, upgraded airplanes occasionally, and flew as often as possible, nearly till the end of his days.

My own years of flying were brief and small-scale. I earned my commercial, instrument and multiengine ratings, and I flew small planes, mostly for fun. Occasionally, I carried a paying passenger to some remote spot lacking a major airport.

I dabbled in ultralight aircraft for a time. Ultimately, and only because I was that relative rarity – a woman pilot – I got to do a little work for NASA in its studies of space sickness and the neurophysiological effects of weightlessness.

You might assume that my father and I bonded in our mutual love of flight, but that’s not exactly what happened.

When, at age 4, I announced that I wanted to be a pilot, he told me that I couldn’t because only boys could fly airplanes. Years later, when I asked him to help me pay for flying lessons, he declined. The cadet wings and the letter will forever hold a top spot among my treasures, but they weren’t to be taken as a sign that he was enthused about my flying.

When United Airlines started hiring women pilots in the 1970s, he was adamantly opposed. We are, after all, talking about a man who believed that women should be prohibited from driving cars. In addition to the gender issue, I think that he may have been concerned that I might inadvertently kill myself.

My father celebrated his 70th birthday in 1994. I flew to Chicago for the occasion, making the trip not as pilot but as airline passenger. By then, my life had changed dramatically, several times over, and I hadn’t piloted a plane in 11 years. At the birthday dinner, Father’s brother John proposed that we meet him the next morning at a fly-in pancake breakfast in Lostant, Illinois.

So the next day, Father and I strapped ourselves into BG. It would be the only time he and I would share a cockpit, and while we had no way of knowing it on that tranquil, azure morning, it would be a milestone flight, the end of days aloft for both of us.

It quickly became apparent why he called the plane Bottom Gun. During taxi-out, he said, “Don’t be alarmed when we eat up the entire runway trying to get off the ground. She always does that. Doesn’t have much pep.”

We lumbered down the bumpy grass field. The engine sounded OK, but at full throttle, BG wasn’t gaining the normal speed. As she labored to become airborne, I worked at remaining perfectly calm. At the last feasible moment, with just a few yards of airstrip remaining, BG unenthusiastically hefted herself some inches off the ground, hesitated, and then began ponderously dragging herself up to 2,500 feet.

I had just relaxed into enjoying the ride when Father said the words I would have welcomed years earlier: You wanna fly? I took the controls and soon saw just how rusty my flying skills had become. I tried to quickly refamiliarize myself with the instrument panel and figure out which, if any, of BG’s instruments were actually operative: about half.

I so very much wanted to be a hot pilot in my father’s eyes, but it had been too long since I’d flown. My old sure-handed precision was shot, my control sloppy. I don’t think he thought a thing of it. I don’t believe that it would have occurred to him that a woman could do any better.

The fly-in breakfast was scheduled to start at 7 a.m. Since pilots are nothing if not punctual, approximately 80 private planes converged on a small patch of uncontrolled airspace above a grass strip on the Illinois flatlands a few minutes before 7. They looked like gnats swarming above the grass as we approached.

Father said, “I’ll fly.”

I replied, “I’ll spot traffic,” and I found myself spotting planes faster than I could call them out. “Aircraft at ten o’clock.”

Father said, “I don’t see it. High or low?”

“Level,” I replied. “More aircraft at eleven o’clock low, two o’clock low, two o’clock high, three o’clock level, one o’clock high, twelve o’clock level….”

“I don’t see it. I don’t see it,” he kept saying, even as he maintained his unshakable calm and his resonantly deep captain’s voice.

“I won’t let us hit anything,” I assured him as I continued scanning the air, left and right, high and low, rattling off sightings like an auctioneer.

Banking BG into the traffic pattern, Father keyed the mike, radioing our position, “Cessna eight-two-five-zero Foxtrot, turning downwind.”

We heard a static-riddled report from a plane just ahead of us, “Mooney niner-two-eight-eight Charlie, turning base.”

“That’s John,” my father said.

I marveled that in all that tangle of air traffic, the two brothers had arrived, one from the south, the other from the northeast, and fallen in one right behind the other. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed that their minds seemed to work in tandem.

We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, all we could eat, at long tables on that cool August morning. Although he never showed it, I’m sure that my father was rattled by the abrupt realization that his vision was failing. I suspect that he knew right then what he was going to do. Three days later, he put BG up for sale.

Our departure from Lostant was far less chaotic than our arrival. We climbed out, again right on John’s tail, banking smartly to the northeast as John flew straight south with a jaunty wiggle of gleaming wings to signal “Goodbye.”

The two brothers died on April 9, John in 1998 and Harry in 2003.

Harry flew east.

Sue-Ellen Davison lives in La Salle, Illinois, and writes and edits communication materials for large and small businesses. She was recently published in Writer Profits: How I Got the Gig, edited by Susan M. Carter.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 | Email This Post

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