Horizons Past And Present—Peter Egan

The big trip has been part of my well-ordered existence lately. Perhaps because it is, or just was depending on where you are, summer. Or maybe it’s been simple restlessness. But whatever the reason, my first was when my hangar partner and I headed over the horizon in our biplanes—he has an Acrosport single-seater and I my oft-mentioned Starduster Too. The destination was a tiny gathering of biplane drivers hundreds of miles away at a mutual friend’s house. A private fly-in if you will.

It was a fabulous trip. Better, in fact, than I had hoped. Like camping, nothing really happened other than getting through the normal daily activities of shelter, food, and plenty of hangar flying. But there was real flying, too, with local hops to breakfast and down the river. There was also some cross-pollination as I got to fly a PT-19. Of course there was also the trip up and back, no small thing as in my hangar mate’s and in my case this amounted to 9 hours of open-cockpit cruising over mountains, deserts, and the Sierra Nevada foothills. Plenty of “I’m over the east end of the big lake, where are you?” on the radio, too. We even picked up another participant biplane along the way, so for a hundred miles we were a flight of three. Six wings and three pilots; not something even I do every day.

And while we were winging north, biplane guru Dave Baxter was headed south from his Oregon haunt. Sporting along in his single-seat Starduster, Dave appeared in NorCal looking far fresher and less fazed by the heat than his 83 years would suggest. Dave makes the rest of us look perilously soft.

In short, it was a lightly challenging change from our local routine and many lessons learned and relearned. Finding each other after taking off from the same airport is one of the more surprising problems. Differences in aircraft performance and fiddling inside the cockpit with engine management play big parts in getting separated. Rejoining takes clear radio communication so scratchy, short-range reception and wind noise were not welcome. Ultimately meeting up at unmistakable landmarks is a good plan B.

There was a California-to-Colorado truck trip just after the biplane jaunt, plus the AirVenture pilgrimage and other constitutionals, but as they involved ground or commercial transport they can be dismissed from our topic of longish journeys in our own airplanes.

But there was another such trip this summer, albeit not my own and actually dating from 1987. However, it was in some ways still personal for me and I thought you might find it interesting as well. Which you can do because it’s all in a new book published by the Octane Press.

Landings in America is the title of Peter Egan’s new 350-page account of taking a lap of the U.S. in a J-3 Cub. Yes, that Peter Egan and if Peter Egan is familiar to you, then welcome paisano and no further introduction is necessary. If not, then the tagline below Peter’s name on the cover of Landings in America gives a good clue. It says, “America’s favorite automotive and motorcycle writer.”

You’ll need to forgive my previous career in the automotive scribbling sphere haunting us here at KITPLANES, but Peter Egan was simply the dean of column and feature writing at Road & Track where I once played on the junior varsity team, and especially Cycle World where his love of all things two-wheeled has made him a legend of communication. The storyteller’s storyteller, Peter’s engaged descriptions of the human condition via its transportation devices is unexcelled and always a treat to read.

More forgiveness may also be necessary here as Peter’s trip was in a certified airplane—the aforementioned J-3—but I’ll quickly add the primitive nature, small size, and antique performance of the Cub mimic many of the more modest Experimentals covered in these august pages. If the bureaucracy of Peter’s mount is outside KITPLANES’ purview, the low and slow spirit of his journey is most certainly not.

And it was a low and slow journey, seeing how the starter motor on my Starduster could likely approximate the performance of Peter’s tired 65-hp Cub. A recently trained private pilot, as was his wife, Barbara, Peter’s plan was to see the U.S. from 1000 feet and well away from the towered airports and metropolises. Similar to his staggeringly numerous motorcycle and car travels, Peter’s Landings in America is about sampling the quiet backbone of our country and especially the people there. And so he and Barbara set off from Corona, California, east to Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, then up the Atlantic seaboard to Pennsylvania. Now headed west, they passed through the Ohio valley and round the corner to Wisconsin where they lingered in Peter’s ancestral—and current—home. In deference to the Cub’s meager altitude performance, they swung southwesterly through the plains until once again reaching western Texas and retracing their path home to Corona along Interstate 10. The trip took six weeks.

Along the way Peter took 110 pages of notes with the intention of writing a “straight-ahead memoir, a road trip of the air.” But sating the pent-up demands of two major motorsport publications upon his return pushed the book to the back burner. “I just can’t write seven days a week. I need to take one day off to rest my eyes and take a motorcycle ride.”

Instead, “Every year I did another paragraph,” says Peter. Sort of like some slow builds we’ve all heard of.

Now more retired than meeting deadlines, Peter recently returned to the long-slumbering project, finishing it off with helpful encouragement from friends and a happy joining with the Octane Press. It’s not a flying book, really. Yes, there are passages any pilot who’s pushed outside the local area can relate to, but really the book is a story of the people—friends, family, and newly found friends—met along the way. Paul Poberezny is credited with saying it’s all about the people, but Peter Egan has lived that ethos through the lens of motorized travel; his native, finely honed ability to tell the character of a place and its inhabitants rolls along like the march of a minute hand or a cross-country Cub. Nothing dramatic seems to happen right away, but scenes and history and vignettes roll out continuously across the pages until you find yourself across a continent and wondering what’s over the next hill. Or page.

Thanks to our minuscule numbers, Landings is not written for an aviation audience, so there are explanations of “taildragger” and other background fabric KITPLANES readers would take for granted. What aviation immediacy Peter may have lost to his lay audience is made up by his human portraits and succinct summations. On joining the Piper Cub reunion at Lock Haven Peter had this to say: “It was like being an Eskimo in New York City and suddenly finding yourself in a bar full of Eskimos. Too weird to be true.”

Or his description of a Pitcairn Autogyro unexpectedly appearing at a fuel stop: “A gigantic praying mantis about to attack the airport. It was a mutant creature out of a fifties sci-fi thriller, probably the result of too much radiation from an H-bomb test on a tropical island in the Pacific…a prehistoric helicopter, really, half open-cockpit monoplane and half Dutch windmill.”

The 38 years between Peter’s flight and Landings hitting print have not dulled the experience. Now both a travelogue and memoir, the poignancy of those so clearly illustrated and now passed lends a depth not possible had it been published as soon as the Cub swung into its Corona tie-down.

Personally the book is full of people from my former life on four wheels, so maybe I have a soft spot here. But it’s also a soft spot to strap back into the Starduster and see what’s over those hills, and that’s a good thing while one still can.