Barefoot Boy
By Gordon Baxter
September 1998
 As a barefoot boy with cheek, I would stand beside the airport fence and watch the mighty DC-3 airliners come boring in from far-away places and land with a chirp and a puff of smoke and taxi up to the gate. And I would look at those cool heroes way up high in the nose and wonder how they could do it. And now in my middling years, having landed many lovely Cessnas (if you can drive you can fly) and floated to grass in Cubs, and even come down bareback astride snorting Stearmans, I still marvel at those heroes sitting way out there in the nose who can gently land tons of airplane with the wheels way back there behind them feeling for the cement. I have always wondered, how can they do it? Could I do that? What a great thing it must be.
And so it came to pass that I was deadheading home one dark night in a Fairchild F-27 of the executive configuration. In its airline suit the F-27 is a great goose of an airplane, high of wing, long of leg, twin Rolls turboprops, and about 40 people at about 40,000 pounds.
This F-27 has seats for about half that many within its paneled compartments. Each seat a reclining, swivel throne attended by stereo, monogrammed lap robes, playing cards and napkins, and 12-year-old scotch. The captain is a wise old bird with miles of skies behind his eyes about whom legends have sprung up: that when he rings his cowbell over the mike certain Texas towers automatically give him clearances and terminal forecasts.
I was fast asleep on a soft lounge, barefooted and weary, when the last VIP deplaned and the captain invited me to the flight deck for the home base leg. It was the copilot who stood up while I, murmuring very small protests, sunk into the deep leather of the right seat and curled my bare toes over the broad cool rudder pedals. To my sleep-fogged mind the instrument panel seemed to come over the top of my head and looked like the Las Vegas Strip on New Year's night. Lots of bright, squirrely lights, but no message.
We roared away on takeoff and in a climbing turn over the pitch-black forest the captain said, "You got it."
Rather than disturb a professional airplane at its work, I just pretended to fly. The Fairchild, that great honest stable long-necked high-tailed goose of a Fairchild, just kept at its business, a normal climb and turn. A regular Eagle Scout of an airplane. As altitude and heading came up I apologetically rolled it into level cruise, and was rewarded with a bonus balloon of an extra thousand feet of altitude. The thing was bubbling with lift.
As we approached home plate, which is about a 3,000-foot gash in the piney woods, the captain told me to descend to pattern altitude and set up a 180-degree overhead approach. It looked awfully black and bottomless down there, but I employed all my great skill as an eight-hour instrument student and started let-down, listening for the scrape of tree limbs. But by the time we had rolled through the turns and woke up the forest creatures for miles around, I was starting to enjoy myself. It flew just like an airplane.
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