62 FlightJournal.com
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left and virtually no wind.
After we were done with the shooting, Gene
said, “Go ahead and fly it.” So I did, even though
I had zero instruments and less-than-zero
visibility ahead. I could see the little (repeat,
little) runway at Rhinebeck, so I started to set
up on downwind for him to make the landing.
When we were abeam of the end of the runway, I
said, “It’s your airplane” and closed the throttle.
He responds, “No, it’s not. You’ve got it.”
Smart ass! I got on base leg and said, “You’ve
got it!”
He again said, “No, I don’t. You’re landing it.”
He and I had flown together
before, so he knew that I had
something like 5,000 hours of
tailwheel time. But I had no air-
speed indicator, and once I turned
final, I wouldn’t even be able to see
the airport, much less the runway.
And to make matters worse, that
end of the runway goes down the
side of a steep hill, with trees on
both sides. You have to drop into
the tree-defined canyon and follow
the hill down to land at the bottom
or you’ll overshoot the runway.
Yeeow! Fortunately, a Stampe is
the very soul of docility, and I took
advantage of that.
I curved onto final in a hard (and
I mean hard) slip so that I could
see the edge of the trees outlining
the end of the runway and get that
kite coming down. But I didn’t have
any idea how fast we were going.
In the back of my mind, I thought
he was going to hit the power and
take us around. But he didn’t, and
as I leveled out over the runway
(which I couldn’t see) and watched
the runway edge on the left, we
floated and floated. We were fast.
So we floated some more. I kept
thinking that he’d hit the power.
I yelled “Hey!”
He replied, “You’ll make it.”
Then I felt the welcome feeling
of the sod talking to my butt
through the wheels. We were down.
As I blasted it around into the
parking spot, I said, “Do you want
to make it two out of three?”
He said, “No!”
I grinned.Shooting air-to-air at Old Rhinebeck was always
a kick because of the airplanes and the pilots’
ability to fly them. For a camera plane, we were
using a Stampe SV.4 biplane. Gene DeMarco, now
general manager for The Vintage Aviator in New
Zealand, was in the back doing the flying, and I
was in the front. They had been working on the
airplane, and the entire instrument panel was
gone (keep this in mind for later). There were
no seat cushions, so I was sitting really low.
The little entry door on the left side had been
removed, so I was down in a hole from which I
had good visibility of the subject airplane on theThe Fun Was on Landing