An Airplane in the Hay

SCOTTSDALE An Airplane in the Hay

If you look carefully, you can see the site just north of Scottsdale Community College, near the baseball diamond and adjacent to the great green alfalfa fields on the Salt River PimaMaricopa Indian Community. Thousands of cars a day fly past the area on State Route 101 without noticing the six sun shelters and the bladed gravel that mark the Scottsdale model-airplane airport. It is a strange little emplacement populated by ardent modelairplane folks every weekend, when their colorful aircraft fill the blue sky. One of the good moments of fatherhood for me was when I bought my son Colin a remote-control airplane six years ago, and we spent two years assembling the thing, getting help when we could from guys at the airport. It is a red and blue and white plane with a 4-foot wingspan and a little gas engine that whines until your hair stands up. We finished construction when Colin was in high school, after dozens of Sundays in our garage, gluing this, adjusting that. He's a scrupulous kid, and we got it all just right. We joined the Scottsdale model-airplane club, and the day that plane took flight was quite a day for us. Two years ago, Colin went to college. He's in Boulder, Colorado, and loves it there. This year, he came home for a week, and we stole the last afternoon of his visit to dust off the plane and have an adventure. To reach the airport of the Scottsdale Model Flyers, you drive through the far parking lot and slip onto a gravel road that runs along the cotton field there and through the community garden plots, and then you come to the gate for the airport and the combination lock on the gate. Remembering the combination was a clear pleasure. We had the airport to ourselves. Flying the airplane, we've learned, is an enterprise full of checkpoints. We had the rubber bands to attach the wing. We had the glowplug and the plane and the controller charged. We had our tools and tape. We had the battery and the starter. The runway is bordered by an orange safety fence. They've erected six large frames with canvas roofs for shade, and the preflight area is covered with yards and yards of old carpet to keep the dust down. We had a cooler with bottles of water, and we had our baseball caps. The plane started on the first crank, and Colin ran the rpms up and then down. What you try to do is listen to the high whine, and you try to adjust the fuel feed so that it doesn't run too lean or too rich. Colin has a good ear for this, and he is fussy about getting it right. I was thrilled that the thing was roaring, and I watched his adjustments with interest. Then the plane died and would not start. We removed the glowplug (the tiny sparkplug the size of a pencil eraser), and saw that it was burned out. In the toolbucket, we have a plastic jar full of all sort of tiny parts, and Colin said to me, "Look at this." He held it up and I saw that the superglue bottle had leaked. All the parts in the jar were glued into a strange and useless block. "It's a paperweight now," he said. But, a few pieces were loose, and one of those parts was our extra glowplug. It was wonderful to be so lucky. While we worked, we could hear the aluminum bats pinging west of us on the baseball field where they were practicing. Colin screwed the new plug into the top of the engine, and we were again good to go. We attached the wing, and Colin got the engine rpms where he wanted them. Then we had that sweet moment when the plane crept forward in the dirt, and Colin turned it with the controller and it began to roll down the runway and suddenly, sweetly into the air. It was beautiful there in the back edge of the campus, nothing in the world but the alfalfa fields and the blue sky and our red and blue and white airplane. Colin said, "I remember why I like this so much." Like all guys his age, he has amazing eye-hand coordination (video games), and he flew the plane low and high, in loops and turns, upside down and straight up. At one point he handed the controller to me, and I turned the plane once to the right and handed the damn thing back to him in, I guess, 10 seconds. He landed the plane perfectly, taxied over, and we refueled it. Ten minutes later, way out over the farm fields, the plane banked and we heard the engine quit. It wasn't particularly worrisome because Colin can glide it very well, and the plane drifted slowly toward us in a soft and steady decline. A few seconds later, it disappeared in the alfalfa field across from the airstrip. Colin said, "I'll get it," and he took off running, long strides. He's 6-foot-2. I made a mistake by going to the car to get some water, and I lost the sight line. When I joined him in the alfalfa field, we could not find the plane. The field was 10 or 12 acres, and the deep green alfalfa plants were all over knee-high. We tried to walk carefully through the crop. I retrieved a stool from the airfield and we stood on that. Nothing. We searched for two hours in the heat of the day. Dispirited and cooked, we packed up and drove home. There we lay on the cool floor and drank water. "What do you want to do?" I asked him. We had lost the plane and were trying to be logical. "Let's go back before dark and look again." I called my friend Scott. He had a 10-foot ladder that I wanted to take with us. Back in the green hayfield, Colin and I carried the ladder into the last daylight. I held it, and he climbed way up there and scanned the area. "I should be able to see it," he said. We set it up four more times around the field. I went across