Tri-Pacer

Piper Tri-Pacer.

The other day (Monday, September 12, 2011) a Piper (“PIPE-rrr”) Tri-Pacer flew over our house.
In 1955, at the age of 11, yrs trly took his first flight. It was in a Piper Tri-Pacer (see above), a tricycle landing-gear version of the Piper Pacer, a tail-dragger.
The Pacer was Piper’s first four-passenger airplane. —The Piper Cub could only carry two.
At that time, middle ‘50s, Piper and Cessna (“SESS-nuh”) were at war with each other, trying to make private aviation the next big thing for the middle-class.
There’s just one problem.
Airplane crashes are usually fatal. Car-crashes not necessarily.
Beyond that if an airplane cripples it falls out of the sky and crashes.
If a car cripples, you just pull over and call Triple-A.
Flying is much more involved and dangerous.
-A) You have to be aware of terrain and radio antennas, so you don’t crash into them, and
-B) You have to watch out for the other guy; you can’t just look straight ahead.
They can come at you from all sides, including above and below.
Hit someone and you both crash and die.
Fly blind, like through a cloud, and things get really complicated.
You depend on your instruments to keep level — there’s no road to do it for you.
And you have to depend on others far away to keep you from clobbering other planes.
Nevertheless both Piper and Cessna thought private aviation was the next big thing.
They tried their mightiest.
With Piper, as I recall, the trick was to make flying much like driving.
Rudder controls were integrated with the control-yoke, which was much like an automotive steering-wheel.
An airplane has three systems to control flight: pitch, yaw and roll.
Rudder-pedals control a tail rudder, the yaw, left-or-right.
Pitch and roll can be controlled by a control-yoke.
Pulling it back or pushing it forward controlled pitch, up or down.
Turning it left or right activated ailerons (“ail-er-ONS;” as in “Ron”) toward the wing-ends, to bank the airplane left or right.
Turning an airplane involved both roll and yaw. You had to bank the airplane and apply rudder.
You didn’t bank a car. You just steered left or right.
Piper’s trick was to integrate rudder-action into your yoke-banking.
So you weren’t using rudder-pedals to turn.
(If I have that right.......)
It was like driving a car.
Well, sorta.
Flying an airplane is not like driving a car.
And then there’s take-off and landing, both of which involved pitch control.
The pavement isn’t setting pitch for you.
It’s tilt able horizontal control surfaces, usually on the airplane’s tail.
Take-off isn’t much trouble, just throttle up the engine and accelerate down the runway until the plane becomes airborne.
Landing is a monster.
My younger brother in northern Delaware long ago had his pilot’s license; his father-in-law and he owned a small private plane, a Piper Cherokee.
Lots of things can go wrong in your landing.
A gust of wind can throw off your approach.
Your airplane has to kinda drop gently onto the runway; you can’t just slam into it.
If you did, your airplane might bounce and flip.
Every time my brother landed his plane, it was “WHEW! Did it again.”
Beyond that you also have to use flaps.
The flaps help slow your airplane, which you’re flying so slow ya need to enhance wing-lift, which flaps do.
How much flap you apply is a judgment call. Imagine Granny doing this: “Oh my golly! We’re approaching too fast. Go any slower and my wings might stall.” (No lift.) “Oh my golly!”
Lotsa times ya see private pilots practicing take-off and landing, touch-and-goes. Touch the runway as if landing, and immediately take off, so as to go around and try again.
The original Piper Cub used a vertical control-stick, not a steering-wheel like control yoke.
A Cub only seated two; the Pacer (and Tri-Pacer) could seat four.
An airplane was rated for how much weight it could carry, and a Cub could only carry two persons.
The weight had to also be properly distributed — improper balance could imbalance the airplane.
A tail-dragger was another incredible challenge — you had to be at the right pitch to gently drop it onto the ground (land). This pitch was nose-up; not the same as flying.
Cessna’s competition also went to tricycle landing-gear, but I don’t think they tried integration of rudder-control into the banking function.
Tricycle landing-gear negated the tail-dragger pitch-angle landing requirement.
With tricycle gear ya landed at the same angle ya flew at.
We flew out of Echelon Airport, long abandoned, a small private airport in south Jersey about 10-15 miles from where we lived.
Echelon Airport eventually became Echelon Mall, which apparently also failed and became Voorhees (“Vor-HEEZ;” as in “or”) Town Center, a giant shopping mall like many private airports became. (Voorhees is a township in south Jersey.)
Ray Hylan Airport, a small private airport southeast of Rochester, became MarketPlace Mall.
Small private airports like Echelon and Hylan had the land needed to develop a mall with its giant parking-lot.
And Echelon kept the name. “Echelon” is an aviation term, but it was Echelon mall.
The only reference to Hylan is in the name of a road through the area.
My flight was a thrill. I did it at least twice, probably three times, ’55, ’56. and ’57.
Each flight cost $5 for 15 minutes. Do that now and it might cost $50-$100.
I had saved the $5 from my allowance, and remember my sister rode along.
Which means I still say my sister owes me, since it was my $5, and she rode along free.
I remember protesting mightily, but my father declared me reprehensible.
All I remember is my sister was riding along free on my nickel. I felt that was unfair then, but that was long ago.
Echelon was apparently a Piper franchise, selling Piper airplanes.
No way in a million years was my father gonna buy a Tri-Pacer.
Our pilot was apparently the owner of the airport.
I was the copilot, and my sister and my father sat in the back.
The pilot let me fly the plane once we got to 1,000 feet altitude — that is, work the control-yoke. I doubt I could reach the rudder pedals, but as far as I knew, that didn’t matter. (Rudder-pedal integration.....)
I flew toward our neighborhood, and then wagged the wings over our house, the international indication to anyone below watching.
I had the plane level, but we kept climbing. We climbed to 1,200 feet.
The pilot had me do the landing approach, hook around, and then down to about 400 feet.
Then he took over and landed the plane.
I was thrilled! He let me fly the plane, sorta.
Back home I drew up an entire Tri-Pacer instrument panel, so I could fly the Tri-Pacer on my bed.
I got catalogs from both Piper and Cessna, and also Beechcraft, now apparently merged with Hawker.
I subscribed to Flying Magazine.
1957 would have been my last flight. Our family moved to northern Delaware at the end of that year.
I never got my pilot’s license.
Flying still stokes a sense-of-wonder; even in an airliner.
As I’ve said before: “The sun always shines at 35,000 feet!”

• We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield, southeast of Rochester, NY.