Turquoise Lament

Excerpt from "Turquoise Lament" by John D. McDonald © 1973


13


SUNDAY morining was crisp and bright, but so windless the smog was going to build up quickly.  Coop flew me over to the Sarasota-Brandenton Airport in his little red-and-white BD-4.  It is a very happy and responsive four-place, high-wing ship.  It is comfortable, reasonably quiet, and cruises at a hundred and seventy miles an hour on its hundred and eighty horses.

Coop is always ecstatic at the chance to fly me anywhere in the state.  I buy the gas and pay the landing fees.  He can't charge for the flight or his services because he built his airplane from a kit.  The FAA classifies it as an Experimental Amateur Built airplane.  Coop paid $7200 for the kit.  He is one of five or six hundred people who fly planes made from the same kit.  He put in twenty hours a week for forty weeks, and the FAA, who had been looking over his shoulder as he built it, watched him climb into it and fly it, and gave it an airworthiness certificate.  There is nothing about it he doesn't maintain perfectly, and nothing about it he can't fix.

I always forget his square name until I see it behind the glassine on the instrument panel.  Pelham Whittaker.  He is know as Coop because he looks astonishingly like Gary Cooper until he either talks or stands up.  He has a fast high-pitched voice.  And he is about five foot five.  He teaches in the adult-education program in the high school at night, so he can fly his BD-4 in the daytime.  His wife teaches in junior high in the daytime, so she won't have to go flying with him.

He is a very careful, fussy pilot.  They are the best kind.      . . . . . . . . . . . . . .