Free Flight of Passage: A True Story by Rinker Buck Page A

the problems of the world all by ourselves. In the meantime, everybody cheats.”
    “Rink, everybody cheats!”
    So, that’s how we handled it. As soon as we got in from school every night, we built a fire in the woodstove and raced a fast relay through my books. Kern was a Latin and bio whiz, so he did that. Geometry was the only math I ever understood or liked, so that was mine. First year French was a joke because I had lied to Father Sean about my grammar school background, and in fact I had already taken three years of it, so “Frog” usually only took about fifteen minutes. In freshman English we read novels like Moby Dick , but Cliffs Notes boiled those nine oceangoing gams down to one page. History I loved and read in the morning on the bus. Religion was total bullshit and we ignored it.
    And cheating was beautiful, intellectual nirvana, the only way to get an education. For the two semesters that we worked on the plane, when Kern did most of my homework, I got straight As in all of my courses and my class ranking shot right up into the low teens. Father Adrian, the dean of studies, couldn’t get over the way I had “turned the corner” over the Christmas holidays. Most nights we were done with my homework in less than an hour and by seven o’clock Kern and I were cheerfully attacking a new repair on the plane.
    Kern was determined to perform a “mint” restoration on our plane, not only because he was Kern and always approached a project that way, meticulously, with precocious attention to detail. He understood a lot better than I did the battering the plane would receive in the brutal desert and mountain flying conditions we faced out west, and he didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
    Quite beyond this, Kern was in love with Piper Cubs in general and our Cub in particular. By the mid-1960s, Cubs were already considered a classic aircraft, as beloved as the venerable DC-3 cargo-hauler or the Stearman biplane. Cubs were just about the last tailwheel planes available in large numbers to pilots like us, a last living link to the romantic, seat-of-the-pants flying style of the barnstorming era. Our Cub was Piper’s PA-11 model, identical to the classic J-3 trainer that dated back to the 1930s except for a slightly larger engine. The registration number, painted on the side of the fuselage in large red letters, was N4971H. Around the Basking Ridge strip, where the Cub had been based for the last ten years, she was affectionately known as “71-Hotel.” The Basking Ridge pilots had always considered 71-Hotel a special plane, what was known then as a “hot Cub.” The cylinders had been bored out for extra horsepower, the wing struts beefed up, and 71-Hotel had a custom, low-pitch “climb prop.” Eddie Mahler had used 71-Hotel for Cub Comedy Acts at airshows early in his career, and she could out-perform any two-seater for miles around, even Super-Cubs with 150-horse engines. All of this meant a lot more to Kern than to me. No expense would be spared toward turning 71-Hotel into “the perfect Cub.”
    In January, one of the first repairs we made was the shock system on the landing gear. The shocks on a Piper Cub are simple in design. The right and left gear are braced together by an X-shaped steel structure, in the middle of which is a flexible armature wrapped tightly with rubber bungee cords. As the plane rolls over bumps, the bungees expand and retract, giving enough play for rough strips or hard landings.
    No flyer we knew bothered to replace bungees on a Cub. The mechanics out at Basking Ridge were even against it. The only thing new bungees did, they said, was make a Cub bounce too high when a student pilot landed hard. On most of the Cubs we’d flown, the bungee shocks were as rancid and lifeless as a dead cat.
    Not 71-Hotel, of course. On the day assigned to landing gear, Kern swung our platform-jack underneath the engine-mounts and lifted the Cub wheels off the floor. Our parts source was Van