House of Pain: New and Selected Essays

No More Immelmans

N O M O R E I M M E L M A N S In the photograph,Tom Cruise has his arm around Randy.He’s grown a beard and left it untrimmed,and he wears sunglasses and a bandanna tied around his long hair. Even so, it’s impossible to mistake him for anyone else.That smile.Tom is short,but Randy is shorter.Tom is thin. Randy is stocky and wears his dark blue flight suit and a straw hat, and they’re both laughing. Not just laughing. They’re laughing hard. I know about that laugh.You come down from those flights so pumped up, physically, mentally, yes, even spiritually. And everybody laughs like that, with the airplane tabernacled in the hangar, still hot, almost a living thing among us. We crack open a few beers like some latterday fighter squadron of hell-bent irregulars, and inevitably someone says, “Cheated the devil again, eh?” Yes (that laugh seems to say), we went up and stole something and got away scot-free. Behind them: Tom’s Pitts S-B. It’s a white biplane with red trim in a kind of reverse Marion Cole paint job. We’ve all seen them at air shows, pulling snap-rolls on takeoff, flying upside-down close to the ground, or doing crazy tumbling maneuvers that seem impossible for a craft that demands to be pulled through the air nose-first in order to stay aloft at all. Randy taught Tom to fly it. And in one just like it he taught me,too.Randy had been my teacher for a year or more when I heard that Cruise had come into the fold. The next year Randy was teaching Harrison Ford to fly his new Christen Husky. Randy’s students included Patrick Swayze, Treat Williams, and Tony Bill, the producer who took an Academy Award for The Sting. Tony and I flew the same Pitts S-B in competition, NAB, Randy’s plane. Although Randy acquired a small stable of celebrity students, nothing really changed. He had the same cramped office at Van Nuys  Airport just north of Los Angeles. The same clutter. During pre- and post-flight briefings, Randy would sit behind his desk, chain-smoking Marlboros with true pilot style, grinning as if to say,“Yep. I’m on fire, and I don’t even mind it.”I had come to know his furtive outlaw comportment , those sidelong, surreptitious glances, as he lit his cigarettes with hands cupped against a wind that no longer blew. A habit from his barnstorming gypsy days of sleeping in the wheat fields. From the first, I could see something in his eyes, a shadow beyond the laugh. I could see Randy running from something. He laughed a lot, and I laughed with him. But he followed each laugh with a stolen look, as if he knew that something was gaining on him. What was Randy going away from at such a furious clip? October , , Randy Gagne was killed on an aerobatics training flightwithhisstudent,aSouthwestAirlinespilotnamedHeidi Cayouette. They dove straight into the ground at a terminal velocity in excess of  miles an hour.I loved Randy.The news of his death sucked the wind out of me. It wasn’t even so much that Randy and I were friends. I knew his wife,Sheree,butIhadneverbeentotheirhouse.Ourlifewasinthecockpit . In many ways, my relationship with Randy was deeper than most friendships, because I trusted my life to him every time we met. We all liked to be around him. He filled spaces in our lives that we didn’t know we had. When the phone would ring, sometimes he’d bark,“Right rudder!” Pause. He’d cover the phone and explain to me: “Whatever the question is, the answer is probably right rudder.” American airplanes tend to spin to the left. Applying the right rudder causes them to recover. People die because they press the wrong pedal. It never entered my mind that it could happen to me. We sat in his office, and he told me through a cloud of smoke that he had begun counting in  and found that an average of six pilots a year died in this sport. I started flying aerobatics in  and have found Randy’s figures to be accurate.“But a lot of them have just had it stamped on their forehead—“ and here Randy lifted his fist from the desk to his forehead as if with a rubber...