Hawkeye’s Squawkbox

Wings

by David Sakrison

On July 30^th 1992 I took my FAA Private Pilot Check Ride and passed it on the first try. Training for that flight had taken me two years. Along the way, I’d acquired and finally shed the universal “student’s death grip” on the control yoke, and I’d faced the most common emergency known to student pilots—a runaway Hobbs meter. (The Hobbs meter measures aircraft time and thus the cost of each flight.)

My final exam had been delayed by a summer of fickle weather and by publishing deadlines that kept me off the flight line. But I made it. I was at last an FAA Licensed Airman—a privilege I had aspired to for as long as I could remember.

I had one more flight test to pass, this one self-imposed.

On a bright CAVU (Ceilings and Visibility Unlimited) Saturday morning in mid-September, I took off in the flying club’s two-place Cessna 150 for Madison, Wisconsin — 60 air miles from my home field in Ripon — to give my father an airplane ride. That trip had been postponed for several weekends running, due to more fickle weather, and I took off with a combination of excitement, impatience, and a little apprehension.

Not long out of college and newly married, Robert Sakrison joined the United States Army Air Corps in 1942. He completed Primary Pilot Training at the head of his class and requested assignment to Troop Carrier Command. He finished advanced training and transitioned into C-47’s, the military version of the DC-3 airliner. He received high marks in flight training and when his class got their orders, he found himself heading back in Texas to teach other Army Air Force pilots to fly the C-47.

In the spring of 1944, he received orders to fly to England, to join the 93^rd Troop Carrier Squadron and the Invasion of Europe. With a full crew and a planeload of supplies, he piloted a C-47 to Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, and Burtonwood, England. Three weeks after D-Day, he was dropping paratroops, hauling supplies, and towing gliders over occupied France and Belgium.

For the next 11 months, he was very much in the thick of it — the Breakout at St. Lo, “The Bulge” at Bastogne on Christmas Day, and the spearhead for the Crossing of the Rhine. During “Operation Market Garden,” the Airborne Invasion of Holland, he and the other members of his squadron flew four or five glider missions a day and, he would later say, “we could have walked home on the flak.” (“Flak” is ground-based anti-aircraft gunfire.)

Years later, at a 93^rd Squadron reunion, his mates described him to me as a very skilled and very brave pilot. He had once mentioned to his squadron leader that he seemed to be flying a disproportionate share of “hot” missions. “I’m sorry, Sak,” the CO told him, “that’s where I need my best pilots.”

After the war, Dad ferried home a C-46 Commando, collected his “Ruptured Duck” (Honorable Discharge Pin) and returned to Wisconsin to work in the family business. Aside from a few joy rides in a friend’s Bonanza, he gave up flying — but not his love of flying.

I grew up on his stories and recollections. What I remember best is that they centered not on war and combat but on the airplanes he flew and on the skills and personalities of the men who flew with him. To me, his deep affection for the C-47 and C-46, and his love of the act and art of flying, were always self-evident.

I thought about all that as the Cessna 150 droned lazily toward Madison. From the day I first climbed into the left seat, passing the FAA Check Ride and getting my Private ticket was a definite goal, but it was only a station along the way. Today, I would be flying with my Dad, the C-47 Driver, the US Army Air Force Instructor Pilot, and this was the check ride that mattered most to me.

He didn’t know that. To him, this was just a joy ride, his first in a long, long time. In his mind, I had already graduated into the Fraternity of Pilots. With only 100 hours in my logbook, I still had a lot to learn, and we both knew it. But he was flying today for the simple joy of it. I made up my mind to do the same.

At an unfamiliar airport, with a crosswind, my approach and landing were acceptable but not pretty. The flight with my Dad went well and we both enjoyed it. Back on the ground, he gave me some tips on landing pattern work, sketching out a diagram on my flight plan. And for a moment, I saw him as his Army Air Force students must have known him — as a young, confident, and very capable Army Air Force Instructor Pilot.

About mid-afternoon after giving rides to my brother and sister, my family headed for their cars and I started preparing for the flight home.

I had topped off the tanks and was preflighting the airplane when my stepmother’s car pulled up to the airport fence. Dad got out and started walking across the ramp. I thought perhaps he had left something in the airplane but a quick check of the cockpit gave no clues, so I walked out to meet him.

As we met he said, “I have something to give you.” Then he opened his hand and gave me his silver Army Air Force Wings.

You could have run me over with the airport tractor and I wouldn’t have noticed it. The entire universe was suddenly just two guys — father and son — standing silently together on a small airport in the late afternoon.

He said, “There are 900 hours of C-47 time on these wings. I want you to wear them.” We put our arms around each other for a moment and then he turned and walked back to the car while I finished my preparations for takeoff.

The flight home alone was very, very sweet.

* * *

I hold them now in my hand. — Sterling silver, nearly four inches across, heavy, weighty with the heroism and sacrifice and extraordinary deeds of ordinary young men.

It took me a few weeks to pin them on my leather flight jacket. The day I passed my FAA check ride, I pinned on a different pair of AAF wings. That pair was a reproduction of the wings Dad wore — that he earned. They were smaller and they didn’t shine as brightly; and that seemed right.

Wearing his wings for the first time, I worried obsessively that I might lose them and I checked every ten seconds or so to be sure they were still there. I finally relaxed; after all, these wings have seen far more hazardous duty than I will ever put them through.

I wore them under my suit coat, close to my heart on the day we buried my father, less than a year after our flight. I have worn them on my flight jacket since then.

I wear them out of love for him and for the men of his squadron who meant so much to him all his life. I wear them in gratitude to the Fates for granting us our one brief flight together.

And I proudly tell anyone who asks,

“These are my Dad’s,” and

“There are 900 hours of C-47 time on these Wings!”

Thanks for all of it, Dad. I guess I passed the check ride.