I noticed the lights of the towns beneath me getting dimmer. I looked up. The stars were gone. I looked down again. The lights had disappeared! I was flying blind in a thick fog. I began to fly by instruments. I pulled up. At 3,000 feet I saw the stars. I was on top of the fog.
I swung around to go back to Hadley Field. Its lights were covered. I saw the lights of what I figured was New Brunswick. I started circling them. I knew Hadley Field was only a few miles from there. The lights of New Brunswick began to blot out. Hey, what the hell! I said out loud to myself.
I saw a segment of the rotating beam of a beacon break through a hole in the fog and make about a quarter of a turn in the darkness before it disappeared. That’s the beam from Hadley beacon! I was saying all my thoughts out loud now. I flew over to where I figured the center of the beam was and started circling. The top of the fog looked pretty bright there. I decided that Hadley had heard me and had turned on its floodlights.
I eased back on my throttle, settled into a spiraling glide, and sank down into the fog, flying by instruments. The opaque white fog got more and more luminous. Individual bright spots, greatly blurred, began to appear. I figured they were the boundary lights of the field. My altimeter read very low. I broke through the bottom of the fog at about two hundred feet. I was over Hadley. I flew low into the blackness back of the field and came around and landed.
“What the hell are you flying in this stuff for?” the Hadley weather man asked me.
“Because I was damned fool enough to take Bellefonte’s weather report seriously,” I said.
When I was in Cleveland at the air races a couple of years ago four so-called flyers asked me to fly with them in their Bellanca to the Sky Harbor airport near Chicago. I agreed. We took off after the last race with just enough gas to make the field nicely. We hit a head wind, but I still figured we were okay. I didn’t know where the field was, but one of the girls in the plane had been taking instruction at Sky Harbor and the other three claimed that they had lived in Chicago all their lives and knew Sky Harbor as well as their own mother.
When we got to Chicago it was already dark. I followed instructions. We flew north. Someone yelled I should turn east. I turned east. Someone else shouted that was all wrong, we were already too far east. I turned west. The next fifteen minutes were bedlam. "_East, north, west, and south,"_ they yelled. I lost my temper. "_Do you or do you not know where this field is?"_ I exploded. "_There it is!"_ they chorused. I heaved a sigh of relief and got ready to land. It wasn’t the field. I looked at my gas, and my gas was too low. I took matters into my own hands and flew back to the municipal airport and gassed up. We started out again. The situation started to strike me as funny as soon as the tanks were full. I let them have their fun, and eventually they did find the field. I called back to the girl who had been taking instruction and asked if there were any obstructions around the field. “Absolutely not!” she vowed. I looked the field over as carefully as I could. There were no floodlights (they had also told me the field was well lighted). I cut the gun and glided in for a landing. A high-tension post whizzed by my left ear. We had missed the wires by just two inches. And there were no obstructions around the field!