Trafford Publishing: My Left Mag' is Out: From the Golden Age to the Space Age

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My Left Mag' is Out: From the Golden Age to the Space Age

by E.R. Wilson

318 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0176; ISBN 1-55212-776-1; US$29.00, C$32.95, EUR24.00, £16.50

A collection of excerpts from the career of a professional aircraft maintenance man.

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About the Book

Aviation's evolution could not have flourished without the technical support provided by thousands of men, and now women, who have gone before and are still to come. They have transcended the generic title of 'mechanic' and matured into truly masterful technicians. My Left Mag' is Out is not intended as a primer of aircraft and engine maintenance. The work will publicize to the flying public that there is life beyond the passenger gates and airport ramps where skilled technicians support aircrafts and arouse memories of incidents in the careers of other maintenance technicians.
The author's maintenance career began when two biplanes chased two frightened boys across a field into the shelter of trees, seven years after Lindbergh's flight to Paris. His goal to be in aviation continues through the thirties and his enlistment in the Air Corps, where the airplanes were. Scrubbing engine parts in a cleaning shed, overhauling engines and maintaining aircraft; the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war years; post-war work at maintaining transports on the Korean Airlift followed by years of maintenance on aircrafts used for various purposes; private flying, commercial transports, research and corporate use. Finally, in structural engineering and consultant. The author was also a commercial pilot.
My Left Mag' is Out has appeal to all who are interested in aviation, now, or have been, involved or are contemplating a career in aviation.
*SPECIAL OFFER* send Earle a proof of purchase of his book My Left Mag' Is Out and you will receive an Aviation Maintenance Technician Log for the cost of mailing (actual value is $14.95).

About the Author

E.R. Wilson ... born in Charleston, West Virginia raised in the hill country of West Virginia and Western Maryland during the Golden Age of Aviation in the thirties. Veteran of World War II and survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan, he graduated from the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics with an A&E (now A&P) mechanics license. Earned an Inspection Authorization endorsement and a Commercial Pilot License. 43 years in Aircraft Maintenance and engineering he was also a consultant with two commuter/feeder airlines. He later became a free-lance writer and attended Colorado State University. Father of three boys and one girl. One son is a pilot flying corporate jet aircraft. Enjoys the outdoors and fishing and is an accomplished fly-fisherman.

Sample Excerpt - from Chapter One

After more than fifty-years, the recollections of those two airplanes flashing overhead seem like the start of a film that had recorded the memories, still riffling through my mind like wind on water.
That first scene may be a little out of focus, but the images of those two biplanes that were a part of it, still remain sharp. If there were any doubts in my young mind that a career in aviation was in the future, they were completely erased that day in the drum of throaty exhausts of radial engines and an astonishing sight: Real airplanes flying, literally, within a small boy's stone's throw.
The day when my aviation career began to germinate was in the tenth summer of my life.
My mother had ordered me to go pick dewberries, a groundhugging version of blackberries. She canned dewberries for an occasional delicious pie, a wonderfully delectable deliverance from our bland Great Depression diet. Hash, navy beans, eggs, salt pork, now and then a Sunday roast chicken, and fresh or home-canned vegetables from the garden were our staples. Like thousands and thousands of other families in that depressed era, practicing frugality was a way of life.
My father was steadily employed as a composing room foreman at the Donora, Pennsylvania, Herald-American newspaper but was paid only about one-quarter of his salary.
His take home pay was just enough to buy bare essentials and pay the light and cooking-gas bill. Employees in today's job market who object to accepting part-pay to keep a business solvent should not feel intimidated; it was common practice during the Depression.
Welfare, as it's known today, was practically nonexistent. At school, kids were given a half-pint of milk to supplement their homemade brownbag lunches; that was the extent of social benefits. My brother Dave and I dug coal from an abandoned mine for the heating stoves; one might say it was a bootleg operation, but we stayed warmⁱⁱ. In retrospect I've often marveled that aviation got off to such an impressive start considering the distressing years of the Depression.
Obediently responding to my mother's order, I found my close chum, Chuck, took two buckets, and off we trudged through a wood-land to a large, open field where we knew the berries were plentiful and ripe.
On our hands and knees, under a brilliant afternoon sun, we busily picked dewberries. Overhead the garter-blue sky was sprinkled with globules of fair-weather cumulus clouds lazing, eastward under the halfhearted insistence of a light breeze.
Except for a far-off husky, metallic murmur that didn't mean anything to our senses at the time, there were the usual summer sounds: Raspy insect cries clashing with the woodnotes of birds, all competing with the strident clannish quarreling of crows in the woods we had just walked to reach the field. It was a typically lazy, latesummer day. But that odd metallic droning was beginning to creep into our senses and youthful chatter. It was getting louder and taking on a steady pronounced beat. Almost like a farmer's tractor powering a threshing machine with rhythmic insistence.
Curious about the unusual sound, I raised on my knees and searched the horizon. Two biplanes were flying low over the ground in a northerly direction. They disappeared behind a line of trees and reappeared at the north end of our berry field.
Their gleaming wings flashing insolently, they abruptly banked sharply and, losing altitude what little they had flew toward us. Displaying infinite skill the pilots stopped their aircrafts' descent, and with their wheels barely clearing the waist-high grass and low, scanty shrubs the airplanes bore down on us.
Foolishly we stood to get a better view, transfixed, speechless in awe and admiration. How privileged we were to witness such a display of those magnificent machines' we only read about or saw in pictures. It was not only my first encounter with airplanes, but here were two flying at us, getting closer and closer by the second. Closer! That suddenly became a horrifying realization and had to be dealt with immediately.
As they thundered toward us, our fascination rapidly changed to consternation and then fear. Abruptly we realized we could be chopped into very small pieces by the scintillating, deadly discs of the propellers. At the very least, if we were lucky, the huge, black tires would send us tumbling through the grass and berry vines. On the other hand, we could be decapitated by the thin outreach of the wings' leading edges. Seconds were flying by and the airplanes were just yards away.
Speechless with fear, we plunged as one into the questionable shelter of berry vines, grass, weeds and sparse shrubs, striving to burrow into the unyielding earth. I never thought of confronting a snake face-to-face, but worried briefly about spilling the berries. The consequences if I went home empty handed or with a paltry quantity of berries, to face my mother, would be grievous.
Our bodies quivered from the reverberations of exhausts and the dry scream of propellers as the two biplanes rumbled over us. With an awful whoosh of disturbed air and the slap of propeller wash, they pulled up and banked nearly perpendicular; we could see the pilots grinning evilly at two frightened boys groveling desperately against the ground. They were wearing helmets and goggles just like in pictures!
It looked like they were wheeling around to make another run at us. That's when an innate sense of survival surged into our senses: This wasn't right, it said. The instinct also said airplanes and trees weren't compatible and like animals that intuitively seek cover from danger, we jumped up and ran for the safety the edge of the woods offered, about three-hundred yards away. Cave people probably did the same when pterodactyls haunted the skies during the Mesozoic Epoch.
Behind us across the field the two biplanes pivoted on their wing tips and dove at us again, one behind the other. For the remainder of our perilous retreat to the trees we alternately crawled and ran in abject fear. Finally, breathless and bleeding from tiny scratches caused by berry vines, weeds, grass and bushes, we reached that leafy haven and security. The planes broke off the exercise in aerial harassment and disappeared toward a small town nearby. How we managed not to spill our berries I'll never know. It would have been difficult to appease my mother if we had.
To this day the make of the aircraft remains a mystery, but my mind's eye can still see the effortless maneuvering of the two biplanes; the bright yellow of their wings and fuselages with slender bands of black trim. There remain visions of the two pilots in leather helmets and jackets; the goggles; hearing the shattering, dynamic blare of engine exhausts. In spite of the fear that gripped me during the lowlevel chase, the dazzling experience only whetted my budding appetite for more of anything that was a part of aviation.
ⁱⁱMy brother David served with 358 (H) Squadron, 303 Group (H), Eighth Air Force as top turret gunner/engineer. His B-17 was shot down during a raid on Schweinfurt, Germany. He was fatally wounded.

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