Planes for Pleasure

Between world wars, when Douglas Bader was a cocky, teen-age R.A.F. cadet, the planes he flew were as perky as their pilot. Light wood, fabric and singing wire, they could bounce to a landing on some farmer's field as handily as they touched down on military runways. Flat-hatting across the countryside with his face in the slipstream, a man could navigate by eye and the nearest railroad track and fly by the seat of his pants.

Just for the fun of it one bright December morning in 1931, Pilot Officer Bader decided to buzz the officers' club at Woodley Aerodrome near Reading, rolled into the turf, and lost both legs as a result of the crash. But after eight difficult years spent learning to move skillfully on a pair of artificial legs, he was back in the R.A.F. as a fighter pilot, and during World War II Squadron Leader Bader personally accounted for 22 1/2-German planes. His career became a British legend, faithfully recorded in Paul Brickhill's biography, Reach for the Sky (TIME, Aug. 2). Today, at 45, as adviser for flight operations for Shell Petroleum Co., Ltd., Group Captain Bader must do some of his traveling in commercial airliners--and for all their comfort, he does not like them.

Gay Abandon. Last week Bader was in the midst of a U.S.-Canada inspection tour. While in Ottawa, he met some of his Battle-of-Britain buddies at the Royal Canadian Flying Clubs' Association. As old flyers will, he got to reminiscing about the old days when aviation was still a sport.

What he missed most, said Bader, was "the gay abandon of the prewar days, with a little clubhouse and a field with light airplanes on it, people having tea under sunshades, and all that pleasant peaceful scene." Flying then was "something exciting and different, and we all wanted to go up in an airplane. It was of course a two-seater, open-cockpit.job . . . Our ardor might have been damped if our first experience of flying was sitting in a pressurized tube looking out of a small side window with 40 other people . . . There is far more exhilaration, fun and impression of speed in the open cockpit of a Tiger Moth doing 80 m.p.h. in and out of the valleys and hills made by cumulus clouds on a summer day."

Buttons Marked Moscow. "It is, I think, essential that the fun of flying be kept alive, and it is only through flying clubs that this can be done. The cheap, light airplane in which the youngster can fly around the field, and when he gets a bit better take his girl friend up too, must remain with us . . . We must keep the airplane for pleasure, for an afternoon's fun which does not need two or three thousand yards of runway, control towers and controls, and all the paper work that makes life so intolerable these days for the private aviator. Give me a field with a circle in the middle, and let us still enjoy those things which have almost disappeared with the biplane and the open cockpit."

As long as airplanes need a human pilot, Bader concluded, there ought to be planes around that are small enough to teach those pilots what it really is to fly. "In the jet age of the future, we may get planes without humans." Then, said the old fighter pilot sadly, no one will need to fly. "We can all sit in the basement pressing buttons marked Moscow."

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