The Cannibal Queen (50 page)
The wind is out of the southwest at four or five knots and a gentle rain is falling. I make a fair landing.
If only I had a little more practice I could get good at landings. Really. All I need is some confidence, and a little practice would give me some. I need to get out to the airport and do a couple dozen landings. Maybe this Saturday.
I shut her down by the hangar and am wiping the oil off her nose and belly when the mechanics come out and welcome me home. Together we look the
Queen
over and poke this and prod that.
She’s in good shape. I think she’ll fly another 49 years, at least. Perhaps someday one of my grandchildren will use the
Cannibal Queen
for a Stearman summer. That’s certainly one of the infinite number of possibilities.
After I get my gear unloaded and we get the
Queen
inside, out of the misting rain, I take the time to inspect the little plane I acquired in April, a Breezy.
The Breezy is a homebuilt yet it doesn’t look like you expect an airplane to look. Most airplanes you sit in, this one you sit on. It has no fuselage, merely a triangular-cross-section framework of welded tubular steel. On this framework hang conventional wings and a tail. Power is provided by a 140-HP pusher engine. The pilot and passenger sit in tandem in front of the wings and engine, out there in front of everything, on seats bolted to the framework. There is no canopy, no windshield, no fuselage, no cockpit. But it flies!
The Breezy looks like what you might get if an ultralight had carnal knowledge of the
Cannibal
Queen.
This one was constructed in 1972 by a high school welding teacher, probably with the help of his students. It was never flown enough, however—a mere two hundred hours in nineteen years—and neglect and corrosion have taken their toll. We’re restoring it—overhauling the engine, replacing corroded tubing, re-covering the wings with new fabric, and so on. When it’s finished in a month or two it’ll be better than new.
And I’ll get to fly it first!
It’ll be a kick. I’ll be sitting on that chair out in front of the whole shebang with a stick and throttle and rudder and darn near nothing else, my nose splitting the breeze. I’ll be grinning so much my teeth will get splattered with bugs.
I’m going to need a name for it, something catchy.
Maybe next summer I’ll fly it around the country. Or to Oshkosh. Or West Virginia. Or …
But that will be another story.
Stephen Coonts is a
New York Times
bestselling author of twenty-eight thriller, suspense, and nonfiction titles, including the blockbuster techno-thriller
The Intruders
(1994).
Born in 1946, Coonts grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coalmining town in the western foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. His father, Gilbert, was a lawyer and his mother, Violet, was a schoolteacher and painter. He attended college at West Virginia University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1968. Following graduation, he joined the Navy and moved to Pensacola, Florida, to begin flight training at the age of twenty-two. He was stationed on the USS
Enterprise
for two combat cruises in the final years of the Vietnam War and flew an A-6 Intruder attack plane, an aircraft featured in many of his early novels. After completing a tour aboard the USS
Nimitz
, Coonts left active duty with an honorable discharge in 1977, having achieved the rank of lieutenant.
Coonts then moved to Colorado and worked as a taxi driver and police officer before enrolling in law school at the University of Colorado. He practiced law throughout his thirties while still enjoying his greatest hobby: aviation. In 1986, he published his highly successful debut,
The Flight of the Intruder
, which spent twenty-eight weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list.
Coonts’s debut borrows heavily from his own experiences as a combat pilot, and the novel is rich in the technical details of aviation and warfare. Nine of Coonts’s subsequent thrillers star pilot Jake Grafton, the hero of
The Flight of the Intruder
, beginning with
Final Flight
(1988). Many of them have also appeared on the
New York Times
bestseller list. Through the course of the books Jake Grafton flies combat missions in the Gulf War and later becomes a CIA agent. He matches up against Soviet spies, terrorists, and, in
Under Siege
(1990), Colombian drug lords. In
The Intruders
(1994), Coonts delivers a sequel to his wildly popular debut, returning to Grafton’s last missions as a pilot in the Vietnam War.
Aside from the Jake Grafton books, Coonts has penned a number of successful series and stand-alone titles. Many of his recent novels feature Tommy Carmellini, a Jake Grafton protégé. Coonts has also branched out into science fiction with
Saucer
(2002), and has cowritten a series of high-tech espionage thrillers starting with
Deep Black
(2003). His nonfiction writing includes
The Cannibal Queen
(1992), a travelogue of Coonts’s summer spent crisscrossing the continental U.S. in a WWII-era biplane, often with his teenage son David as a companion.
Coonts currently lives in Colorado. He has four children: Rachel, his oldest child, works as a paralegal; Lara, his second oldest, is married and has two kids of her own; David, a software engineer with Lockheed Martin, is now married with three children; and Tyler, Coonts’s youngest son, who works for a marketing firm in Las Vegas. Coonts still resides part-time in West Virginia on Deer Creek Farm, where he does much of his writing.
Stephen Paul Coonts around one year old, in his hometown of Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coalmining town in the western foothills of the Allegheny Mountains.
Gilbert (“Gib”) and Violet Coonts with a nine-month-old Stephen. Violet, a school teacher and artist, is five months pregnant with Coonts’s brother John.
Coonts and his brother John, sitting on their grandparents’ stoop in Elkins, West Virginia, about 1952.
Coonts’ school photo from age nine or ten. The photo was taken at a profile because he had a black eye from fighting on the playground.
Coonts sitting atop Mount Evans in Colorado, June 1985.
Coonts in front of his hangar in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993.
Coonts flying his Breezy in Boulder, Colorado, in 1992. An experimental plane, this Breezy was constructed in 1971 in Nebraska. Steve purchased it in 1991 and spent a year rebuilding it from the frame out.
