Golden/Slay Airplane

Chester Slay was probably my best friend in the elementary school period, although I ran with a pretty large crowd.

Somehow Chester and I got fixated on building an airplane - well, a glider. We must have been about 9 or 10. We did this at his house.

We started with a lightweight crate used to deliver produce to grocery stores. We tacked a couple of boards onto the sides of the crate to serve as wings and hung a rudimentary tail structure onto the arbitrarily chosen back end.

We built a ramp out of a couple of 2 X 4s that ran down from the picnic table, reached almost to the ground where it was balanced on a stump, made a 90 degree turn upward and ran over a saw horse. The idea was that the pilot would sit in the ‘airplane’ and the mechanic would push the assembly off the picnic table onto the ramp where the contraption would pick up speed on the downslope, magically turn the 90 degree corner and launch into the air. With no flight controls we decided that the pilot would use weight shift to direct the flight path. Good enough for the Wrights, good enough for us.

The magic ingredient to make all of this work was butter. Butter on the ramp and butter on the bottom of the crate. Butter would eliminate all of the friction!

We washed a bunch of empty soft drink bottles, loaded them into Chester’s wagon, hauled them to a small grocery about 4 blocks away, exchanged the bottles for the deposit money and used that money to buy a box of butter.

Four sticks of butter did not really coat the ramp and the crate bottom very well, but so what, we were ready to fly.

Chester somehow got the ‘right’ to be the test pilot. so he loaded into the crate atop the picnic table and I got behind to push. We needed more butter. In lieu of more butter, we slid the contraption somewhat onto the ramp and Chester reboarded. This time when I pushed, it moved. It moved just far enough to tilt downward on the ramp an cause the ramp, the crate, the wings, the tail and Chester to crash to the ground. He must have been resilient because I don’t recall a medical emergency.

We abandoned the glider in lieu of building a helicopter at my house. We just needed a lawn mower engine to power it.

It is great that imagination powers kids’ dreams.