WAR

On this day he had just taken off when his engine conked out. He was too
low to turn back, too low to try to pick a spot to land. He instantly put her nose
down to maintain flying speed, but since he had just taken off he was dangerously
low, and since he had put her nose down he was getting lower. An orchard lay
ahead; there was no sound but the whistling of the wind in the wires. The S.E.
went through some telephone lines bordering the orchard, shredding them like
spider webs, effectively severing all telephonic contact between Ayr and the rest
of the world, knocked the chimney pots off a farm house and went on down
into the orchard, tearing the wings off and shearing the branches from the trees.
At the up-wind end of a trail of splinters sat the only two parts left intact,
that part of the fuselage in which Vaughn was sitting, and Vaughn, who climbed
out without a scratch. "The S.E. had that great big long nose sticking out in
front to take the shock," he recalls. "You could run it into almost anything and
get away with it."
Vaughn.
Any landing you
can walk away from is
a good landing.