e cheapen words unmercifully and ruin them. If we call a home run "awesome," what can we call a tornado? If an ordinary can of Coca-Cola is a "classic," what name can we hang on the Piper Cub?

Well, by God, the Cub is a classic. It is old and survives because its virtues are undiminished by age. It is a notable work in a sound tradition. It has inspired generations of students, teachers, admirers and imitators. Its name resonates for anyone with even the slightest knowledge of its kind.

Every actor wants to play Hamlet or Lady Macbeth, and every pilot wants to fly the Cub. Not every actor wants to make a career out of playing Shakespeare, of course, and most pilots want to fly a variety of planes. But both actors and pilots know that those who match themselves against the classics come away richer.

The classics enrich us in more ways than one. They form the core of our culture, aesthetically and morally; they teach us structure; they furnish touchstones for comparison; and they are delightful to perform or to witness. The humble Cub, designed to be the simplest of airplanes, succeeds in all these roles.

Cultural core: Memory, both personal and collective, is the essential enabler of culture.

I was a little boy, just finished with second grade, at the end of World War II. All through the war, along with everyone else, I soaked up aviation lore, and could identify any of the Allied or Axis warplanes by its silhouette. My cousin Bob was a B-24 pilot. A neighbor boy was killed flying as a gunner on a bomber. We knew about Chennault and his Flying Tigers, Doolittle and his raiders. The Sunday funny papers had Terry and the Pirates, Smilin' Jack, and Buz Sawyer, hotshot pilots all.

Then there was one last airplane, Enola Gay, and they all came home. And here my memories of the Piper Cub begin.

When the boys came home, a lot of them knew how to fly. They had a few dollars, too; times were good as the country retooled for peace. And for a few short years, there were plenty of good, cheap airplanes.

During 1946 and into 1947, Piper churned out new yellow J-3 Cubs as fast as ferry pilots could fly them away to their buyers. They were cheap: $1595, cash or terms, and you were king of your own two-seat airline. There were plenty of cars that cost more. If you couldn't come up with the money, you could rent a Cub for maybe five bucks an hour, gas included.

In my family, the most begged-for treat was "a ride in the car." Remember, this was in a time and place (the late Forties in Chicago) when you didn't need a car to go to the store, when a kid with a bicycle didn't need a chauffeur to get to the movies, when workers commuted by train, streetcar, or bus. The word carpool had not been coined. So for my sister and brother and I, a ride in the car was enough out of the ordinary that we took some time and care in choosing a destination.

The Lake, of course, to watch the sailboats; the steel mills after dark, to watch them dump the trains of fiery, volcanic slag; any number of parks; but best of all, on a sunny weekend day, an airport. Any airport.

Once or twice we went to Midway, then the world's busiest airport, to see the DC-3s and Convairs and by the end of the decade, a few four-motored giants, the DC-6s and Constellations. But that was frustrating; the planes were far away, behind fences. We liked the little airports better.

There were two that I remember, Cicero and Harlem Airports. Both were swallowed years ago by urban sprawl, but then they were at the southwestern fringe of the city. Sorting in middle age through the fragments of a child's memory, I blend them together, and I see:

A line of little airplanes, tied down on the grass. A faded windsock, once red. The waxy blonde wood of propellers. The wobbly waddle of the planes as they taxied over the turf to and from the runway. The purposeful takeoff roll, tail coming up, speed building, wheels still spinning as they left the ground. The steep approach, propeller flickering at idle power, the birdlike flare, the nearly silent three-point touchdown. Crayola colors: yellow Cubs, green turf, blue sky, white clouds.

We walked along the rows of planes, reciting their names: Taylorcraft, Aeronca, Stinson, Luscombe, Cub. We peered into their windows, touched their fabric skins. My father asked polite questions of the pilots; we children wished he would ask the one question we did not dare: Could we go for a ride? But he never did, and no one offered.

Still, we learned a lot. My father, the cabinetmaker's son, himself a craftsman, showed us how the planes were made: the taut skin over the smooth bones, the hinges of rudders, ailerons and elevators, the cables that turned and lifted them. He showed us how they worked, how the pilot used both stick and rudder to make a turn. Watching the pilots start their engines by reaching up to grab the prop, kicking a leg up for extra momentum, and pulling it through, my father explained that it was just like our ancient Neptune outboard motor, fired by a simple magneto. We nodded and pretended to understand the physics.

I know that the pilots spoke to us, but I recall them mostly as silent, smiling gods (and goddesses; I remember lots of couples in those airplanes). I remember their movements as sure, not fast; the impression was of great happiness taken from careful work.

That was my introduction to the culture of flying. I was taught quite deliberately to see and appreciate the technical sweetness of the machines, and to respect the difficulty and danger of flying them. I learned without being told that the heart of this enterprise was not commerce and utility but beauty. Craftsmanship, mastery of tools, and love of one's work: these are high ethical standards, and I saw them enacted at a couple of little airstrips on the Southwest Side of Chicago some 45 years ago.

And the icon that summed up this ethic, this culture, this faith was the J-3 Cub. There were so many of them in those days that "Piper Cub" became the generic name for "little airplane." For many people it still is. For those who have flown it, the name is entirely specific, but the airplane itself stands for all the challenges and delights of our craft.

Structure: "It's a good school," my friend Vaughn Roberts says of the Cub. He's flown about everything from gliders to cropdusters to military transports. It's a classical education, I say. I haven't flown quite so many makes and models as Vaughn has, but I do know a little about the classics.

"I was given a classical education because there seemed little else to do with me," Stephen Leacock wrote. I, too, was trained in the classics, though my teachers claimed to have more positive reasons than Leacock's did. The idea was that learning Latin and Greek in high school would teach me habits of mind that would make it easier for me to learn more directly practical matters later.

There was as much wrong as right with that theory, but it was far from nonsense. The wrong part was the assumption that studying Latin ablatives and Greek aorists would make it easier to learn (say) biology or economics. It didn't. But the heavily analytical approach to learning these old tongues did help me see the structure of the modern languages of Europe, including English. The words, too, reappear, especially in Italian, French and Spanish, and in the technical vocabulary of most of the world.

So the dead languages illuminate the living ones. Similarly, the obsolete Cub, designed more than half a century ago—more than half of the entire era of powered flight ago—still furnishes a superb illustration of the principles of flying that every pilot must learn. Its bone-simple design pares aviation to its essen- tials: stick and rudder, throttle and trim, the basic grammar and the core vocabulary of a pilot's language.

Touchstone: The J-3 Cub dates from 1937 in its present form. Piper Aircraft produced it for about 10 years. During that time, according to one estimate I found, 14,125 Cubs were born at Piper's factory at Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. About 5,000 of them were painted military olive drab for use as hedge-hopping liaison and observation planes during World War II. Nearly all the rest were an unforgettable bright yellow with a vivid black lightning streak the length of the fuselage.

Piper (and many other manufacturers in those days) had visions of outfitting a nation of aviators. I have a reprint of a Piper sales brochure dated 1946. Here is a sample: "In the coming air age, landing strips, small airports and seaplane bases will dot the country...Your life will be fuller, happier, and more healthful in the coming air age...you will fly to your favorite vacation spot or to an entirely new one more quickly and more often...In your own or a company-owned light plane, you will meet appointments, make business or sales calls, or visit your men in the field...If your occupation is farming, you can look forward to the coming air age with just as much anticipation as your city cousins...You will fly quickly to market for repair parts for your farm equipment...When snowed under or bogged-down by mud, you will be able to reach town for supplies and fly the children to school in your plane."

The booklet then goes on to show you how to fly in a series of 52 tiny photographs; the student is a young woman, an enlightened touch for 1946.

There is no way to estimate the number of individual pilots who have flown the 14,000-plus J-3s that Piper launched, but it must be enormous. Probably the majority of Cubs were used as trainers at some time in their lives, and each of these nurtured dozens of beginners. After they graduated, these same pilots continued to rent the Cub, and people who trained in other aircraft rented it too, because it was usually the cheapest mount in the livery stable. Even the planes that escaped from flight schools and were the pets of individual pilots probably passed through many hands. Original owners passed on to faster airplanes, or just passed on, and the Cub would itself pass on to a new master. And on and on; hard to damage and easy to fix, the Cub is a survivor.

As a result, we have had several generations of Cub pilots, and their numbers are great enough that their experience is part of the collective unconscious of aviation. People describe a gentle, docile, forgiving plane by saying that "It flies like a Cub." They also describe an airplane that is embarrassingly difficult to land well as "hard to handle as a Cub in a crosswind."

To say that the Cub is a standard for comparison does not mean that it wins all such comparisons. In fact, it is easily among the worst in several categories. It is laughably slow, cruising at less than 80 MPH. If you are flying into the wind, a freight train can outrun you. It is notoriously uncomfortable; its tiny seats are just slings of stretched canvas. The noise level is oppressive. It is miserable in cold weather; the heater is a mockery. Visibility from the back seat is hampered by the big wing overhead—and the plane is flown from the back seat, not the front.

In fact, many of its design points are baffling. Just offhand, I can cite the carburetor heat knob, buried in a recess next to the front seat, out of easy reach of the pilot in the back seat. A short fellow like me finds it easier to work the heat knob with the toe of the right shoe than to lean forward to get a couple of fingers on it. The oil filler cap and dip stick are under an exhaust pipe, so you risk a burned hand to check the oil of a Cub that is still hot from a recent flight. The fact that the plane is flown from the rear seat means that you can't reach the instrument panel to set the altimeter. For that matter, if you have a passenger in the front seat, you can't see the instrument panel. You have to ask the passenger to skootch to one side or the other so you can check the air speed or altitude. The tiny brake pedals are operated with your heels, assuming you can find them; you have to work the rudders with your toes at the same time.

Nevertheless, the J-3 Cub is an incomparable trainer and a refreshing pleasure aircraft, precisely because of its classical virtues. It flies like a proper airplane, and it is a taildragger.

A proper airplane, especially one used for training, requires the pilot to recognize and blend all the components of its motion. Some modern airplanes have such sophisticated controls that you can turn without using the rudder pedals. This is an indecent liberty. Some have such limited elevator travel that you cannot make them stall. This is cringing timidity. A proper airplane will yaw toward the outside of a turn unless you feed in enough rudder, and a proper airplane will stall when the pilot chooses: just as the wheels touch down on the runway.

Above all, a proper airplane has a tailwheel. The modern tricycle gear airplane is a marvelous invention. It is easy to handle on the ground, both taxiing and landing. This design took hold in the 1950s and is credited with opening aviation up to thousands of people who could not or would not learn to fly the older tailwheel planes, which are harder to land and taxi. Maybe so, but the taildragger has some solid and unique virtues.

In spite of the fact that almost all airplanes designed in the last 40 years have nose gear, the taildragger is still officially called a "conventionally geared airplane." It's like the automo- bile: nearly every car has automatic shift, but the stick shift is still called a "standard transmission."

The taildragger survives because it is better at some important things. It is immensely better suited to landing on rough fields. Nearly all "bush" planes are taildraggers. The reason: nose gear legs are fragile when you push them through tall grass or over potholed runways. Tailwheels trail along unharmed in the same conditions. It is also possible to land taildraggers at very slow speeds, meaning that you can use very short landing strips.

In flight, the taildragger is more streamlined than the tricycle plane; that nose gear is sticking down there creating enough drag to cut several miles per hour off the airplane's speed. Of course, if the gear is retractable, drag isn't a problem; but retractable landing gear is fragile, troublesome, expensive, and one more thing to deal with in flight.

The taildragger's worst supposed faults—difficult landings and ground handling—may be considered virtues, and the Cub exemplifies them beautifully. A proper three-point landing in a tailwheel airplane involves precise airspeed control, strict attention to wind throughout the approach, landing, and roll-out, and delicate but authoritative use of the rudder pedals. All these ought to be part of any landing in any airplane. Unfortunately, most tricycle gear planes allow the pilot to get away with touchdown techniques that would wreck a taildragger. The same goes for taxiing in quartering winds. Most tricycle-gear jockeys just drive around the airport like they were in cars. They are shocked when they flip over or run into a ditch on a windy day. Taildragger pilots must keep "flying" the plane all the way to the hangar.

The Cub, as a properly rigged-out taildragger, is thus one of the standards against which all airplanes are measured. Compared to modern aircraft, it is a serious challenge to a pilot's skill. Compared to other taildraggers, it is considered benign and forgiving. Either way, it's an important benchmark: a classic.

Delight: A classic delights by instructing, and it instructs both artist and audience. Instruction is demanding. Going through the motions simply will not do. An actor who can play Shakespeare or Sophocles without learning from them ought to take up telephone sales, and a pilot who can fly a Cub without learning from it ought never to operate machinery more complex than a forklift. A playgoer who sits through King Lear or Antigone out of mere duty should stick to daytime television, and someone who watches a three-point landing without admiration should go to tractor pulls.

One begins instruction with simplicity, and the Cub embodies simplicity. Examine its lines: flat surfaces everywhere; except for the top of the wing and the cowling around the engine, it's all plane figures, a Cubist sculpture.

Flying it is also elementary, in the sense of being stripped to its essential elements. The airplane is so light, and its big wings are so lightly loaded, that each twitch of control you apply, and each breath of wind you fly through, gives you a sensation of flying that can be curiously absent in a more powerful airplane. Each turn is a lesson in coordinated flight; apply too little rudder, and the poor Cub drags itself around with its nose stuck out. Put in the right amount of rudder, and the airplane pulls around the turn like a train on a banked track.

Learning to land a tailwheel airplane properly imparts first humility, then deep satisfaction. In a good three-point landing, you bring the airplane down nearly to the runway at a reasonable approach speed, then flare just above the surface, holding off nose-high to bleed off airspeed until the wings stall and the airplane settles onto all three wheels at the same instant. You roll straight ahead a little way and coast to a stop, not even needing the brakes. It's as elegant as figure skating.

Do anything wrong, however, and all hell breaks loose. Come in too hot and you can't get it stalled; you may even float along the runway, unable to get down to the surface. Then you have to swallow your pride and go around. Or fail to get the nose up far enough in your flare, and you will land on the main wheels first. You will bounce back into the air, usually at an awkward angle. If you bounce twice, go around; it will only get worse further down the runway. Or you will fail to correct for a crosswind, or land a bit crooked, or get the rudder a little to the wrong side, and you will ground loop, swerving violently around, the tail trying to get ahead of you. The outcome can be a bent airplane and a damaged aviator.

Jim Elliott, who flew bombers in World War II, learned to fly as a kid in the late 1930s. He soloed in a Cub. When I told him I was learning to fly the Cub, he smiled and told me, "You'll learn a lot. I remember right after I first soloed, I went out to the airport all by myself and pushed the Cub out of the hangar. I got it started and went around the pattern. First time I tried to land, I bounced like I was on springs. I went around and tried again: same thing, only worse. This went on and on, until I said to myself, 'My God, I'm going to run out of gas and crash!' I finally got it on the ground." He shook his head. "You'll learn a lot from a Cub," he said.

And so I did. A man named Bill Phippen taught me to fly it at Lakeview Airport, north of Dallas. Lakeview is built on a little point of land on Lake Lewisville. There's water at each end of the runway, a powerful aid to concentration during final approaches. It's only about 2800 feet long, skimpy for a commercial airport, but three times long enough for a Cub.

Actually, there are two runways at Lakeview, a paved strip 30 feet wide (again, a bit on the minimal side; that's less than the wingspan of most airplanes), and a wider grass runway alongside the pavement. It's this turf strip that gives Lakeview its character and makes it a natural home for the Cub.

Grass airports attract old airplanes and old aviators. There's a sense that there's plenty of time, none of the hustle that attends scheduled departures. From the frankly rather crummy office to the line of vintage airplanes tied down along the edge of the field, the place looks and feels like the end of the 1940s. Two or three or half a dozen people are usually stationed on or around the little porch, watching airplanes. Some of them are pilots, some used to be, some just like to watch.

All of them are critics. It's like an opera audience in Italy. They are all well versed in the classical standards and they expect compliance. Everyone who lands at Lakeview is rated by this panel of judges. They don't hold up cards with scores like 8.5 and 9.1, but that's the feeling. When you taxi in after a good landing, they might even tell you so. They certainly will tell you about a bad one. "Practicing recoveries today, I see," one of them told me.

Bill Phippen is a good teacher, patient and hard to irritate. He needs to be. Most of his students are like me, already licensed and wanting to transition to taildraggers. He would rather that students begin with the Cub and finish up in tricycle gear Cessnas, precisely for the reasons my old high school teachers talked about. Learn the classics first and all your later lessons come easier.

I gave him less trouble than some of his applicants, because I had learned to fly in gliders. Like the Cub, a glider requires lots of rudder in the turns and delicate handling as you set it on the ground. Nevertheless, I had one new and difficult lesson to learn: the three-point, full-stall landing.

You fly a glider onto the ground; its landing roll is a continuation of the approach. You are still moving fast enough to fly when you touch the runway. Similarly, with a tricycle gear airplane, you can let the main wheels squeal onto the concrete well above the plane's stalling speed. But with a taildragger, the ideal landing involves letting all three wheels settle onto the runway at the precise moment that the wings cease to support the airplane's weight.

Here the standards apply with truly classical rigor. Do it right, and the landing ends with the inevitability of a symphony's final bars. But land too fast, and the airplane, still full of undischarged energy, springs up again at some unmanageable angle, crow-hopping down the runway until you have to punch the throttle forward and go around. Flare too soon, and you will stall onto the ground, all right, but from two or three feet off the surface: WHAM! Let the airplane start to turn before it rolls nearly to a stop, and the tail will do its best to whip around ahead of you in spite of your tardy stabs at the rudder. Punishment follows transgression as surely as in any play by Euripides. And if you enact this tragedy at Lakeview Airport, a chorus of Harpies and Furies will comment from the porch.

After a few rides and many landings, Bill Phippen said, "That was pretty decent. Give me one more landing like that and I'll sign you off to fly this thing by yourself." I bounced the poor Cub the length of the runway and had to come back the next day. While we labored around the landing pattern, we saw some truly remarkable traffic. A beautiful old DC3, painted in the colors of Continental Airlines in its pioneer days, lumbered into Lakeview and landed daintily on the grass. The old airliner, also a taildragger, looked perfectly at home on the old airport. It was on its way to an air show. Maybe I was heartened by seeing this venerable giant land ahead of me. In any case, I made a couple of respectable three-pointers and Bill pronounced me fit to solo the J-3 Cub.

So I logged my first hours as pilot in command of an American classic. Since then, I've become part owner of a much more modern Piper airplane, the Cherokee 140, a classic in its own way. But every few weeks I head out to Lakeview and buy a couple of hours in the little yellow taildragger. An old pilot who flies gliders with me at the Texas Soaring Association asked me what I pay to rent the Cub. "Thirty-eight fifty an hour," I told him. He winced. "My God, I used to rent a Cub for five bucks an hour. Eight with an instructor. Of course that was a while back."

Yes, it was. That was back in classical times.

© Paul J. Sampson