“If I Can Learn to Fly, You Can Learn to Fly”

Popular Science – Jan. 1967 (pp. 77-79, 198-199)
by: Danny Kaye

TV’s famous redhead, now piloting jet planes, tells how he learned—and how he took a test with a liverwurst sandwich in his pocket

Once each week, lithe, redheaded Danny Kaye entertains millions on his CBS TV show. For many years he has been a movie star. But few of his fans know that Kaye is an accomplished pilot as well, licensed to fly multi-engine planes and holder of a coveted instrument rating that permits him to fly when the clouds close in.

Now he is in “transition” training, from propeller aircraft to jets.

Let Danny himself tell you the story of his affair with his second love, flying. His first love, of course, is show business. He talked to Popular Science’s Devon Francis between sessions in transition ground school at the Lear Jet Corp., Witchita, Kan.

This goes back (began Danny). It was 1959. I had made a movie with a fellow named Michael Kidd. We used to drive to the studio together. Now, I wasn’t altogether crazy about Mike’s driving. No, let me put it another way. It got so I wouldn’t even ride with him.

Some months after we finished the picture, I got back from a trip abroad, and somebody told me Mike had become a licensed pilot. Well, it was shattering. I couldn’t believe that anyone as inept as Mike was in a car could ever have mastered the art of flying—and it is an art, as I was to find out later.

I called Mike on the phone and said, “What is this implausible nonsense about you being a pilot?”

He said yes, he had been learning to fly, and now he was a qualified pilot.

Curiosity gets the best of all of us sometimes. I had to find out about Mike’s flying. Summoning up my courage, I remarked, “I’ll go up with you.” He picked me up and drove me to the Van Nuys (Calif.) airport. On the way I noticed there was an appreciable improvement in his driving. Could learning to fly have made such changes in his driving habits?

Now, I’d been flying as an airline passenger since 1933. My first trip was in a Ford trimotor. Somewhere in my uninformed mind I had the vague idea that if I ever flew an airplane I’d hop in and yell, “Hey, fellows, this is Danny and I’m going flying.” I’d roar down the runway in helmet and goggles, with scarf streaming out behind, and be off into the wild blue yonder.

But oh, no! Mike spent a full half-hour on what he called preflight, checking the airplane. He got on the radio to ask permission to taxi and take off. He understood all that jargon coming out of the receiver from Ground Control.

Learning the Lingo. This was the most beautiful combination of Greek, Japanese, and native Aleutian I’d ever heard in my life. It sounded like, “Roger, neeaw-whup-emup, altimeter razzmatazz, wind wheekip-peredherring.” I was impressed.

We flew. Mike was good. I was even more impressed.

Mike said, “Why don’t you put your hands on the controls?” and I think that’s when it hit me. There was a little bug, nondescript in color and not very large, that had evidently got into the cabin. It flew ‘round and ‘round, finally hit me in the back of the head, buried itself in my brain, and I had caught that marvelous disease spread by the “flying bug.”

I said, “Hey, Mike, what do you have to do to learn how to fly?”

He said, “Danny, it takes coordination, and you seem to have that in abundance anyway, so it would probably be easy for you.”

I said, “Mike, outside of that, what do you have to do to get a license?”

He casually said, “Oh, not very much, Danny. All you have to do is take some lessons and pass a simple little written exam.”

I said, “I’m sunk.”

Now, bear that point about the written exam in mind because I’m coming back to it.

I began taking lessons.

Dick Weaver, my instructor, was an ex-Navy pilot, a gruff but likable guy. He didn’t care whether you were a movie actor or a mechanic or a politician. He growled at everybody in exactly the same way. But his pupils knew they had been taught well.

“What if it stops?” At one point on my first instruction flight I said to Dick, “Hey, what if that thing stops?”

He said, “What thing?”
I said, “That thing that’s making fresh air out there.”

He said, “Oh, if this thing stops?” Whereupon he switched off the engine.

He said very calmly, “Now there’s no engine.”

I said, not quite so calmly, “I just happened to notice that. Don’t you find it excessively quiet in here?”

He said, “Not for glider pilots.”

The point he was trying to make was that even if you lose your engine, you can still glide gracefully down to a safe landing.

When we got down I was really excited. I started ground school. That’s where the written exam would come in. Oh, boy!

Mathematics, yet. The subjects were meteorology, navigation, power plants, aerodynamics, and the Federal Air Regulations. Let me tell you why I had my wind up over the forthcoming exam. When I was a kid in school I just couldn’t get mathematics. Here I am in the midst of a course that requires mathematics, and I can’t even add.

If I’ve got four sets of figures to sum up, I begin at the top and add down. Then I add from the bottom up. Then I separate the figures, two and two, add them, and take those sums and add them together, and if it comes out the same, I must be right.

If I’d been shot to the moon in a capsule I couldn’t have been on more unfamiliar ground right then. But George Budde, my ground-school instructor, was a patient kindly man who guided me beautifully through the whole course.

I spent weeks flying with Dick in the morning and studying with George in the afternoon. You learn to do eights-on-pylon, lazy eights, and chandelles. You learn to keep that black ball in the turn-and-bank indicator right in the center in turns. At first, I could hardly even keep it in the cockpit. You learn to bank without losing altitude.

That first solo! I’d had about 10 hours of instruction. One morning Dick Weaver remarked, “How about taking it around yourself?”

Whew! Here it was. I expected a long speech of do-this and do-that, and don’t-do-this and don’t-do-that. You know what he said? All he said was, as he folded the belts on the seat he had just vacated, “Hey, Redhead, don’t kill yourself!”

And let me tell you something else—the first time that I soloed an airplane, John Glenn was nothing!

But that wasn’t all there was to getting a ticket. Oh, no! The day came when I had to take that written exam.

The exam. Here I am with a liverwurst sandwich in my pocket because I know this is going to be a terror, going on for hours, and I sit down to a desk with all these questions in front of me. Here’s something strange. I can step out in front of 20,000 people to do a show, and not be nervous at all. Yet when I went to take my examination, I was as nervous as a cat.

But I had something going for me. Mike Kidd had remarked to a friend of mine, “I don’t think Danny will have the patience to do everything it takes to get a ticket.” That did it! I’d get my ticket, or else.

I got through the exam. Don’t ask me how. I left the Federal Aviation Agency office thinking, “Well, if I failed, I can study some more and take the exam over again. And after all, I just might have made it. Seventy’s a passing grade.”

Well, the grades came through. I got 90. My first reaction was that they had made a mistake. No, it was right. Ninety. I felt as if I was ready to run for Congress.

I still didn’t have my ticket, though. I had practiced with Dick Weaver in a twin-engine plane, and after I passed the exam, I bought a Piper Aztec. There was much more to learn on that than there was on a single-engine airplane. How could I remember all the extra things?

But I did get my ticket, and not in a single-engine airplane. This may interest you—one of my friends told me later that I was one of only 14 people in the whole country—at that time—who had obtained a private license and a multi-engine rating at the same time.

I’ve done everything in my flying career backward. Most people get a private license, then a commercial ticket, then a multi-engine rating, and finally an instrument rating. Not me! Oh, no!

Six years after I got my private license—in a twin-engine airplane—I qualified for single-engine.

Flying “under the hood.” A couple of years ago I thought to myself, well, why not an instrument rating? I practiced flying “under the hood” with Bob Dorn, and went up for my check ride and passed the flight test. I thought that this time the written exam would be easier. But oh, no! By some miracle, I got 90 again.

I decided to go for a commercial license. Here was that written exam again.

A few days later I’m at the home Gussie Busch (August Busch, president of the brewing company and owner of the St. Louis Cardinals) in St. Louis, and every four hours I’m on the telephone to California to see how I came out on the exam. I made 91. I could hardly believe it.

The jet that “wants to fly.” But let me do a commercial on the jet made by our company. This is such an incredible airplane—the Lear Jet. You hear all this stuff about frightening acceleration when you push forward on the throttles. Forget it. This airplane exceeds everything that you hear or expect. It’s alive. It wants to fly.

You go to level out, and you’re still climbing. The airplane is that “clean.” Do you know how I fly this airplane once I’ve got it to 41,000 feet and flying straight and level? I pull my knees up and rest my hands on them, and just use finger movements. It’s that easy. Of course, you can put it on autopilot and do crossword puzzles if you want to.

A jet flies mostly like any airplane, except that everything happens faster. In my transition training, I’ve discovered that you’re never “ahead” of your plane at the start. There’s so much to do. But you learn. You catch on to anticipating. You “lead” your airplane, just as you drive ahead of your automobile, anticipating turns and traffic, if you’re a really good driver.

I’m using jets now to get to distant points, meet with business associates, and still get home for dinner on the same day. I could never do this before.

To finish the commercial, the executive jet is one of the most effective business tools ever invented. It literally creates time.

And what’s that pitch the girl makes for sewing patterns? “If I can learn to sew, you can learn to sew.” Let me paraphrase it. “If Danny Kaye can learn to fly, you can learn to fly.”

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