PSS Candidate | Melmoth
Be only the second person in history to build one.
Early in 1976, my lifelong career dream of flying for a living was crumpling in the face of the lingering effects of the first oil shock on the world economy. For every commercial pilot position, there was a seemingly endless line of potential hires, all of whom where way more qualified than I even dared to dream. Also, as I approached the end of my relatively successful high school career, there was subtle parental pressure to attend university — a good one. An ‘undergrad’ spent sleeping on a hangar floor in La Ronge, Saskatchewan — the most sure route into commercial flying at the time — was not what my folks envisioned for their kid. They rationalized that if I was good enough to be acclaimed onto my high school’s Reach for the Top team it followed — in their mind — I was ‘pretty likely’ to be accepted and succeed at MIT or Caltech. My folks’ almost pathological optimism is still endearing to this day.
It was in this context I angrily tore into the December, 1975 issue of Flying magazine. I was now reading my favourite magazine not as a source of career advice, but as an aviator wannabee with my nose pressed up against the airport fence — another spectator at the airshow gawking up at people way luckier than me. But in that fateful issue, I stumbled on writing that without a hint of exaggeration, was to change the course of my life from that moment forward. The quickly dog-eared issue contained, starting on page 44, Peter Garrison’s The Compass and the Clock.
While I was vaguely aware such things were possible, Peter’s article was an eye-opener — he demonstrated it was actually possible to design and build your own, real airplane in your own backyard. However, that was nothing compared to the central narrative of the article. Garrison took his homebuilt airplane—christened Melmoth — and, accompanied by his clearly very understanding partner Nancy, did something I still find hard to comprehend to this day.
He flew it across the Atlantic.
I was utterly transfixed by the idea. I couldn’t sleep I was so excited. My grades began to slip as I used my classroom time to sketch my own version of a plane which could fly the same distances as Melmoth. I started reading all the books both by and about Lindbergh, looking for the same kind of insight that the self-taught Garrison clearly had. I even did calculations on fuel burn and the capacities of the tanks which would be required and drove myself to distraction figuring out where all that fuel was going to go. Come hell or high water — an ironic metaphor, in retrospect — I was going to do that someday. Like Garrison, I began to look at globes and see only great circle routes and the far off places to which they led.
If, after a couple of years, any of the Melmoth magic was beginning to wear thin, a Flying magazine thunking down on the front door step in early 1977 brought still more of the exquisite torture. In it, there were yet more of Garrison’s tales about his prodigal, prodigious travels in Melmoth. It was right there on the cover taunting me: a picture of Melmoth and the headline “To Japan and Back — In a Single”. This latest adventure included a non-stop leg from Cold Bay, Alaska to Chitose, Japan — a stunning 2,650 miles virtually all of which was over the forbidding and empty North Pacific.
Of course, even the most crippling love affair can burn itself out, and my Melmoth dream inevitably died, crushed under the weight of a university admissions process that had me not succeeding, cum laude, at MIT or Caltech as my parents dreamed but instead flunking out at UBC. Following my blinding Melmoth epiphany, I had decided that designing and building aircraft was sufficiently adjacent to flying the finished product. And an engineering degree was good enough for the folks, so seemingly everybody was happy. The only fly in the ointment was that UBC was not exactly the centre of the aeronautical engineering universe. Besides, there was a kind of pouting, miserable injustice in being in the same classes as the kids who partied right through high school while I was at home writing and rewriting my essays on the folks’ Coronamatic. Life after my ill-fated post-secondary school career became the best of the also-ran, pick-me-up careers for the next few decades.
In that period, I satisfied my aviation bug with model aircraft, eventually settling on sailplanes as my particular cup of tea. There was a diversion for a time while my wife and I built the tail, wings and some of the fuselage of an RV-6. That dream died, too. I eventually gave the completed assemblies along the with the rest of the kit to my nephews. One of them in particular approached it with the compulsion necessary for such an undertaking. He finished it and it’s now flying and it’s utterly magnificent. I take consolation in knowing the thousands of rivets Michelle and I set eventually found their way skyward. But if you look at its lines, and squint a little, you can see Melmoth in it. It’s no accident. Its rough resemblance to the plane of my childhood dreams was an important reason why I chose this particular aircraft for my stab at homebuilding.
During this period, I had taken it upon myself to get in touch with Peter Garrison via this newfangled thing called the internet. He made the mistake of politely answering my first email, which gave our electronic pen pal relationship a life it likely didn’t deserve given the silly questions I was asking. But he patiently and promptly answered all of those emails. He even sent an autographed copy of The Compass and the Clock which I framed and hung near the RV-6 project, like a talisman to help urge me forward through the endless project. Sadly, not even the Melmoth magic was up to that task.
But then came my opportunity to edit the New RC Soaring Digest, and it provided yet another plausible excuse to think about Melmoth. Once again, I impinged on Peter’s peaceful existence and asked him whether he might be interested in contributing drawings and other material to a PSS Candidate article for the magazine which I now edited. To my great shock, he actually agreed. And so, if you scroll down to the Resources section at the end of this article, you’ll find lots of digital artefacts which will be great feedstock of a 1/4- and/or 1/3-scale model of the fabled Melmoth. Its clean, compact, sailplane-meets-fighter lines will make for a sweet slope soarer. And you’ll be only the second person in history to build one.
Now, a smarter man than me would have left Mr. Garrison in peace at this point given that the Melmoth dream, at least in a vaguely poetic way, had finally been brought full circle.
But I’m not that smart.
I asked Peter whether he still owned the copyright on The Compass and the Clock, which he does along with much of his other work, a lot of it originally published in Flying magazine over the years. So, it is with the greatest honour — and boyish excitement — that I present The Compass and the Clock, in it’s entirety, right here in RCSD.
It’s as fresh and inspiring now as it was when it was first published well over four decades ago. See if it works its strange and wonderful magic on you.
©2021 Terence C. Gannon
Resources
- Watch this space. On or about 2021–11–15, Peter has committed to making the Melmoth files available and their links will appear here. If you want to be the first to know, we will announce their availability on the RCSD Twitter feed.
- Peter also added that if an RCSD reader “decides to build a model, I will be glad to communicate personally and provide additional documentation, photographs…” So there you go, folks—quite conceivably a once-in-lifetime opportunity to get your reference material directly from a bona fide aviation legend.
- The Compass and the Clock by Peter Garrison. Yes, right here in RCSD.
Read the next article in this issue, return to the previous article in this issue or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
