Touch grease

Subverting America’s youth one camshaft at a time

I woke up this morning at 5:30 to suit up in my ground instructor uniform — Ridgecut work leggings and polo shirt with obligatory embroidered company logo. My mission was to spend several hours in the pilot lounge at Bay Bridge Airport (W29). I had an appointment to yammer for 20 minutes at a time to groups of 5-10 Scouts seeking to earn an aviation merit badge. My topic was “Powerplants” and I provided not just the usual slideshow and video of a cutaway 4-cylinder recip — I hauled in a pile of dirty, greasy, clapped out engine components for the kids to handle. An engine case, a cylinder assembly, crankshaft, camshaft, A-case. A carburetor from the 1940s and a magneto from probably earlier than that.

The first group was shy about coming to handle the parts, even though I told them that was the only reason I’d hauled them in. (Not an idle effort — the case weighs at least 45 lbs and the crankshaft has to be over 30. And it has sharp edges.) But out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the interest of the dads sitting in chairs around the periphery of the room. So with group two I made explicit eye contact with these guys and wouldn’t you know it — as soon as the dads gathered around, the kids followed.

This was a “Scouts” group, not Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. The mix was about 90% male and I have no idea if these were co-ed troops or a joint event with both Boy and Girl Scouts. I know this is a fraught topic in certain circles, but I honestly don’t care. I also work with Civil Air Patrol and the cadet squadrons have been co-ed forever. I mention it only because it wasn’t the sex of the kids that determined whether they were willing to engage with dirty old aircraft components. It was whether their dads were standing behind them and encouraging them.

The other delightful thing was the look of dawning understanding on some of the kids’ faces when they were shown the dance of pistons moving up and down, crankshaft and camshaft moving in geared unison, the valves pushed up and springing down. All brought to life by the release of a stable store of chemical energy in the fuel, transformed by combustion into thermal energy, encased in a system that captured the energy of those expanding gases and used it to turn a crankshaft that turned a propeller that provided the thrust to overcome drag long enough to let the rush of wind over the wings produce through the magic of Bernoulli the lift that allows man to reach into the heavens.

Subversion? It is. Subversion means, at root, to turn upside down. Every time we pull a kid’s nose out of a phone and into the elemental magic of grease, metal, wood, and wire — we turn their worlds upside down and inside out.