1 day ago July 14, 2026joynealkidney

Joyride

This poem, written in 2006, is in Chapter 3: Flora and Fauna of The Immigrant and the Outlaw.

The backstory is that my husband was an air traffic controller. Get a couple of controllers together, or a group of retired ones, and you still hear several of these terms.

Retirees from the Des Moines Air Traffic Control Tower, 2023, monthly breakfasts at the Urbandale Machine Shed Restaurant. This group just lost one of their own on July 4–Frank Smith, who lived with cheerful sarcasm in spite of all his Vietnam war related challenges.

The only one I didn’t hear from them was Immelmann. That came from a WWII letter from Danny Wilson, whose transition training and combat was as the pilot of a P-38. 

Joyride

Notch-tailed cadets
take turns in the traffic pattern
without benefit of control tower,
sweeping downwind,
shouldering baseleg,
gliding into low approach,
dipping, diving under
a graveled bridge along
Old Creamery Road,

emerging upwind, into
a steep Immelmann turn
against a peach and mauve glow
on a September evening,

chattering and fluttering afresh
into the traffic pattern
of young barn swallows,
dark above a flash of rosy tan,
crosswind, downwind,
for yet another spin.
—–

Barn swallows are such neat little birds, darting around the farm yard, lacing the air with their happy chitters. Their mud nest are fascinating, tucked up under joists in the barn. Childhood memories.

21 comments

  8. I enjoy the poetry very much, but, I must admit I like high-speed flight just a bit more. The Immelmann is still commonly used maneuver today. It is a way to reverse flight direction without any turn radius, as in a horizontal turn of 180 degrees. You accept airspeed loss on the pull-up, but regain speed coming back down to continue the “ dog fight” with the aggressor. In the A-4 Skyhawks we were trained in the maneuver for both types of nuclear weapons delivery, always initiated from tree top level. If the Immelmann is continued in the opposite direction, then you have just completed a “Cuban 8”. NOW, I have bored all your other readers! Bob

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