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Parked in a meticulous, seemingly-measured row, and angled away from the wooden fence on the rolling grass field of Bealeton's Flying Circus Aerodrome, the N2S-1 and 3 Stearman, Fleet, and Waco biplanes, all accommodating single pilots and either one or two passengers, had been poised for imminent flight, deluding me into believing that I had somehow stumbled into a barnstorming era scene frozen in time. Fully slipping through its cracks, I would take to the sky in one of these 1930s-,open-cockpit, single-engine, fabric-covered biplanes on this clear, blazingly hot August afternoon in central Virginia.

The Waco aircraft scheduled to return me to history, a dark blue-fuselaged, bright yellow-winged biplane registered N229F, had sported the Army emblem on its upper wing and the designation "US Army Air Corps, Maxwell, Alabama" on its vertical tail.

Access, along the left wing root, led to the forward, two-place, padded bench seat cockpit immediately behind the small, Plexiglas windshield and featured basic instrumentation, inclusive of an altimeter, a compass, a turn-and-bank indicator, an engine gauge in revolutions-per-minute, an airspeed indicator, a rate-of-climb indicator, a temperature gauge, and the rudder pedals. The pilot sat in the single-place cockpit behind me.

After fuel injection into the exposed-cylinder engine, which turned a single, wooden propeller, the biplane, bathed in slipstream, released its brake and followed an identical blue-and-yellow Waco type across the rolling grass over what had sometimes been used as the short, diagonal, cross runway, and then turned toward the east.

Making the 180-degree left turn after the lead aircraft had become airborne, biplane N229F unleashed itself over the grass with a full, 1,900-rpm throttle application and, after lifting its tail wheel off of the now blurred carpet of green, surrendered its two, fabric-covered wings into the sky at 70 mph.

Banking right to a 030-degree heading at 300 feet, the aircraft settled into a 200 foot-per-minute climb in the hot, flawlessly-blue August sky over central Virginia's rolling green canvas, a view which would have been equally seen by any 1930 barnstorming flight. The expanse had formed the basis of as many "runways" as its pilot had fancied to land on in order to find passengers seeking rides.

Banking left to 210 degrees, a compass heading which had been almost double the brutal, 120-degree air temperature, the aircraft settled into its

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