chapter 1
Night Flight
The sun had slipped away and the night had turned against
me. That old airplane was leaking like a
pecan tree. I was banging along in a
high wing PA-18 not a hundred feet above the ground, with the rain pelting
against its worn fabric skin and pouring into the cockpit around the plexiglass
window in the top of the center section.
In what seemed like a matter of minutes, the temperature had dropped
about 25 degrees.
The overcast was ragged and boiling, and as I blundered on
into the night I dropped down to about 75 feet above the ground. I was following a highway I knew well, over
country that I knew like the back of my hand.
Still, it was a little disconcerting the way the blackness of the scrub
oak reached up for that wind-stomped airplane.
I should
never have launched out on that flight.
I hadn't bothered to check the weather.
I was probably the only man in the
State of Texas who didn't know that a few days earlier an ocean of cold air had
come rolling off the arctic ice cap and was now sweeping everything before it
from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico.
I was now flying right square into the leading edge of a Texas Blue
Norther that was slamming into a warm, moisture-laden Gulf air mass. Ignorant of these events, my mind heavy with
the routine problems of my daily work,
I had climbed into that old airplane and headed north to Crystal City.
Slowly it
occurred to me that only a fool would be sitting up there in an airplane on a
night like that. But there I was. That's just exactly what I was doing.
Just sitting there, getting knocked around all over the place by the
wind, staring into the lighting-slashed darkness and choking the stick fit to
kill.
"What
am I doing here", I kept asking
myself? I had good sense. I had been flying airplanes for years. This was the very sort of insanity that got
pilots killed, and I knew it. This was
killing weather. This was the kind of
foolhardiness that gave aviation a bad name.
As I tried
to keep out of the overcast, and keep the airplane right-side-up, I was
desperately searching for a suitable spot to safely put her down. I realized that the scene was playing out
exactly like the first page of one of the many National Transportation Safety
Board accident reports I had read.
"This is how some idiot got himself killed," they all read
between the lines. Because I was
so familiar with the country I was flying over I knew that my only hope was to
stick like a leech to that highway. I
knew that all the country on either side was rough and desolate brush country,
and that making a forced landing away from that highway would have been like
going down at sea. It had become evident
even to my addled brain that I was going to have to put that airplane on the
ground. And pretty soon.
As I
searched into the darkness of the night, and into the gloom within my mind, I
found that the fear was matched only by the disgust of having let myself
blunder into yet another losing situation.
Real
pilots, like Rosco Turner, Terry and The Pirates, or Chuck Yeager, would have
known just what to do. They would have
become steely-eyed, and done something heroic.
They would have landed safely in some barnyard and graciously accepted
an invitation to join in the family meal.
After dinner, they would have sat before the open hearth, smiled at the
farmer's daughter, and told stirring tales of flight.
But not
me. I was a tramp crop-duster
pilot. Scared to death. Soaked with cold
rain. I wanted on the ground!
Because I
knew that country so well, I knew that I was approaching a 200 foot radio tower
about five miles ahead. I knew it was
located about 100 yards off the east side of the highway. Although I was sure it was at least five
miles ahead, I still had gumption enough to keep on the west side of that
highway. And the west side was closing
in. I was starting to be forced to alter
my course in a zig-zag sort of way around the rain squalls and low-hanging clouds.
As I fought
the airplane deeper into the turbulence the scattered rain showers in front of
me started coming together. Soon they
became a solid wall of black water. I
knew that time was running out.
I knew that I could not allow myself to lose visual contact
with the ground even for a few seconds.
That old airplane had never been equipped with blind flying instruments,
and at present had little more instrumentation than a poorly-calibrated
magnetic compass and an airspeed indicator that worked now and then.
I knew that
airplane would soon be on the ground, and I resolved to fly it to the
ground as the pilot, as opposed to being later described as
the man found "still strapped into the pilot's seat." I bit down the panic rising in my throat.
I knew I
could no longer fly north. I knew I
could not chance moving to the east side of the highway. I pressed lower, and began a careful turn to
the right. The blackness had closed in
behind me. My turn moved me over the highway, which was really only a narrow,
hilly, twisting, little Farm and Ranch Road with telephone lines crowding one
edge, and concrete buttresses marking the culverts at every little low
spot. That road was dead cross-ways to a
gale force wind.
Subconsciously,
I abandoned my plan of getting the airplane on the ground in one piece. I knew that I was way past the time for
making wise decisions. I knew I had run
out of options. My goal now was to get
the airplane on the ground, and still be able to walk out and find a telephone.
I knew that
I had rather take my chances putting her down into the wind, and into the
brush, than taking a wild stab at that narrow little strip of asphalt. As that road sailed below me I could see that
I was dead down wind. I knew that the
only plan I had left was to continue the turn 180°, cross back over the asphalt at a 90° angle, roll-out dead ahead into the wind, and put that
airplane down straight ahead into whatever blackness fate was going to toss up
at me.
The reader
should understand that I was not a man who had fully discounted the power of
prayer, for I had not. I just hadn't had
much luck with it. I had long since
given up the idea of offering up overly ambitious prayers. They simply hadn't worked for me. Which, no doubt, at least partially explained
how I had come to be a tramp crop-duster pilot in South Texas. So that night, my prayer was very modest. I
think it went something like this:
"Lord, I know I'm the biggest
jackass you ever let live, and I promise I won't keep asking for these little
favors. But could you help me out just one more
time?"
Perhaps He
agreed, although it is presumptuous of me to imagine that He even
bothered. But when I slid back over that
little strip of asphalt, a lacing
network of fire right outside my windshield revealed a long open path not 100
yards to my left where the bulldozers had scratched out a jagged right-of-way.
I kicked and fought the aircraft over where it needed to be,
chopped the throttle,
and dove for that long, twisted space. I knew that my airspeed was much too high for
touchdown, but I also knew that I had to make immediate contact with the
ground. I no longer had any visual
references, and vertigo had taken me by the throat. My last intelligent thought was that I was
drifting much too fast to the left. I
had either grossly misjudged the wind, or it had abruptly changed. Just as I slammed her into rough alignment
and tried to spike one wheel against the ground, the world went black.
I hit hard. I didn't
even flare. I just flew her flat against
the earth, ricocheted like a hockey puck, busted through a knot of wind that
wanted to roll me inverted, and slammed the throttle to the fire‑wall. But it was too late. The aircraft was crashing, and I could not
tell where the horizon stopped, and the blackness began.
And then I just sat there and rode her out. I just sat there in that little steel cage as
it destroyed itself against the earth. There was nothing left for me to do.
The right
landing gear failed on the second impact, and the propeller sliced into stony
ground. The right tire and landing gear
strut folded up against the fuselage and tried to come into the cockpit with
me. As the dying airplane started its
pivot to the right, the wing spar outboard of the wing struts failed, and that
portion of the wing, plowing through ancient limestone and tree stumps, folded
back like it had been built on hinges.
As the
engine mount failed, the steel tubing behind the fire‑wall folded back
against the rudder pedals and I could feel the structure closing in around my
legs. That terrifying fold abruptly stopped
as the fuselage behind me began to twist, and the longerons started to bend and
buckle. As the engine tried to roll up
under the belly, the wreck lurched to a stop.
Sure, I sat
there for a few minutes. I didn't think
about much. I just watched the light show, and slowly realized that the world
was roaring with noise. The silence of
my engine had only allowed the outside noise to grow stronger. As I wormed my way out of the cockpit, I
heard the first scatter-shot of hail against the cloth-covered wings.
I walked
away a little bit, my hands discovering only minor traces of blood. My whole body was trembling, and the icy wind
sliced across the goose bumps on my barren arms. I stopped and looked back at the twisted
hulk. It looked so small and maimed in
the traces of blue light.
Before I began my long walk out, I looked up into the screaming sky.
"Thank
you, Sir," I said.
**********