Tail of the Storm

by Alan Cockrell

  If the wings folded in flight, what would happen? My mind raced. Would I continue to have control? I thought I remembered that the ailerons operated normally with the wings folded. But would the fixed part of the wings generate enough lift to keep me airborne? And if it did, wouldn't the ailerons now act as additional rudders? How would that affect roll control? And what if only one wing folded? I would corkscrew like a cheap bottle rocket. How would I eject from that at this low altitude? I was only 2,000 feet above the ground.

  It took about a nanosecond to interview myself with all those questions, after which I rolled into a right climbing turn and told Lead that I was heading for the emergency strip. I warned the jets to the north, on Guard frequency, to stay high while I flew across two active gunnery ranges in a nervous beeline to the Gila Bend auxiliary field.

  The wings never folded. The mechanics found a faulty warning circuit. The master caution light had toyed with me. The jet had winked its eye at me in a practical joke of some morbid sort.

  "Got your attention, didn't I, big boy?"

  Yeah, that's what it does bestgets your attention. Sometimes I feel like I've got a master caution light inside me. When it flashes, I ought to be looking down deep inside and checking my fault panel. But too often, I don't do that; I just reset it and plow on.

  And that's what we're doingplowing on. On through the post-Desert Storm skies. But the rumors are running like the wind again. Joe Brewer thinks this will be our last trip. I'm not so optimistic.

  Eighteen.

  In Lindbergh's Prop Wash

  You fly by the sky on a black night, and on such a night only the sky matters. Sometime near the end of twilight, without realizing when it happens, you find the heavens have drawn your attention subtly from earth, and that instead of glancing from compass down toward ground or sea, your eyes turn upward to the stars.

  Charles Lindbergh, Spirit of St. Louis

  You have to cross this vast stretch of frothing nothingness to comprehend what he did. And you can't really grasp it while sitting back in seat 44D on United 913, eating lasagna and watching movies. You have to be up herein the cockpit.

  I don't try to understand why he did it. I know that. What intrigues me is how Lindbergh felt about it. The nearness of death wouldn't bother me so much. But the totality of the lonelinessI don't know how I'd deal with that. At least I've got radiossix of themto talk with distant voices. And there's the reassurance that there are many other aircraft out here, piloted by people facing the same immense emptiness. And I've got Findley.

  Findley is one of my two flight engineers. I look back and see him, sitting sideways to the airplane, in front of his colonies of switches, lights, and dials, their glow reflected in his spectacles. His panel is so enormous and complicated that the very sight of it confounds me.

  Technical Sergeant Bill Findley

  Findley is an admitted jabberer. He talks constantly to whoever will listen. I guess it's his way of diffusing stress and fending off boredom. Even now he blabs incessantly into his boom mike as he scans his jumbled haunt.

  "I just don't know how a man is supposed to make a living farming, these days. The middlemen are taking all the money. I put in eighty acres of beans last year and. ."

  Because of the relative vastness of our cockpit and the noise created by the slipstream, we communicate with one another by headset. With a "boom mike" fixed an inch in front of my lips I can speak with anyone on the crew, fore or aft, in a normal tone of voice. In an electronic sense his ear is only an inch from my lips, and mine likewise from his. But such conversations go largely without eye contact. I have to careen about to see eye to eye with anyone except for the copilot with whom I'm talking or listening. This I do when there's urgency or when I want to emphasize a point. Or when humor is at work.

  Normally we push a button to talk and release it to listen, just as we do with the radio. It makes laughing at a joke an awkward thing. You feel like a fool, pushing the talk switch just to laugh, but you don't want to embarrass the humorist with silence. So there's a certain subtle protocol we use to normalize the strange ways that we communicate on the interphone system.

  "Hot mike" is the preferred way. We simply pull up two buttons, which makes our boom mikes "hot," or continually open to interphone conversations without our having to press the talk switch. The pilots very rarely use the hot mike because it picks up noises such as breathing on the mikes and the hissing of the slipstream. And the casual conversations between the engineers, who always use it, distract from the task of listening to the radios.

  A favorite ploy of mine is to pull up the hot mike "listen" button so that I can eavesdrop on the engineers. Mostly I hear them talking at length about some little problem or curiosity with which the jet has presented them. Sometimes a senior engineer will be lecturing to a newer guy on the finer points of the trade. But occasionally I catch a little gossip.

  And they have their own little capers to keep their conversations private. The extra engineer may stand up for a stretch and take a quick gander at the pilots' interphone panels to make sure the hot mike buttons are down. Others, such as the one we call Catfish, are more cunning. While I was once eavesdropping on him, he paused and tested me by asking me when we expected to land. The question was posed on hot mike rather than on interphone. I knew it was a trick because I had my hot mike volume turned lower than the interphone volume. When I ignored the question, he assumed he had privacy and proceeded to discuss some particular shortcomings of another pilot, who happened to be a friend of mine. I listened for a while, then interrupted and chastised him for gossiping and defended my buddy.

  But tonight I'm on hot mike with Findley. I hold up my end of the perpetual one-sided conversation by nodding once in a while, grunting now and then, and occasionally posing a question or comment. I depend greatly on Findley's knowledge of the Starlifter's internal workings. He's the jet's doctor, its trainer, its groomer. He's its occasional healer and wizard. He rebukes the jet when it falters and praises it when it performs to his expectations. His is a labor of love, but like most flight engineers, he would never admit it.

  The Starlizzard has a complicated nervous system, over which Findley meticulously watches. He sees that ample power from our four engine-driven generatorsenough to light the town of Gunnison near his farmis satisfying the demand of our lights and electronic packages.

  He monitors its cardiovascular system as well. The jet has three hearts that pump the blood of hydraulic fluid through hundreds of feet of tangled metal arteries at a pressure of 3,000 pounds per square inch. This pressure drives actuators that provide the raw power to move our flight control surfaces against a wind force of several hurricanes.

  He closely watches the jet's respiratory system, which features extremely hot, high-pressured air piped from the compressor stage of the engines and fed through ducts to the air conditioning and pressurization systems.

  He's also the jet's nutritionist. The four gluttonous engines drink the putrid fluid stored in our tanks at the rate of a gallon every two seconds. Periodically I hear the clicking sound of Findley orchestrating his clusters of cross-feed valves and boost pump switches twenty-seven of themto ensure that the ten wing tanks drain symmetrically and in a specific sequence. I haven't the slightest idea how to do this and depend on him totally. The fuel is heavy; there is seventy tons of it, and the flow sequence is necessary to preserve the wing's balance and structural integrity.

  These planes have far exceeded the manufacturer's recommended useful lifespan. Cracks in the shoulders of the wings began to show up several years ago and caused severe restrictions to be placed on some jets. Attempts were made to mend the cracks, but new wings were out of the question. The government had decided not to pay for the storage of the jigs and tooling after production ceased, so the manufacturer just threw them away. Later, we would scoff at General Johnson's response to a congressional committee convened to review the lessons of Desert Storm. When asked about the wing cracks, he re
plied, "Yes, sir, we took a few chances."

  Imagine that. We we took a few chances. Pardon me, but how many times did you go downrange in a C-141, General? No, sir. It is Findley and I who take the chances; we and the others of the Cracked Wing Roulette Society.

  The watchful Findley continues his prattle: "We tried catfish farming one year but. ."

  We are over Newfoundland. It was here that Lindbergh watched the night settle in over the island's uplands: "Each crevice fills with shades of gray, as though twilight had sent its scouts ahead to keep contact with a beaten sun. The empire of the night is expanding over earth and sea."

  I watch the lights sparkle into life along the seacoast and listen to Moncton Center as they issue a routine traffic advisory to a British Airways jet concerning us.

  "Speedbird two niner eight, Moncton, you have traffic your one o'clock, ten miles, opposite direction at flight level three three zero, a C-141."

  "Roger, Moncton, Speedbird has the traffic in sight. Is he going to the Gulf?"

  Moncton Center knows our destination tonight is Germany, but they have no way of knowing our ultimate destination. I hesitate for a second, trying to remember if our itinerary is classified. I don't know. I press the transmit button.

  "Roger, sir, we'll end up there eventually."

  "Then God be with you."

  I appreciate his good wishes but hope we won't need the Lord as badly as he insinuated.

  It has been three hours since we departed McGuire for Germany, but we are still over land. I've done this before when passengers have come up asking if that was Ireland down there. I get a kick out of telling them that we haven't even started across the Atlantic yet. Many people simply don't realize that the direct route to northern Europe from the United States is northeastward, up through Canada, which stretches for hundreds of miles toward Europe.

  Now it's time for our familiar battle over our clearance with Gander Oceanic Control. Up ahead, as we leave Newfoundland, Gander will funnel us into one of the five tracks leading across to Europe. The tracks, known as the North Atlantic Track System, or NATS, parallel each other sixty miles apart and are redefined each day to take advantage of the high-altitude winds and pressure patterns. The eastbound tracks, labeled "V" through "Z," are active at night and expire at dawn. Then westbound tracks "A" through "E" are activated. Aircraft are fed into the NATS at certain intervals and altitudes. Because air traffic control radar cannot currently reach out more than a couple of hundred miles across the ocean, planes must be separated by lengthy intervals. They must also report their positions by high-frequency, or HF, long-range radio every ten degrees of longitude.

  I suspect that Gander doesn't look forward to seeing us coming. We are sixty miles per hour slower than most commercial air traffic, and so the control center must leave a wide gap behind us before allowing one of the faster jets in, or else we will be overrun. This requirement of course makes traffic control harder.

  Thus the controllers like to get us out of the way by assigning us an altitude too high for our heavy weight or too low for proper engine efficiency, which would eat into our reserve fuel. Neither is acceptable. The clearance delivery frequency can sometimes sound like haggling over a used car. They make an offer. We refuse. They counter. We compromise. In a while we have an altitude and route that suits us. But others of our kind have had to turn back or divert elsewhere for extra fuel because the clearance was unacceptable.

  Tonight Gander has cleared us into track Whiskey at our present altitude of 33,000 feet. But we have agreed to climb to 35,000 feet at forty degrees west longitude, by which time, Findley tells me, we will have burned off enough fuel weight to climb. This will keep Gander happy by allowing faster traffic behind us to overtake and pass underneath us.

  We now make final accuracy checks on our two inertial navigation systems before leaving the security of the land-based navigation stations. The INS is a cluster of very sophisticated gyroscopes that remember the point from which they departed and sense direction of movement and acceleration. It feeds the data into a computer, which translates to us carbon-based units such niceties as where we are, how fast we're going, and our estimated arrival times at any point along our route. Human navigators used to do this work. But no more, not on these airplanes. Now the nav seat is only a temporary berth to a dozing loadmaster or an inquisitive passenger.

  We pass over St. Johns, Newfoundland, which Lindbergh called the doorway to the Atlantic, and commit ourselves to the oceanic emptiness. Soon we are out of range of radar and normal radio contact and have to rely on the abhorrent HF radio.

  Similar to that used by HAM operators, the HF is an extremely long-range radio that achieves its distance by bouncing its signals off an ionized layer of thin air in the upper atmosphere, a feat that our normal land-based, or VHF, radio cannot do. But the HF is painful to listen to. It is filled with shrieking, hissing, squealing, scratching background noises. Through this preposterous soup of racket come staccatolike, half-human Donald Duckish voices from thousands of miles away. Moreover, the HF can be totally unusable during periods of peak solar activity. We hate it with an untold passion and take tums monitoring it.

  There is a certain band of HF frequencies that can best be described as "jungle" noises. I once made this observation to a copilot who then related George Fondren's brilliant theory about the origin of the mysterious sounds. It seems that George counsels his younger copilots that the noises are precisely thatjungle sounds: crickets, grasshoppers, frogs, birds, and other chirping and singing creatures. He theorizes that many planes crashed in World War II on deserted jungle islands. And that their radios, with jammed transmit switches, are still operating, picking up the songs of the jungle, and transmitting them worldwide. Fueled by the perpetual power of acids derived from rotting jungle juices, their batteries are constantly being recharged with fresh ions. The theory reeks with a scatological influence of a bovine nature, but I heard that one lieutenant listened with a great deal of attentiveness.

  We can relax a little now. Until we coast in at Ireland, we will mostly just monitor the Starlifter's autopilot and navigation devices. Findley is resting now, and Lynn; the carpenter by civil trade, has taken over the engineer's panel. Findley doesn't just lie down on the bunk for a casual nap. He goes to bed. He strips to his shorts and T-shirt, arranges pillows and covers, and settles in for a serious sleep. I should try that.

  On a previous flight, shortly after Findley had turned in, we were directed to descend temporarily to a lower altitude, which is a bit unusual. The silencing of the engine noise and the premature descent brought him to the flight deck to investigate. Turning, I saw him standing there in shorts and socks, with the multicolored cockpit lights reflecting in his glasses as he swung his head here and there, searching for trouble.

  I thought I'd solicit a little chuckle to break the monotony and shouted back that we had lost an engine and were diverting to Mildenhall Air Base for an emergency landing. I thought that was the end of it, but a few minutes later he reappeared on the flight deck fully dressed. Then he noticed that all engines were running happily. He didn't appreciate the humor but was too much of a gentleman to call me what I deserved to be called.

  I guess he gave up sleeping; he sat on the aft bench seat and reached for his box lunch, which I had previously tampered with: I had removed the sandwiches and replaced them with navigation booklets. This was another in a chain of pranks that started before takeoff. He had proudly showed me his new flashlight and boasted profusely of its power and reliability, prompting me covertly to remove the bulb before he began his walk-around inspection in the darkness. We all claimed innocence when he came back aboard, unsmiling, for another bulb. But he knew I was the culprit.

  The missing sandwiches tripped Findley's breaker. Still respectfully avoiding indicting his degenerate boss, he unleashed an awesome wrath. "I wish you guys would stop pickin' on me."

  I did feel a little bad about it and hoped it wouldn't drive a wedge betwee
n us. But a few hours later Findley was back at the engineer's panel, jabbering away at me about federal farm subsidies, and I knew that all was again well.

  It was about here, a couple of hundred miles past St. Johns, that Lindbergh wrote: "Here, all around me is the Atlanticits expanse, its depth, its power, its wild and open water. Is there something unique about this ocean that gives it character above all other seas, or is this my imagination?"

  No sir, it's not your imagination. You have never flown over other oceans, as I have. Yes, this one is unique. Many other seas are as cold and gray. Many others are littered with ice and blowing foam. But this one is different because it sits like a restless sentinel between two vastly populated and closely related continents. Its bottom is strewn with the wrecks of storm and war. This ocean doesn't beckon warm and friendly to overfliers as does the Pacific. This one dares youand bides its time.

  Listening to the static and the incessant transmissions of other pilots, I wait my turn and seize the instant as soon as a pause presents itself.

  "Gander, Gander, MAC Victor 3512, position."

  "MAC Victor 3512, Gander, go ahead."

  I speak more clearly and carefully on the HF than I normally do because of the great potential for misunderstanding.

  "MAC Victor 3512 checked five zero north, four zero west at zero zero three five. Flight level three three zero. Estimate five two north three zero west at zero one two eight. Five three north, two zero west next. Over."

  Gander acknowledges my position report, and as soon as he finishes, a TWA pilot calls for Gander's attention but is inadvertently blocked by an Air Canada pilot. Gander advises Air Canada to stand by, and directs the TWA pilot to proceed while light years in the electronic distance I hear another MAC flight, operating farther south, pleading for a higher altitude from Santa Maria Center.

  Such is the business of the HF airways. I relax, glad that the position report went off easily. Sometimes we try for fifteen minutes to get a word in. Happily, the next report is almost an hour away.