Green Dream

by Robert Gollagher

  “Yellow and white, eh? You’d think they’d come up with better colours for an aeroplane that yellow and white, red and white, blue and white. Who comes up with these colours?”

  Michael was checking the engine oil. “It’s an aircraft, mate. Aeroplanes are those wind-up toys kids chuck around in parks. And what colour it is has got nothing to do with it.”

  The girls were waiting impatiently to board the plane. Diane spoke up. “Huh. That’s a typically male comment. What’s the most important thing about a car?”

  “Colour,” said Marie. “Ask any marketing executive.”

  “Well,” said Michael, closing the engine cowling. “Yellow and white will have to do. Anyone who doesn’t like the colour can wait for the next plane. Any takers?”

  “It’s a bit old, isn’t it?” said Ian. “Is this one of the old training tubs from the flight school? Another cheap rental?”

  “Don’t knock the 172. I learned to fly in one of these, you know. It’s a fine aircraft. This thing is the Old Faithful of aviation, and there’s one thing about Old Faithfuls: they never let you down.”

  “You boys finished yet?” said Marie.

  “Yep,” said Michael. “Let’s get goin’.”

  The flight had been uneventful, if a little bumpy, until Marie noticed Michael fiddling with the radio. He looked annoyed. Despite barking his callsign and position into the microphone on his headset several times, he was getting no response.

  “Ah, shit,” he grumbled.

  “What’s up?” said Marie, over the engine noise.

  “The bloody radio’s on the blink.”

  “You sure? There’s some storm activity. Maybe it’s interference.”

  “Nah. Bloody thing’s fucked up again.”

  Marie shrugged. “I thought Bert had fixed it.”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “It worked fine, on take-off.”

  “Yeah. Looked fine on preflight, too.”

  “Any chance of getting it going?” said Marie.

  “No. Last time this happened, Bert had to take it apart.”

  “Hmmm. Well, that’s not good.”

  “He reckoned it was gonna be fine, now. It passed the checks.”

  “So, we’ve got no radio.”

  “Not a cracker,” said Michael. “Shit.”

  “It’s not Bert’s fault.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just, I’m worried about those storms.”

  Marie nodded.

  “With the radio out, I can’t tell how bad they’ll be, up ahead.”

  “You want to turn back?”

  “Ah, I’m not sure. Weather wasn’t good at Albany, when we left. Might be worse behind us than in front. It’s a tough call.”

  “Hmmm.” Marie was silent for a few minutes.

  “Look at that lot. That’s gotta be bad news.” Michael pointed at several towering columns of cloud, ahead and to the left and right. Visibility was poor and it was starting to get dark but what had Michael worried was clear enough: cumulonimbus clouds, great storm stacks reaching up high, white monsters turning slowly dark.

  “You think we can go through it?”

  “Maybe, if we go around the cells, but if the storm cells coalesce, we’d be stuck right in the middle of it. I think we’d better turn back.”

  “Ian and Diane won’t be happy. They’re supposed to be at work tomorrow morning.”

  “I know, luv. But it’s just not safe.”

  “So, you want to go back?”

  “Yeah. We don’t want to take a 172 into that kind of weather, not without a radio. Anything smaller than a jetliner doesn’t want to go through that. The windshear could toss us around like a leaf.”

  “I know,” said Marie. “I just didn’t want to disappoint them.”

  Michael patted his wife on the knee. “You’d better wake ’em up.”

  While Marie woke up Ian and Diane, and told them that they had to turn back to avoid the storms, Michael banked the plane, turned 180 degrees and reversed course.

  “Is it really that bad?” said Ian, sleepily.

  “Afraid so, mate,” said Michael. “Sorry.”

  “What a bugger.”

  “It’s okay, Mike,” said Diane. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

  Michael had gone quiet. He seemed distant.

  “Something up?” said Marie.

  “Look at that.” There was a big storm, dead ahead.

  “This is getting worse, isn’t it?” said Marie.

  Without a radio, there was no way Michael could get an accurate picture of where the bad weather was, of how thick it was in each direction of the compass and of which route and altitude he should take to get out of it as quickly as possible. The light was failing rapidly. Soon it would be completely dark. It was a freak situation, incredibly unlikely, but Michael’s training told him not to waste time thinking about that. He simply had to deal with the situation at hand. There was no time for philosophising about how they had gotten into it. That time would come later, much later.

  A flash of lightning answered Marie’s question.

  Suddenly, the plane bucked up, then dropped. Diane felt sick. The plane must have dropped a hundred feet without warning.

  “Windshear!” Michael yelled tersely, as he settled the aircraft back into level flight. He knew that a violent updraught must have stalled the wing, bleeding them momentarily dry of the aerodynamic force, lift, which kept the plane flying. The engine could be running perfectly, but with a stalled wing, without lift, the plane would drop like a stone until Michael could correct the controls and level it out again. Up here, at five thousand feet, Michael knew this was not such a problem, but down low, near the ground, a drop of only fifty feet might prove fatal. He flew south, trying to maintain five thousand feet, while his mind worked overtime to find a solution.

  The sun had disappeared beyond the horizon. Only the afterglow of dusk remained to light the rural scene below, miles and miles of almost flat, gently-rolling farmland, dotted with trees and powerlines, grazing cattle and dirt roads. The scene was just barely, if at all, visible from the aircraft, thick in the storm. Lightning flashes bathed the wings in light between moments of darkness. The horizon was a ruby line, rapidly fading.

  “Marie,” said Michael, “we’re in trouble.”

  “Mike?” Marie had never heard him say such a thing, in all the years they had flown together. She was suddenly worried.

  “Guys,” Michael repeated, “we’ve got a bit of a problem, here.”

  Ian and Diane leaned forward, struggling to hear him.

  “The weather’s closing in and I don’t see a way out of it. Without a radio, there’s no way to guess which way to fly. It’s getting dark ... and in pure darkness there’d be no hope of landing unless we could make it to a lighted airport.”

  “Right,” said Ian.

  “What do you think we should do?” said Diane.

  “Well, if that windshear was any indication of things to come, it might be too dangerous up here. I’m having trouble maintaining altitude, so we can’t outclimb the storm. If we hit more serious turbulence, it could damage the airframe.”

  “You mean ... we could stop flying?” said Ian.

  “I’m not saying that. I just think it’s too dangerous up here. There’s still some light, and there’s an airstrip near here, on Johnsons Farm. If we want to take that option, we can ...” Michael stopped talking. The plane had suddenly dropped again. It was a sickening feeling, like being in a lift with a snapped cable, plummeting straight down.

  “Hold on!” Michael yelled.

  Then he spoke calmly, once he had the aircraft in a long, gentle dive to pick up speed and restore the airflow over the wing after the stall. “We’re down to four thousand feet.”

  Marie knew what Michael was going to say. “We can’t keep going like this, can we, Mike? Not in the dark.”

  “No. I don’t think so. I think we can’t.”

  “Well,” sai
d Ian, as calmly as he could, “we’d better put her down, then. We’d better land, while there’s still light.”

  “You’re the pilot, Mike. It’s your decision,” said Diane. She trusted him instinctively. He had never let them down before and it was reassuring to her that Michael was in command. He would get them through this in one piece, that much she was sure of.

  “Okay. I think we should land at Johnsons Farm, while there’s still light. Tighten up your seat belts. This could be a little rough.”

  “Okay,” said Ian.

  Marie said nothing, but shared a private glance with Michael. She, too, was sure that he would get them through safely.

  Michael slowly lost altitude, maintaining a steady rate of descent and a safe cruising speed as best he could in the violent weather. At last, he could just make out Johnsons Farm, in the near darkness, and the farm’s dirt airstrip. Fortunately, Michael had landed at this farm several times before, during his charter work, and he felt comfortable that he could find a safe approach to the airstrip, even in the poor light.

  As he turned onto the final leg of his landing pattern, lined up perfectly on final approach and sinking past five hundred feet, Michael’s thoughts were calm. He thought only of the task at hand, which was to set the aircraft down safely – a difficult job in the dim light, with strong crosswinds and the rain and lightning of a violent storm falling down on them from above. The other three occupants of the plane were nervous, because they did not have the task of flying to occupy their minds. All they had was hope.

  For Marie, it was probably worst of all. Michael hid the seriousness of the situation quite well from Ian and Diane, but fifteen years of marriage allowed Marie almost to read Michael’s thoughts. She could see it in his face: this was serious and they might not make it. There was no time to talk about anything. Things were happening fast and Michael needed complete concentration. Marie simply tightened her seat belt a little more, gripped the seat firmly, and waited.

  The little 172 stopped bucking and weaving so much, as it neared the ground. At four hundred feet, Michael was reasonably happy with the approach. At three hundred, he decided to go ahead and not to abort the landing. He was lined up well, drifting down to the near end of the airstrip as the altimeter indicated two hundred feet. Silently, Michael gave thanks that the turbulence was smoothing out. He felt confident.

  Nevertheless, he still considered the risk of fire. Under ordinary circumstances, in an emergency landing in calm conditions, he would have liked to shut down the engine, switch everything off, and glide to the ground without power on. If anything should go wrong, that would give him the least chance of a spark igniting the gallons of aviation fuel that still slopped around in the tanks. On the other hand, if he cut the engine, he would have no way of aborting the landing if a violent gust were to grab the aircraft and push it off course at the last moment. He might need the engine to go around again. The decision was already made: he would not switch off until the aircraft was grounded and travelling too slowly to become airborne again. It was a decision, along with the decision to attempt the landing at all, which would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  The plane gradually lost height as it swooped in at a high landing speed over the long, dark path of dirt that passed for a farm airstrip. And then – suddenly – there was a terrible, malignant jet of wind, violent enough to blow old strips of corrugated iron over the airstrip. Michael would later remember the sight of those bits of tin, which had covered a nearby well, fluttering across the airstrip like silver leaves.

  The sudden gust, like the hand of an angry giant, took the small aircraft and wrenched it to the right. It happened far too quickly for Michael to correct. The left wing was pushed up at an absurd angle and the right wing stalled. Michael had the control wheel twisted to the left, pushing forward desperately to try to correct the stall and the simultaneous quarter-roll to the right, but the raised left wing was caught even more effectively by the wind and it went past vertical. For Michael, events now seemed in slow motion. He fought at the controls but knew it was beyond controlling.

  They were flying on their side now, plunging vertically down and only an instant away from colliding with the ground. Although the sudden lurch of the plane rolling was a sickening feeling to all the passengers, Ian and Diane, in the back, were probably less horrified than Marie, since it was only Marie who had a clear view of the ground rushing up at them and of how imminent the impact was. She knew, in that split second, that they would probably not survive. And then the instant was over.

  The right wingtip hit the ground. And that was the end of being airborne – they were no longer flying. The little plane, wrenched over by the wind, caught by the ground like an animal in a trap, began a sudden, horrific cartwheel. The right wingtip gouged a furrow along the wet ground until the left wing came flipping over the top, spinning the plane end over end like a gigantic toy, and finally turning the whole mangled aircraft upside down, then smashing it into the ground with unthinkable force. It skidded to a halt. The occupants were already unconscious.

  “I’m telling you, it’s a bloody plane!” said the farmer’s grown-up son.

  “Get out of it, Jack. For Chrissake, nobody’d be flying in this storm.” Reg Johnson was annoyed. He was trying to watch television.

  “Listen, Dad. I saw the strobe light. Somebody just tried to land on our strip. I saw it come down. Come on! Get off your arse.”

  Reg Johnson let out a heavy sigh. “Are you sure?”

  “Fuckin’ oath, I’m sure, Dad.”

  “Well, if a plane did come down in this, they could be hurt.”

  “That’s what I’m saying!”

  “All right,” said Reg. “Get the Land-Rover, and the first-aid kit. And tell Mum to stand by the radio. We might need to call for help. Bloody hell. Right in the middle of the fuckin’ footy, too.”

  By the time the two men had bumped across the paddock in the four-wheel drive and reached the airstrip, in the now-complete darkness and the driving rain, they realised a plane had indeed come down. Caught in the headlights, as they drove along the dirt strip, were white and yellow pieces of debris. Reg Johnson had stopped joking. He looked sad.

  “Oh, shit, Dad.” Jack had seen the plane, which the long line of debris had led them to. It was by the right side of the airstrip, shining in the beam of the powerful spotlights of the Land-Rover. It didn’t look an aircraft but like an ugly pile of twisted metal, like a scrap dump. The plane was upside down and mostly unrecognisable.

  “Come on, mate,” said Reg. “There might still be people alive in there. Leave the lights on.”

  Jack turned off the engine, grabbed the first-aid kit and, together with his father, jogged over to the wreck.

  They came to the pilot’s side of the plane first. Michael, like the other three people in the plane, was hanging upside down by his seat belt, and, unlike the other three, was still alive. His face was pushed against the door window and it was stained with blood. He was completely unconscious.

  “I found the pilot!” Jack yelled. He pulled at the door but it was too buckled to open. “Can’t get the bloody door open. We’ll need the winch, Dad.”

  “Right, mate. Get back to the car. I’ll set up the cable. And make it quick. This bloody thing could catch fire. I smell fuel.” Reg took the winch hook from behind the roo bar of the big Land-Rover and, as Jack played out the line, ran back to the wreck and planted the winch hook over the bent edge of the pilot-side door.

  “Ready, Dad?”

  “Ready, son. Let her rip. Gently, now.”

  The door buckled further, under the pull from the winch, then popped open. Michael’s head flopped down, hanging vertical.

  Reg put his cold fingers in front of the pilot’s mouth. He felt breath on his hand. “Jesus, he’s still alive! Help me get him out!”

  Together, the two farmers undid the seat belt and cradled the unconscious man, as gently as they could, out of the aircraft. It was still raining
. They carried the man to the side of the Land-Rover. Reg yelled again at his son. “Get a tarp out of the Rover, mate. Cover him up. Keep the rain off him. I’ll check the others.”

  Reg stuck his head into the cabin of the wreck. He shone a waterproof torch around, and soon wished he hadn’t. The two in the back, a man and a woman, were obviously dead. The back of the cabin was crushed around them and there was no way to get the twisted bodies out. It was not a sight for the faint-hearted. Even Reg, a toughened farmer, felt sick. He turned his attention to the woman in the front seat. He noticed that the engine block had come back, pushed rearward by the impact, and crushed the lower half of her body. He felt for a pulse. There was none. She was dead.

  Reg made a mental note to check the pilot’s legs. They might have been crushed, as well. Then he came out of the wreck and walked to the one man he could still do something for, the survivor. “Right, son. Help me get him in the back of the Rover. Careful of his legs. I think they might be broken.”

  At that moment, as Reg and his son gently lifted Michael into a half-sitting position, in preparation for lifting him into the truck, Michael’s eyes opened. He gasped a little, confused and dazed.

  “He’s awake, Dad,” Jack whispered.

  “Crikey. Poor bastard. Would have been better if he’d stayed unconscious. Nearest doctor’s an hour away. He’s going to need some morphine, or something.” Reg looked at Michael and raised his voice enough for the dazed man to hear. “Okay, mate. You’re gonna be all right. Don’t try to move, eh? Just sit still. We’ll look after you.”