High Flyer

Many commercial pilots come from a military background. I was told that you can tell where they came from — Air Force, civilian training, or Navy — from how they take off. A long, slow, measured takeoff at a low angle? Air Force or civilian training. Runway training. A comparatively fast, abrupt takeoff at a high angle? Navy. These are people who learned to fly off the deck of aircraft carriers. I don’t know how true any of that is; I can just as easily imagine commercial carriers being picky about how their pilots take off, demanding that it be done in Exactly The Same Way, across the board, given suitable conditions. Still, this is what I was told when I took my seat on a small commuter plane back in 2003. It was the mid-Basic Training winter break promised to me in my Army enlistment contract, and I was on the way back to Houston. As far as I could tell, most everybody else on the tiny flight was military, as well — most on BCT breaks like myself, with some more seasoned folks likely heading home to see their families for the holidays. The enlisted fellow next to me bestowed this tip for identifying the pilot’s training as we accelerated down the runway, and I’ve paid close attention on every flight since. As I recall, this was a Navy take off.

Generally, I feel safer flying on smaller, propeller-driven planes. There’s something about being able to feel the slight turbulence that small craft are more susceptible to that makes it seem less remote, inhuman, suspended and apparently unmoving tens of thousands of miles above the surface of the Earth. Even so, I thought the engines were unusually loud, and the noise was wrong. “Wrong,” as in, “when machines don’t sound right”. Tonally wrong. I have no familiarity with propeller-driven engines, but the sound it made was unsettling from the start. I commented to my seat partner about it, and he looked out the window and sort of shrugged. The sound seemed to get worse with time, but that could’ve just been in my head.

The smoke was not. I was not the first to point it out. I could easily see the engine from my window, and the smoke was slight enough, hard enough to see that it could be written off as paranoia. The sound got louder and louder. For reasons that still aren’t clear to me, we either dropped or hit hard turbulence and the tiny snack cart was flung all the way to the back of the aisle, taking the stewardess who tried to hold onto it to the ground and hitting a kid’s leg on the way back. The cabin exploded into nervous chattering after that. We got a seatbelts warning from the pilot. I pointedly looked away from the roaring propeller just outside my window. After a bit, the roaring stopped. The pilot had shut off the engine. “You can land just fine with one engine,” my companion noted with inappropriate cheer. “You can even land with no engines.” This was nice to know, but what I really wanted — and what I suspected many others on the flight wanted — was to hear something, anything, from the pilot. He wasn’t saying much; the news that he’d shut off the engine filtered back to us by word-of-mouth and visual confirmation. We also heard that the other engine was having trouble, but I don’t remember him shutting that one off. I only remember that, aside from a cabin rife with gallows humor, it was eerily quiet up there.

I’m grateful to have had that experience on a flight that was at least 50% enlisted folks. It meant that if we were going down, we were going to crack jokes the whole way there. The jokes only intensified when the pilot finally got on the intercom to tell us that we would be making an emergency landing in Montgomery, Alabama. He did not tell us we would be circling the airport at a steep angle until we started doing it, with the wing at 60–70 degrees to the ground. So many strange things had already happened on the flight that, in retrospect, I think I was too worn out to be truly shocked by what was an unexpected, but clearly controlled, acrobatic feat. I suspect troubled rumblings among the passengers led one of the flight attendants to call up to the pilot and tell him to let us know, for god’s sake, what he was doing. Turns out, he was dumping fuel. I didn’t make the obvious “so we don’t explode if we crash” connection until later, which is probably for the better. We flew in circles, the plane slowly, gracefully rolling this way and that, for about 45 minutes. It was… serene. The sun glinted off the wingtips and cast warm, slow-moving shapes across the plane’s interior. Most of the passengers had quieted. I remember wishing I had phone reception so I could call, text, or something — anything — to let people know I was thinking of them. You know. If we died. In that moment, I neither expected to die, nor specifically to live. It was, as we were, “up in the air”, and all one can really do is accept it. It’s in probability’s hands. Maintenance’s hands. The pilot’s hands. I think maintenance kind of screwed us, but the pilot’s hands were apparently quite capable, and he landed us without further incident. I recall no mounting terror as we approached the tarmac, just enthusiastic clapping when the plane rolled to a stop. Relief. Warmth.

The airport in Montgomery was small. Tiny, even. The sort of place where you still deplane by going down wheeled stairs and walk back inside, or take a shuttle to the terminal. On the way out, my companion asked a flight attendant where he might be able to smoke. “Outside”. “Outside” had become “around the plane”. Those of us in uniforms — smoking and not — had grouped up near the wing in a sort of impromptu After-Action Report. About 20 feet away stood the pilot, hunched into himself, frantically sucking on his cigarette and utterly drenched in sweat. Soaked. I cannot emphasize this enough. I have never seen such a visibly stressed man outside of culturally designated Stress Zones, like the Emergency Room — and even then, rarely. I wanted to know what happened to that plane so bad, but he emitted such powerful “please, for the love of god, leave me alone I JUST LANDED A CRIPPLED PLANE” vibes that all we could bring ourselves to do, as a group, was offer him comradely congratulations on his excellent flying. And not killing us. Thanks for not killing us! (We didn’t say that. I am sure he knew that is what we meant.)

I still wonder about him from time to time. I came out of it okay. I’m uncomfortable on planes, but lots of people are. I suspect the other enlisted folks came out of it okay. We’re pretty good at coping, and besides, nobody got hurt — aside from that kid getting a snack cart to the shin. The pilot, though… I wonder if he was okay. I wonder if he actually made mistakes that led to the troubled flight, and that weighed on him. I wonder if he missed something on a checklist before taking off. I wonder if he heard that engine and thought, “that doesn’t sound right,” but didn’t quite have cause or the ability to do anything about it. I wonder what the actual mechanical fault was. I wonder if that plane had a history of problems. I wonder if flying at such a steep angle, wings nearly parallel to the ground, is normal procedure for fuel dumping, or if something else was going on and I’ll never know what that was about. I wonder if the pilot had anybody to talk to about what he went through. I wonder if he got PTSD.

I wonder if he ever flew again.