Excitement in the Air

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My wife, my daughter and I have just returned home from a very long vacation trip.  We have a little more than a day to get on top of jet-lag, and we have to get Junior to the airport some 200 miles away in Newark, NJ, so that she can head off to where she lives, in Arizona.  (This is sort of routine; we all are experiencing a significant lack of discretionary income, so we prefer to drive to a major airport nearby, rather than pay the exorbitant additional airfare to the local teeny-weeny air terminal.  It saves us close to $200, which is, let's see: something like 100 hamburgers, not to mention some fries!  Okay, that's enough levity.)

Our friend Jeffrey, a colleague, is a pilot, and owns a small plane.  (One doesn't really own a plane outright, around here; one owns a share in a plane.)  It so happened that, some months earlier, Jeff had talked with my wife and me at Stammtisch (which is a German institution that sanctions the use of beer as a bonding material.  This idea has been very cleverly adopted at our local watering-hole to promote beer consumption).  Jeff had disclosed to us, over a glass of beer, that it was pretty easy to ferry a passenger to any major airport in the vicinity.  This, we had all thought to our separate selves, would beat the heck out of a 4-hour trip out to the airport, and a 4-hour trip back, not to mention numerous other inconveniences that knew not their right hands from their left, to paraphrase the Prophet Jonah*.  So now, anticipating a very long road trip to Newark, NJ --not, I might add, one of our favorite places to visit casually, and don't get me started-- I asked Jeff whether it might be in the cards to get Junior flown out to Newark in his plane.

Jeff looks up his busy schedule; a trip up to Toronto has just been cancelled, and he is free!  We iron out the mathematical details, and it appears that, for the low, low cost of around $165, Junior and I can hop over to Newark with Jeff, and Junior can catch her plane to cactusland, while Jeff and I return, and celebrate with a nice lunch.

Junior's flight is at noon, so we figure that she has to check in around 10:30 A.M. (or 10:30 hours, as we say in the flying culture).  "If we leave at 9:00," says Jeffrey, "we can make it with a little time to spare.  If you get to the private plane area at 8:30, you can go through the pre-flight check with me!"  After he explains what a pre-flight check is --just going through a very extensive list of safety precautions-- we agree to be at the airfield at 8:30 AM.

As you can imagine, we hardly get any sleep that night.  We watch Meet the Robinsons, a maniacal animated feature by Walt Disney (not bad, actually), and then I stagger off to lie down in lieu of sleeping, while Junior and my wife watch Tangled, while Junior tries to pack her stuff in such a way that both Jeffrey and the airline which will convey her to AZ will be happy with the result.

We're up long before 6:30 AM.  More frantic packing.  All the bags are weighed, and carefully labelled with their weight.  We also weigh ourselves; there is a detailed analysis of the balance of the plane, in order for optimal maneuverability.  My wife had volunteered to stay behind to give Jeff a little more flexibility.  We find the place where we are to meet at the airfield --obviously a place we've never been, since we've not flown out of our town in a private plane before.  Jeff rolls up, does a little paper work, calls the control tower, we load the bags onto a golf cart, and roll out to the hangar.  Jeff opens up the hanger, and there is the --very small-- Cessna that is to transport the three of us to Newark!  All the finicky enumerating of the weights of the people and the luggage becomes very reasonable.  (It is all about what we call moments : the rotational effect of a weight in a particular place.  You multiply the weight by its distance from the center of gravity of the empty plane; weights on one side must balance the weights on the other side.)

Jeff loads the bags, while the rest of us anxiously look on.  We go through the fabulous pre-flight check.  We check the oil, the fuel (any water in the fuel?  Luckily, no), the tires, the control surfaces (tail elevators at the back, the rudder, the wing elevators) the propeller blade for nicks, take out the air intake covers (prevent birds from nesting in them), the cover of the pitot tube (a gadget which measures "air speed", the speed of the plane relative to the air around it.  There is a GPS on board that estimates the true speed; from the two we can calculate the wind speed, but I know you don't really care at this point!).

Finally we're ready to leave.  He hands us each a head set, which we plug into sockets near our seats.  We close down the doors and windows, Jeff straps his log book onto his left leg, and his Ipad onto his right leg, loudly calls out "Clear!", and starts up the engine.

It turns out that a large part of what a pilot does is to keep talking to people in control towers.  Since we were flying according to Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), the towers were entirely in control of us, we had to fly at roughly 7,000 feet, and we had to do precisely what we were told.  If we were flying according to Visual Flight Rules, we would fly lower, and fly by sight, using visual landmarks.  ("Not necessarily lower," Jeffrey corrects me.  But low enough to be below the cloud layer, so visual navigation is at all possible.  Today the clouds were roughly at 6,000, so we would have had to fly below that altitude.)

We could hear the Control Tower in our headsets.  "93-Romeo, you're cleared to take off," he says, and follows up with a rapid-fire mumble that essentially recounted local wind-speed conditions.  Jeff reports that there are a flock of geese camped out near the runway, who seem not to be a problem.

Soon we are off, leaving my wife looking after us, with a very anxious expression.  We wave frantically, and head out towards a mid-way landmark, at which point we're supposed to head straight to Newark.  It's a little rough as we pass through clouds on our way to 7,000 feet.  Jeff reports to the regional control center to which he has been handed-off, that the cloud tops are at roughly 6,000 feet, in case "anyone asks."

Junior is seated in front, while I sit in the back.  We're both very quiet, but Junior has a really good camera with which she's systematically taking a photographic record of everything.  Eventually Jeff is talking to us (we hear his voice on the headsets), and we figure it's safe to talk back.

"Would you like to fly the plane?" he asks Junior.  Her face lights up, and he explains what to do.  The hand controls bank the plane to the left or the right, which is how the plane is steered for the most part.  Pulling the controls towards one sends the plane up, pushing it away sends the plane downward.  The main trick, apparently, is to make very slight corrections.  Unlike an automobile, where the steering wheel controls only the angle of the front wheels, in a plane the procedure for a slight correction is quite different to the procedure for a large correction.  For slight corrections, the control automatically returns to "neutral" position (just like the steering wheel in most cars).  So that's what she should do, to keep the bearing of the plane matched up with the bearing recommended by the navigation equipment.

"Pull the nose up ... pull the nose up ... great!  That's good," Jeffrey says, and then after a while, "Turn right; bring it to 120.  Turn right ... keep turning ... that's good," he says.  She's a quick study, is our Junior, and afterwards Jeff is full of praise.

We're handed off to Allentown control, then to New York control, and finally to Newark.  We come down to 3,000 feet, and then, at the urging of the Tower, race in at top speed, to land on the little runway kept for small planes such ours.  We taxi in to a facility (Signature Service), that sends a gentleman over to take charge of the plane, top up the fuel, etc.  The baggage is loaded into a dolly, and then into a courtesy van, and Jeff joins us to drop Junior off at Departures.  I just begin to realize that the General Aviation system is, at least logically, completely outside the virtual enclosure that each commercial carrier maintains.  You only enter this enclosure when you check in and go through security; once you land, and exit through the gate, you're mostly out of this enclosure.  (You know this, because if you try to go back to the gate, you will be stopped.)

Jeffrey and I head back to the private plane area (General Aviation), get ourselves some popped corn and some marginal coffee, visit the restroom, do some paperwork, and then head out to the plane.  Without Junior and her baggage, we're in good shape.

After some more busy talking with the control tower, we're sent out to the runway, and we're off.

"Would you like to fly the plane?" Jeff asks, and I blushingly admit that I would.  He shows me what to do, and I try.  Initially I steer a little too aggressively, which ends up dropping the nose too much.  I gradually learn to make a series of little corrections rather than one big correction (which would require additional altitude corrections, which is not good).  I am far from being a natural at this game, especially as I tend to be intimidated by clouds which seem to be rushing faster towards us if they're higher.  (This is an obvious parallax phenomenon, just as distant trees, or buildings, for that matter, seem to go by more slowly than nearer ones.)

When we're about halfway, things start to go wrong.  First, some of the navigation equipment (there were at least three independent systems Jeffrey had at call) starts to go on the blink.  We really know that something is wrong when the control tower can't hear us respond to an instruction.  We hear him anxiously asking "93-Romeo, do you read?" several times.  Jeffrey is calling back, "Control, this is 93-Romeo; do you read?" but they don't acknowledge.  We have turned due West to avoid a parachute-jumping event that was in our path, but the control tower is not yet aware of it.  (Eventually they will see us on our new path on their radar, but at the moment they're anxious.)

"The electrical system is failing," says Jeff.  It seems to me that the engine is working perfectly, so the failure seems to be confined to the accessories --thinking of the navigation system and the radio as "accessories", so I'm not too concerned.  Jeff has taken the controls already, to make the turn.  He asks me to look in the back seat for a bag which has the backup radio, a hand-held one.  I can't hear him over the interior intercom, so I take off the headset, though I'm a little nervous that Jeff is still wearing his.  I can hear him pretty well without the headset, because he has quite a carrying voice.

I find the radio, and pass it over.  He succeeds in raising the control tower one last time, and requests to be allowed to drop down to 4,000 feet and switch to visual flight rules because we're obviously losing voice contact.  The control tower is agreeable.

"Well," says Jeff, "thank goodness for good old Ipad!"  He explains where we are, and says he's going to get close to home, and then call our local control tower, and explain that we've got a bad electrical system.  The engine is fine, he confirms (though I don't know exactly how that happens to be the case; presumably the engine is wired to carry on even with a faulty charging system).  I am a little bewildered, because I can't identify any landmarks.  Usually I can spot the big interstate highways such as I 80, but here all I can see are local one-lane-each-way roads.  We spot a pair of cooling towers that go with one of the local nuclear power stations.  That makes me feel a little better, and then I spot one of the enormous geological formations that are characteristic to our area, namely the Nittany Ridge.  We cross over it, and I feel a little better, for no very good reason.

"Here's what we're going to do," says Jeff.  "You fly, while I try to raise the tower.  When we get closer, I'll take over."
"But where am I heading?  I can't spot any landmarks!"
"See the Mall?  Go straight towards it!"
What Mall?  I can't see a thing that I can recognize.  But I take the controls, and concentrate on keeping the plane level, which is easy.  Suddenly, I recognize this crazy sculpture that is a landmark at our Mall, and now I know where we are.

Jeff has managed to raise the tower, and is explaining the situation.  "Oh, any runway is fine.  No, actually," he says, "27 is good, because this is going to be a no-flaps landing."

Evidently the electrical system controls more than just the radio and the navigation instruments; it also controls the flaps.  The flaps are things you use when landing, to cut down the speed.  "Luckily," Jeff explains, "we've been practicing No-Flaps landings just this month.  It's going to be okay!  Right ... right ... a little further right ... good."

I can see the landing strip now.  There is a large diagonal one, and the one towards which we are heading, labeled with an enormous "27" right at the nearer end.  I am given the hand-held radio while Jeff takes the controls, and I'm instructed to relay any last minute instructions from the tower.  I suspect that I was not pressing the right button, or something, because the tower wasn't saying anything!  Or maybe they were too busy watching the plane.  [Jeff says that there is no button to receive, and he's glad I wasn't pushing anything.  You only push the button to talk / transmit.]

Jeff warns me that he is doing a side-slip; a maneouver that enables the plane to lose height and speed at the same time.  It feels weird, but having read a lot of Biggles books in my early youth, I have an idea what it was like.  It is a long, controlled slip, and then we're nicely lined up.  The enormous '27' rushes towards us, and then we see a million skid-marks hurtling up, and we're down.  It really seemed easy.

As soon as he turns the engine off, Jeff heaves a sigh of relief, and the fuel truck chugs up.  Poor Jeff has to unburden himself to the fuel guy, who placidly listens to Jeff's account of how things went wrong.  It takes fifteen minutes to get the plane into the hangar and batten it down.  We head out to the parking lot, get in Jeff's little Toyota, and drive round to the restaurant at the main terminal.  It is a good restaurant, and Jeff orders a Rum and Ginger.  Evidently Jeff only orders a Rum and Ginger when he has come through a particularly hairy experience.

I order one, too.  A Rum-and-Ginger is going to become a ritual for me too, I can tell!

*The very last verse, I believe.  You know my methods, Watson; apply them.