The Compass and the Clock
A speck upon an endless ocean, a work of science and of art, Melmoth strikes eastward to test the mettle and endurance of its maker.
I am drawn by the thought of flying long distances. It is my mountain climbing, my archery, my test of strength. I don’t know why it appeals to me so much, but I like to look at a globe, mentally measuring the great-circle routes and translating them into hours and into pounds of fuel. The more remote and the lonelier the route, the greater its magnetism for me. My reason sees such long flights as long sits, merely tedious waits for a machine to tick up its appointed number of revolutions; but in my heart, they appear as the door handles of eternity, glimpses of the inaccessible and the sacred.
When I designed an airplane, it was natural that I would design it for range. It was not optimized for range; airplanes optimized for range have long slender wings like an airliner’s or a sailplane’s. Though graceful, such wings are ungainly and hamper maneuverability. My airplane would be as compact as a fighter and would achieve its range by means of low drag and a large internal fuel capacity.
The thought of flying around the world was always in my mind; a convenient design parameter was offered by the distance from San Francisco to Hawaii, which I came to think of as the longest unavoidable stretch of open water on an imaginary circumglobal jaunt. (Actually, that stretch is avoidable by following the northern Japanese islands into the Aleutians, but the uncertain weather on that route makes it impractical.) From San Francisco to Hawaii is about 2,100 nm; a range of more than 2,800 nm would be necessary to make that flight comfortably.
The airplane I built is named Melmoth. It took five years plus two more for tests and alterations, and it has a paper range of about 3,000 nm on a fuel capacity of 154 gallons. The fuel is carried in two tip tanks that hold 35 gallons each and two integral wing tanks holding 42 gallons each. The tanks can be selected manually, or else a pair of tanks — both tips or both mains — can be selected manually and the fuel system set on “automatic,” whereupon it switches from one side to the other by itself every five minutes, keeping the plane balanced.
The engine is a Continental IO–360-A of 195 horsepower, with 210 available for takeoff. It is a six-cylinder, fuel-injected engine; mine has been carefully overhauled so that it uses little oil — a quart every 12 hours or so. It runs smoothly on very lean mixtures.
The airframe is small, less than 22 feet long with a 23-foot wingspan. The cabin seats two, with a large baggage compartment in which a single jump seat can be used by a third passenger of great limberness and endurance. A large all-flying T tail provides a wide CG range.
The airplane is fast and maneuverable when it is lightly loaded, climbing at nearly 2,000 fpm, doing a roll in three and a half seconds, indicating over 180 knots at sea level. It gets fairly good gas mileage: 25 nmpg at 115 knots and about 18 at 160 knots.
With this airplane, on paper at least, I could fly 3,000 miles with a passenger and more than 100 pounds of baggage and remain aloft for more than 24 hours. The “door handle of eternity” was within my grasp.
Nancy and I decided at random to cross the Atlantic. A date, remote but not absurdly so, was tentatively set. The scheme seemed thereafter to gain solidity and momentum of its own accord, until it could no longer be stopped. The first preparations were abstract ones. At the beginning of the year, I sent letters to the governments of the countries we expected to visit requesting permission to operate an experimental airplane in their airspace. I ordered a subscription to the International Flight Information Manual from the Government Printing Office (it was never to come — though I did mistakenly end up with a subscription to the domestic Airman’s Information Manual). I wrote to Canada for a detailed account of their requirements for single-engine aircraft departing their shores for Europe. I obtained Ocean Navigation Charts for the European and eastern Canadian areas, and GNC 3N, the Global Navigation and Planning Chart for the North Atlantic.
A meteorologist lent me a book compiled by the U.S. Navy, in which a statistical summary of Atlantic weather data for the last 20 or 30 years was presented in cabalistic form, preceded by an epigraph observing that the improbability of a disaster was small comfort to its victim. I copied this caution down and kept it for a long time.
It appeared that the month of August, during which Nancy was most likely to be able to take a month’s vacation, was as mild a month as might be found for the crossing. The winds would probably be light for the return flight, there would be little chance of icing, and there would be few storms. Disasters were therefore improbable.
Throughout the spring, the tempo of preparations increased. I collected fuel-consumption data from the engine manual. I installed Collins Micro Line VHF navcoms and an audio/marker panel, a Narco ADF and transponder. The Canadians required dual ADF capability, but it turned out that a portable radio with a null-seeking system of some sort would do for the second ADF. My father had an ancient Nova-Tech Pilot II, which I pressed into service. I had an Eastern Aero Marine two-man life raft and two life vests that I had obtained a year earlier for a Caribbean crossing; the raft contained every item required by the Canadians except a waterproof, buoyant ELT. It turned out, however, that my Emergency Beacon Corporation ELT, which could be removed from the airplane easily and sealed in a plastic bag — I used quintuple-redundant plastic bags — would meet that requirement.
An autopilot of some sort is practically indispensable for very long flights and for single-pilot IFR. I had the simplest kind I could get: the under-$1,000 Edo-Aire Mitchell Century I. A wing leveler with VOR/LOC coupler and turn-command knob, but without heading hold, it is nevertheless able, with careful trimming, to hold a heading within a degree or two for as long as an hour at a stretch, which is better than most unslaved DGs will do.
The first set of tip tanks I built had an irreparable leak; I had to build a new pair and did not finish them until a couple of weeks before our date of departure, which, by the second week of July, was finally fixed as August 2. They turned out to hold more fuel than I had calculated they would: 70 gallons rather than 60. The only problem with them was one of fuel pressure; it fluctuated in hot weather, evidently a result of vapor lock. I fumbled about with that problem a great deal and finally satisfied myself that in cool weather, such as would certainly prevail over the North Atlantic, vapor lock would not be a problem. But I was always nagged by a lingering doubt about the tanks.
I went through the engine carefully; installed a set of AC platinum plugs; cleaned injectors; replaced filters; checked compression. I kept lists, files, volumes of data and advice. I got Jepp charts for all of Europe, the Atlantic and eastern Canada. That trip kit turned out to be the key to getting around in Europe, since the ONC charts were useless and native European charts were almost impossible to find. I answered hundreds of times the two questions that people hearing that we were planning to fly across the Atlantic all asked: “What will you do for a toilet?” and “Have you seen Jaws?”
Nancy, who has no natural fondness for flying, reserved until the last the right to remove her name from the manifest and take an airliner. I was concerned about her state of mind, which I assumed would become increasingly anxious as the fateful flight drew nigh. I was also concerned about what I would say to her if we ended up in the raft.
In July, I installed a Silver Fuel Guard, which is a fuel-flow gauge and totalizer that lets me know how much fuel I am using at any moment, how much I have used since the beginning of the flight, how much remains aboard and how many hours I can continue flying at the present fuel flow. It made possible a phenomenal increase in confidence and also quickly revealed that my fuel-flow data, based on manufacturer’s tables, were quite inaccurate.
With the Fuel Guard, it was no longer necessary to depend on my rather slipshod fuel-quantity gauges for a measure of remaining fuel, nor to rely on a guess about the rate at which I was consuming it. Everything was out in the open; fuel status, hitherto the weak spot in my otherwise thorough instrumentation, was free of almost all uncertainty.
The last and most difficult piece of equipment to acquire was a high-frequency radio. HF makes possible communication over ranges in the thousands of miles — sometimes — and it is required for position reporting in the North Atlantic. (The Canadians require an IFR flight plan with position reports every five degrees of longitude, or about 200 nm.) After much phoning around, I arranged to rent one from Globe Aero of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, a ferry firm that flies from Gander to Shannon several times a week with airplanes having various numbers of engines, including one.
The HF antenna would consist of a foot-long mast projecting downward from the floor of the cabin. At its top end, below my knees, was a reel; at the bottom end, the antenna cable would be secured to a dime-store plastic funnel. It would trail behind me, 30 or 40 feet long, for the entire trip.
You can prepare forever and never be ready, because the first time across you simply don’t know the ropes. No one can tell you everything in advance. And so, a well-prepared tyro, I left Los Angeles on the afternoon of August 2 with 20 pounds of charts, a handful of routine permissions to operate in foreign countries, raft, sleeping bags, perhaps 40 pounds of luggage for almost any climatic eventuality, survival gear, camera, a few tools and spare parts, and the beginnings of a sentiment of fear that would remain with me almost until we landed at Shannon.
Gander, Newfoundland. We arrive at nightfall. It is clear, and the lights of the airfield are visible from far out in the gray that grades into darkness. A cold wind is blowing. Nancy dashes off to the terminal to put on something warmer while I wait at the plane for the fuel truck. Next to me at the fuel ramp is a Navajo chock-full of 500-gallon drums; it is a Globe Aero ferry job on its way to Johannesburg. I had chatted a little with the pilot at Lock Haven, and now we chat again. How does he like the work? I imagine the romance of distant places, the long hours over water, the uncertainties, as adding up to a particularly attractive way of life. He hates it; dull flying; none of the places he goes really interests him; but at least the money is good. The plane is due in Johannesburg in two days, so now he’s hustling over to Tenerife, in the Canaries, crossing the Atlantic during the night. The thought enters my mind that probably he’s got a woman somewhere whom he hates to leave, and all the time he’s traveling, he’s wishing he were back.
The fuelers don’t kid around. Gas gets spilled all over the place, but when they’re finished, the tanks are brimful. I bring the oil up to 10 quarts, pay the bill and taxi to the light-aircraft parking ramp. The plane is strange with its 924-pound fuel load; the oleo struts are almost fully compressed, the tires, cooled and squashed, bulge out below the wheels, and it takes a lot of throttle to get rolling. I wonder if this lead pig with bumblebee’s wings will get into the air.
The night before you cross, you put in for a weather folder. They make up a forecast especially for your route, altitude and time, including the winds in each five-degree weather sector, photocopies of several graphic synoptic charts on which puffy masses of cloud spread and coil like protozoa on a slide, terminal forecasts in an indecipherable code for everywhere you could possibly end up going, all packaged in a personalized, blue folder. It’s a nice system; it means that you have all the weather data handy for consultation should some question — such as the limits of an area of high winds or low freezing levels — arise in the middle of the ocean.
The weather office is on the mezzanine of the terminal building; we go up, passing a little museum of transatlantic flights, which includes a painting of some luckless fellows clinging desperately to the flotsam of their airplane in stormy seas. Their haggard and terrified faces remind me of the faces of the damned in the Sistine Chapel. In the met office, a beaming forecaster takes our order. On the wall is a huge Mercator map of the world. I like the Mercator version these days, because it exaggerates the length of the Atlantic crossing, which on a globe or a GNC seems quite unimpressive — it is about as far as from Los Angeles to Detroit. Each time I see one, I gaze at that ragged patch of northern ocean over which Greenland hangs like a bunch of grapes and imagine myself vaulting it in a single bound.
The people of Newfoundland seem dour and gray; unsmiling natives direct us to a hotel and a restaurant, and by midnight, we are in bed. I fall asleep easily — I almost always do — with the specter of the crossing hanging like a fog bank off the shores of my consciousness.
In the morning, the airport is zero-zero. Disheveled corpses litter the terminal. The butterflies in my stomach awaken slowly. It is necessary to check out of customs, get the weather briefing, file a flight plan, have a bite to eat and go; this simple series of events somehow devours two hours.
The weather forecast calls for intermittently strong cross-track winds, but the bored and unsmiling met man, friendly beneath the frost, I feel, guesses the net component as zero. No weather at first, then some cumulus buildups. possibly to 11,000, in midocean, combined with a drop in the freezing level to 6,000 or so, then no “significant Wx” till the coast of Ireland, where there is a front with some thunderstorm activity. I am thankful for a mild day but disappointed in the wind.
The international flight plan form is unfamiliar, and it seems to be of the kind of which I always enter everything on the wrong line. It is curious about our survival gear. “We don’t like to alarm people,” the center chief apologizes, “but it’s good to know these things.”
I do not feel impatient at all; but finally, at nine o’clock, we get a ride out to the plane. The fog has lifted; there is now a mile or so of visibility under a 100-foot ceiling. The airplane is wet and dripping; a sporadic drizzle falls. Everything seems to contain a strange mixture of the everyday and the unknown. The engine starts up normally, we taxi soddenly, call ground: “November Two Mike Uniform, taxi takeoff. IFR Shannon” IFR Shannon — a little less than 2,000 miles across an ocean of legendary cruelty.
After a long clearance readback, we are cleared for takeoff. We are 400 pounds heavier than the highest weight at which the plane has ever flown before. Full throttle. The prop surges, then settles down to 2,800 rpm. Acceleration is rapid; I realize now that air temperature and the density altitude affect the takeoff more than the extra weight. Here, on a chilly sea-level morning, we will have no problem. I hold the airplane down a little beyond my normal 80-knot rotation speed, then rotate gently. It’s heavy all right; I can feel the weight, the lethargy in roll, the reluctance to become well and truly airborne. After perhaps 3,000 feet, the wheels lift off, settle and touch, lift off again, touch again; and then we are 10…20 feet above the runway, gear coming up, speed already above 100 knots, and into the clouds. At 110 knots, I bring the flaps up, watch the altimeter for a sag; it’s there, but not serious. The air is dead-still, and the airplane solid as a rock. With 115 knots indicated, the rate of climb goes to 700 rpm. Rpm back to 2,600, still full throttle, all temperatures and pressures are good, climb is good — everything is okay.
We are in the fog for a few minutes and then break out on top of a seemingly borderless undercast, with blue sky above. We are climbing slowly to 9,000 feet. The sunshine buoys my spirits. I look over at Nancy; she is already settling in with her book for the crossing, adjusting her pillows, her face untouched by any hint of fear. She’s going to be fine, it turns out. Perhaps everything will be fine.
We level off at 9,000 feet some 45 minutes after takeoff; the coast is now 60 miles behind us. Speed builds up slowly; 120 knots…125 — and, to my chagrin, 125 seems to be it. I had anticipated that the plane would be slow with a full fuel load but not this slow. We are doing less than 150 knots true at 70-percent power, burning almost 10 gallons an hour.
Anxiety wells up in me. All my range figures are predicated on our managing better than 19 nmpg; we are more than a quarter below that figure. I do a series of calculations on the pocket electronic calculator, which I keep aboard as a sort of chew-toy, and breathe easier; even at this mileage, we will make it with ample reserve, and this mileage is bound to improve. Still, this is not a pleasing discovery, because it makes me wonder whether the calculated range of the airplane could possibly be correct, or whether I could even make Hawaii with decent reserves from Los Angeles.
Gander Radar hands me off to Gander Oceanic; Oceanic assigns me a couple of frequencies. I turn my attention to the HF. The man at Globe had given me a quick verbal rundown on its operation, which sounded simple, but I worry that I may have missed some fundamental point, as I usually do in such cases, and might be unable to run the thing at all.
It turns out to be so simple that you could work it with no instructions whatever. I reel out the antenna until the tuning meter peaks on my primary frequency, set the friction lock, and that’s that.
The undercast breaks along a wide, arcing front, revealing blue water on which scattered whitecaps graze like sheep. The air is glassy. The trailing edge of the white wing seems, as I stare at it, to extrude a pebbly-grained, navy-blue sheet. The ocean seems very remote and flat, like a lake, not the towering, tempestuous Atlantic that has propelled so many men and ships into history and legend. Toward the horizon, the water’s deep blue pales in the haze, until it merges at times with the murk of a distant overcast or separates itself from the very pale aqua color of the horizon by a strip of thin, white clouds. The velvety, featureless whiteness of the wing and tip tank resembles that of a snowy mountain. From time to time, streets of puffy little clouds pass, or a grayish, dirty-looking band of overcast slides by just above our heads.
At first, everything is uncertainty, and time seems to race by, The first attempt at contact with the HF is unsuccessful, but I easily get a relay from an airliner. They all guard 121.5 over the North Atlantic and use the “party line,” 123.45, as a frequency for casual talk. The airline pilot is friendly and efficient. The next leg is 202 nm, yet it seems to be gone before I have finished fiddling with the radios and making my fussy notes and calculations for the first leg. Again, no luck with HF; again, a relay.
I was told that you can pick up the BBC on 200 MHz just out of Gander. I try, but if there is a modulated signal behind all that noise, I cannot make it out. During the first hour out of Gander, I had stayed coupled to the VOR; now, and until an hour short of Shannon, I am reduced to dead reckoning, with the wing leveler holding the heading, which changes every 200 nm or so. I am ignoring wind altogether in my navigating. From the whitecaps, I can tell how it is blowing; generally it is a crossing wind. My position reports are based on time and my observed true airspeed. By most definitions, we are lost, because I don’t know where we are.
I watch the main-tank quantity indicators and the Fuel Guard as the hours roll by. Fuel returned from the engine’s fuel-injection system goes to the main tank on the side from which it came; before feeding from the tips it is necessary to partially empty the mains. My plan is to run 30 or 35 gallons out of the mains, then switch to the tips and empty them completely, and then finish the trip on the mains. After three and a half hours, the time has come to switch to the tips. I cannot wait too long, because if the tips, for some reason, fail to feed, I have to be able to return to Gander; therefore, I have to have at least half the main-tank fuel remaining, which I can always stretch considerably by slowing to a more efficient speed.
Nancy is asleep. I switch the selector to “tip” and watch the fuel-pressure gauge. At first, nothing; then, suddenly, the engine is completely starved and cuts out. Nancy awakens with a start and looks at me wildly; my hand flies to the boost-pump switch while my other hand makes placating gestures. After an eternal instant, the engine surges and backfires, and after gulping and sputtering, it is again on its feet. Nancy is still shaking. “Never do that without telling me first,” she shouts into my ear.
Once one tip is feeding smoothly, I cycle the automatic switcher to the other, this time leading with the boost pump. The effects are less startling; in a minute we are getting smooth flow (except for that constantly flickering fuel-pressure needle) from that tank as well. The bubbles have been swallowed; 120 gallons of fuel remain.
The HF has so far failed to raise anybody; looking over my shoulder, I can see the useless plastic funnel trailing behind me, describing wide and random arcs in the air. One Pan Am pilot has reacted with surliness to my request for a relay, saying that if people can’t get the proper radios themselves, that’s their problem. I explain, In a wounded tone, that I am a tiny single-engine speck in a vast emptiness and how can he be so heartless? He, knowing that other airlines are hearing the conversation, retorts irritably that there is nothing in my N-number to reveal that I am a single-engine plane, but if I had any sense, I wouldn’t be out here.
Band of brothers.
Incredibly, the DG has not precessed in four hours. Everything is smooth. Sometimes, when I don’t think about the engine for a while, it seems to subside to a soft murmur; then at other times, if I yawn or turn my head or wiggle an earplug, the note of the engine seems to change. I listen to it intently. A prickly sensation moves up my thighs. The smooth hum seems to break apart into a stumbling tattoo, a medley of rumbles, warbles, hisses and snorts with no fixed rhythm; I scan the instruments — everything is normal. I pry my attention away from the engine sound, and it slowly retreats into a featureless, soft hum.
The engine sound is a barometer of my state of mind, which slowly alternates between blissful complacency and an anxious, hollow feeling of having gone too far. I wonder at times what I am doing out here, as I look out at the water stretching from horizon to horizon, the rugosities of its surface endlessly repeated, its color sometimes mottled as though there were sandbars a few fathoms down; but that is an illusion, for the water here is two miles deep, perhaps three, an awesome weight of liquid darkness through which “a pensive drowned man occasionally descends.” The depth, the pressure and darkness, the vermin-devoured serpents, the twisted trees, they are repellent and awful to me; I feel as though I were suspended by a delicate thread above a yawning, hungry maw. Again and again I idly retrace the same nightmare path; the leaden depth, glowing worms, the bottomless darkness; the fragility of fuel lines; the inevitability — and therefore the unimportance — of death; the ennuis and chagrins of life that make one sometimes long for death; the sweetness of life, sunshine and breath; to lie in cold obstruction and to rot…full fathom five…alas, poor Yorick. I think of all the poor devils of past times and present who trusted their fortunes to fragile shells, who traced like tiny laborious insects the web of their travels across this gulf, and of them whom fortune failed, on whom the immensity and indifference of the universe dawned only when they were treading a thousand fathoms of water at night, crying vainly for help into the gale…
And then I dredge myself up from these thoughts into light air and daylight where we are smoothly sailing along. I think of the record — the Canadian inspector said that no lightplane had gone down for mechanical reasons, only fuel and navigational mistakes, since he had been there, which was years and years; and all the hours I have flown this engine without any trouble whatever, over 400 since overhaul, never the slightest problem, not even fouled plugs. I think of how this is only 11 hours, and there is no reason, if I have never had an engine problem in 2,000 hours of flying, I would have to have one now. My spirits brighten and relax then, and I review the instruments and the navigational progress and the weather and fuel, perhaps read a chapter or two of a book, stretch my legs and shift my position on the seat. After an hour or two, worry starts to come over me again; I think of the early attempts: Nungesser and Coli, Minchin and Hamilton and Princess Lowenstein — Wertheim, Hinchcliffe and Elsie Mackay, Bertaud, Payne and Witt…their epitaphs are written on the water. Again, the ocean becomes sinister; like Rimbaud’s boat, I long to see some European puddle again; the minutes stretch and the coldness of the ocean again seems to seep into our cozy cell…
The OAT has dropped, as forecast, from 18° C at this altitude out of Gander to 1° here. The fuel flow has increased correspondingly but the speed is up 10 knots. Our fuel efficiency is gradually increasing. We move, as forecast, into an area of cumulus buildups.
Nancy has been alternately reading and sleeping. When she sleeps, I take her book and read sections of it at random; it is Zola’s Nana, a sizable tome that she will nevertheless finish in the course of the flight. Sometimes she looks out at the ocean and the clouds. It is too noisy in the cockpit to talk comfortably. Sometimes I scratch her back. Mostly, however, she reads and sleeps. This galls me. Like most men, I would like an adoring female audience for my accomplishments; Nancy is not cooperating. I try to see things from her point of view; she is accompanying me on a possibly suicidal ego trip, from which she gets nothing at all but a cheap ticket to Europe, an economy she could easily forego. I have failed in the two aspects of airplane design that concern her most: noise suppression and comfortable seating. Furthermore, there is nothing to adore. I am not defeating monsters with kung-fu; I am just sitting here with my arms folded, twitching occasionally. I tell myself that I should be glad she is willing to keep me company on this gratuitous venture. Since I do not know where I am, and since I have not seen a single ship or even the contrail of an airliner, I have the sensation of being completely alone. Therefore, it does not occur to me, as I begin to climb to clear the buildups. that I am in violation of an IFR clearance; at 11,500 feet, I decide that we will not make it over the tops, so we start down, weaving among the pillars of cloud. This is the first time I have hand-flown the airplane since we left Gander. Nancy wakes up and watches curiously as we drop down to 5,000 feet, where we are finally below the freezing level, though still above the bases of the clouds. We pass through a cave of rainbows and showers. Sheets of rain and snow (snow! in August!) finally wash from the windshield the dehydrated remains of a huge bug that we acquired somewhere in Kentucky. The ocean below is blacker and its surface closer and proportionately fiercer. Gradually, however, it becomes calmer; it is interesting to see how we pass quickly across zones of widely differing wind and weather. Almost seven hours out, some time after I give a position report. Shanwick (Shannon-Prestwick, the oceanic control on the other side) advises by relay that we are below the floor of controlled airspace and will require a clearance to climb back up above 5,500. This seems to me like a laughable absurdity. How pompous of them to imagine that they have any control over what is happening out here! Nevertheless, I request clearance to seven as the temperature begins to rise. I duly get it and climb.
The sun sets. Its slanting rays burst in bundles among stacks of gray clouds, and silver paths and patches, mottled with the shadows of clouds, appear on the water. The glow in the sky lingers for a long time behind us; and suddenly, at one point, I realize that it is behind us and to the left. I scan the instruments; wet compass, remote compass, DG — they all agree we are on heading. How can the sun be to the left? I finally realize that as far north as we are, the sun crosses the horizon at a shallow angle, and its glow, after it has sunk from sight, continues to move northward along the western horizon.
At last I succeed in making HF contact with Shanwick; but it is unreliable, since the slightest rain seems to blanket the signal, and we are flying in and out of rain and cloud all the time now. In the last light, I have taken the measure of the surface wind; for hours it has seemed to be an intermittent quartering headwind; now it has reversed itself and we have a stiff quartering tailwind from the northwest. The water is rough and frothy. I began to think some time ago about how difficult it would actually be to ditch into this stormy sea and then to climb out of the foundering airplane — which, for all I knew, might do an immediate nose dive for the bottom — into a raft that would be half awash and blowing away, and to help Nancy out (she hates unsteady and slippery places) and to remember all the junk I want beside what is already packed into the raft, loose stuff like the ELT and the flashlight and spare batteries and jackets. And then we would be soaking wet, the wind would be 40 knots and the temperature would be 40 degrees…
As the ocean disappears in darkness, I know that if all that would be difficult and chancy in daylight, it would be next to impossible in the dark, and colder still, lonelier and sadder, a miserable way to die without even time to think back over good times or perhaps without even time for a parting kiss, although it is sentimental to suppose that kissing would even enter into it…
We have been flying for nine hours. Night is fully upon us. Nancy can no longer read; she is awake and looking out, and then suddenly — a light! There is a bright light down on the water. A boat! I know Lindbergh’s feeling when he saw those boats, or any mariner’s at the first birds he sees as he approaches land. Your heart sings with excitement. Nancy sees more of them to the right, several, a whole line of boats! The water around the lights seems peaceful. I don’t know how far we are from shore, nor how far north or south of our course; there are thunderstorms and coastlines between us and the BBC, and I can’t rely on the ADF indication. We plunge again into cloud; the nav lights’ reflections brighten and fade with the changing density of the clouds. It begins to rain, heavily; a horizontal rain that resembles fine silver wires trailing behind us in the halo of the white taillight. It becomes turbulent; this is the front forecast to lie off the coast of Ireland. Roaring, bucking, rattling, we shoot through the glowing darkness. I have not felt so good in days.
Shannon is no go on VHF from 220 nm, as I expected; I turn on the transponder, but there is no reply light. I relay through an airliner on 127.9; not long afterward, at an amazing distance — about 170 nm — I get Shannon. After a while, he tells me that he has me on radar: yes, the reply light has begun to blink. I hadn’t even noticed it. Shannon is clear, unlimited visibility, windy, warm. Where are we? The VOR needle is still waggling around in confusion. “It looks like you’re spot on, maybe a mile south of course.”
A mile! One part in 1,500. There’s dumb luck for you.
Soon the VOR is centered and we are tracking; the transponder is winking brightly. Other aircraft, local flights, European flights, are talking to Shannon, and he to them. The BBC is clear, though schmaltzy. Radar tells us we’ve crossed the coast, and a few minutes later we break out of the clouds. Nancy points: roads. towns, headlights and, in the distance ahead, an airport.
We land, taxi to light-aircraft parking, shut down. Silence at last. We are 10 minutes late on our ETA — 10 hours and 55 minutes altogether. Forty-six gallons remain in the tanks, enough to continue, at best-range speed, to Rome. The gyros are spinning down, the airplane is rocked by a gusty wind. I lift a window; the air is balmy and sweet. I look at Nancy; I don’t know what to say. We made it; there is something special about this moment, and then again there is nothing special at all.
A little yellow truck of the Irish Airport Authority drives up, and a uniformed figure gets out. Normal life resumes immediately.
I at once dreaded the return trip and was impatient for it. Perhaps I was merely impatient to have it over with. In midocean eastbound, I had felt at times like holding my breath, sitting very still lest evil spirits take notice of my existence; I asked myself, why am I doing this? At such moments, the sight of a tree would have been very sweet indeed; but there were no trees — there was nothing but thousands of feet of water. And now I reluctantly hastened to put myself in that place again.
Passing through Prestwick a few days after landing in Shannon, I had found out that, unlike the Canadian authorities, the Irish and Scottish ones would permit us to depart across the ocean without an HF radio. I had simply to file a VFR flight plan, or an IFR plan at an altitude below the 5,500 of the oceanic control zone. Since the winds were likely to be adverse, the low altitude would have been my choice anyway. We therefore did not pick up an HF for the return, and I removed the dangling antenna and mast from the belly of the airplane.
We arrived in Shannon direct from Biarritz, in the south of France, on the afternoon of August 28. I put in for weather direct to Boston, hoping for weak winds. Getting up at five, I found that luck was not with us: not only would the epic flight to Boston — nearly 3,000 sm — be impossible, but the headwind component at 4,500 feet would be around 35 knots, which would give only a two-hour reserve on reaching Gander if we flew at 75 percent power — which, in view of the headwind, we might as well do. The forecaster expressed great confidence in his winds, but could I be confident in his confidence? I decided to file to Keflavik, Iceland, refuel there, and go from there to Goose Bay, a hop of only 1,322 nm.
We took off in the middle of a warm-front passage; this time, the takeoff seemed almost normal — I was already used to the excess weight. It was an easy flight, less than six hours, two of which would be within range of good navigational facilities and the rest an easy shot across an area of crosswinds. We broke out of the weather after an hour and emerged on top of a broken undercast that eventually went solid and remained so to Iceland. I made some sporadic attempts to get position fixes from Bushmills Consol station; but either I was not using the dots and dashes correctly, or it was as a Canadian inspector had said; Consol is good for telling you where you are, if you already know where you are.
We arrived in Iceland on schedule and on top. The weather below was 300 and three quarters. While we were being vectored, it dropped to 200 and a half and was deteriorating. I had visions of diverting back to Shannon. I was not looking forward to an ILS approach, since my glideslope receiver had not worked at all in Europe (it resumed working as soon as I re-entered the U.S.). However, approach advised that this would be a PAR approach, and sure enough, onto the line came a flat Southern voice that gave me a neat, dispassionate, downhome GCA.
Iceland was cold, blustery, wet, muddy, foul. I changed a traveler’s check into Icelandic crowns to pay for gas, and was told they didn’t accept their own money — only American dollars. An apologetic airport official collected the landing fee, which, together with another fee for just being there, added up to $36. I got another weather folder from a brusque person who seemed quietly furious with me for still having trouble with the international flight plan form.
The wind was blowing harder — 25 knots now — and it had started to rain. We raced out to the plane, buckled in, I started up. Something was wrong: the engine was missing on a couple of cylinders, and though it finally caught on all six, it seemed to be running roughly. Though I was pessimistic about the prospects of Keflavik — which handles a few jet airliners and a NATO base with C-130s and the like — being able to service a Continental engine, I got hold of a mechanic through ground control, and he directed me to taxi to an immense hangar — a DC-8 could be accommodated in it with only the fin left out of doors. There we pulled the plugs — it was all we could do with tools left over from DC-7 days — found nothing wrong and put everything back together again. I suspected it might be a dirty injector; but rather specialized tools are necessary to remove the injectors from this particular engine, and Keflavik did not have them.
It was now raining harder, and the wind was blowing fiercely, I wondered whether it would be wise to attempt a takeoff in an overloaded airplane in such a wind and decided it was no more unwise than Iceland was unpleasant. I started up again; the engine sounded reasonable. I figured that I had been letting my imagination run away with me, and we went out and took off into the teeth of a sweeping gale that blew right down the runway, all the way from Goose Bay.
We flew for an hour or so in cloud and rain, and then it broke up and we were on top of an undercast that was to remain almost solid for hundreds of miles. I talked with a Seneca II on the way into Kef from Gander; he had had a light westerly component at 11,000, he said.
The tip of Greenland is 627 nm from Keflavik; thence to Goose is almost 700 nm. Based on the winds report from the Seneca, which I decided had to be more accurate than Shannon and Keflavik’s secondhand versions of things, I estimated the Prince Christian NDB at the tip of Greenland about four hours and 20 minutes out of Kef. We arrived there one hour late. Below us, visible through gaping holes torn in the cloud deck by a turbulent wind swirling off Greenland’s point, the whole ocean seemed to be stampeding toward Europe. The surface wind had to be 40 knots. Our groundspeed from Keflavik had so far been 118 knots; our true airspeed was closer to 160. The winds were not better than forecast; they were as bad as, or worse. At this rate, it would take us half an hour more to cover the 1,322 nm into Goose than it had taken to go 1,720 nm from Gander to Shannon.
It was off the tip of Greenland, which rose out of the ocean and clouds like some sudden Sierra, all craggy rocks and behind them a huge, smooth hump of snow, that Nancy realized that if we had to ditch, we would not be cozy in our little raft. She carried this unsettling thought with her as we flew along into a lengthy sunset, and as, after dark, we began picking up ice. We dropped to 4,000, then to 3,500, progressively shedding ice and then watching it reform as the freezing level pursued us downward. Finally, at 3,000 feet, we remained free of ice; but the MEA into Goose would be 6,000 after passing the coast. All this made Nancy truly nervous; we had once before had a close call at night with icing and heavy winds, and now there was a freezing ocean to boot; and to further compound her uneasiness, an eerie, low, wailing sound had come into the cockpit and stayed there like a mournful stowaway ghost. I said that it was caused by airflow over the ice, but in fact it had occurred on a couple of other occasions when there was no ice, and I still do not know what actually caused it.
After a long, uneasy period during which my fear was that we would have to drop right down to the deck in darkness — without a local altimeter setting — to stay out of ice, or that we would have to climb up to 6,000 in icing conditions and carry a load all the way to Goose, things improved. The sky cleared, we climbed to a higher altitude under a starry heaven; we picked up the Hopedale and Cartwright NDBs, one to the right, one to the left, and a rough triangulation put us right on course and now a little early; the winds had slackened considerably after Greenland. A pale but immense aurora was playing in the sky ahead of us, a reflection of monstrous cataclysms. Goose Bay VOR was good from 140 nm out; then a friendly controller, a distant brooch of lights in the black velvet ahead, vectors, localizer, landing. “Welcome to the Goose,” said a cheerful radio voice.
Nobody, not a soul was around as we parked beside a Baron on an otherwise empty ramp. It was no different from any other ramp, but I felt a difference somewhere. Perhaps I was only breathing easier; the ocean was behind us, our feet were dry, we were back home.
©1975 Peter Garrison
This article originally appeared in the December, 1975 issue of Flying magazine. Read the next article in this issue, return to the previous article in this issue or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
