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| Storm over North Carolina, by Jim Moore |
“It seemed hopeless. In twenty minutes of struggle I had not moved forward a hundred yards. What was more, with flying as hard as it was out here five miles from the coast, I wondered how I could possibly buck the winds along the shore, assuming I was able to fight my way in. I was a perfect target for the enemy there on shore. Fear, however, was out of the question. I was incapable of thinking. I was emptied of everything except the vision of a very simple act. I must straighten out. Straighten out. Straighten out.” Antoine St. Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars (published in 1939)
I was born into a family of writers and pilots, took my first transcontinental plane ride on a TWA “Connie” Constellation before I was one, sat in the co-pilot’s seat of a small plane when I was ten, handled the controls of a Cessna when I was eleven, learned to navigate using charts, and stopwatches before I turned 13, and got my pilot’s license just a few years later. Aviator and author Antoine St. Exupery’s books—Wind, Sand and Stars; Night Flight; Flight to Arras (and, yes, The Little Prince)—was with me every step of the way.
During those formative years, one lesson was paramount and hammered into me by Exupery, my instructors, my mother and my father: “Assess and understand your conditions and fly the plane.” That lesson, and the rules of operation and navigation that followed, rested on one non-negotiable fact: Inattention and overconfidence while airborne can kill you. The corollary to that was: the plane can handle a finite number of your mistakes, the operative word being “finite.” We’ll come back to that momentarily.
One of my favorite ground-school subjects was meteorology. To those of you who have seen my seemingly endless supply of cloud pictures, that should come as no surprise. Student pilots quickly develop a very rational respect for the seen and unseen swirling forces that surround our Blue Planet. What might feel like a lovely summer breeze to a ground-bound observer worries the hell out of a 20-hour student pilot intent on completing a short solo flight where the heat of the day lifts and churns the air and hurls burbles of turbulence into the path of a small plane that weighs less than the family SUV.
Controlling a light plane in less-than-stable air confounds the overloading senses of a young pilot, and every light bump feels like a jarring thud to the seat-of-the-pants student. The temptation is to clutch the wheel or the stick and wrest the craft away from the jaws of destruction and get back down on solid ground. But it’s important to overcome that temptation by chanting the primary mantra: “Fly the airplane.”
Over time, with lots of practice and a good instructor, the anxiety born of turbulence and clouds slowly subsides as the aviator becomes one with the air. In meteorology classes, and in the airborne classroom, pilots learn to recognize the subtle (and not-so-subtle) languages of the troposphere—that thin layer of the atmosphere through which most non-turbine-rated pilots fly. We learn about fronts, high and low pressure, orographic lifting, the adiabatic rate of cooling air, mountain waves, different kinds of ice, the danger of frost on our wings, every cloud type from stratus to cumulonimbus, and the effects of the sun on fields (plowed and unplowed), bodies of water, and concreted-over metropolitan sprawls. If we really put our minds to those lessons, we pilots become weather-whisperers, able to discern from little hints what awaits us in tomorrow’s sky.
We also learn to respect the fundamental strength of the planes we fly. We learn about where and where not to put weight inside our plane; we learn just how much stress our plane’s wings are designed to take; we learn about the inherent and vital flexibility of the fuselage, wings, vertical and horizontal stabilizers, the rudder, elevator, and ailerons. There is a reason why the wings of great airliners flex upward as lift is achieved and gravity is opposed; there is a reason why the cabins of even huge planes like a 747, 777, or an A-380 seems to bend and twist in turbulence: if they did not, if they were built to be rigid, they would snap apart and spill you out. Be grateful, not fearful, then, the next time you are in the midst of a bumpy ride aloft—the flexible tube you are in is keeping you where you belong.
Novice pilots learn that our aerial chariots, while designed and built to be trustworthy containers for us and our passengers, have their limits, and woe to the charioteer who willfully exceeds those parameters. One of the first things pilots learn to do is calculate weight and balance and to consult a very important chart that is part of the plane’s operating handbook to be sure we are not adding too much weight…or putting weight where it does not belong—when we are prepping for a flight. You can throw a ton of junk into the back of your pickup truck, and the worst that will happen is that the back end will sag, and your shocks will take a beating. With planes, even a couple of 40lb. bags improperly placed aft of the cabin can lead to disaster at the end of the runway or later in the flight.
If there is one flying lesson that is hard to learn—the hardest and most severe when not learned—it is when to say “no” to an opportunity to go flying or when, once airborne, it is time to turn around. You would think flying is all about common sense, given the real dangers of screwing up. But too many pilots, now deceased, put more faith in their skills than was merited by the conditions facing them. I have witnessed four plane crashes. Three fatal, one nearly so.
Over time, with lots of practice and a good instructor, the anxiety born of turbulence and clouds slowly subsides as the aviator becomes one with the air. In meteorology classes, and in the airborne classroom, pilots learn to recognize the subtle (and not-so-subtle) languages of the troposphere—that thin layer of the atmosphere through which most non-turbine-rated pilots fly. We learn about fronts, high and low pressure, orographic lifting, the adiabatic rate of cooling air, mountain waves, different kinds of ice, the danger of frost on our wings, every cloud type from stratus to cumulonimbus, and the effects of the sun on fields (plowed and unplowed), bodies of water, and concreted-over metropolitan sprawls. If we really put our minds to those lessons, we pilots become weather-whisperers, able to discern from little hints what awaits us in tomorrow’s sky.
We also learn to respect the fundamental strength of the planes we fly. We learn about where and where not to put weight inside our plane; we learn just how much stress our plane’s wings are designed to take; we learn about the inherent and vital flexibility of the fuselage, wings, vertical and horizontal stabilizers, the rudder, elevator, and ailerons. There is a reason why the wings of great airliners flex upward as lift is achieved and gravity is opposed; there is a reason why the cabins of even huge planes like a 747, 777, or an A-380 seems to bend and twist in turbulence: if they did not, if they were built to be rigid, they would snap apart and spill you out. Be grateful, not fearful, then, the next time you are in the midst of a bumpy ride aloft—the flexible tube you are in is keeping you where you belong.
Novice pilots learn that our aerial chariots, while designed and built to be trustworthy containers for us and our passengers, have their limits, and woe to the charioteer who willfully exceeds those parameters. One of the first things pilots learn to do is calculate weight and balance and to consult a very important chart that is part of the plane’s operating handbook to be sure we are not adding too much weight…or putting weight where it does not belong—when we are prepping for a flight. You can throw a ton of junk into the back of your pickup truck, and the worst that will happen is that the back end will sag, and your shocks will take a beating. With planes, even a couple of 40lb. bags improperly placed aft of the cabin can lead to disaster at the end of the runway or later in the flight.
If there is one flying lesson that is hard to learn—the hardest and most severe when not learned—it is when to say “no” to an opportunity to go flying or when, once airborne, it is time to turn around. You would think flying is all about common sense, given the real dangers of screwing up. But too many pilots, now deceased, put more faith in their skills than was merited by the conditions facing them. I have witnessed four plane crashes. Three fatal, one nearly so.
One was the crash of a charter airliner that the pilots flew into the side of a Colorado mountain in 1970 (30 people died). One was the crash of a small plane into a Colorado beet field after the pilot flew into a thunderstorm and the plane emerged without wings, tail, or elevator like a red and white lawn dart plunging out of the clouds. The third fatal crash happened in 1972 when one of the Thunderbirds experienced a mechanical failure during an airshow at Dulles. The pilot ejected, but his parachute carried him into the fireball of the wrecked plane.
Of those three fatal crashes, the first two occurred because the pilots put themselves into conditions (too low in the high mountains; purposeful flight into a thunderstorm) that neither they nor their airplanes were capable of surviving. In the case of the charter flight, the pilot, already too low in a box canyon (Loveland Pass, for those who want to look on a map), tried to circle his way out of trouble in the high-thin air, and was unable to climb above the tree line on a ridge. As cold-hearted as it might sound, the passengers who died were victims of the pilot’s prime transgression: he willfully put his plane where it never should have been.
In the case of the small plane in the beet field, the pilot put himself and his passenger in mortal peril by penetrating a thunderstorm that was easy to see and avoid. Small planes—and even very large ones—do not do well in the heart of the worst clouds, towering cumulonimbus. The up- and down-drafts are brutal; icing is a problem; lightning can cause vertigo and loss of spatial orientation; and the overall forces can rip the wings off a plane. My B-52-flying father told me that the Strategic Air Command once prohibited bombers from flying in thunderstorms during peacetime missions, and there is a well-documented (with pictures) story of a B-52 that had a good chunk of its vertical stabilizer ripped off by clear air turbulence along the Rockies in the mid-1960s.
Why do some pilots—those dead, and those who are lucky to be alive—put themselves into such unwinnable positions?
They do so out of too much pride, too much hubris, too much complacency, too much misplaced faith in their frail human capabilities, too little thought for the safety--even the lives--of others, too little regard for the limits of their planes, too little respect for the power of the weather. Any one of these attitudes is a weak link in a chain events leading to a fatal crash; put two or more of them together, and the outcome is preordained.
So, too, is the economic, social, and political outcome preordained for a nation ineptly navigated by someone who exhibits almost all of the above traits. The elegantly-winged-document that is our nation’s Constitution was designed to be strong enough to weather most storms by being flexible enough to take the shocks of an abusive presidency or a useless Congress or a contrary Supreme Court. But even a Constitution as strong as ours, as capable as it is of taking us to the upper reaches of the atmosphere where hope and justice, peace and tranquility, equality and happiness overarch a beautiful nation…even such a Constitution cannot long endure the reckless actions of a danger-seeking, self-serving, mentally-deficient pilot.
If we are to take America to the heights of our greatest ambitions and visions, we must take control and fly the plane ourselves. We must start being very afraid of the political weather as we see it play out on social media, cable news, or on the pages of our newspapers. We must trust our instincts and know which way the wind is really blowing and fly accordingly.
Of those three fatal crashes, the first two occurred because the pilots put themselves into conditions (too low in the high mountains; purposeful flight into a thunderstorm) that neither they nor their airplanes were capable of surviving. In the case of the charter flight, the pilot, already too low in a box canyon (Loveland Pass, for those who want to look on a map), tried to circle his way out of trouble in the high-thin air, and was unable to climb above the tree line on a ridge. As cold-hearted as it might sound, the passengers who died were victims of the pilot’s prime transgression: he willfully put his plane where it never should have been.
In the case of the small plane in the beet field, the pilot put himself and his passenger in mortal peril by penetrating a thunderstorm that was easy to see and avoid. Small planes—and even very large ones—do not do well in the heart of the worst clouds, towering cumulonimbus. The up- and down-drafts are brutal; icing is a problem; lightning can cause vertigo and loss of spatial orientation; and the overall forces can rip the wings off a plane. My B-52-flying father told me that the Strategic Air Command once prohibited bombers from flying in thunderstorms during peacetime missions, and there is a well-documented (with pictures) story of a B-52 that had a good chunk of its vertical stabilizer ripped off by clear air turbulence along the Rockies in the mid-1960s.
Why do some pilots—those dead, and those who are lucky to be alive—put themselves into such unwinnable positions?
They do so out of too much pride, too much hubris, too much complacency, too much misplaced faith in their frail human capabilities, too little thought for the safety--even the lives--of others, too little regard for the limits of their planes, too little respect for the power of the weather. Any one of these attitudes is a weak link in a chain events leading to a fatal crash; put two or more of them together, and the outcome is preordained.
So, too, is the economic, social, and political outcome preordained for a nation ineptly navigated by someone who exhibits almost all of the above traits. The elegantly-winged-document that is our nation’s Constitution was designed to be strong enough to weather most storms by being flexible enough to take the shocks of an abusive presidency or a useless Congress or a contrary Supreme Court. But even a Constitution as strong as ours, as capable as it is of taking us to the upper reaches of the atmosphere where hope and justice, peace and tranquility, equality and happiness overarch a beautiful nation…even such a Constitution cannot long endure the reckless actions of a danger-seeking, self-serving, mentally-deficient pilot.
If we are to take America to the heights of our greatest ambitions and visions, we must take control and fly the plane ourselves. We must start being very afraid of the political weather as we see it play out on social media, cable news, or on the pages of our newspapers. We must trust our instincts and know which way the wind is really blowing and fly accordingly.
We have an opportunity later this year, and again in 2020, to retake the controls and fly away from the darkening squall line of an impending storm the winds of which we may not be able to survive. We must assure ourselves and our neighbors—our fellow countrymen and our allies—that we are smart enough to know it is time to relieve this insane pilot of his duties and return our flight to a course toward a reachable future for all rather than continue into a wrathful cloud of national crisis where many dreams will perish.
It is time, America. Straighten Out. Fly the plane.
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