I'd Rather Be Flying (Myself)

The moment of flight thrills even jaded airline pilots: the machine stops being a car and starts being a bird. The runway noise disappears, and all three dimensions are yours as the plane banks gently to the left, nose high in the air, climbing quickly away from the people stuck to the ground below. It's like a carnival ride, except the amazing thing is that you're the one making it happen.

There's only a second to celebrate, and then there's work to do. Get the landing gear up, scan the instruments to make sure everything's working, turn to the departure heading, adjust the throttle and propeller settings for climb configuration -- there are so many details to focus on at takeoff that airline pilots regularly enforce a "sterile cockpit," meaning that none of the crew members talk to the pilot unless it's an emergency. Fly first, talk second, instructors say.

During the climb you flick a few knobs and double-check the engine gauges. The needles are centered in their green arcs. Chatter with a few more controllers. Level off the plane at 8,000 feet and adjust the power settings for cruise flight. There you sit, in the middle of a ton of aluminum and gasoline and fiberglass, floating on air. An hour ago your investor reneged on his promised half million. Sales are slumping, and the economy is going to hell. But you can handle it. If you can make this screaming monster fly, you can do anything.

Below, the sunlit fields and roads have dropped away, falling lower and lower until the houses blend in with the ground. Shopping malls, tall buildings, highway interchanges -- they all shrink blandly into the landscape until they're almost impossible to spot. The best landmarks are giant-sized: lakes, wide rivers, power lines, highways, airports, mountain ridges, oceans.

The ground becomes a big greenish-brown smear that meets up with the bluish-white smear above. The line they make at the horizon encircles the plane, and that's your guide for keeping it right side up. The plane can fly sideways or upside down. It doesn't care where the horizon is as long as air keeps moving over the wings. It's the pilot's job to eye the horizon constantly, jiggling the yoke every so often to correct for drift and keeping the wings level in relation to that outside line.

And yet, it's not as demanding as driving a car. Dip or wander a few feet, or a few hundred feet, and there's really nothing to hit but sky. Other planes headed toward you will be 1,000 feet above or below (mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration to provide separation), so the risk of a midair collision is low.

"Long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror" is how pilots describe the experience. After an hour or so in cruise, the boring part begins. The novelty wears off, and the scenery repeats itself -- another town next to a lake, another airport, another river branching off into creeks. The engine purrs, so soothing. It's like the calming clickety-click of train rails or the comforting rocking motion of a boat. Wouldn't it be nice to doze off, just for a second? So tempting to nap while things are calm.

What's that? Did the engine just cough? Erect in the seat, all tiredness gone instantly, you scan the gauges. They look steady. Did it cough again? OK, calm down. Panic never helps anything. What's the procedure? There's always a procedure, thank goodness. Sputtering engine: it could be water in the fuel lines, or one of the fuel tanks running dry, or mechanical trouble. (Where is the closest airport?) Take it one step at a time. The most likely thing is an empty tank or water, so switch tanks first. (If the engine quits, remember the first thing to do is establish the best glide speed!) Reach down to the floor and rotate the fuel-selector switch quickly from the right to the left tank. Your eyes are riveted to the fuel and engine gauges -- flow meter, mixture, tachometer, manifold pressure. (If it quits now, there's enough altitude to make Roanoke airport, straight ahead.) The gauges hold steady in the green. Nothing wavers, nothing sputters. The whole event takes less than a minute.

Is it OK now? A few more minutes of steady engine noise and you take a deep breath. Seems fine. Another bullet dodged. The hairs on your neck slowly settle.

Clouds building up ahead. Damn, probably should have filed an instrument flight plan just to be safe, but Flight Service gave an all-clear weather briefing earlier. Granted, that was three hours ago. Nobody can predict what it will actually do up there, how the moisture and winds will swirl together over warm plowed fields and cool lakes. Clouds tend to linger over the Appalachians. Fortunately, today the clouds are thin, with blue sky peeking through from the other side. There's a hole big enough to fly through and still be legally on visuals.

The plane bumps on the way through -- clouds are the sky's potholes. It's mild chop, not enough to be scary, although passengers would gasp and grab the armrest. On the other side of the clouds lie familiar landmarks, with Knoxville about 50 miles away. Do the math. To reach the landing-pattern altitude of 2,000 feet, you have to lose 6,000 feet. At a standard descent of 500 feet per minute, that will take 12 minutes. Descent speed will be about 180 miles an hour, which puts you how many minutes away from the airport? Uh, 180 miles an hour is 3 miles a minute, so 50 miles away divided by 3 equals 16 minutes from the airport right now. Better start the descent.

Throttle back, point the nose slightly down, tune the radio to listen to the recorded weather information for the airport. Down the plane comes, wind whistling loudly past the cockpit. Down toward the airport. Where is the airport, anyway? The needle on the navigational instrument points directly to it, but you still can't spot the runway through the haze. Look for a large, empty field with wide roads cutting through it. It's next to the river, close to the city. Is that it? Down points the nose, down toward the field. That must be it. Yes, there's a hangar.

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