frequency, to stay high while I flew across two active gunnery ranges in a nervous beeline to the Gila Bend auxiliary field.
The wings never folded. The mechanics found a faulty warning circuit. The master caution light had toyed with me. The jet had winked its eye at me in a practical joke of some morbid sort.
'Got your attention, didn't I, big boy?'
Yeah, that's what it does bestgets your attention. Sometimes I feel like I've got a master caution light inside me. When it flashes, I ought to be looking down deep inside and checking my fault panel. But too often, I don't do that; I just reset it and plow on.
And that's what we're doingplowing on. On through the post-Desert Storm skies. But the rumors are running like the wind again. Joe Brewer thinks this will be our last trip. I'm not so optimistic.
Eighteen.
In Lindbergh's Prop Wash
You fly by the sky on a black night, and on such a night only the sky matters. Sometime near the end of twilight, without realizing when it happens, you find the heavens have drawn your attention subtly from earth, and that instead of glancing from compass down toward ground or sea, your eyes turn upward to the stars.
You have to cross this vast stretch of frothing nothingness to comprehend what he did. And you can't really grasp it while sitting back in seat 44D on United 913, eating lasagna and watching movies. You have to be up herein the cockpit.
I don't try to understand why he did it. I know that. What intrigues me is how Lindbergh felt about it. The nearness of death wouldn't bother me so much. But the totality of the lonelinessI don't know how I'd deal with that. At least I've got radiossix of themto talk with distant voices. And there's the reassurance that there are many other aircraft out here, piloted by people facing the same immense emptiness. And I've got Findley.
Findley is one of my two flight engineers. I look back and see him, sitting sideways to the airplane, in front of his colonies of switches, lights, and dials, their glow reflected in his spectacles. His panel is so enormous and complicated that the very sight of it confounds me.
Findley is an admitted jabberer. He talks constantly to whoever will listen. I guess it's his way of diffusing stress and fending off boredom. Even now he blabs incessantly into his boom mike as he scans his jumbled haunt.
'I just don't know how a man is supposed to make a living farming, these days. The middlemen are taking all the money. I put in eighty acres of beans last year and. .'
Because of the relative vastness of our cockpit and the noise created by the slipstream, we communicate with one another by headset. With a 'boom mike' fixed an inch in front of my lips I can speak with anyone on the crew, fore or aft, in a normal tone of voice. In an electronic sense his ear is only an inch from my lips, and mine likewise from his. But such conversations go largely without eye contact. I have to careen about to see eye to eye with anyone except for the copilot with whom I'm talking or listening. This I do when there's urgency or when I want to emphasize a point. Or when humor is at work.
Normally we push a button to talk and release it to listen, just as we do with the radio. It makes laughing at a joke an awkward thing. You feel like a fool, pushing the talk switch just to laugh, but you don't want to embarrass the humorist with silence. So there's a certain subtle protocol we use to normalize the strange ways that we communicate on the interphone system.
'Hot mike' is the preferred way. We simply pull up two buttons, which makes our boom mikes 'hot,' or continually open to interphone conversations without our having to press the talk switch. The pilots very rarely use the hot mike because it picks up noises such as breathing on the mikes and the hissing of the slipstream. And the casual conversations between the engineers, who always use it, distract from the task of listening to the radios.
A favorite ploy of mine is to pull up the hot mike 'listen' button so that I can eavesdrop on the engineers. Mostly I hear them talking at length about some little problem or curiosity with which the jet has presented them. Sometimes a senior engineer will be lecturing to a newer guy on the finer points of the trade. But occasionally I catch a little gossip.
And they have their own little capers to keep their conversations private. The extra engineer may stand up for a stretch and take a quick gander at the pilots' interphone panels to make sure the hot mike buttons are down. Others, such as the one we call Catfish, are more cunning. While I was once eavesdropping on him, he paused and tested me by asking me when we expected to land. The question was posed on hot mike rather than on interphone. I knew it was a trick because I had my hot mike volume turned lower than the interphone volume. When I ignored the question, he assumed he had privacy and proceeded to discuss some particular shortcomings of another pilot, who happened to be a friend of mine. I listened for a while, then interrupted and chastised him for gossiping and defended my buddy.
But tonight I'm on hot mike with Findley. I hold up my end of the perpetual one-sided conversation by nodding once in a while, grunting now and then, and occasionally posing a question or comment. I depend greatly on Findley's knowledge of the Starlifter's internal workings. He's the jet's doctor, its trainer, its groomer. He's its occasional healer and wizard. He rebukes the jet when it falters and praises it when it performs to his expectations. His is a labor of love, but like most flight engineers, he would never admit it.
The Starlizzard has a complicated nervous system, over which Findley meticulously watches. He sees that ample power from our four engine-driven generatorsenough to light the town of Gunnison near his farmis satisfying the demand of our lights and electronic packages.
He monitors its cardiovascular system as well. The jet has three hearts that pump the blood of hydraulic fluid through hundreds of feet of tangled metal arteries at a pressure of 3,000 pounds per square inch. This pressure drives actuators that provide the raw power to move our flight control surfaces against a wind force of several hurricanes.
He closely watches the jet's respiratory system, which features extremely hot, high-pressured air piped from the compressor stage of the engines and fed through ducts to the air conditioning and pressurization systems.
He's also the jet's nutritionist. The four gluttonous engines drink the putrid fluid stored in our tanks at the rate of a gallon every two seconds. Periodically I hear the clicking sound of Findley orchestrating his clusters of cross-feed valves and boost pump switches twenty-seven of themto ensure that the ten wing tanks drain symmetrically and in a specific sequence. I haven't the slightest idea how to do this and depend on him totally. The fuel is heavy; there is seventy tons of it, and the flow sequence is necessary to preserve the wing's balance and structural integrity.
These planes have far exceeded the manufacturer's recommended useful lifespan. Cracks in the shoulders of the wings began to show up several years ago and caused severe restrictions to be placed on some jets. Attempts were made to mend the cracks, but new wings were out of the question. The government had decided not to pay for the storage of the jigs and tooling after production ceased, so the manufacturer just threw them away. Later, we would scoff at General Johnson's response to a congressional committee convened to review the lessons of Desert Storm. When asked about the wing cracks, he replied, 'Yes, sir, we took a few chances.'
Imagine that. We
The watchful Findley continues his prattle: 'We tried catfish farming one year but. .'
We are over Newfoundland. It was here that Lindbergh watched the night settle in over the island's uplands: 'Each crevice fills with shades of gray, as though twilight had sent its scouts ahead to keep contact with a beaten sun. The empire of the night is expanding over earth and sea.'
