I watch the lights sparkle into life along the seacoast and listen to Moncton Center as they issue a routine traffic advisory to a British Airways jet concerning us.
'Speedbird two niner eight, Moncton, you have traffic your one o'clock, ten miles, opposite direction at flight level three three zero, a C-141.'
'Roger, Moncton, Speedbird has the traffic in sight. Is he going to the Gulf?'
Moncton Center knows our destination tonight is Germany, but they have no way of knowing our ultimate destination. I hesitate for a second, trying to remember if our itinerary is classified. I don't know. I press the transmit button.
'Roger, sir, we'll end up there eventually.'
'Then God be with you.'
I appreciate his good wishes but hope we won't need the Lord as badly as he insinuated.
It has been three hours since we departed McGuire for Germany, but we are still over land. I've done this before when passengers have come up asking if that was Ireland down there. I get a kick out of telling them that we haven't even started across the Atlantic yet. Many people simply don't realize that the direct route to northern Europe from the United States is northeastward, up through Canada, which stretches for hundreds of miles toward Europe.
Now it's time for our familiar battle over our clearance with Gander Oceanic Control. Up ahead, as we leave Newfoundland, Gander will funnel us into one of the five tracks leading across to Europe. The tracks, known as the North Atlantic Track System, or NATS, parallel each other sixty miles apart and are redefined each day to take advantage of the high-altitude winds and pressure patterns. The eastbound tracks, labeled 'V' through 'Z,' are active at night and expire at dawn. Then westbound tracks 'A' through 'E' are activated. Aircraft are fed into the NATS at certain intervals and altitudes. Because air traffic control radar cannot currently reach out more than a couple of hundred miles across the ocean, planes must be separated by lengthy intervals. They must also report their positions by high-frequency, or HF, long-range radio every ten degrees of longitude.
I suspect that Gander doesn't look forward to seeing us coming. We are sixty miles per hour slower than most commercial air traffic, and so the control center must leave a wide gap behind us before allowing one of the faster jets in, or else we will be overrun. This requirement of course makes traffic control harder.
Thus the controllers like to get us out of the way by assigning us an altitude too high for our heavy weight or too low for proper engine efficiency, which would eat into our reserve fuel. Neither is acceptable. The clearance delivery frequency can sometimes sound like haggling over a used car. They make an offer. We refuse. They counter. We compromise. In a while we have an altitude and route that suits us. But others of our kind have had to turn back or divert elsewhere for extra fuel because the clearance was unacceptable.
Tonight Gander has cleared us into track Whiskey at our present altitude of 33,000 feet. But we have agreed to climb to 35,000 feet at forty degrees west longitude, by which time, Findley tells me, we will have burned off enough fuel weight to climb. This will keep Gander happy by allowing faster traffic behind us to overtake and pass underneath us.
We now make final accuracy checks on our two inertial navigation systems before leaving the security of the land-based navigation stations. The INS is a cluster of very sophisticated gyroscopes that remember the point from which they departed and sense direction of movement and acceleration. It feeds the data into a computer, which translates to us carbon-based units such niceties as where we are, how fast we're going, and our estimated arrival times at any point along our route. Human navigators used to do this work. But no more, not on these airplanes. Now the nav seat is only a temporary berth to a dozing loadmaster or an inquisitive passenger.
We pass over St. Johns, Newfoundland, which Lindbergh called the doorway to the Atlantic, and commit ourselves to the oceanic emptiness. Soon we are out of range of radar and normal radio contact and have to rely on the abhorrent HF radio.
Similar to that used by HAM operators, the HF is an extremely long-range radio that achieves its distance by bouncing its signals off an ionized layer of thin air in the upper atmosphere, a feat that our normal land-based, or VHF, radio cannot do. But the HF is painful to listen to. It is filled with shrieking, hissing, squealing, scratching background noises. Through this preposterous soup of racket come staccatolike, half-human Donald Duckish voices from thousands of miles away. Moreover, the HF can be totally unusable during periods of peak solar activity. We hate it with an untold passion and take tums monitoring it.
There is a certain band of HF frequencies that can best be described as 'jungle' noises. I once made this observation to a copilot who then related George Fondren's brilliant theory about the origin of the mysterious sounds. It seems that George counsels his younger copilots that the noises are precisely thatjungle sounds: crickets, grasshoppers, frogs, birds, and other chirping and singing creatures. He theorizes that many planes crashed in World War II on deserted jungle islands. And that their radios, with jammed transmit switches, are still operating, picking up the songs of the jungle, and transmitting them worldwide. Fueled by the perpetual power of acids derived from rotting jungle juices, their batteries are constantly being recharged with fresh ions. The theory reeks with a scatological influence of a bovine nature, but I heard that one lieutenant listened with a great deal of attentiveness.
We can relax a little now. Until we coast in at Ireland, we will mostly just monitor the Starlifter's autopilot and navigation devices. Findley is resting now, and Lynn; the carpenter by civil trade, has taken over the engineer's panel. Findley doesn't just lie down on the bunk for a casual nap. He goes to bed. He strips to his shorts and T-shirt, arranges pillows and covers, and settles in for a serious sleep. I should try that.
On a previous flight, shortly after Findley had turned in, we were directed to descend temporarily to a lower altitude, which is a bit unusual. The silencing of the engine noise and the premature descent brought him to the flight deck to investigate. Turning, I saw him standing there in shorts and socks, with the multicolored cockpit lights reflecting in his glasses as he swung his head here and there, searching for trouble.
I thought I'd solicit a little chuckle to break the monotony and shouted back that we had lost an engine and were diverting to Mildenhall Air Base for an emergency landing. I thought that was the end of it, but a few minutes later he reappeared on the flight deck fully dressed. Then he noticed that all engines were running happily. He didn't appreciate the humor but was too much of a gentleman to call me what I deserved to be called.
I guess he gave up sleeping; he sat on the aft bench seat and reached for his box lunch, which I had previously tampered with: I had removed the sandwiches and replaced them with navigation booklets. This was another in a chain of pranks that started before takeoff. He had proudly showed me his new flashlight and boasted profusely of its power and reliability, prompting me covertly to remove the bulb before he began his walk-around inspection in the darkness. We all claimed innocence when he came back aboard, unsmiling, for another bulb. But he knew I was the culprit.
The missing sandwiches tripped Findley's breaker. Still respectfully avoiding indicting his degenerate boss, he unleashed an awesome wrath. 'I wish you guys would stop pickin' on me.'
I did feel a little bad about it and hoped it wouldn't drive a wedge between us. But a few hours later Findley was back at the engineer's panel, jabbering away at me about federal farm subsidies, and I knew that all was again well.
It was about here, a couple of hundred miles past St. Johns, that Lindbergh wrote: 'Here, all around me is the Atlanticits expanse, its depth, its power, its wild and open water. Is there something unique about this ocean that gives it character above all other seas, or is this my imagination?'
No sir, it's not your imagination. You have never flown over other oceans, as I have. Yes, this one is unique. Many other seas are as cold and gray. Many others are littered with ice and blowing foam. But this one is different because it sits like a restless sentinel between two vastly populated and closely related continents. Its bottom is strewn with the wrecks of storm and war. This ocean doesn't beckon warm and friendly to overfliers as does the Pacific. This one dares youand bides its time.
Listening to the static and the incessant transmissions of other pilots, I wait my turn and seize the instant as soon as a pause presents itself.
'Gander, Gander, MAC Victor 3512, position.'
'MAC Victor 3512, Gander, go ahead.'
I speak more clearly and carefully on the HF than I normally do because of the great potential for misunderstanding.
'MAC Victor 3512 checked five zero north, four zero west at zero zero three five. Flight level three three zero. Estimate five two north three zero west at zero one two eight. Five three north, two zero west next. Over.'
