It is to be a normal flight tonight—so the dispatcher tells us—from
Lima up to Houston, all six and a half hours of it, all unaugmented (just two
of us up front), and all dark. The route takes us up the coast to Guayaquil,
where we go feet-wet over the Pacific, then coast-in near San Jose, Costa Rica.
From there it's up across Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula,
and then more blue water over the Gulf. Dispatch says the only problem area
should be the Pacific coastal waters—just a few of the regular thunderstorms
that hang out there, he says.
Yeah, they hang out there all right, like restless malcontents at a pool
hall. Some nights they don't even notice you're in the neighborhood. Other
nights...well, this is to be one of those “other” nights.
But it starts off innocently enough. (That's been a pattern in my flying career—“innocent” starts.) The first officer, Perry, notices meteors. A shower seems to be underway to our front right. We dim the cockpit lights and watch for them as the Big Dipper rears up above the northern horizon dragging hundreds of points of light with it. It makes me think of St. Exupery's Fabian leaning out his window and gazing up at the night sky before leaving for his nightly mail route in a biplane across Argentina. St. Exupery writes that Fabian “looked at the moon and reckoned up his riches.” His wife joins him at the window, knowing he was already on his way. She points to the sky and says, “See, your road is paved with stars.”
And for us indeed it is. A feeble moon sinking into the west, to our
left, reddens the sky in that direction and soon we pass the first thunderhead—a
sentinel posted out to warn the others that we are coming. The cell passes between
us and the setting moon. The storm eclipses moon and becomes ablaze around its
edges—a colossal anvil silhouetted with shimmering ochre moonbeams. Few human
eyes ever feast on such a divine orchestration of cosmic and earthly beauty.
Satisfied that my cup runs over tonight with heavenly vistas, I tend to
the normal cockpit duties of long-cruise Mach Rangers: fuel burn analysis,
monitoring the auto-flight devices and keeping track of where our best divert
airfields are (should the fit suddenly hit the shan). That done for now, I yawn
and fire-up my Kindle for a spot of reading.
I'm half way through Huxley's Brave New World, and am trying to
be brave enough to finish it. It's a chore. I tire with it quickly, yawn some
more and rub my eyes. Brave New World is putting me to sleep. I switch
to Horowitz's Inside of a Dog. Now this is much more interesting, as a
dog is a big part of my life. Horowitz says dogs don't lick your face when you
come home because they love you, rather because their olfactory senses want to
see where you've been and what you've eaten. Interesting, but I know Horowitz
is full of the stuff that hits the fan. My dog licks me because she adores me.
Neither can Horowitz hold my attention long. My eyelids grow heavier.
But this languor is about to change.
Perry, who is flying the jet tonight, is fiddling with the radar. He's
painting bright red splotches up ahead, just where Mr. Dispatcher said they
would be. We douse the floods and lean forward hoping for Mark-1 Eyeball
contact. The horizon ahead and to our right is ablaze with strobes and flashes.
As we move northward the perpetrators of the flashes raise their heads above
the horizon, a long unbroken line of them. They have tired of waiting for us and have taken to slinging fiery arrows at each other.
We must DV8 (that's ACARS-speak for “deviate”) far left of course. CenAmer
control approves and we swing farther out over the Pacific, only to see even
more thunderheads blocking our starry path. What would Fabian do?
“I’ve made my plans,” he told his young wife. “I know exactly where to
turn.” Perry and I are lacking of Fabian’s cocky assurance. We must place our
faith in Mr. Bendix’s X-band wizardry.
Before long we are over a hundred miles off course and getting more
off. The FMC—the 767’s brain— gets worried, tells us we have “insufficient
fuel.” We know once we turn back toward
course the landing fuel projection will return to near normal, but the FMC
can't read our minds. It doesn't know when or if we will ever turn back. The jet thinks we are going to
miss the North American continent and burn our last gallon somewhere west of
California with the wheels still in the wells.
At last we find the storm system's west flank and turn back east. But
now we are in the soup—“embedded” with the sparring giants. The depressing murk
enshrouding us flashes with sparks flying from their stupendous clashing
swords. We begin to weave between the battling giants hoping they don't notice
us. Strangely, not a ripple in the air disturbs us.
Headed back north now, the FMC gets happy again as it re-calculates our
landing fuel projection. Then we break out of the gloom and feast our eyes on the
Big Dipper, dead ahead. I yawn, call back for some strong coffee and reach for
my laptop. I ponder a new blog post and a name for it: Night Flight. I
hope St. Ex won't mind.
Wondering what happened to Fabian? "Only too well he knew them for a trap. A
man sees a few stars...and climbs toward them, and then—never can he get down
again but stays up there eternally, chewing the stars….But such was his lust
for light that he began to climb."
Perry relaxes. The sun is up.
Unlike Fabian we have gotten through.
