We've got time, oh baby There's no rush Gonna be a better Day for us Hang on And I will wait for you Our love will always stay as good as New
It's a matter of time
-Time and Tide
Basia
"Not enjoying this."
That was my last text to P before crawling into the Columbia to fly back to KELM yesterday.
The weather had started to take a turn for the worse over the course of the day. If I'd been able to leave early I might have beaten the growing swath of icing across Pennsylvania and western New York, but my schedule included a hearing at 3:30 eastern to argue in opposition to a motion for summary judgment that was risibly hopeless but required an audience with the judge all the same. I attended the hearing by phone from the conference room at the tiny Perry airport, with the plane right outside loaded and ready to go as soon as I hung up.
I stepped with a sense of dread, thinking maybe tonight I'd end up a statistic, another guy with "get home itis" who flew into stuff he had no business flying into, only to plunge toward the darkness of hills and woods until the shock of seeing trees rushing toward the windscreen at 200 miles an hour was the last thing I ever felt.
Earlier in the day I read up on my icing equipment, scanned the FAA's 100 page document on flying in icing conditions ("don't do it" would be a fair summary of the message), called the Leidos weather briefer to talk about what was out there and what seemed to be developing. Still there was this unease, an existential sense of dread. I thought of whether my sons would show up for the funeral, of who'd suddenly become wealthy with my demise, and whether I'd somehow survive the impact and end up freezing to death out there before help arrived.
No, this was not enjoyable in the least.
God's persistent love of irony meant conditions in Perry were beautiful, 73 and not a cloud in the sky. I climbed out and made my way north, headwinds building as the altimeter kept dropping. Bad weather ahead.
As I passed Charlotte at sunset, things were still lovely if bumpy and breezy.
A couple hours later I took vectors into Greater Cumberland Regional for a fuel stop. Johnstown Approach asked if I was picking up any ice. Not a good sign.
Then I couldn't get the runway lights to illuminate, frantically clicking the mike button to no avail. Finally I called in the blind for anyone listening to please turn on the lights. Seconds later a fully lit runway appeared a couple miles in front of me.
The nice fellow at KCBE who heard me and turned on the runway lights then fueled the plane within a couple minutes of the propeller stopping. He groused to me as he scanned my credit card about how "a certain person" was to blame for our high fuel prices, and for his inability to find ammunition for sale here in the peak of deer season. I smiled and rolled my eyes, letting him think I was part of the tribe.
Twenty-three minutes after I pulled up for fuel, I was climbing toward Elmira. "Good luck, buddy," came the farewell from my fuel truck friend over the radio.
And it was luck I needed at that point. I decided to fly a little lower than usual, 7,000 feet, because Elmira was a short hop of an hour, and higher altitude meant a greater chance of ice.
Johnstown Approach reported another plane was picking up rime ice at 7,400 feet just southeast of Altoona, along my route of flight. As if on cue, when I arrived in the same neighborhood the leading edges of the wings turned bumpy and white, and a quick scan with my phone flashlight out the window revealed ice creeping over the tops of the wings. I activated the TKS system and the propeller heat, then asked for a lower altitude. The controllers gave me 5,000, and I popped out of the clouds halfway there.
The deicing system is in fact pretty amazing. It basically dribbles antifreeze over the wings and horizontal stabilizers, while the propeller heat amounts to an electric blanket taped over the leading edges of the blades. Now the only real risk is ice coming down the engine intake, but even that can be addressed with induction air heating by pulling a knob on the instrument panel. You don't want to hang around in ice, but all these gadgets make it survivable. Usually.
About 45 miles from Elmira things got dodgy again. I flew back into clouds, and saw I was picking up ice again. I pushed the buttons for the TKS and prop heat, and started the defroster on the windscreen. The strobes on the wingtips soon created a surreal scene, as with each flash I watched snow and ice blast past the wingtips at 200 miles an hour. I kept scanning the wings with my flashlight, and watching for a drop in manifold pressure that would signal icing over the intake and a real emergency. The Nexrad in front of me was a Rorschach splotch of blue and pink, snow and freezing rain, until I was almost to ELM. None of this was very good.
Finally about ten miles from the field I descended and broke out of the weather, and made a visual approach into the field. The coda to my adventure was a chunk of ice that flew off the cowl and crunched off the windshield as I touched down.
Peg was waiting in the lobby at Premier with flowers and a hug and a cocktail. Homemade chicken soup simmered on the stovetop when we got home after driving through snow and sleet. I ate, and after letting the adrenaline trail off fell dead asleep.
But there I was back awake at one a.m., and this time my head was filled with sounds and images and smells from someplace else. It was January, 1991, and I was back in the desert.
That's one of ours from that far-off time, 82035. Flown her many times.
In my mind's eye I was riding out in darkness across the tarmac in the crew van to an F-15, getting ready to climb the ladder and "go downtown," as we used to say, crossing the fence in a MiG sweep or escorting bombers in milk bowl weather with the constant threat of having someone try to kill you.
And, oddly, Basia was playing in my head as I thought of these things. Mom had sent me a pile of cassette tapes, things she thought I'd like to play on my new Walkman when I wasn't flying. There was Jerry Jeff Walker. There was Jimmy Buffett. And, of course, there was Basia, with the hit album of roughly two years before, "Time and Tide". I listened to that cassette until it practically fell apart, the title track feeling like safety and love and home, civilization, the world we all hoped to see again when this war was over.
That all sounds melodramatic with the benefit of hindsight--we all came back, after all. But at the time that wasn't a given, and we were briefed afterward that there was serious concern we'd be wiped out immediately upon our arrival the previous August, and the computer models all calculated a loss of around 150 fighters over the course of the Desert Storm air campaign. Of course that didn't happen, but the threat seemed real enough, particularly in the early days of the war. Every time you climbed the ladder you wondered if you were ever coming back--or more accurately you didn't wonder, because dwelling on those things made it that much harder to do an already difficult job.
It's funny how the mind works, isn't it? Crawling into that Columbia yesterday with a head full of worries about picking through horrible weather in darkness triggered an old cluster of brain cells and synapses that remembered the last time I felt that way, wondering if I was going to survive that evening's encounter with danger in the air. And once it tickled those disused neural pathways back to life, the whole sensory tableau sprang into Technicolor in my head. I could smell the desert dust and the jet exhaust. I was there again.
So of course I couldn't sleep, not until maybe 45 minutes before the alarm went off. Coffee is my friend this morning.
Thankfully, all I have on the books is a conference call at ten, followed by a mediation at 2:30 that is guaranteed to be a complete waste of time, and perhaps will be brief. Time to shake this desert dust off my shoulders and return to now.
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