Night Flight - The Next 30 Trips - Issue #9

I am writing a collection of essays, thirty stories from my first thirty years, spanning growing up flying in Western Alaska, to launching / landing rockets, to bootstrapping a business to space, to coming out more human on the other side. This is a chapter from that project, still in work. I would love your thoughts and feedback!

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This story is Chapter 2 in Book 1: Coming Into The Country. It is set directly after Chapter 1 "Launch Day" which ends with rolling our first rocket out into a new morning to get ready for launch. This chapter picks up where that one left off.

Night Flight

I skidded to a stop in front of an old, beige hangar in my ‘89 Jeep Cherokee. Other than the color, this hangar had nothing in common with the one of the future. Its siding was dingy, dented, and peeling away in many places. There was no rocket inside, just some groceries, pallets, and assorted tools. It wasn't lit at all.

I stepped from [BK1] my Jeep out into the dark, wintry morning; the only light the starry sky overhead and a single old, streetlight hanging from a utility pole a hundred yards away in the middle of the tarmac. I was, as always, completely under dressed for the conditions and the sharp early morning air bit at the gaps and seams of the thin hoodie.

I pulled my hands inside the sleeves and threw the hood up on my head as I did a slip-slide in my tennis shoes across the glare ice covering the tarmac, out into the pool of yellow light where our plane, an old 1940’s Beech-18, awaited me. A highly functional antique, all that prevented it from being an anachronism was its elegant utility when navigating Western Alaska.

Twin radial engines, Pratt and Whitney R985’s, each flashed their nine cylinders from under their cowls. The bulbous nose stood ready to punch through any weather. The stout, over-built landing gear perfectly suited for the rough gravel runways. The H-tail standing at attention at the back, like a hunting dog on a scent, its big twin rudders provide enough control authority to kick it around on the ground and through storms alike. The lines on this craft made it fairly hum with stored potential just sitting still. Its aspect possessed determined purpose.

This was by design. Seventy years before that morning, metal, glass, copper, vinyl, and rubber came together and were arranged in just such a way that, still, all those years later we could pick up and fly anywhere we chose. It seems simple, even prosaic, on the surface. But when you consider the achievement of building anything that lasts seventy years it’s impressive. When you consider that “the anything” in question was made to fly through all kinds of inclement weather, shuttling cargo between a small town in Alaska and villages further afield, and was designed to do all of this before computers existed, it strikes me as a near miracle.

And truly the plane flew like a miracle. It handled gracefully, was neutral in its control, and responsive in its supercharged power. The original builders were able to imbue this craft with their purpose and create something with personality and temperament all its own. They took raw elements and turned them into this carefully considered machine and, in doing so, created an extension of themselves that in turn serves as an extension of capability for all who pilot it.

As with all things, the precision and care became clear when examining the minute details; the joints, the seams, the interfaces where each piece came together. It’s more than aesthetics. The balance, feel, performance, and identity of this craft were created not just by how its individual components worked with one another, but also how they interacted with the world moving around it. Characteristics of planes morph with every edge in the airflow, every gram of mass fore or aft of center, the geometry of the supercharger intake, the amount of force required to move the levers, the placement of controls and gauges. The balanced and considered interplay of all these individual parts combined to create an expression of intelligence, of spirit, and of singular personality.

I marvel, not for the first time, that dumb individual elements such as metal, vinyl, and glass can create something that seems to come to life in our hands. Each of these small elements meshing creates what ancient peoples called “the spirit in the machine.” Certainly, it is an old tradition to imbue inanimate objects with human emotions.

But go fly a 1942 Beech-18 and tell me I’m wrong. Every sound, whether a change in propeller pitch, engine speed, or phase, is a message. Every bump and jolt are heavy with meaning. The way the controls feel when it’s lifting off full of fuel and cargo, building stability in ground effect before strongly climbing out, versus its playful agility when coming back home empty. It would only take a single flight to convince someone that this amalgamation of elements was speaking to them.

An endless stream of data came to us from our eyes, our ears, and our butts but it always struck our hearts. We processed that real-time information and weighed it against what we thought we knew moments before. Was the airplane temperamental today, or was truly something wrong? Was that a rough spot of air, or did the weather change on us? In this way, flying did not free us from, but rather coupled us ever more tightly to, the present moment and the world moving silently by.

I had been daydreaming again. I fired up our 1965 GMC Truck - two decades newer than the plane - and sat behind the wheel, trying to stare through a frosted windshield. I watched my breath swirl and condense on the glass while the stiff drive belt and cold bearings screamed. After defrosting a porthole-sized section of glass, I shifted into first, one of the only two gears this vehicle ever saw, and coaxed the truck’s frozen bones into motion.

I pulled up in front of the plane, hooked up the grounding cable, climbed up onto the wing, and gently touched the metal fuel nozzle to the bare metal inlet of the fueling port. Static electricity in these cold, dry conditions is serious business. My bare hands went numb holding the fuel nozzle while I squatted and waited for the inboard wing tanks filled. I switched hands periodically, fueling with one and blowing warm breath into the other. A sliver of my back was exposed where my sweatshirt hitched up above my waistline. I continued shivering and daydreaming, then my two most typical pastimes.

I moved on to fueling the large military surplus rubber bladder in the plane’s cargo bay. We were hauling 300 gallons of heating oil out to Iguigig. I reset the meter, put in a new paper ticket, and started the pump. I watched the collapsed bladder slowly expand like an oversized air mattress as fuel flowed.

As I did this, my Dad arrived. I first noticed him as a silhouette, moving silently against the dark across the icy ramp, wreathed in the frozen vapor of his breath. The rumble of the fuel truck and roar of the pump filled the early morning air and we just nodded a quick hello. He was busy with his own pre-flight preparation.

It was always the same. He would slowly, methodically, approach the plane and, with a utilitarian grace, reach a single hand up to touch the left wing’s navigation light. He’d run his hand lightly down the leading edge of the wing, feeling the smooth surface of the rubberized anti-ice boots. He would stop at the first engine, look inside the cowl at the cylinders, check that the latches were secure, and inspect the propeller. Then, he went to the right side and repeated the same practice before continuing around the tail, checking each hinged surface.

A pre-flight check is a highly practical ritual, but it is also spiritual. If you could ask my Dad about this, he’d disavow it. He was far too practical, outwardly, to admit to such a thing. He would say that he was simply running down the checklist on the aircraft. Maybe he didn’t notice the change, but I know he felt it. Maybe he just didn’t have the words.

I probably don’t either, but I’ll try to find them. As he walked around that plane, he set down the weight of everyday life: the bills, business worries, the plethora of small things that buzz around the back of all our heads. In their place, he picked up only the task at hand.

He began to cast himself out over the horizon. To think about mountain passes, natural checkpoints, approach procedures, and the myriad pitfalls awaiting us. He meshed these with the day’s weather he’d seen on the radar and web cams. He began to anticipate the decisions and adjustments that would have to be made to get us there and back again.

This transformation from daily life to this new state spun a spell that moved him from our shared frame of daily existence to some other. One where everything you can measure melds to form a vision of the future to plan around. One that prepares him for what our flights through Western Alaska really are: a probabilistic casting of lots where he would be constantly performing combinatorics on a complex, shifting set of conditions.

After he finished with the plane, he checked the weather for the third time. He filed our flight plan; this morning, two souls on board. All the large pieces were in place: our route, our alternates, our fuel load, our weight and balance, and now it was up to us to translate these abstractions into action, odd actions though they may be. To exist as the interface between intention and action. Discrete adjustments of power levers, foot pressure on pedals, and movements of the yoke. Those elements of the plane assembled just so must also be moved just so and, similar to those elements, our many small movements would coalesce into action that propelled us up and over the horizon.

My fueling was complete and the cargo area was closed out and secure. Pre-flight also complete and plans filed, my Dad returned and we climbed through the small window on the pilot’s side which served as our main point of entry. In an emergency, this same small window was also our primary point of egress. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to climb over my Dad to get out and I always hoped to God I’d never have to.

We sat in the cold, dark plane, our breath frosting the windshield in front of us. The only light came through the glass from that same solitary lamp on the tarmac. Our ritual continued as we adjusted our seat belts, trim tabs, friction wheels, and even pant legs just so. Whatever it took to get comfortable, settle in, and become aligned with the task at hand. It may be obsessive to adjust shoulder straps by the millimeter, allowing me to lean forward enough to see out the side window but not be flung so far forward I hit the dash. It may not serve a purpose to fiddle with the throttle friction locks until they feel just right. Then again, who’s to say? If superstition has ever failed a pilot, they never reported back.

Starting a Beech-18 is a lot different than starting a car and, honestly, it’s different than starting most other airplanes. Like flying, it required a detailed procedural checklist coupled with the ability to improvise on the fly in response to the vagaries of the day.

We worked our way down the checklist. Brakes, throttle, and mixture set. All else complete, we flipped the master switch on. The soft whine of the gyros spinning up was our first sign of life. Next, we turned on the left fuel pump and primed the cold engine well. Left engine start. It turned through, fired, then coughed its way to life. Left magnetos on. The engine grumbled a bit while Dad tinkered with the throttle and mixture, coaxing it along, before finding it’s pace and settling into an easy lope. Oil pressure rose appropriately and we repeated the recipe with the right engine.

With both engines warming up, my Dad flipped the avionics on and we were greeted with a long squelch and short beep. Weather was again punched up. The pre-recorded voice played through the briefing three times as we noted the details, adjusted altimeters by fractions of a degree, and double-checked winds. The engines finally gained some heat and I felt the first hints of warm air blow out of the floor vent onto my frozen sneakers.

Dad began the run-up procedure for the engines, first with the left, taking it up to about 20 inches of manifold pressure, or around 1,500 RPM. He checked the magnetos, cycled the propellers, and tested the electric feathering function. If we lost an engine, we’d need that to turn the propeller blades sideways into the airflow. Finally, he checked that the carburetor heat, which prevents the Venturi nozzle from icing up as it expands cold air into the engine, the electric generator providing power, and the vacuum system running our gyroscopic instruments were all working. Repeat again for the right engine, then set all flight instruments to their proper headings.

I was startled by my Dad breaking our shared silent attention to the plane to radio the Kenai ground controller for clearance to taxi. We’d been completing the checklists without speaking, tuned instead to the sounds of the plane and the story they told. His clearance call was the first thing I’d heard him say since arriving that morning.

Speaking aloud our intention to get underway broke the reverie of our respective rituals brought us to the operation before us. Every flight was routine only in that the route was the same: from Kenai, across the inlet, and past the active volcano Redoubt into Lake Clark Pass to the communities beyond. Everything else is new; a fresh casting of lots across the spectrum of chance toward some binary outcome.

We were cleared to taxi from our tarmac to runway 20R, two-zero-right. We throttled up the slight incline from our parking area onto the main taxiway. The plane bounced gently as it rolled. We were quiet as we clipped along past the other dark hangars toward the far end of the airport. Our path was illuminated by our taxi lights, the occasional streetlight shining above an empty tarmac, and hemmed by the small blue taxiway lights flitting by. Above, the stars shone down from a clear sky.

We reached the threshold of runway 20R and held short. The controller in the tower had undoubtedly been watching us, the solitary plane of the new morning, during our slow taxi across the airport. Still, he waited for us to reach out.

My Dad turned to me, looked me briefly up and down, then smiled, his kind eyes crinkling and alight with anticipation, the joy of the task upon us.

“Ready?” he asked me simply. I nodded my assent.

He pressed the mic button and called, “Kenai Tower, Beechcraft N9210 holding short runway two-zero-right, ready for departure and turnout to the west,” in that gravelly, low voice all pilots affect.

“Beechcraft N9210 cleared for takeoff,” came the ready reply.

Gamely he added power and kicked the rudders to swing our nose down the runway. Pointed now down the runway he pushed the propeller control levers full-in and smoothly rolled full power on. The engines shifted eagerly from their laidback lope to a purposeful roar that drowned out all else. We picked up speed and the white lights lining the edge of the runway began to tick by ever faster, until they became a blur, giving me the feeling that we were leaving this dimension through some portal to another.

Light forward pressure on the yoke lowered the nose, rotating us on the main gear and lifting the tail wheel off the ground. Constant, intuitive adjustments on the rudders kept our heading straight. The whole craft hummed and I felt the wings begin to fill as the air underneath them stagnated and swelled. Then, just as lightly, Dad eased back on the yoke and held it. The plane responded by popping neatly off the ground. We cruised straight down the runway in ground effect, trapping the air between the ground and bottom of our wings to generate extra lift, while we built speed. Dad scanned the instruments and verified their health. All looking good and speed built, he raised the landing gear and began a steep climbing turn to the right, out toward the western horizon and into the dark morning.

We crossed the flatlands and I watched them fall away down sandy bluffs and beach before giving way to the frozen inlet. I noticed the light of the full moon for the first time. It illuminated the monochrome landscape of snow, ice, and water, painting them all in its muted yellow light.

We were egregious in our hubris, crossing the miles of dangerous inlet in minutes, slipping past the sleeping volcano. We covered distance in hours that took humans lifetimes before. I pondered the absurdity, but also what felt like the eventuality, of it.

Our craft a cocoon radiating light, heat, and noise out over the sleeping void. It is a microcosm of earth itself: a loud, unlikely, somewhat absurd buzzing of life across an otherwise cold expanse. Just like Earth, the walls protecting us are shockingly thin. Very little separates us, materially and circumstantially, from the cold realities of the universe that surrounds us.

Over millions of years, cooperating bacteria became cells and then organisms, extensions of the cells’ desire to cooperate and grow. They did, they became something more than the cells were on their own.

Somewhere, people came into being and figured out how to take that cooperation a step further, working with each other to build the societies that accomplished more than individual humans ever could. Eventually, those societies produced machines that again extended our ability to cooperate and grow. The fractal patterns, churning at each layer of abstraction. What would be the next?

As we slipped along, our craft was an extension of our intent, translating pedal pushes, yoke pressure, throttle changes, and myriad other adjustments into coordinated progress over the water and icebergs below on our way to bring necessities – today fuel, other days food, vehicles, and building materials – to support communities beyond the roads.

Maybe an odd train of thought for a night flight, but it’s easy to get lost amongst the icebergs and moonlight floating below.

Looking at that frozen inlet made me appreciate the cabin’s growing warmth. I kicked my feet and enjoyed the circulation returning. I leaned back in my seat and stuffed my Dad’s jacket between the headrest and the wall. I closed my eyes and let the hum of the engines lull me to sleep as we flew through the dark, a singular beacon of life’s determined nature, over the horizons to the sleeping towns beyond.