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[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]October 12, 2004[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]From his book, "Ask The Pilot", former-flyer Patrick Smith tells of a delirious disaster at thirty thousand feet.[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
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[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva] [FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva] An old bromidic adage defines the business of flying planes as long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Moments of sheer ridiculousness, maybe, are equally as harrowing. One young pilot, when he was 22 and trying to impress the pretty Christine Collingworth with a sightseeing circuit in a friend’s Cessna, highlighted the seduction by whacking his forehead into the jutting metal pitot tube hanging from the wing. Earning a famous “Cessna dimple,” so he chose to think, would be the stupidest thing he’d ever do in or around an airplane.[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
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That was more than a decade ago, and a long way from this same pilot’s mind during a late-night cargo flight. It’s eleven p.m. and the airplane, an old DC-8 freighter loaded with pineapples, is somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle, bound from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Cincinnati. The night is dark and quiet, void of moonlight, conversation, and for that matter worry. The crew of three is tired, and this will be their last leg in a week's rotation that has sent them from New York to Belgium and back again, onward to Mexico, and now to the Caribbean.
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]They are mesmerized by the calming drone of high-bypass turbofans and the deceptively peaceful noise of 500 knots of frigid wind cleaved along the cockpit windows. Such a setting, when you really think about it, ought to be enough to scare the living shit from any sensible person. We have no business, maybe, being up there, participants in such an inherently dangerous balance between naïve solitude and instant death, distracted by paperwork and chicken sandwiches while screaming along, higher than Mount Everest and at the speed of sound in a 40 year-old assemblage of machinery. But such philosophizing is for poets, not pilots, and also makes for exceptionally bad karma. No mystical ruminations were in the job description for these three airmen, consummate professionals who long ago sold their souls to the more practical-minded muses of technology and luck.[/FONT]
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[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT] You can find the rest of it here:
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-articles/read.main?id=69
I was cleaning up my desk and came across a printout of this article. I find it extremely well written and very funny...
[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]By Patrick Smith
[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]October 12, 2004[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]From his book, "Ask The Pilot", former-flyer Patrick Smith tells of a delirious disaster at thirty thousand feet.[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva] [FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva] An old bromidic adage defines the business of flying planes as long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Moments of sheer ridiculousness, maybe, are equally as harrowing. One young pilot, when he was 22 and trying to impress the pretty Christine Collingworth with a sightseeing circuit in a friend’s Cessna, highlighted the seduction by whacking his forehead into the jutting metal pitot tube hanging from the wing. Earning a famous “Cessna dimple,” so he chose to think, would be the stupidest thing he’d ever do in or around an airplane.[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]
That was more than a decade ago, and a long way from this same pilot’s mind during a late-night cargo flight. It’s eleven p.m. and the airplane, an old DC-8 freighter loaded with pineapples, is somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle, bound from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Cincinnati. The night is dark and quiet, void of moonlight, conversation, and for that matter worry. The crew of three is tired, and this will be their last leg in a week's rotation that has sent them from New York to Belgium and back again, onward to Mexico, and now to the Caribbean.
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]They are mesmerized by the calming drone of high-bypass turbofans and the deceptively peaceful noise of 500 knots of frigid wind cleaved along the cockpit windows. Such a setting, when you really think about it, ought to be enough to scare the living shit from any sensible person. We have no business, maybe, being up there, participants in such an inherently dangerous balance between naïve solitude and instant death, distracted by paperwork and chicken sandwiches while screaming along, higher than Mount Everest and at the speed of sound in a 40 year-old assemblage of machinery. But such philosophizing is for poets, not pilots, and also makes for exceptionally bad karma. No mystical ruminations were in the job description for these three airmen, consummate professionals who long ago sold their souls to the more practical-minded muses of technology and luck.[/FONT]
[FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva][FONT=ARIAL, Helvetica, Geneva]
[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT] You can find the rest of it here:
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-articles/read.main?id=69