Fingernails In Leather

Copyright © 2013 by J.L. Vaughan

All rights reserved. This story may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.

Fingernails in Leather- A Pilot Confessional

By J.L. Vaughan

Any parent who has sent a child off to college will tell just how hard it is to see them go. You’ve spent their entire childhood preparing them for this very moment, for them to venture out into the world on their own.  That day comes and you break down, you want to tuck them back into that racecar/princess bed—knowing full well those days are gone. On a particular Sunday Roger and I were called in by a mother and father also seeing their son off as he ventured to college for the first time.  It’s almost a tradition to help load your son or daughters bags into the back of their car or drive them to the bus station for that last heartfelt goodbye.  It’s not strange to find a mother making her son or daughter a snack for the road and for her to ask if they packed their toothbrush, just as this particular young man’s mother had done. That day Roger and I had loaded the bags of this young man into our airplane as a teary eyed mother and proud father stood on the airport ramp saying good bye to a son who was flying to Pullman, Washington that afternoon.  His college courses would start the next day and he was equal parts nervous and excited.

The plane ride for him was nothing new, it was one of his families normal modes of transportation.  Our airplane, for this man was no different than most people view hopping into the family sedan for a weekend vacation. It was just the way his family had always gotten around, there honestly was nothing different about him than any other eighteen year old packing his things. I’ll never forget the look on his mother’s face as she handed him the sandwiches she had made for the flight. She knew full well that Roger and I would have snacks on the plane, she knew we could arrange to have a five course meal catered and ready. Not today, this mom was sending her son away with something special, something she made with her own hands. I have know doubt that it was the same kind of sandwich she had made for him back in his high-chair days.

After we finished loading up all the young man’s belongings we told our passenger that it was time to go. He hugged his mother and father and walked up the stairs into our airplane. Both parents fought every instinct they had to grab him and tell him not to go.  Roger and I took no time starting up the airplane and getting ourselves into the air. 

Personally I had my own reasons for not wasting too much time on the ground. Just like any other job, each aviation job has its goods and its bads. With my first position as a flight instructor, came pay that was below 3^rd world country poverty levels and a schedule that had nothing that could pass off as even mirroring consistency, but I did find myself under the veil of a “as long as you leave it full of fuel you can take any of the airplanes” clause which made for some very good days off in Southern California.  My next job was that of a cargo pilot and it came with a constantly insomnia driven schedule; airplanes that were so old, decayed, and overly used that daily malfunctions became an expectation; and the guidelines of a single pilot operation that lended itself toward being very lonely.  On the plus side though, the cargo airplanes were fast(compared to the ones before it), the packages never complained about your landings and the pay scale was at least up into U.S. poverty levels. The next job, as charter pilot, came with its nuances such as cleaning the av-toilet, picking up after messy passengers and an occasional off comment on a landing or two but it did have one very big plus—carrying passengers. Finding a spot on your plane for someone that wasn’t a company employee or passenger on empty legs was no longer frowned upon and now was completely legal. Sure in the cargo world it was rumored that an occasional girlfriend or pilot’s father might get snuck into an airplane on an early morning when no one was looking. But God help that pilot if dispatch, the chief pilot or the faa ever found out about it. The legal consequences were endless.  For those of us wanting to share what we do with those around us this new level of freedom was amazing.

On that particular Sunday I had arranged a little family transportation of my own. It turned out my little sister had recently graduated from the same collegiate institution our young passenger was about to attend and was visiting Pullman that very same weekend with some friends. Me, being the good brother that I am, I had talked her into ditching her friends for the seven hour car ride back to take the fourty-five minute flight with us back to Arlington. Of course she had said yes.
Once we landed at Pullman Roger and I quickly unloaded the new freshman’s belongings from the airplane. We helped him load them into the taxi that had met us, ready to take him the rest of the way to his dorms. My sister was nearby but I had told her to wait out of sight. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with taking her on the trip back, like I said it was perfectly legal and I’d literally received the stamp of approval from dispatch. She was on my passenger manifest and everything. It was just that, since this man’s proud Mom and Dad had footed the bill for the entire flight, I decided the less questions asked the better. Walking into the small FBO(Fixed Based Operator or airplane Gas Station and lounge) I could see her peering out from one of the back rooms. I told her the coast was clear, we exited to the ramp then up into the plane. 

After a safety briefing, being sure to cover all the little cool nuances of our aircraft that I knew she’d get a kick out of, I left her to her seat and we took to the air. The first few minutes of our flight I had checked back on her to make sure she wasn’t nervous. Both times she didn’t even notice I had looked, she was too enthralled with the scenery around her.  That was a good flight. My sister and I did not come from an aviation family, flying to us was new. While I’ve since grown used to flying, it was fun to see the look on her face as she took in the view from the aircraft window; we were flying over the same section of Eastern Washington the two of us had grown up in. I left her to enjoy her flight and concentrated on the task of flying the airplane back to Arlington. Along the way Roger and I got into our usual chitchat. That day’s discussion centered around his church’s bookreading group. Roger was an old-school guy, the type that wore cowboy boots, carried a pocket knife and wore a ball cap only because a Stetson (that is a cowboy hat to city folk) wouldn’t work well in the airplane. His church’s book group was reading some “whiny, hold hands, and get in touch with your feelings book,” as he put it and he was fit to be tied. He had plans to set the book on fire in front of the whole group as a public protest and it was all I could to do keep him in the copilot seat and calm.
 

“That’s what’s wrong with men today,” he had said. “The bunch of pansies. About the time a guy’s cahones finally drop in, the whole world starts to tell him he needs to shove’em right back up there. The stones in David’s slingshot weren’t the only ones he had on him you know.”  While I may have mostly agreed with Roger, his use of imagery and planned public book burning still didn’t seem like the best course of action, especially in a church. Over the course of the flight I did my best to talk into re-organizing his planned protest.

It didn’t seem very long into our flight before we’d found ourselves nearing Arlington.  It being a clear summer day we started our descent early down to the flight pattern and entered on down wind, adjacent to the runway.  As we neared parallel to the runway numbers being at our traffic pattern altitude of 1,500 feet another aircraft asked us if we could do a short approach.  A short approach entails making the quickest descent and turn to final that can possibly be made, getting down in a hurry so this next aircraft would fit in quickly behind us, us being just inside of him.  The runway numbers being even with our left wing I told Roger to tell him we would oblige. With a grin on my face, in one fluid motion I quickly pulled the throttles back to idle, pushed the props to high pitch, engaged the landing gear, put in our first notch of flaps and pointed the plane down toward the ground.

For this next part we need to talk systems  for a second. A plane of this size and price comes with all level of technological gadgetry. Systems giving you the weather, databases of airport lengths, frequencies, procedures. We have an oxygen system in case we lose pressurization at altitude, fire detection systems there purely to detect flames in our engines, oodles of back up instrumentation and GPS equipment just incase an instrument might have a bad day. One particular system is the Terrain and Obstacle Warning system.  This system lays dormant unless one of two things happen.  First, if it thinks that our aircraft is on a course that within one minute could cause it to collide with what its database tells it is the ground, a loud audible voice yells “Caution Terrain!”  Second, if its instrumentation shows an excessive rate of descent near the ground, the same voice yells “Sink Rate-Sink Rate!”

While we tended to avoid short approaches such as these on our standard flights due to passenger comfort, it was a more than safe maneuver for our airplane. Still, with the quickness that I had changed the airplane’s configuration and speed, having yanked the power back in one motion from cruise settings straight to idle, changed the propeller from a set of blades that pulled us through the air to two big speed brakes and lowered our landing gear and flaps our aircraft lifted, lurched forward and dropped all at once amongst a myriad of noises.  Even though I had full control of the aircraft, because of our descent rate and proximity to the ground the two audible warnings, “Caution Terrain” every seven seconds and “Sink Rate-Sink Rate” which increased in frequency the closer we got to the ground, had both kicked in. I hadn’t done an approach like that since my cargo days and I was loving every minute of it.  We had our airplane on the runway and stopped in record time.  The only thing I had forgotten was that my little sister was seated in the back, and until then she had been enjoying what she thought was a serine flight. As we turned off the runway I looked back to see her feet planted into the floor, back arched deep into her seat, hands clenched, nails dug into her armrest and her eyes as big as baseballs. I had gotten so excited at the chance to work the airplane over a little I had completely forgotten she was back there. After parking the airplane and apologizing profusely she had calmed down enough to talk.  She said in a very somber tone. “I just knew you were my brother and…I thought…I hoped you knew what you were doing.”    

The end

*The story above is fictional with some level of truth in, with and under it. At what level fiction takes over reality and whether this has its basis with the authors own situation or one that he may have heard via other parties is for only the author to know. The author felt the need to write it in first person in order to give the story the needed effect for the sake of the reader.