Full Circle
April 18, 2023
SO MUCH OF a piloting career is leaving things behind. Change is a constant — new airlines, new planes, new routes — and you’re always saying goodbye. Goodbye to companies, goodbye to colleagues, goodbye to places you loved (or hated) to fly.
And goodbye to airplanes. Seems we’re always jumping from one model to another. Maybe your company finally retired those aging 757s. Maybe you upgraded to captain on a different type, or switched to something bigger and better.
And those airplane farewells aren’t always fond. So it was in 1992 when I completed my final flight in the Beech 99, a twin-engined fifteen-seater from the 60s that was my first assignment as an airline pilot. When I stepped off the stairs of that sad contraption for the last time, I couldn’t run away fast enough. To borrow from an earlier story…
Unpressurized and slow, the Beech 99 was a ridiculous anachronism kept in service by a bottom-feeder airline and its tightfisted owner. The rectangular cabin windows gave it a vintage look, like the windows in a 19th-Century railroad car.
Passengers at Logan would show up planeside in a red bus about twice the size of the plane. Expecting a modern Boeing or Airbus, they were dumped at the foot of a fifteen-passenger wagon built during the Age of Aquarius. I’d be stuffing paper towels into the cockpit window frames to keep out the rainwater while businessmen came up the stairs cursing their travel agents.
A Northeast Express Beech 99, circa 1992.
The noise, the cramped cockpit, the shame. Good riddance. My logbook lists my valedictory flight as a run from Augusta, Maine, to Boston, on August 13th, 1992. I don’t remember it, specifically, but my sentiments at the time remain indelible: I never wanted to set foot in a Beech 99 again. And because the plane was an obsolete antique that no respectable airline would operate, never in my dreams did I expect to.
Fast forward to 2023, and I’m sitting with my girlfriend at the airport in Nassau, Bahamas, about to catch a flight to the tiny island of Staniel Cay. We’re booked with something called Flamingo Air, which until three days ago I’d never heard of. Sitting in the departure lounge, I’m idly wondering what kind of plane will be making the half-hour hop to Staniel. A Twin Otter? A Caravan? A Cessna 402?
And then I see it. Or I hear it, actually — that vaguely familiar buzz-rumble of PT-6 engines. I turn and there it is, taxiing towards the building. The awkward, tail-low silhouette and the square windows. The long tapered nose. You can’t be serious. Well fuck me if it isn’t a Beech 99.
“You can’t be serious.”
“What?” says Liz.
“That’s our plane.”
“It’s so cute!”
Nostalgia, you’re thinking, would be the way to approach this. But the only sensation I can muster up is wary combination of disappointment and fear. The Beech 99 was already a tottering piece of junk 32 years ago. To discover one still airworthy is equally hilarious and startling.
And now I have to get in the thing. Being a superstitious sort who can’t help seeking out those nooks of fate where irony and tragedy intersect, I’m convinced I’m going to die.
An agent walks us across the apron towards the plane, which is mostly tombstone-colored. Coming around the wing, I notice the red tail-stand. The 99 is aft-heavy, and boarding has to be staggered to keep it from plopping onto its tail. At Northeast we’d hold the thing up with our shoulders until the forward rows were full. Then after landing we’d run back and do it again.
Going up stairs I catch a view of the tail, decked out in a colorful design of the famous swimming pigs of Big Major Cay. The charm of the image is a little hard to savor because the decal is webbed and cracked and peeling, giving the fin the look of a shattered window.
“All the way forward,” the agent tells me. I climb inside and go to the first row, just behind the pilots. I have to turn sideways because there isn’t enough legroom between my seat and the copilot’s. There’s no cockpit door, of course. At Northeast Express, some of our 99s had curtains. Not this one. The copilot’s shoulder is inches from my face.
It all comes back to me, the details suddenly familiar, even after three decades. The comically small seats and the dearth of headroom, the wing spar cutting across the middle of the cabin floor. The grime and the chipped paint and broken-off moulding. The sun-baked upholstery and the scratched-up plastic windows. The shambles of it all.
Elizabeth eyes me cheerfully, asks me to take her picture. To her this is all great fun. She has no idea of this rattletrap’s significance in my life, or the fact that I’m terrified of it.
I look at the instrument panel. More memories, none of them especially welcome. The toy-sized artificial horizon, the torque gauges, the radio panel straight from a 1970s Piper Cherokee. Theres a primitive GPS, at least, which is something we didn’t have in the early 90s. Several of the annunciatior panel lenses are cracked or missing. The whole thing has the look and feel of a military surplus plane reassembled in someone’s garage.
I recall my first-ever time at the controls of this thing. “It seems like yesterday,” I might say. But it doesn’t. It seems like when it was: October of 1990. On the glamorous route between Manchester, New Hampshire, and Boston — a flight even shorter than this one. I remember cutting my knuckles on the cabin door latch the first time I closed it, flying with bloody fingers.
Off we go. The copilot’s sun visor is broken in six places. It’s turned to the side, and as we accelerate for takeoff it slips from its mount and lands in my lap. I place it on the floor.
The plane is louder than I remembered, and with every seat taken our takeoff roll seems to go on forever. Once airborne, it shimmies and wobbles as it climbs, as if aggravated by its own lack of strength.
At last we reach 5,500 feet and the pilots level off. Takeoff is the most inherently dangerous part of any flight, and I feel better now with the ground a mile below. I relax a little — at least until I glance at the engine gauges and notice the RPM indicator for the left engine sitting at zero. The propeller is still happily turning, thank goodness, so clearly the instrument is kaput. I don’t think that would’ve been “deferrable,” as we put it, back at Northeast Express. Not a big deal, but the little things are adding up.
Elizabeth is looking out the window. The scenery as we near the Exumas chain is unworldly, a psychedelic swirl of blue and cream, sandbar and sea. At least someone is enjoying it.
I already know that I’m going to write about this. Assuming I survive, of course. The question is how. What will the angle be? Should I interview the pilots? The captain is an older guy who looks like a lifer, not some kid building experience with his eyes on a better job elsewhere. He’s not saying goodbye. He must have some stories, flying around the Bahamas all these years, dodging storms, landing on tiny runways. This is the kind of flying highly dependent on seat-of-the-pants skills and local knowledge.
Maybe that should be my article. I jot a few things in my notebook, my handwriting vibrating in time with the engines. But ultimately I decide that I don’t care. I don’t care about the nuances of flying in the Bahamas. I don’t care about local knowledge or the captain’s derring-do. I just want off this thing before the coast guard is fishing my half-eaten body out of some barracuda-infested reef.
And that — this — is my article.
There’s a warbling as we start down, the propellers out of synch as the power comes back. I see an island in the distance, a candy-bar landing airstrip at the center of it. A few minutes later the gear drops. If either pilot says so much as a word over the radio, I don’t notice it.
We whistle over the rocky edge of Staniel and settle onto the pavement. The touchdown is feather-smooth, but when the props go into reverse, it sounds like a table saw chewing through plywood.
The runway is three-thousand feet, the captain tells me after shutting down the engines. We chat for a couple of minutes. “I have eleven hundred hours in one of these,” I tell him. I do some quick and depressing math in my head, calculating how many days of my life that works out to.
He seems impressed, or something. And maybe he’s annoyed. There I was in the first row, watching so intently. Back-seat flying, as it were.
“What’s up with that RPM gauge?”
And though we’re safe and sound, for now, I can’t really savor the moment, because the scarier part is yet to come. Landing on a 3,000 foot runway is one thing, taking off is another. Something to worry about for the next five days.
None of this, if you can’t tell, is especially rational. It’s all me. Was that airplane actually unsafe? It was old and cosmetically beat-up, sure, but aside from a malfunctioning non-critical instrument, everything seemed normal. The ones I flew thirty years ago were no different. The pilots are experienced and know what they were doing. Is it safe to fly this airline to Staniel Cay? No doubt.
The danger exists entirely in my head. It’s not about the airplane; it’s about my past. I’ve been taken hostage, it feels, by the neurotic and the annoying games I play with memories and fate, self-conspiring to wreck my vacation. I can’t help myself.
At the airport we rent a golf cart. That’s how you get around on Staniel, switching from one silly mode of transportation to another. Liz steers us towards the villa while I ruminate. Is there a ferry back to Nassau, I wonder? A fishing boat? Anything but a Beech 99?
Related Story:
THE RIGHT SEAT. PROPELLERS, POLYESTER, AND OTHER MEMORIES.
For more pictures from Staniel Cay, see the author’s Instagram sets.
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47 Responses to “Full Circle”
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On my way from Florida to the Bahamas to cut a record at Compass Point in 1980 I recall the plane was seriously small and I think it was a prop plane…I do remember a priest and some nuns on board, and that he was really nasty to them, like a bad boss. Not being religious, I didn’t attach any feelings one way or another to having the godly on the plane and was happy to get to Nassau.
Fine article! I’m not a professional pilot; I have a Private Pilot License, SEL; not instrument rated. At one lesson I went with the CFI to HIS favorite FBO (not the one I preferred) and proceeded to pull the door off the Cessna. It was fixed and the flight went off with no problem. At another (far away) FBO I was checking out a 172 with a CFI and during the flight noticed some condensation dripping on my sweater. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this but it’s 100LL, not water’. We returned safely to the field. I can’t tell how many times I experienced 172 nose wheel shimmy. We all have flown rattletraps but fortunately training cuts in and we live to tell about it.
Many pilots today would kill to fly on anything other than a Cessna 172..
And be paid for it.
Thank you for sharing!
I just flew on a regional service into St. Louis and it was on a Cessna Grand Caravan that sounds almost identical to this. Unpressurized, twin prop with rectangular windows.
The website for the company has a FAQ saying “How do I avoid getting the middle seat?” To which they responded “You’re in luck! We don’t have middle seats!”
I began my career flying a Be-C99 in the Bahamas in the mid nineties. I think it’s the reason I have measurable hearing loss in one ear. Recently, I got to go aboard one converted into cargo hauler at DEN. The nightmares returned.
Can you believe that thing didn’t have a HUD?
Jeebus, I think I flew in a plane just like this out of Nassau in 2009! (Heck, could be the same damn plane, for all I know.) It was a flight to Andros Island. I didn’t think to get all of the details, but I know it was a twin-prop Beechcraft, still the only piston-engine airplane in which I have ever traveled. The interior was much as you say as well, and at my size (6’4″, 240 lbs), I was seriously folded up.
This story, along with many of the ensuing comments, made me LOL. I too have what many in the legacy airlines refer to as “regional PTSD”, although mine is more associated with my former training department than with the rattletrap equipment some folks describe here. Excellent writing all around.
Yup, and by his own admission it IS in the author’s head. I hope for his own mental health he’s sittin’ on a front porch in a rockin’ chair tryin’ his hardest to get over his trauma & what sounds like ptsd… it surely does equal that which one experiences in combat.
Well, I hope you didn’t take the fright part too seriously. The story is mostly tongue-in-cheek. My anxiety was more a low background hum than anything acute.
I wasn’t REALLY worried about crashing.
I think.
I’ve read most everything on this blog, and I think this is one of the best things you’ve written. A remarkably improbable story, told well. My other favorite of yours is your near mid-air flying with your girlfriend as a young pilot. Great writing, both. Thanks.
It’s a good thing you didn’t inform your companion about your past with the aircraft. When a pilot is nervous, you can be sure that the rest of us are soiling our armor.
Thanks for this story Patrick. Entertaining, informative, and well written. Great photos too. That RPM indicator…
Great writing. I flew the 99’s back in the early ‘70’s for Penn Commuter Airlines. Lots of hot summer, stormy weather and cold snowy winters … and no autopilots or GPS. Flew mostly the DC, BWI, PHL, MDT runs.
Flew our own planes into Staniel ( and most other out islands) for years.
Again, great article …. Brings back memories
Not that it needs to be said again, but this is writing worthy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or Beryl Markham. Great work!
25 or so years ago I landed my S 35 Bonanza on the same airstrip. At the time the final approach came over a bar called Thunderball Bar where the customers took bets on whether or not the plane going over would stay on the runway. Fortunately no one made money on my landing. Enjoyed your Beech story!
I flew N99CA as a Captain for Mohawk Airlines out of KSYR in 1991. I flew that airplane for its last flight on7/29/91. When I landed and shut down it had 20 MINUTES of airframe life left on 50K hours. A couple of week later I saw it on the back of a flatbed wings off and tied down headed for the scrapyard. The company had removed the autopilots. When I questioned it I was told, “we’re paying you to FLY the airplane”. The thing that I remember the most is my skin “singing” from the vibration of the prop wash hitting the side of the fuselage by my seat. I hope to NEVER get in one again.
Many thanks to the author for such a remarkably tragic and hilarious account of his regrettable, and hopefully last flight in a Beech-99. To say it brightened up, and provided me with ruckus laughter of my rather boring Friday night minimizes an excellent story.
Be good, or be careful,
Paul
Perhaps the most entertaining post you’ve written. I especially enjoyed how much of your early work was assuaging the public’s fears of flying by informing them of the realities, yet here you are having a moment of where being too informed is leading to the irrational fear …or is it entirely rational?! LOL.
MZ, we flew together, but in the Dash 7. The B99 was a good plane in many ways but then , there were those days…I assume you are now happily retired, as am I.
I’m not sure when it was or why I was flying from Baltimore to Philadelphia in a Beech 99. I don’t remember the condition of the airplane and I know I wasn’t a commercial pilot, as I am now, at the time. We were probably flying at 5000′. All I remember was two small boys sitting in the first two seats, with the curtain fastened open and the co-pilot turning to talk to them occasionally. It must have been one of the greatest experiences of the young lives and perhaps started their love for flying.
I flew an antique (1980) Citation II into Staniel several times. Fun times, copilot wasn’t too keen on the idea. Minimum fuel to jump over to International airport for Customs outbound to USA.
I flew the Beech 99 for 5000 thousand hours back from 1972 to 1977. Henson Airlines/Allegany Commuter. It was a work horse and fun to fly. Through bad weather with a little green radar and no autopilot. It allowed me to become a good pilot. You should appreciate your time in that airplane a little more. Or are you spoiled now that you have moved on?
My dad loved and had Beech H50s, and we regularly flew from Portland, Maine, to a coral strip (@2,000 feet) on Scotland Cay, Abaco. After he sold it, N155H was in service for a small local line until 2007.
After my dad’s death, I flew Aerocoach (which we called Scareocoach)from Florida to Marsh Harbour, and I once was in the right seat of a fully loaded Beech 99. The pilot never said a word, and he didn’t look professional enough to be in the ground crew. At least one instrument was in its death throes, and I spent the entire flight watching another one twitch and listening to the engine miss with increasing frequency. No one else seemed to notice. Your story echoes that frightening memory and makes me very grateful I now have a friend who takes me along in a new Navajo with a professional pilot.
Nice article. I flew in the Albany NY area most of my life. I remember the ’99’s at ALB. I have logged with tail numbers and other details my 60+ years of traveling. Among my almost million miles of airline flying I am quite sure a few rides were in this type. Mall Airways (based in ALB) flew them among many. I can’t quite remember if I flew in one since my trip logs are not with me.
I wonder what the author flys now.
That’s a fantastic story. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the visor landing in your lap.
Thanks for sharing.
Back in the 1970s when I was a student at WSU in Pullman Washington I discovered that with my dad’s 75% discount for being a retired United pilot I could fly home to Seattle for $20 on Cascade Airlines in a Beech 99 which given we are talking late 1970s gas crisis prices wasn’t all that more expensive than driving the 320 or so miles home (a 6 hour drive), especially if I had my Olds Toronado at school. Plus given I was often having to deal with the mountain pass it also seemed safer. I do recall some turbulent flights over the mountains including once being beefy pitched on our side but that was the only drama, well I did once get bumped because a kid had peed on the seat, lol. Eventually they replaced the 99s with Metroliners which were a lot more modern and had more legroom at the cost of less headroom and smaller windows.
Another well-crafted story. Maybe you should publish a collection of these. I’d buy a copy.
For fellow readers, here are two more good ones:
https://www.salon.com/2008/06/06/askthepilot280/
https://askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/en-route-angst/
The second story you linked to also appears in my book. The other one is old and half-assed and needs a serious re-write.
Memories! I used to fly the Augusta Maine to Boston route, as a passenger, regularly 1978-80. Beech 99 on Bar Harbor Airline. Sometimes Air New England in a De Haviland Twin Otter.
I do not recall feeling unsafe in either, but then flying it would be rather different. Great to have memories of that sparked.
I remember Air New England well. They flew mostly Twin Otters and FH-227s.
And Bar Harbor, of course. If you read my “Right Seat” story, you know that my first airline, Northeast Express, was owned by the same guy who had owned Bar Harbor. He still owes me like two thousand dollars from a bounced paycheck in 1994.
Awesome involuntary flashback story. I hope you do buy that older left-seat guy a few drinks and get some caribbean war stories.
Wonderful story! I could even smell the inside of that aircraft!!
I accrued about 900 hours in the ’99, mostly left seat. I was even proclaimed “Check Airman” at a later stage but no one bothered to inform me…one day crew schedule called and the rest is history. Looked great on the resume’. I’m guessing at your age when I say that I flew them about ten years (and many airframe hours younger) than you did.
I remember one flight in the Northeast in moderate, steady rain. There was a big hole in the top of the radio stack. I forget what should have been there. The windshield started to leak and it was dripping on what was left of the radio stack. I found a towel or something and placed it on top of the radios. As I recall, I did this as though it was another day at the office. Mind you, this was in the full view of the passengers, of course!
This is hilarious – and so, so vivid. I’m very happy you survived.
You had me in that plane (crate?!) next to you, Patrick! Great writing!
Great story. You remember I complemented you on your photographic skills recently. You’re also a terrific story writer.
Thanks, Patrick. This was great writing!
Fantastic bit of writing, Patrick!
By the way did you hear Matthew McCanaughy on the radio talking about having been in heavy turbulence on a recent flight “it hit so hard the plane was out of control.” Sheesh.
Flying to Texas this week and then UK in a month. Can’t wait. I still think flying’s romantic. I’m just old, I guess.
What a wonderful STORY about not so wonderful flight!
I’ve been Following you for years!
Nicely done. I have the same feelings about the C-47 (DC-3) when I used to have to sit in one of them for a few hours. I know they are one of the safest aircraft in the military but those are statistics that I’m always leery of. Is someone “cooking the books” to keep them flying? lol
Thanks for the memories,
Eric
I always look forward to your posts. This one was particularly fun, eliciting some out-loud chuckles. Gail
Excellent essay, Patrick. I really enjoyed reading this.
You’ve outdone yourself, Patrick: This vividly detailed narrative exceeds your “Propellers, Polyester and Other Memories” piece, which I just reread for old times’ sake. And it brings back some memories for me: That panel looks almost exactly like the one in the King Airs that I used to fly. Great reading!
Yup, the 99 and the King Air are in many ways the same plane.
A wonderful story, wonderfully told. Sucks that your vacation started like this, but your loss is your readers’ gain.
Your blog is one of my favourites. This piece – peak Patrick Smith brilliance.