UPDATE. July 14, 2025

The preliminary crash report on Air India flight 171 is out, and what it says is startling.

It contends that at the moment of takeoff, both fuel control switches “transitioned” from the RUN to CUTOFF positions, essentially killing both engines.

One of the pilots is then heard asking the other why he did this. The second pilot responds that he did not. (Which pilot was speaking to whom is not specified.)

A few seconds later the switches transitioned back into the RUN position. The engines began spooling up again, but there was nowhere near enough time for them to produce adequate power.

In other words, it seems that one of the pilots switched off the fuel intentionally.

Or did he? Notice the investigators’ use of the word “transitioned.” The report is not fully clear as to whether the data recorder was tracking the flow of fuel independent of the switch position, or if it shows the switches themselves were, in fact, physically moved by hand. If they weren’t, it remains possible that an electronic glitch in the plane’s digital engine control system could be the culprit.

But if the switches were moved to CUTOFF manually, the billion-dollar question is why? Were they moved by accident, or nefariously? Was it an act of absurd absent-mindedness, or one of willful mass murder, a la EgyptAir, Germanwings, and (almost certainly) MH370.

As preposterous as the idea of a pilot mistakenly shutting off the engines sounds, I’ll note that it’s happened before. Consensus, however, is trending toward premise number two.

At least to me, though, the dynamics of the crash don’t really fit the suicide theory. You’re saying that the pilot’s plan was to cut both engines and let the plane glide into the ground? That seems an awfully conservative scheme. There would be a lot of unknowns in such a scenario, and no guarantee that the ensuing impact would be as disastrous as it turned out to be.

Just to the left of the impact zone was an area with no buildings and fewer obstructions. Perhaps with just a little more altitude they could’ve reached it, resulting in a crash that was partly survivable. Calculating the exact impact point ahead of time would’ve been nearly impossible.

Further, the second pilot denied shutting off the engines when queried by the first one. Why?

Rumors are circulating that the captain was going through a divorce and had been treated for depression. Whether or not this turns out to be true, just keep in mind that although depression sometimes turns people suicidal, only in the rarest cases does it also turn them murderous.

One thing that should pique interest is the report’s inclusion of a Boeing service bulletin issued a few years ago. The concern was fuel control switches failing to properly lock. The bulletin pertained to 737s, but the same basic switch is used on the 787 as well. Is it possible the fuel switches on Air India 171 were defective, and were moved from RUN to CUTOFF by nudge or vibration?

 

UPDATE. July 9, 2025

The focus now is on the fuel control switches. These are a pair of manually positioned cockpit controls that effectively turn the engines on or off.

These switches lever-lock into place cannot move automatically. Whichever position investigators say they were in, a pilot had to put them there.

If an engine fails during flight, one of the steps in securing that engine is to shut off its fuel control. In the case of Air India, what’s being whispered is that an engine may have failed on takeoff, and one of the pilots then grabbed the wrong switch, thus rendering both engines inoperative only a few hundred feet over the ground.

The biggest problem with this idea is that engine failures aren’t handled this way. All pilots are trained to wait until a safe altitude — usually at least a thousand feet — before commencing any steps to secure or troubleshoot a malfunctioned engine. You don’t start moving critical controls until there’s adequate time and altitude. Additionally, any time a fuel control switch is lifted out of the RUN position, both pilots must verbally confirm the correct one is being manipulated.

Is it possible a pilot could’ve have reacted in a panic and done exactly the wrong and catastrophic thing? Yes, and it’ll be quite troubling if it turns out one fuel control switch was found in RUN, with the other in CUTOFF.

And what if they were both found in CUTOFF? Well, putting aside the a possibility that the plane was crashed on purpose, this would make some sense. One of the steps addressing a dual engine failure — rare as such things are — is to cycle both fuel control switches. That is, move them from RUN to CUTOFF, then back again.

If something in the plane’s electronics went haywire and caused the engines to lose power simultaneously, we can imagine a desperate crew, with only seconds to spare, attempting the re-start process, with both fuel controls repositioned to CUTOFF and not enough time to get them on again.

Nothing in the preliminary report will be definitive, but if the switches were found in different positions from one another, this hints at pilot error. If both were found in CUTOFF, this hints at a dual failure and a last-ditch re-start effort.

 

UPDATE. June 24, 2025

It’s looking more and more likely that flight 171’s ram air turbine (RAT) was indeed deployed just prior to the crash. If so, this more or less confirms a loss of power in both engines.

Why it lost power is another issue altogether, and a potentially calamitous one for Boeing.

See below for more.

June 15, 2025

AIR INDIA flight 171 plunged into a neighborhood seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad airport on Thursday afternoon, killing more than 270 people. The exact death toll is uncertain, as the search for bodies continues. One passenger survived.

My rule this soon after an air disaster is to avoid conjecture. Crash investigations can run for months before causes are nailed down, and first-glance theories, however convincing they seem in the moment, often turn out to be wrong.

That being said, evidence suggests the Boeing 787 suffered either a loss of thrust in both engines, or an inadvertent retraction of the plane’s flaps and slats before reaching sufficient speed.

The plane climbed to only about 400 feet above the ground (the 650 feet being reported by the media is the altitude above sea level), leaving the pilots no time to troubleshoot or turn back. All they could do was glide straight ahead. The flight path was stable, but the jet slammed into buildings at over 150 miles-per-hour, exploding into a fireball.

The loss of thrust theory is evidenced a few different ways. Most notably, one of the pilots, in a mayday call to air traffic control, reported power loss to air traffic control. In addition, some of the video footage appears to show deployment of the 787’s ram air turbine (RAT), a device that extends from the fuselage automatically, triggered by the loss of both engines, to provide flight control power. The “bang” heard by the surviving passenger could have been the RAT dropping into place, and the buzzing noise in one of the videos could be the sound of the device doing its thing (it’s essentially a propeller driven by the oncoming air). The footage is grainy and unclear, however.

Engine failures are rare. A loss of both engines is exceptionally rare. A bird strike, a la Captain Sullenberger, would be one possible culprit, but so far nothing points to this. Other possibilities include a malfunction of the 787’s electronic engine controls, fuel contamination, or ingestion of runway debris. There’s also the chance, however far-fetched, that a pilot shut the engines down, either out of carelessness, or, in a worst-worst-worst case situation, deliberately.

Getting back to those grainy videos, it’s hard to see much detail, but the wings look strikingly “clean,” which is to say the flaps appear retracted. Flaps, which extend from the trailing edge of the wing, together with slats, which extend from the front, provide critical lift at low speeds. Jetliners almost always take off with these devices extended (the particular setting varies with weight and runway length). The pilots then retract them incrementally as speed increases. Perhaps in this case they were brought up inadvertently — or by way of some bizarre malfunction — immediately after takeoff, resulting in a loss of lift without enough altitude for recovery.

Then we have the landing gear. It was not retracted after liftoff, as normally would be the case. Curiously, this hints at either of the two scenarios just discussed. In the first one, we imagine the pilots, distracted by engine warnings and a sudden loss of power at the worst possible time, simply neglecting to raise it. In the other, a pilot mistakenly retracts the flaps rather than landing gear. The probability of such a mistake is absurdly low, but it’s bigger than zero.

On the other hand, the 787’s aerodynamics are uniquely sculpted, and when the flaps are extended the wings take on a camber, a smoothly downward curve, front-to-back, that makes the flaps less conspicuous than they are on other airplanes. Looking at videos of 787s taking off under normal circumstances, loads of which can be viewed online, those wings, too, look very clean. And photos from the crash site show a wing with flaps and slats that appear to be extended, at least partly.

The stronger evidence points towards power loss. My hunch is that something went wrong with the jet’s digital-electronic engine management system.

Whatever it was, the data and voice recorders will tell us shortly. That would be the how. Figuring out the why might take more time. For Boeing’s sake, let’s hope it’s not a design flaw buried in the plane’s high-tech architecture.

This is the worst crash since the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, more than a decade ago. As of June 20th the body count is 274 people, including dozens killed on the ground.

The media keep reminding us how terrible the last twelve months have been for aviation, with at least four high-profile accidents. It hasn’t been a good run, but as I underscored in a recent post, historical perspective and context are important. Even including the past year’s spate, we see far fewer plane crashes than we used to. Heck, in 1985 there was a serious accident every 13 days, on average (including the bombing of an Air India 747 that killed 329 people). Multiple deadly disasters were once the norm, year after year. This is no longer the case, despite the number of commercial flights more than doubling since the 1980s.

 

Related Stories:

MH370: A STORY IN PIECES
PILOTS AND MENTAL HEALTH
WHAT’S GOING ON?

Photo courtesy of Unsplash.

March 24, 2025

APROPOS OF nothing, aside from the nagging frustrations of getting older, it dawns on me that, at one point or another during the course of my beleaguered career, I’ve worked at three of commercial aviation’s most historically significant airline terminals.

And I don’t mean just passing through. I was based in these buildings.

In the early and mid-2000s I worked New York’s JFK Airport out of what, at the time, was known ignominiously as “terminal 3.” In its heydays, though, this was the Worldport, the home hub of Pan American World Airways.

The Worldport was never beautiful, architecturally, but it was one the most distinctive airport buildings ever constructed — a Jet Age fantasy topped with a dramatic elliptical rooftop that loomed over JFK like a giant flying saucer. Kings and queens, sheiks and ambassadors, statesmen and spies all had walked its corridors. And me, of course, headed off to Paris or Sao Paulo or Dakar.

Even before I worked at the Worldport, I more or less knew my way around it, having flown Pan Am several times as a kid. My first-ever visit had been in the spring of 1979, when I was in seventh grade. Me and a friend embarked on a secret trip to JFK — a sort of junior pilot’s planespotting pilgrimage, in which we’d spent the entire Saturday afternoon up on roof, watching and photographing the jets. We’d used our birthday money to buy round-trip tickets from Boston. We brought packed lunches, binoculars, and an old Kodak 110 camera. Our parents had no idea.

By the 2000s, long after Pan Am’s glory days, it was dilapidated and falling to pieces — a grimy warren of dimly lit passageways and peeling paint. Strategically placed buckets and sheets of canvas collected the rainwater that poured through ceiling cracks. The great flying saucer was still there, but its crumbling masonry evoked little beyond a crying need to be torn down.

Which, in 2013, it was…

Also in the early 2000s, prior to my time in terminal 3, I operated some flights from the Marine Air Terminal over at La Guardia.

The M.A.T. is William Delano’s Art Deco jewel in La Guardia’s southwest corner, right on the water. Opened in 1940, it was originally the embarkation point for Pan Am’s flying boats. Inside the rotunda is the famous “Flight” painting by James Brooks.

Unlike terminal 3, it remains standing, kept from destruction by the good sense of Gotham preservationists. The building’s newer extension is used today by Spirit Airlines, which is maybe an example of the worst kind of irony. Most passengers pass through the newer section without ever seeing the original atrium or the Brooks mural, but you can detour through if you want.

Commissioned in 1952, the mural traces the history of aviation from mythical to (then) modern, Icarus to Pan Am Clipper. The style is a less-than-shy nod at Socialist realism, and at the height of ’50s McCarthyism, in a controversy not unlike the one surrounding Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center, it was obliterated with gray paint. Not until 1977 was it restored.

There’s even a cozy garden and picnic spot just outside, to the right of the gleaming Art Deco doors as you face them, where you can relax beneath the blue and gold frieze of flying fish.

And, swinging back to JFK, in 1996 I flew out of Eero Saarinen’s landmark TWA terminal.

This is the most famous of the three terminals, and probably the only one that deserves to be called iconic (fewer words are more overused these days, but here’s one time it belongs).

“All one thing,” is how Saarinen, a Finn whose other projects included the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the terminal at Washington-Dulles, once said of it. It’s a fluid, unified sculpture of a space, at once futuristic and organic; a carved-out atrium reminiscent of the caves of Turkish Cappadocia, overhung by three cantilevered ceilings that rise from a central spine like huge wings.

In 1996, though, when I was working there as a captain for TWA Express, it had long since fallen into disrepair. Clutches of sparrows lived in the rafters, I remember, bouncing across the floors in a hunt for crumbs. The walls were discolored and the carpeting gave off an ammonia stink. It was a wretched place in swift need of a wrecking ball.

What happened, instead, was a miraculous reinvention. After sitting empty for several years, it was turned it into a hotel. Or, more accurately, it was renovated and a hotel was added on.

The TWA terminal is now the TWA Hotel, with the original section serving as a check-in lobby and, though it’s not described as such, a museum. It’s been kitch-ified a touch, but overall the preservation efforts were beautifully executed. If you can afford the rates, come stay the night. If you can’t, stop in and wander around for an hour.

So there it is. My New York City “terminal triangle.”

I have six more years before the government makes me hang up my wings. These are things I think about.

I think, too, about how our airports have changed — devolved, maybe, is the better word — in the decades since Eero Saarinen or the Marine Air Terminal. With only scattered exceptions, they’ve become unspeakably generic, lacking of any real architectural vision or grandeur.

Right next to the TWA terminal at JFK used to stand the National Airlines “Sundrome,” a glass-and-steel beauty designed by I.M. Pei. Think about it: Saarinen and Pei, at the same airport, a few hundred feet from each other. The Sundrome was demolished about ten years ago, and on that hallowed ground today sits the hulking nothingness of jetBlue’s “terminal 5.”

Functionality and efficiency are now the only measure. Like so much of the air travel experience, it ain’t what it used to be.

 

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

RELATED STORIES:

A NIGHT AT THE TWA HOTEL
ODE TO AN AIRPORT

APROPOS OF the death of filmmaker David Lynch, I dug up this photo from a few years ago.

There I was, watching Lynch’s proverbial cult classic “Eraserhead” in an Emirates first class suite. It had been ages since I’d seen the movie and was surprised to discover it in the airline’s catalog.

I can’t think of a stranger venue in which to have watched this movie. If you know “Eraserhead” you’ll know what I mean. The contrast was ridiculous: the luxury of the cabin and the industrial bleakness of the film.

It was great to see it again, and the experience was extra-enjoyable thanks to the Bowers & Wilkins noise-cancelling headsets that Emirates provides in first class. Sound was always such an important element in Lynch’s movies, especially in “Eraserhead,” and the ambient whooshing racket of Mach .84 at 35,000 feet might otherwise have drowned out that critical aesthetic.

That said, I was never a huge fan of Lynch’s work, save for this one and “Blue Velvet,” which I probably watched 62 times and at one point had most of the dialogue memorized.

Meanwhile I can thank various inflight entertainment systems for having introduced me to many of my favorite movies and TV series.

I discovered “Arrested Development” on a business class seatback screen several years after it went off the air. The same with “Flight of the Conchords,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Louie,” and, more recently, an excellent drama from England called “Happy Valley.”

I’m old enough to remember when airlines used to project movies onto a blurry bulkhead screen. If you didn’t fancy the carrier’s choice of the day, well, you were out of luck and had to read a book or peruse the inflight magazine. If you were lucky, on a longer flight, they might show two movies.

For the audio, they’d pass out plastic, stethoscope-style headsets that would plug into the armrests. The actors sounded as if they were yelling at each other under water.

 

Related Story:

SAVE OUR SCREENS!

A Planespotting Memoir.

December 4, 2024

WHAT WERE YOU DOING on December 4th, 1980? Chances are you have no clue. Owing to my eccentric habits of memory, I can tell you exactly what I was doing. I was flying to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a four-day vacation with my parents and sister.

I was a freshman in high school, thirteen years old. Distant ago as it was, my recollections of that long weekend are, you’ll likely agree, startlingly specific. This is owed, maybe, to the impressionability of the adolescent mind, but also the degree to which I savored trips by airplane. Short as it would be, this was a vacation I’d spent weeks looking forward to, with most of that adrenaline focused on the flight.

The morning of the fourth was a Thursday. I’m so sure it was a Thursday that I’m not going to burden Google with the keystrokes to double check. It was also cold; the temperature had plummeted overnight, making the thought of a respite in sunny Puerto Rico all the more appealing. I can remember, our bags packed and waiting for our ride to Logan, standing by the door that led to our back porch, and marveling at how the glass had frosted over, all white and crystalline. A man on the kitchen radio said it might drop into the teens.

We flew economy class on an Eastern Airlines L-1011. It was my first time on a TriStar and only my second time on a widebody jet. The cabin was maybe half full. I moved around, and at one point had a center block of seats all to myself.

A movie played on the cabin bulkhead screen, blurry and distorted, but I didn’t watch it. Instead I listened to music, clamping on a pair of those awkward, stethoscope-style headphones some of use are old enough to remember, with the little caps on the end that scratched into your ears. The Pat Benetar song “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” was popular the time. I had no prior fondness for that song, but something about how it sounded, coming through that blue plastic tube, enthralled and energized me. I listened to it over and over. (You couldn’t rewind on the old audio systems, so I’d wait patiently while cycled through a dozen other songs.) The chorus would be stuck in my head for days.

We stayed at the El San Juan, a mediocre hotel just a short drive from the airport. I have a memory of beige or yellow stucco. The hotel was on the beach, with backside rooms overlooking the ocean. The room they gave us, however, was on the city side, five or six floor up, and when I pulled back the curtain I was astonished to realize we had a view of the airport. Specifically, we could see the entire approach end of SJU’s runway 8, plus a good portion of the adjacent taxiway. Planes touching down would soar right past our balcony, while those taxiing for takeoff would trundle by in plain view.

This would be a problem. For as much as I wanted to swim and enjoy the warmth of the Caribbean, I also wanted to sit on the balcony with my binoculars and watch jets. We hadn’t traveled much, and my planespotting had been limited mostly to Boston, with its predictable roll call: Eastern, Delta, Allegheny, TWA, plus a smattering of European traffic. San Juan, though, was like nowhere I’d been — an airport of Latin exoticness. Here would be planes and airlines I’d only seen pictures of.

I unlatched the glass door and stepped outside, taking in that tropical smell of heat, humidity and vegetation, with the whine of turbojets in the background. As my mom, dad, and sister put their swimsuits on, I became more and more reluctant to leave that balcony.

Two things solved my dilemma:

The first thing was the weather. Thursday afternoon had been sunny, and Susan and I spent a good two hours in the water battling the four foot breakers. By the morning of day two, however, it had turned damp and drizzly and cool. And the forecast said it would stay this way — overcast, with periods of light rain — right through our departure on Sunday.

The second thing was a hamburger. I’d consumed this burger in the hotel restaurant on Thursday evening. By midnight I found myself in the throes full-on food poisoning, vomiting and feverish. I camped out in the bathroom for I don’t know how long, sitting in the harsh fluorescent light, listening to a radio station from the Virgin Islands. I can clearly remember the garish red-and-white pattern of the tiling.

And so, after an abbreviated and fitful sleep, I awoke on Friday morning to gray skies, a low simmering fever, and a very troubled stomach. Swimming or sightseeing was out of the question. About the only thing I could do, and would do, is watch planes.

It’s not that I wasn’t disappointed. Enamored as I was with aviation, I wasn’t going to forsake the the warm-weather pleasures of San Juan for something as nerdy as planespotting. But now that weather had gone south. And, I was sick. I now had a viable backup plan, enjoyable and distracting enough to salvage my vacation.

I have no idea what my parents and sister did over the next 48 or so hours. I assume they went shopping, or maybe took a rainy-day tour of El Morro. But I know what I did: I sat in a metal chair with my Bushnell 10x42s and a notebook, hunkered down like a postmodern birdwatcher, logging the arrivals and departures at San Juan International Airport. Rain and illness were a bummer for sure, but on another level I was elated.

Back at home I had a book, the 1980 edition of “World Airline Fleets.” This was an annually published directory with the registrations and specs of every commercial plane in the world, arranged alphabetically by country and airline. Once a plane once was “spotted,” you could mark it with a check, or, as I did, line through the listing with a highlighter. Later, at our dining room table, I’d take out the notebook from San Juan and meticulously transpose each sighting.

Neither that notebook nor the fleets volume survive (the one in the photo was found online). Like most of my memorabilia from that era, it was carelessly and foolishly discarded. My memories, on the other hand, are intact, perhaps to a point of almost preternatural detail. How and why I’m able to recall such things is something I can’t fully explain; after all, there are significant tracts of my life that I remember little from. I’ve forgotten names, places, birthdays, phone numbers, the when and where of so many events. But I can tell you without hesitation which planes I saw coming and going at the San Juan airport in December, 1980.

There were, for starters, the multicolored Herons of Prinair, the Puerto Rican commuter carrier whose route network island-hopped the Caribbean. The Riley Heron was a peculiar bird, with 17 seats and four piston engines. That weekend was the only time I ever saw a Heron, but surely I logged the entire Prinair fleet three times over. Every minute, it seemed, a Heron was puttering by.

I remember the American Airlines “Inter-Island” Convair 440s. Those too were piston-powered, precursors to the American Eagle turboprops and regional jets that would later serve San Juan. I saw the old Jetstreams of Dorado Wings, an Air Haiti C-46 Commando, and any number of Douglas DC-3s, anonymous in dirty silver paint. I saw a DC-9 in the colors of BWIA, an Aviaco DC-8, an Iberia DC-10 coming in from Madrid, as well as my first Pan Am DC-10, a plane inherited during the merger with National Airlines earlier that year.

The highlight, though, had to be the Lockheed Constellation. It wore the red and white livery of Argo S.A., a Dominican freight outfit, with the registration HI-328. I watched it take off and land at least three times, so it must have been shuttling back and forth. This was the only operating Constellation I ever saw, or ever would see. You can find several photographs of HI-328 online, where you’ll also learn that it crashed into the ocean near St. Thomas about a year later.

And that was my holiday.

On Sunday afternoon the skies cleared, just in time for our trip home. We took off in darkening twilight at around 4 p.m. Once again we were aboard an Eastern L-1011. This time we were upgraded to first class, a 2-2-2 cabin done up in fudge-brown leather.

We all have our ways of recalling our lives, our chronological cues. For me, the demarcations are so often those of airplanes, trips, and places visited.

I’m frustrated, though, by the selectiveness of memory. I can remember the registration I.D. of a particular airplane, which is cool (I think), but what I can’t remember is what sort of path I expected my life to actually take. What was I thinking? I wanted to become a pilot, that I knew. But I was such a lazy little shit of a kid, with no real idea of how to make that — or anything else — happen; how the steps towards that goal were actually my responsibility. Something, somebody, would take care of it for me, I assumed. It would all just work itself out.

I think I became a pilot in spite of my love for aviation, not because of it. I got lucky.

On Monday, December 8th, I was back in class at St. John’s Prep School, where I was a moody misfit freshman with no friends. Nobody believed I’d been to Puerto Rico, because I didn’t have a tan.

 

Related Story:
MY LIFE LIST

 

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.

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.