July 2014- While I’m sitting at my desk and writing this, we are currently three weeks into the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 brouhaha. In case you’ve been in another star system for the past several months, most of us are well aware that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished from the planet on March 8, 2014, while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China.
There were 239 people on board, and electronic evidence—what there is of it—denotes that the airliner went through some weird maneuvering without ever sending a single indication the flight was in any sort of trouble.
Actually, the flight had, soon after changing ATC frequencies, shut down all electronic outgoing signals (including the transponder) and was simply never heard from again. Almost. As the world has learned since, an automatic electronic “handshake” from the built-in engine/airframe monitoring equipment was pinging once an hour.
Another wrinkle in the fabric of this complex story is that Malaysia Airlines had opted to not purchase a subscription to that monitoring service, so nothing other than this hourly electronic handshake was being sent out by the Boeing jet.
Theories abound as to what could have happened—log on to the internet to see them all—but the two most popular of those theories is that the airliner was successfully hijacked and is now sitting at a Taliban-controlled airport at the top of some mountain, or it is at the bottom of one of the vast oceans that cover that section of the world after one (or both?) of the pilots elected to commit suicide. Everyone is invited to take their pick of theories, or pick any variation in between, since no matter what you come up with, it will make as much sense as anyone else’s guess.
By the time you read this perhaps something more definitive will be known, but,so far there is nothing conclusive to report.
I’ve received a number of emails about this incident, particularly from the readers of my novel “Captain,” wherein another widebody airliner disappears while en route over a big but different ocean (the Atlantic); for most of the novel, most of the folks in charge are convinced that the airliner has been hijacked by an onboard pilot and now is headed straight for a 9/11-style suicide attack on either New York or Washington.
The folks who had emailed me usually commented on the coincidences between the Malaysia flight and my novel (which has been out for a couple of years) and a few went as far as to suggest that the media should get hold of me to get my views on this incident.
I’m glad that nobody from TV-and-newspaper-land did try to get to me, because I don’t have anything to add to the mix other than pointing out that since there were no cell phone calls from the flight’s distressed passengers, I must assume that they were either far out to sea (one of the factors in “Captain”), or that all the passengers had already somehow met with an early demise.
So, other than acknowledging how life does sometimes imitate art, what this Malaysia Airlines episode did was to get me thinking about my own personal experiences of “being lost.”
My “lost” stories are nowhere near as dramatic as what is currently going on in the Far East, and I’ll tell you right up front that in each instance I was, quite obviously, “found.”
But since being lost is one of the unstated themes of being a pilot, here are a few examples of when my current airborne location was unknown—by either myself and/or others.
For the first one, I’m going way back to nearly the outer limits of my personal memories. It was the late 1950s, I was a student pilot, and I was taking a dual cross-country trip with a flight instructor who had only a handful more hours than I did and was pretty new to all this aviating stuff.
While it may be difficult to imagine in this age of computer-driven electronic screens, we were doing this dual cross-country excursion in a Piper Super Cub that had only one functioning navigation radio—an anemic VOR receiver that was reluctant to point to anything that was more than 25 miles away.
Our object that day was to demonstrate and practice dead reckoning and pilotage. (If you don’t know what these are, suffice it to say that they are from the manuals of ancient aviators who took off, pointed and mostly hoped.) Complicating matters that particular day was a hazy summer sky and flight visibilities of five miles or less.
Quickly, the instructor and I got very lost. In retrospect, we were making a classic pilotage error by reading from the ground to the map, not from the map to the ground. (The ground has many more details on it than the map does; hence, the need to do the latter, not the former.)
We fiddled around, made some (stupid) assumptions, made some (stupid) course corrections until we finally couldn’t match a single thing between the ground and the chart. The flight instructor in the backseat was even more lost than I was—at least I could see over the Cub’s nose, albeit not very far in the thickening haze.
Then we spotted an airport. A single blacktop runway. A hangar in the middle and a couple of airplanes parked there. There was absolutely no airport of this particular configuration anywhere around us on the chart. Where the heck were we?
“Let’s land,” the instructor reluctantly said.
I complied, then taxied the Cub up to the hangar, the only building on the airport. When we shut down, the instructor said, “Don’t say nothing, kid; it’ll make us look bad. I’ll go in and see where we are.” I followed him into the small operations building.
The place was neat and clean, and nearly empty. Three men were standing inside. They stopped talking when we walked in and looked directly at us. My instructor glanced around at the walls: they were completely blank. The countertop, ditto. He looked at the men sheepishly.”Yeah?” the bigger of the three men said as he turned around. “Whaddya want?”
Gulp. Pause. Then the instructor said, “Er, where are we?”
“Where are you?” The big man guffawed and turned to his companions. “You get that, Earl? These guys landed here and they’re lost! Our first visitors—and they didn’t even mean it!”
The three of them laughed, then the big guy explained that this was a brand-new airport, just opened that very day, and that it’s not on any of the charts. Turns out we weren’t that far off-course after all. That was the day that I learned, absolutely, to never read from the ground to the map.
One more story, of airline vintage, and again, from the old days. I was the copilot on a Mohawk Airlines Convair 240 back in the middle 1960s. We had left somewhere in upstate New York and were en route to Cleveland. It was a beautiful morning—superb, actually—with crystal clear skies, tabletop smooth air and unlimited visibility. The captain was a pleasant man with strong political opinions that he liked talking about.
As was the custom of the era, we were going VFR and had picked up a direct heading for Cleveland, based on our “cheat sheet” cards that showed the direct magnetic heading between any two of the airline’s cities. We had shut off our ATC radio receiver since we weren’t taking any kind of federal assistance for that flight, and, as we were supposed to, I had the second transceiver tuned to the company’s central frequency; I really did—but what I hadn’t noticed was that the radio’s volume was set all the way down.
We were heavy into our good-natured political debate in the cockpit when, in the distance, I could begin to see the outline of the lake that told me Cleveland was not far away. I begged off our conversation for a moment to radio the airline’s Cleveland station about our imminent arrival. After that, I dialed in the Cleveland Approach frequency to get into the VFR arrival sequence. That’s when we got this urgent message:
“Three-Eight-Six, where have you been? Company headquarters have been trying to contact you for the past 50 minutes! Contact them immediately!”
So I switched frequency and called. They responded with, “We’ve been calling you for almost an hour! We were starting to think something bad happened! Whatever you do,” the company radio operator transmitted, “Don’t drink the coffee! The caterer thinks he might have boarded a jug filled with cleaning fluid instead of coffee!”
The captain and I looked at each other. He slowly put down his nearly-drained coffee cup. I slowly put down mine. We looked at each other again. Finally, after a few more seconds, he picked up his cup, sniffed at it, then tentatively took a small sip. He smacked his lips, wrinkled his nose, then took a bigger sip.
Finally, the captain put his coffee cup down and reached for the microphone. He pressed the button and transmitted, “This is Three-Eight-Six. You can contact that caterer and tell him that he should switch to whatever brand of cleaning fluid that this might be. It’s much better tasting than the garbage he usually serves.”
So, we had evidently been lost to them, but not to us. The two drivers in the front office knew exactly where they were all the time—headed straight for Cleveland on a beautiful day, right on schedule, and having an interesting political debate to make the time fly even faster. How much more position awareness could you possibly ask a flight crew to have?
Editor-at-large Thomas Block has flown nearly 30,000 hours since his first hour of dual in 1959. In addition to his 36-year career as a U.S. Airways pilot, he has been an aviation magazine writer since 1969, and a best-selling novelist. Over the past 30 years he has owned more than a dozen personal airplanes of varying types. Send questions or comments to editor@www.piperflyer.com.
