September 2012
While I’ve been an aviation magazine writer for the past 40-plus years, some members are probably also familiar with my aviation-themed novels: there have been seven of them since 1979. The first one—“Mayday,” an airline disaster story—was revised and updated in 1997 with my lifelong friend, author Nelson DeMille. “Mayday” was eventually bought by Hollywood and turned into a CBS Movie of the Week that aired October, 2005.
In April of this year my latest aviation-themed novel, “Captain,” was released in a print edition and also in all e-book formats. That novel was reviewed here at Piper Flyer a few months ago (refer to the July 2012 issue —Ed.), and that’s when the idea came up to share some of the “insider stuff” about this aviation story with our loyal Piper Flyer readers.
First, let’s talk about the whys and wherefores for having a fireside chat about a work of fiction in a magazine that is dedicated to helping real pilots in moving their real metal through a very real sky. What’s the possible connection? Allow me to quote the jacket copy of “Captain:”
“…a chilling and all-too-real story about a routine Trans-Atlantic airline flight that suddenly turns absolutely insane. In the doomed airliner’s cockpit, inside the passenger cabin and on the ground, a complex array of characters have been propelled at jet speed into a sudden and frantic race for survival. ‘Captain’ is about the individual and collective struggles of each of these men and women as they attempt to deal with and ultimately fight against the odds and circumstances that are stacked against them.”
Also, allow me to make a few observations, and several promises. Most importantly, the piloting elements that went into “Captain”—from the mechanical techniques of piloting a widebody jet across an ocean on through the decisions, reactions and motivations of the crewmembers, passengers and the folks on the ground—were steeped in what is real. While the airliner itself was labeled a “Consolidated 768,” it was identified as a highly modified Boeing 767.
The Consolidated 768 and the related “Consolidated modifications” were the only areas during the novel’s construction where poetic license was taken for the sake of the storyline. As a point of fact, there have been a number of airliners throughout aviation history that have been highly modified afterward by some other company and then called something else: I’ve got a couple thousand hours as the pilot in command of a Convair 580, which neither looked nor flew like anything that came out of the Convair factory when those airframes were first built.
There’s nothing coming up in our fireside chat that requires you to have read “Captain.” If you have, you’ll probably be able to spot where the ideas, phrases and quotes that I’m using are coming from—but it’s not a prerequisite to what we’re going to be talking about here.
Conversely, if you haven’t gotten a copy of “Captain” as yet but you intend to, I’ll promise you that nothing we’re going to chat about will tip off too much or in any way diminish your future involvement in what happens to the passengers and crew onboard Trans-Continental Flight 3. To help keep the action veiled for future readers, while I’m quoting the text directly I’ll X and Z out character names and omit other significant clues that might be too revealing.
That said, let’s take a look at “Captain.” There are some valuable piloting nuggets that can be mined from those pages.
USING THE RADIO:
“X knew that Z found comfort in using the radio, in talking about what Z was doing, as if that electronic link to someone else provided Z with more hands and eyes in the cockpit, and with more skill. ‘Let go of the transmit button if you need me to answer you.’”
“If hZ was talking on the radio, X knew that he wasn’t listening to the airplane or watching the instruments as carefully as he should be. He had seen that sort of thing thousands of times at the airline. And he had seen it with Z, too. It was, he knew, something that Z was inclined to do, to talk on the radio when Z should have been doing something else.”
“X decided to let him make the radio call at his own pace since it would focus his attention. He would just give Z a slight nudge. ‘How’s that radio call coming?’
“‘Too busy for the radio,’ X said tersely. ‘You do it.’”
“‘And we can live without the radios.’ X glanced down at the radio sets on the center console. With X, that collection of expensive radios and electronic navigation gear had become nothing but dead weight, unnecessary ballast. ‘There’s nothing that anyone can tell us on the radio that matters. We’re on our own, even if we could transmit and receive voice messages.’
“‘That’s always been the case.’”
“X knew that establishing a radio link with the ground was basically a sham, a potential temporary psychological boost for the pilots, but nothing more. More often than not, it would become a distraction. In his mind’s eye he could see Z reaching for the microphone instead of the flight controls when things started to go bad…”
In the real world, our radio connections have evolved from being simple links to get potentially useful information into becoming the be-all, end-all. Some would argue that we have gone from a sky full of pilots to a sky full of radio operators.
The guiding principle for pilots to keep firmly in mind is that whenever there’s an urge to reach for the microphone (or, these days, the urge to become immersed in an onboard video monitor with its endless spools of mostly irrelevant data), you must first be absolutely certain that there isn’t something more important to be done.
Making radio calls—and even answering them—is pretty far down the list of required airmanship skills. Pilots need to recognize that whizbang cockpit gadgets have the potential to be distractions; sort of like cell phones and texting for automobile drivers. Good pilots know that the airplane will fly nicely if you ignore the radio/data screen, but the radio/data screen won’t work much longer if you choose to ignore the airplane.
KEEP THE AIRSPEED WHERE IT NEEDS TO BE:
“X had to get back the airspeed they had given up. He absolutely had to.”
“X knew that Z didn’t understand what he was about to try. ‘More airspeed!’ is all X had time to say.”
“He would trade their precious altitude for airspeed and try to get the ship to…”
“X had leveled the airliner by trading their extra airspeed in an aerodynamic exchange to stop their downward travel. But the airspeed was bleeding off quickly…”
“X knew that the airliner would stall and fall out of the sky if the airspeed went much lower. ‘One seventy-five,’ X announced, eyes fixed rigidly to the airspeed indicator on the captain’s flight panel. X did not want to look outside at the surface of the ocean again. X wouldn’t, no matter what. Life or death was directly in front, in those numbers. ‘One seventy-three.’
“X was threading an aerodynamic tightrope; there was no altitude left, and no airspeed cushion either.”
Airplanes don’t fly through the sky because the government has given them a certificate, or because air traffic control has told them to go this way or that. Airplanes fly because the pilot has kept the proper airspeed flowing, at the proper angle, across the surface of the wing while simultaneously avoiding unwanted contact with the ground or objects attached thereto.
Piloting basically means to “fly the wing” because if the pilot doesn’t, then the remainder of those miscellaneous piloting chores will invariably come to a crashing stop in the very near future. Flying straight into the side of a mountain isn’t a good idea, but without some timely and proper airspeed control beforehand, that airplane is never going to reach the potential scene of the accident. When it comes to the skill of piloting, first things always come first.
Next time we meet here at Piper Flyer:
“Any flight is capable of going from completely routine to your worst nightmare in less than 30 seconds.”
“Captain” is available in a print edition and all e-book formats by going online to Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com or Smashwords.com and searching for “Captain” or “Thomas Block.”
Another way to locate the novel is to go FlyingB-Ranch.com where a section dedicated to all Thomas Block novels (including full descriptions and reviews) will lead you directly to the publisher and e-book sources.
An ongoing reader survey for “Captain” is easily accessible through the ranch website, and also through other online locations such as Facebook.
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.
