I am often astounded by the nonchalance of most airplane passengers during the critical moments of take-off. The plane takes position on the button of the runway, and there is a brief pause. Clearance comes from the Tower, the throttles are shoved ahead, and the roll begins.
When I am a passenger, on an airliner or even just a local sked flight, when takeoff time comes I am glued to the little window alongside my seat. I’m not saying I’m worried; I’m just interested. I love to watch as the runway markers clip past, and I imagine the terse back-and-forths up front on the pilots’ intercom. Acceleration, more acceleration, still more, and then the lift, and that incredible climb rate as the welded-bolted-glued-wired-shimmed-inflated-lubricated-ignited-repaired-signed-off behemoth strains upward to its preferred habitat of Flight Level 350, six or seven miles above terra firma. As a corny airshow commentator back in the Midwest could never resist saying, “Wow, folks, lookathat, she’s climbin’ like a homesick angel…” (A witty pilot friend of mine says, about less impressive climbs, “Looky there boys, she climbs like a ruptured duck.”)
And yet, all around me in the plane – even in the tiny planes I fly on floats and skis and fat tires – the moment of take-off is apparently hardly worth a glance from today’s jaded passengers. Everyone’s phones, of course, demand constant staring and pecking, and if those are already stowed away my fellow voyageurs just adopt the slightly-perturbed blank stare which is the default visage of the modern traveller. You’d think that, instead of hurtling down a runway to rotation and liftoff, we were all on a Greyhound bus two days into a long trip, pulling out of the A & W in Kalamazoo, half-delirious and bored stiff.
In 1993 my mother – who happily turns 88 years young today – Happy Birthday Mom! – was in the Peace Corps, stationed in Armenia. That was a mixed-bag experience, I gather, since she was over there to help the locals promote tourism, just as Armenia blundered into a half-hearted border war with neighboring Georgia. The prospects for new tourist business tanked. (My Mom had other overseas adventures, including a late-1980’s hike up to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. I – who have hardly been overseas at all – like to make much of those journeys whenever I introduce her these days. What a gal!)
That summer, 1993, the Diamond Rush was in full swing up in the NWT (there was no Nunavut yet.) I was busy being a lowly co-pilot and human forklift aboard the Twin Otters at Air Tindi, so I did not go along when my father and sisters went to Armenia to visit my mother. (And yes, I will regret that decision as long as I live.) On Mom’s summer break they all flew together from Yerevan to Paris, on a jet operated by Aeroflot, the notoriously haphazard Flagship Airline of Russia. For the rest of his life my Dad loved to tell the story of that take-off from Yerevan, after being stranded for many hours on the tarmac, awaiting clearance.
Evidently the Aeroflot crews in 1993 viewed the various “critical” phases of flight a lot more casually than most of us North American pilots do. For instance, there were several too many people aboard the plane, so some seatbelts had been made into makeshift seats by buckling them together across the aisle to form a sitting sling. And as the takeoff began at last and the plane began to gather speed, some passengers were still standing up, so they just braced a hand up against an overhead bin and steadied themselves, as they would in a street-car rounding a sharp corner downtown. Some were smoking, some were pouring shots of vodka, and everybody was obviously tickled to be on the way to gay Paris at last. And, needless to say, these decades later, even with all those hard-and-fast rules broken, it all worked out.
And here we all are, on the button of the runway again, tonight, cleared for takeoff into the brave new world labelled 2025. Over the past week or two, though, my Dad’s vivid account of that Aeroflot take-off has been flashing again and again into my thoughts. What’s up with that? Well, I have that same mixture of dread, bemused and detached interest, and weary resignation that my Dad told me he felt that day in Yerevan, hurtling toward the stratosphere at last.
I can’t help but wonder, after all these years, whether this time around all the pre-takeoff checks are truly complete. Has the Minimum Equipment List been ticked off item by item? Is the crew licensed, current, and proven competent? Have they had a good night’s rest? Are the most recent repairs and service to the airframe and engine all signed off “in accordance with the acceptable standards of Airworthiness” and have the engineers scrawled their initials in the logbooks?
Well, hmm. I remain unconvinced. But hey, it looks like we’re about to roll.
Times like this, I sometimes find solace in a longer view. Or an even longer view. At least a slightly expanded version of our puny human-lifetime view. I like to go backward or forward a stretch, say 300 years, or some similar blink of an eye. Out beyond my own links of flesh and blood, back up the ladder past anyone I ever met or spoke to in person (ending in that direction with my grandparents) and down the road to my children and the newborn children of their next generation.
Some days, when I am flying around alone above the vast emptiness that is our home terrain, I ask myself, “What has changed, right here below me, since the year 1725?” Or again, “What will change, right here below me, by 2325?” Rock. Sky. Lake. River. Herds of caribou, flocks of ptarmigan, fat fish in the rivers. And the very merest almost insignificant smattering of Homo sapiens.
I find solace in that long view, puttering along above that ever-enduring wilderness, on a New Year’s night like this.
Buckle up your seatbelts and review those Safety Features Cards, folks.
Or, alternatively, just have a shot of something strong, light up a cigarette and brace one arm against that overhead luggage bin. Maybe even this time, once we’ve lifted off and we’re climbing at 3500 feet a minute, it will all work out, yet again. Anyway, one way or another, we’re rollin’.
"bushedpilotblog" Dave Olesen 