galletas y gallinas

finally, after a month of mostly sitting around, an instructor was available last week to fly with me. i completed my flight training in the caravan and passed my checkride and line check last tuesday.

i have been released into the wild. this is a picture at 12,500 feet when i realized i was by myself in the plane.


so now that i'm running around unsupervised, you may ask, what does this circus pilot do? usually, i plug in the ipod and rock out. if no one else is in the plane, i sing along loud. our flights last anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours; so sometimes in cruise, i will play scrabble or parachute on the ipod. after completing my paperwork of course. work always comes first. but mostly i look out the window and think about things.

the jungle is so dense there is no visible room for anything to escape upwards. i feel like a spanish fly, annoyingly buzzing over endless bundles of broccoli as far as i can see in every direction. it is mostly deep green, with the occasional mildewed top of yellow or greenish-brown. sometimes there is a brief clearing for a town and its crop fields, but you can sense that the jungle is relentlessly taking it all back. slowly, at the speed of a stealthy green mamba snake, the vines wind their way up; poking through holes in the dark canopy to claim their place in the sun. the jungle was here first, and it will be here after we are gone.

a flash of gold catches my eye. it is the sun reflecting off a meandering, glimmering serpent the color of cafe au lait. she slithers through the broccoli patch, seeking the lowest point; in no hurry. quietly moving towards her union with a larger chocolate-milk snake, and then with the mightiest of them all, the congo. the same river that took joseph conrad into the heart of darkness.


congo has more hydroelectric potential than all the american rivers put together. it could easily power the entire continent of africa. instead, most places have no electricity (or even a light bulb to turn on anyway). at the point where the mighty congo empties into the atlantic, the flow averages 1.4 million cubic feet per second.

all this water, and all these thirsty people. none of it is safe to drink.

for comparison, the mighty salmon put-in in idaho would be at flood stage with a flow above 30,000 cfs. some of the oars guides and myself ran it during a few days in may when it peaked at 92,000 cfs. it was insane, entire renegade pine trees were floating down like torpedos, and the frothing river was 8 feet deeper than usual, washing out camps and turning lots of already-big rapids into epic standing waves 15 feet tall.

the congo river has 15 times as much water flowing on average as that record spring melt in idaho. because it starts in the southern hemisphere, and then arcs well above the equator before turning south again, it is always the rainy season somewhere in the congo basin drainage. inland, there are not really any rapids, as the mighty brown mamba drops little elevation on her weaving 2900-mile course towards the capital. below kinshasa, however, 220 miles of impassible rapids await. there are standing waves 40 feet tall. there are gnarly, boat-swallowing holes. the stuff of dreams that make boatmen wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

my thoughts are interrupted by the gps blinking at me with a message. i am approaching my descent profile.

i click off the autopilot and configure the van for landing. i’d like to say that i grease it every time, but that would be bullshit. the van is a bit more squirly than the brasilia, and it’s hard to keep her on speed when it's windy. when you reduce power, she drops like a stone. natasha (the brasilia) was pretty easy to land consistently well. i’m still learning this ship. as they say, it’s a good one if you can walk away.

every time i pick up new passengers, i have to give a safety briefing. i wanted my briefing to go something like this, in my best deep movie-announcer voice:


"in a world of humanitarians......
one pilot....... would go beyond the call of duty.......
braving mountains..... jungles......rivers.....and isolated cell thunderstorms.....
to get you...... to where...... you..... need...... to be:

welcome....
to the patrick keelan experience."


unfortunately, the briefing has to be in french. and about "safety." so i basically say this instead:

"good day, my name is patrick, welcome aboard, this is a non-smoking flight, please fasten your seatbelts, turn off your mobile phones, four exits on this aircraft, two here and two in the rear, water, juice, and cookies in here for you, 1 hour and 35 minutes to Kasongo." 

my french sucks, but i hope to change that by the end of the year. i take advantage of our free tutor as often as i can, and listen to french lessons on my ipod. at least my spanish helps with reading and sometimes hearing the gist of what's happening.

the vanilla cookies are, by the way, delicious; and the juices are 100% pure love. i generally steal at least one of each per flight, more if there’s enough to go around.

on my last flight i was flying live chickens. i gave them the safety briefing but they didn’t pay attention. so i put them underneath in the cargo pod and kept all the cookies to myself.