of birds and men

lost in late-afternoon reverie, 5 miles above the deep-green bunched-broccoli jungles of congo.


an alarm chime sounds in the cockpit and i slide my gaze from the clouds outside to an amber caution message on the crew alerting system (CAS). one of the air data computers has failed.

my thumb hovers over the master caution button, squishing subsequent shrieks from the glockenspiel and letting the swiss miss finish puking up all the vile yellow bile onto the screens. a string of supplementary proclamations pop up on the CAS: air data/attitude heading reference system (ADAHRS) channel B fail. true air temperature (TAT) R probe fail. transponder no alt reporting.

get it all up, girl. a few precious teaspoons of brain matter are diverted into memories of a certain chivalrous young lad holding his girlfriend's hair up as she embraced a toilet in the wee hours of her 21st birthday.

everything splattered on the computer screens is obviously related to the first failure; that tipping point of singular electronic dissonance that sent a cascade of spasms into the system.

my copilot, distracted from his usual unassigned unappreciated unrelenting need for storytelling, runs through the QRH (quick reference handbook). it directs us to pull the appropriate circuit breaker. after a brief search on the floor, under my chair, and in my pants, i find the associated electrical bus breakers on the side panel (it was right next to me the whole time!)

i pull it out (the breaker that is; get your mind out of the gutter) but nothing is remedied. the loss of the air data computer has caused 3 other systems to quit working. end of checklist.

i make a mental note to thank the manufacturer. their legacy model cockpit didn't have all of this fancy jet-pilot computer screen bullshit, and it worked great.

the situation reminds me of a book i just finished called shop class as soulcraft. written by a philosopher/mechanic, it takes on the heavy subject matter of what in our nature, as man the tool user, has been lost by no longer understanding or being able to work on our own pieces of technology.

i've flown swiss, brazilian, canadian, and american-built aircraft. each have their own personalities and strong points. and certainly the increasing complexity of modern aircraft necessitates a certain level of automation for managing peripheral systems, helping pilots who would otherwise be task-saturated. but most manufacturers are trending towards a design philosophy that increasingly relies upon engineers and computers instead of pilot skill for flying the aircraft.


aircraft fabricators have begun to dumb-down their system diagrams in pilot operating handbooks, to the extent that a modern pilot often lacks the detailed knowledge of his machine that his predecessors held. gone are the white-scarfed barnstormers who could diagnose an engine's purr by ear like the intimate nuanced language of a lover. the glamourous heroes of yesteryear have been replaced by a butt in a seat; a conditioned lab rat relegated to pushing the right buttons in the right sequence to get a piece of cheese. with the automation taking care of things, the job now requires less natural talent than that of a circus monkey.

we are all captives, modern pilots, in the automation race. for on those exceedingly rare occasions that a plane has crashed, pilot error is frequently a contributing factor. so the solution has been to engineer the pilot out of the equation as much as possible. the dissection and removal of human thought and judgment from the cockpit by engineers and insurance companies.

back in the olden days, when airplanes were simple things, pilots knew what they were up against when it all started coming apart. now you sit in a cold, surgically-sterile metallic operating room and you're lucky if the computers let you have a vote in where they take you or how they get there.

sometimes i feel like i was born 60 years too late. i long for st. exupéry's day, when pilots flew airplanes by actually moving yokes connected to bell cranks that pulled cables attached to the flight control surfaces. man was tuned into his machine, to each rattle and hum, every pitch and decibel change, the tiniest flickering of a needle on a gauge. there was a solid, true and tight, honest and undeniable mechanical linkage from pilot to aircraft, and she gave her pilot feedback in the form of feel. now a control pressure is translated into an electrical impulse that commands an actuator to do this or that. electrons being sent into the void, hoping that they stay true to the skipper's bidding on their journey through the wires.

the era of salty experience and seasoned knowledge, when the hero captain would bring his ship home through the dark and stormy night, is vanishing. these legendary sky kings are being replaced by self-diagnostics and self-correcting systems. the automation trend is certainly a testament to the engineering abilities of homo sapiens. but it's also an incalculable loss to the romance of flight.

airbus may think they can design the expensive, whiny, spoiled brat out of the cockpit and save 2 minutes flying time and a couple of gallons of fuel in the process. but at the end of the day, don't you want someone in steerage who can reason? don't you want a pilot to have the ability to override the carnival attraction when the computers take a dump? and will his stick-and-rudder skills be sufficient in that hour of need, or will they have atrophied because of the utter reliance upon autopilots?

when the shit hits the prop, the nerdy engineer who designed the latest and greatest systems isn't the one in the hot seat trying to save the day. it's the pilot, who sits caged behind such a barrier of electronic bullshit that he's unable to simply wiggle sticks and keep cows from getting too big.

and romantic delusional fantasy of self-importance aside, a certain quality of flight has also been lost during all these upgrades. airplanes have become just impersonal inter-city busses with wings. and the powers that be insist on a further division of labor until we are all just mindless flying-cubicle dwellers; babysitting computers, maximizing widget production, everything a beige or an off-white. worker ants doing the bidding of the queen, wealth further consolidated, the dreams of little boys and girls crushed under the weight of monotony and procedure.

and the magic of flight, of being in a pressurized metal tube whizzing 7 miles above the firmament at 3/4 the speed of sound, ceases anymore to stir the greater parts of our souls.


******


dawson, my old chief pilot at air serv, calls just after dinner. he is in town from sudan on break, and wants to know if i'm interested in joining him for a refreshing adult beverage. we agree to meet at 4 turkeys, a local haunt popular with the working girls of uganda.

approaching the entrance, i admire dawson's wise choice to make camp outside at one of the streetside tables. a fellow aviator: always thinking of a quick escape route.

i grab our respective favorites from the barmaid: a watery piss-yellow nile special for him and a thick rich satisfying guinness foreign extra stout for myself. working my way over to the table, a pair of night fighters undress me with their eyes. to them, i'm just a piece of mindless meat: man the tool-user. all women are the same.

we catch up, swapping our most recent bush tales. dawson mentions that he's supposed to go up to chad to cover for a few weeks, but is being pulled in 5 other directions at the same time (as usual). beers flow coldly, lubricating our motor mouths. as the night goes forward we move aft; into the past. apparently all those nasa nerds working on interstellar travel haven't yet figured out the simple power of beer for altering the space-time fabric. reliving the glory days, when we flew the twin otter together to the humble packed-dirt-and-camel-shit strips alongside darfur refugee camps.

de havilland, a wildly successful canadian company, built the DHC-6 twin otter. it is one of the most capable, versatile, and fun aircraft i've ever flown, and will always be one of my favorites.


it's a real airplane. the kind that young boys flock to. inside, it's a dinosaur. but the dusty, oily-sweet kerosene smelling cockpit reeks of character, and craftsmanship, and a life full of stories.


the good ol' days of chad. sweating our asses off sunrise to sunset in the convection oven of broiling dust; swatting flies away and dodging sandstorms and rebels and trying to give the pretty aid worker girls a smooth landing. making it home in time to heed the evening muslim muezzin's call to prayer: the pilot's call to beer.

we laugh about how abéché is so hot that even after drinking lots of cold beers at the end of the day, you rarely have to pee, as anything that was bound for your bladder seems to end up getting reabsorbed into your system in some magical dehydrated alchemy of malted barley and smoking hot dust.

dawson asks what i'm doing for the next 3 weeks, and if i can fill in as a twin otter captain back in abéché. as much as i would love to, i can't right now because of work.

we talk about the irresistible pull of that place. remark at the paradox of why men are drawn to the driest, rockiest, craggiest pieces of inarable land possible, and will defend it to the death. how barren wastelands speak something to our souls. how wilderness serves as a kind of mental refuge from the madness of cities. of the psychological need for the vast and the gut-twisting bittersweet of open spaces.

the ache for distance.

i think st. exupéry understood this well. maybe it was going through his mind even as that newer german fighter slid in behind his tail and took aim. a great man downed over the mediterranean; lost in that endless blue.


******


the next morning there is no flight because the mechanics still don't know what's wrong with our fraulein. it seems the computer age has tied the hands of mechanics as well as pilots. they let me know that the airplane will be down for a couple weeks while they wait for parts, so i skip town.

head to jinja, a village a few hours east of here. it's on the banks of the nile river, just as the lukewarm bilharzia-infested waters start out of lake victoria on their 4,000 mile journey to the mediterranean sea. the victoria nile has some of the best whitewater on earth if you are into boating, and i've rafted this stretch twice before. this time i decided to just chill and lay in my hammock and read.

i stay at a sleepy jungle lodge on the banks of the river, with a mellow bamboo bar hanging over the quietly swirling waters. eat good cheap local street food. go for long walks in the mornings on the red-dog dirt roads; continually amused by the bewildering signage of this continent.


it's pleasing to discover that castle milk stout is now brewed in jinja by nile breweries. you can get your paws on a cold tasty for $1.25.

swaying in my hammock with the liver marinating nicely, i contemplate the swirling waters and their tumultuous journey. just downstream from here the gradient drops and the turbulence commences; quickly building into a string of strong proofs of the wicked water gods and their hydrological processes. further on is murchison falls and lake albert; then the profound deserts of sudan. later, drifting past sleeping pharoahs and massive stone pyramids. burial chambers stuffed full of desires and ideologies, an attempt at eternally preserving things as they are. all for nought.


fluid dynamics. all things in perpetual motion. we inevitably drift downriver, unable to fight the steady pull of gravity.


a dark form catches my eye. haliaeetus vocifer.

maybe i should have been born an african fish eagle. soaring circling swooping silently over the nile, sharp eyes searching the eddies for perch:

caw! caw!

effortlessly shifting a few feathers and zooming into a turn, the sunlight glinting off of my glassy marbled eyes. a satisfied smirk in the corner of my beak as i spiral in the late-afternoon thermals. always scanning the airspace and keeping an eagle eye out for a lonely female to share my treetop penthouse with.


an airplane is just a poor excuse for the real thing.