Emergencies

Maybe one of the best "flying lessons" I ever got took place 60 feet below ground level! Back in the Bad Old Days of the Cold War I served as an Air Force Minuteman launch control officer. How I came to do that for a living, when I took command of the Air Force's Precision Sitting Team, the "Thunderchairs," and why I actually launched an ICBM in 1987 are all stories for some other forum. But the pressure-cooker environment of potential total nuclear war, 60 feet under the Missouri plains, strangely did much to prepare me for the single-pilot cockpit of a piston airplane. One thing the "missile business" did for me was to teach the concept of minor, major, and critical errors."

It's nearing midnight. A damp fog rolls lazily off the Gulf of Mexico, thick clouds blurring the lines between earth, sea and sky. Lights pierce less than a mile through mist and fog under a 100-foot overcast. Dark silence envelopes the salt marshes of the Florida panhandle. Suddenly an otherworldly shriek shakes the trees and swamp, a wail punctuated with a dull thump, the squawking of birds, then a return to silence. An airplane lay mangled in the steaming marsh, its pilot dead at the controls. Why?

The number of our landings must always equal our number of takeoffs -- or so goes the adage -- but sometimes the safest way to ensure equality is to do neither. Unlike birds possessing the gift of flight and whose skills are instinctive, we have the gift of thought, but our skills are hard won.

On April 27, 2000, a Canadian commercial helicopter pilot who was also a helicopter flight instructor took off with a maintenance engineer in a Bell 206 from an airport in Quebec to perform a test flight. Five minutes later, they disappeared from radar.