by Max Hennessy
Someone at St John’s would have seen them as they had passed overhead and radioed a message to New York that they had been seen heading out into the Atlantic. If trouble occurred later, such a message would fix their course and help a search, and it would set at ease the minds of Sammy and Hal Woolff and the Wright engineers. When a pilot disappeared over the horizon his ground crew always shared his apprehensions and the nervous strain that came with the first hint of trouble. No self-respecting mechanic lived without anxiety and no excuse about bad weather or errors of judgement gave solace to him as he tortured himself about wiring, fuel, and valves, and the possibility of having overlooked some small but vital adjustment that might cause the death of his pilot.
Nevertheless, those down below who had seen them pass overhead had had no knowledge of the wind in the upper air, no information about drift or faulty compasses, and this fact made them painfully alone with their problems, cut off from the rest of the world by the few hundred feet of altitude and the few miles that separated them from civilisation.
* * *
They began to see more white objects like sails below them and realised they were the conically shaped tips of icebergs linked together by wisps of woolly white. Patched with the broken fragments of floes that had become detached from the northern icefield, the sea was obscured by streaks of thickening mist which ran into each other to form a broken bank of fog.
‘All OK so far,’ Alix said, reading out the instruments. ‘Compass course 87. Altitude 1,000 feet. Revs 1,700. Temperatures and pressures fine.’
‘How do the compasses compare?’
‘There’s a hell of a gap. I think the liquid compass is wandering too, now.’
Ira was silent for a while before replying, curiously grateful for her presence and the steadiness of her voice.
‘We’ve still got Sammy’s Chicks’ Own,’ he said. ‘We can always fall back on that.’
* * *
Despite their small anxieties, they had started the night with things so much in their favour, the first faint suggestion that something was wrong appeared quite unexpectedly.
It came six hours later, soon after midnight, with the stars bright and frosty above them. The day had slipped away suddenly, disappearing into the mists that hugged the American coastline, and they were flying by the stars instead of the compass card.
They’d been flying in darkness now long enough to feel confident and poised in time, a minute point of life hung in space above the night. Overhead, they had only short glimpses of the sky, and although they had climbed higher to get a better view of the stars, the patchy cloud persisted in a blurred unevenness that obscured the view. The wind had changed, however, just before darkness, and though they couldn’t tell exactly, to judge by the fuel consumption, it was now right on their tail and helping them along their way.
Ira glanced at the illuminated dots of the compass card. So long as he could still see the stars, the unreliable dead eye of the compass wasn’t much of a problem, but even while his mind dwelt on the subject, the stars disappeared again as a patch of cloud obscured them, and his eyes flickered to the ball of the turn-and-bank indicator and the altimeter needle. He was glad now he’d spent those hours over Charleston with nothing to help him but his instruments, because his senses were crying out that the instruments were wrong. It was easy in dark or cloud to feel you were flying one wing low or in a nose-down position because the senses seemed to lose their anchorage when there was no horizon, and pilots who had tried to correct a plane’s position by them had found themselves sliding off on one wing to smash into the ground before they could recover.
After eighteen and a half hours of the sonorous beat of the engine, however, it was hard, with nothing to do but watch the needles, to stop the eyelids from drooping, but they’d climbed up to 6,000 feet in an attempt to escape the cloud and their view of the stars suddenly grew clearer again and they were able to lift their eyes from the instruments once more. Ira would have preferred to have been even higher but they were still heavily loaded and the machine laboured when he tried to lift her further. He glanced at the dials on the dashboard. All the readings were normal enough, and as he flipped the magneto switches he hardly got a response from the needle.
With the end of daylight the cabin had grown cold again and they’d fastened up their flying suits. Clouds lay on either side and ahead of them now, masses of weirdly shaped cumulus, shadowy bulging curves too high to climb over and too widespread to make it worth trying to fly round them.
Ira studied the cloud mass warily, despite the exaltation the majesty of it produced in him, seeing soft foggy valleys and sharp black chasms and caverns, towers and arches as clear-cut as icebergs, festooned with splendid garlands of mist, all swirling and moving in the currents of the upper air. His experience told him their sides were full of danger and his instincts indicated that the only way to deal with them, short of turning back, was to go down to sea level. But that was too dangerous in the dark and a detour would use too much fuel, and he decided it was perhaps wiser to try to work his way through. The hammerheads of cloud towered probably to 25,000 feet but there were plenty of breaks and the valleys were wide between the misty bulwarks.
He glanced upwards, assessing the height, and had begun to pick his way through the clefts and gorges with the purple exhaust glowing against the mist and the stars clear and sharp above his head when there was a white flash of lightning behind them that seemed to light up every swiftly moving valley and tower and showed up the fan-shaped spread of the anvil heads above the route along which he was trying to pick his way. The lightning came again – and again – until the clouds seemed a living wall of light, then they hit the first of the air pockets.
The first jolting was not severe but they heard the fittings rattle and he saw that the plane – the wings, even the air about them – was touched with the greenish incandescence of St Elmo’s fire, so that they seemed to trail a tail like a comet. The next blow was harder, shaking them in their seats, then the jolts began to come like the blows of a giant fist to press them against safety belts and plummet them downwards so that the altimeter unwound crazily and the airspeed increased to a shrieking 180, before hurtling them upwards again through the churning walls of mist, draining the blood from their brains and making their arms leaden. Working the throttle, Ira saw that the lightning had turned purple, as vivid as the exhaust flashes in front of them, and the machine began to shake and swing and shudder as disturbed air among the boiling cloud chasms caught it.
Unexpectedly, from among the maelstrom of swiftly moving cloud, rain and hail crashed noisily against the windscreen, bringing them both bolt upright in their seats at once. They couldn’t even see the blue-blackness of the night now, only those jumping, jerking, shuddering streams of water that quivered in the slipstream across the glass. The plane was shaking violently, shuddering and swinging with an exhaustingly violent motion that put a strain on their muscles and nerves, and as the crash of the storm grew heavier and louder, they realised they were running into hail.
The engine sounded ragged and Ira worked the throttle until its beat smoothed, then the hail hit them again with a crash like a giant wave and the instruments seemed to go mad once more.
There was a terrific flash nearby that seemed to toss the machine about as though it were a leaf, and water began to drive its way into the cabin in a spray.
The compass needle was swinging wildly now, moving backwards and forwards in weird long sweeps as it was affected by the storm, and Ira’s anxiety increased because, now that they could no longer check their position against a map, they had to rely entirely on the dial of a clock and that uncertainly swinging needle. They seemed to go on fighting the storm for what seemed hours, the aeroplane one minute sinking terrifyingly towards the surface of the sea as though the engine had cut and she were in a nose dive, the next rising like a lift between the shafts of cloud. Then it was swinging from side to side as though it were a pendulum until they
felt sick and shaken with the motion, their bodies aching with the violence, their minds numb with the noise of the storm and the protesting cries of the overstrained machine.
Neither of them spoke as Ira fought against the controls. With the size of the storm area, there had been no sense in trying to fly round it and they simply had to hang on and fight their way through it. The rain continued to clatter against the windscreen and Ira could feel it soaking through the leg of his flying suit and spattering on his face in little flurries of fine mist.
There were times when he felt the windscreen would give way with the force of the squalls, but the little machine fought back, driving steadily into the teeth of the storm so that his confidence began to return.
The buffeting grew less at last and he felt that perhaps they had passed through the centre of the storm. Then abruptly, just as the strain seemed to lift, the dashboard lights went out and they were in terrifying total darkness without even the instruments to correct the directions of his senses.
For one horrifying fraction of a second, it was like the end of life itself, before his mind absorbed the absence of light and his instincts reacted to the emergency.
‘Torch, Alix!’
A light flashed on almost as he shouted, and he saw her glancing at him nervously as he drew a deep relieved breath.
‘Rain must have short-circuited ’em,’ he said shortly. ‘Thank God we thought of torches. What’s the time?’
‘Ten-forty-five. New York time.’
‘I reckon we’ve got another three to four hours of darkness. Perhaps it’ll sort itself out when the rain stops.’
Even as Ira replied, the violence seemed to go out of the storm, though it was some time before the buffeting ceased. They began to take stock of their position, searching the aircraft for signs of damage.
‘Any icing your side, Alix?’
She flashed the beam of the torch through the window and he saw the faint glisten along the leading edge of the wing, like a snail trail in the darkness.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ she said.
He nodded, reassured. There wasn’t enough to clog the venturi tube, but they would have to remain alert for it, because in the cloud it could form swiftly, loading the wings and jamming the controls or lining the rim of the carburettor airscoop.
They checked the fuel lead trap for dirt and water, draining off a spoonful of petrol to free the lead of impurities, but it was an instinctive safety precaution only, because the Whirlwind was still firing steadily and safely, the metallic beat drumming through the framework of the machine.
The rain continued fitfully for some time, rattling against the glass, the water running backwards, sideways and upwards in its narrow thread-like streams, small rivers on a miniature map, blurring the vision even of the night, but there was no violence in the wind now and the controls were no longer stiff and harsh to the touch.
‘We’ll go down a bit, I think,’ Ira said. ‘We might get out of it altogether.’
He put the stick forward and levelled off, but the squalls persisted and he stared ahead through the scattered streaks of water on the windscreen, wondering if they should swing south. Though a turn would increase the distance they had to fly, it might take them out of the area of the storm. They seemed to be out of danger now, however, and it was probably unwise to increase the distance unnecessarily. He decided to hold his course.
Alix turned her head. ‘We must be pushing a hundred and twenty,’ she said. Despite the storm, she sounded calm.
He eyed the compass, wishing it would settle down, then he gestured across the cabin. ‘You’ll have to give me readings on the Chicks’ Own,’ he said. ‘Is it working?’
‘Better than the others. It doesn’t hold but it’s not crazy.’
For some time they flew in silence, a thousand worries nagging at them despite their smallness. While they knew how compasses generally behaved in relation to the poles, how they were affected by turns and speeds and the position of the aircraft, there was little they could do once the sensitised steel of an individual instrument no longer reached for the true magnetic north. Under such circumstances, from being an aid to navigation, a compass became only a hindrance, a twisted signpost, a sun coming up in the wrong quarter of the globe, a North Star moving out of its accustomed sphere, and they couldn’t tell from it whether they were flying in the direction they wanted or had wandered off course or even turned round and were heading back the way they had come.
The rain had stopped completely and Ira peered into the blackness, wondering just how wrong their course might be, his eyes searching for the sky and a sight of the stars. Ahead of him the blue glow of the exhausts made a barrier of light between them and the night, and made reading the instruments more difficult.
The beam of the torch moved and the chart rattled alongside him as Alix studied it. He glanced at the clock. In New York by this time the next day’s newspapers would be almost on the streets, and the late sub-editors would be watching the agency messages to find out if anything could go into the late-news columns. dixie over Newfoundland. They’d already have a reference to their last sighting, and everyone would be wondering now if they’d been seen over the Atlantic. By tomorrow evening, they’d be waiting for reports of a sighting from Europe and by this time tomorrow night, the late-news men would be working on reports that they’d arrived.
Or that they’d not arrived.
He realised he’d been flying by the senses for some time now, for though soft calls of course kept coming from Alix, instinct told him it wasn’t safe to put too much trust in the readings from the compasses. He was well aware that it was wrong to fly by the senses rather than by the instruments, but the Hughesden earth inductor was wildly wrong and the liquid compass was still uncertain.
He suddenly noticed that the turn indicator showed that he was flying left wing low and he realised his eyelids were drooping and that the soft calls from the other side of the cabin had ceased. His mind had become separate from his body and fatigue was making him detached and probably not aware of small things that might be wrong. He had just come to the lethargic decision to wake Alix when the first hint that something was wrong brought him bolt upright in his seat, aware that the engine had missed a beat. The hesitation had been so faint he’d hardly noticed it but it had immediately sounded an alarm in his mind and he was awake at once.
‘Alix! Hear that?’
‘Yes!’ Alix’s voice was clipped and brisk and she was as awake as he was.
‘Did I hear something or was I half asleep?’
‘You heard something.’
A flash of rage seared his spirit, mingling with the apprehension that could not be held back, then, knowing that anger couldn’t help them in their present situation, he forced himself to be calm and to listen with his head cocked for the slightest pause in the beat of the engine.
They were both alert now, on edge, every sense quivering to catch whatever it was that had brought them to wakefulness. It had been almost too fragile to discern, a fragmentarily different note in the throb of the engine, a pause, something that didn’t fit into the steady roar to which they’d been listening now for not far short of a whole day.
He glanced at the instruments. The fuel pressure seemed normal but the engine was beginning to run raggedly, spluttering and jerking as though trying to wrench itself from its bearings. He moved the mixture control but the coughing continued and, coldly, he went through all the normal procedures before making a diagnosis, checking altitude, mixture, ignition and carburation.
‘Might be condensation,’ he suggested. ‘Or a spot of rainwater. It was wet enough when she was filled up. Try draining the trap.’
She leaned forward, checking the reservoir in the fuel lead that separated water from fuel, but even as she did so, the break in the engine note came again with a heart-stopping unexpectedness almost as though the Dixie had halted momentarily in its easy flight. This time it was a distinct hesitation, as though the
pistons had stopped to catch their breath, and this time, as his eyes flickered over the instruments, he saw that the fuel pressure had fallen.
‘Crank that wobble pump, Alix,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s the Hughesden!’
Her fury burst out of her in an impassioned cry. ‘That goddamned Hughesden!’
As he heard the squeak and hiss of the pump by his seat, Ira glanced downwards towards the blackness beneath him. There was nothing to be seen below but he knew that down there the waves were unrolling with the sluggishness of great depth, black, unfathomable and uncontrollable. If they had to ditch now, it would be God help them in the dark.
‘I think it’s cleared.’ Alix interrupted his thoughts. ‘Shall I keep on pumping?’
‘No. Give it a rest. It might have cleared itself.’
Even as he spoke, however, the hesitation came again.
‘Pump, Alix,’ Ira said quickly. ‘Where are we?’
The charts rattled as she gave him their position. ‘Nineteen hours out, and seventeen-fifty miles to go.’
Ira nodded. They were committed now to continuing because they’d reached a point almost as near to Europe as to America, a point where, with the wind blowing strongly from the west, it was safer to carry on rather than traverse the area of the storm and cloud again on a return course.
‘Not much choice, is there?’ he said.
‘We ought to be able to make it.’
‘So long as it grows no worse. If the spindle shears like it did on the way to San Antonio we’ll be flying without a pump.’
‘Can’t we use the hand-pump?’
‘For twelve-fifteen hours?’ Ira kept his words calm because there was a sudden edge of alarm in her voice.
‘How about gas?’
‘No problem, so long as it gets to the motor. What tank are we on?’
‘Main.’
‘Keep her on that. If the pump packs up altogether, we’ll go on to wing tanks.’