Bruno’s voice on the radio now asks you to come in to land; the first solo landing is, of necessity, the reverse of the first solo take-off, and God help you if it were otherwise! Bruno’s voice on the radio always has a touch of uncertainty and concern, as once you had occasion to notice in the control tower, listening in with an operator. Bruno sidles cautiously up to words as though coming from somewhere he prefers not to name, giving the impression that words are the last resort when all alternatives have failed. On this occasion, the tone is deeper and the worry greater, perhaps because the trees at the bottom of the runway block his sight of you, and from the ground he asks your position in strict aeronautical jargon, and immediately afterwards asks in everyday language if everything is OK, and you give the position in aeronautical jargon and reply yes, everything’s fine. And finally, while you go through the downwind checks, while you remove the antifreeze and enrich the mixture and cut back on engine speed and set the flaps at ten degrees, finally it occurs to you that the first take-off is the meeting of two fears – yours and his, the mutual, shared fears of two people obliged to face the one event with only partial knowledge. What does Bruno know about you? Nothing at all. Mere intuition. Has he ever witnessed your hysterical scenes? Your moments of total abstraction? Has he ever seen you experience those moments of rapture, when you lose yourself in a void and leave behind your body like yesterday’s newspaper to fill a spot you have vacated? Or those moments of ice-cold, bitter, deaf rage or pure hatred – those forces of evil to which you would so happily give vent? And what would Bruno say if he knew that leaving the airfield in the evening and walking home, you enjoyed keeping time to ditties of your own composition, like:
The night has arrived
The planes are asleep
The tower is dark
The fax makes a bleep
If you were in Bruno’s shoes, would you entrust a plane to a man like that? What can have made him believe you were up to it, what does Bruno know about you? Only what he may have deduced from a very limited area, such as piloting a plane, an aptitude and activity which can, admittedly, be subject to scrutiny, but for the rest, for all the other things about a person, the things that matter and would matter more than anything else in those crucial moments of mid-air emergency, he can only go by intuition and deduction from those acts, those few acts he has seen you carry out; this is the risk he is running, what if there were engine trouble right now? An engine has no way of knowing who is at the controls, chance never takes circumstances or a pilot’s experience into consideration. The other person, who just happens to be you, ought to have adequate self-knowledge, or at least that’s the hope, but who can say if he really has that grasp of aeronautics, that pilot’s know-how which at this moment of his life, on his first solo landing, now seem to him so crucial, and it’s here that your greatest risk lies. As the final turn to the left brings the city into view, with the island on the right and the airfield straight ahead, speak into the radio, call on final, flaps out, undercarriage down, landing lights. There’s Bruno, a tiny figure standing on the grass border of the runway, looking upwards, walkie-talkie clasped to ear, that’s just fine, he murmurs, just fine, you repeat to yourself, checking distance and trim. You are sitting on an accumulated inheritance of speed and height waiting to be dissipated and run down, the descent is the richest moment of flight (the body is the prime gauge of this wasting bonanza, of this wealth dispersed in descent and free fall, of the pure joy of refound weight and gravity), drop the nose of the aircraft, let it go, let yourself go, come down in a gentle glide over the trees, if you were not so tense and concentrated you would notice the shadow projected ahead of you by the sun at your back and could watch it expand on the grass and touch down a few moments ahead of you, your shadow has landed, your plane following it down, let yourself go, place the central wheels on the grass and for a moment keep the aircraft suspended in that position, a moment later the nose wheel touches down, leaving you only to brake, gradually, decisively, to brake until the thing carrying you, on which you are seated, slows down and ceases to be an aeroplane.
All that’s left is to make your way to the hangar, taxi to park, the last manoeuvre cleared by Bruno over the radio before handing you over to control tower, now that the airfield has reopened for traffic; it may be simply a clearance to backtrack off the runway, but in your mind it is a clearance of vast import, the first step in an enterprise just beginning and which could be ended only by some terminal event, an overriding clearance bringing with it many small, accompanying clearances, like the clearance to receive less severe treatment from the mechanic standing there, crossed forearms aloft – the sign for flight terminated, engines off, complete stop – at the end of the yellow line you are meticulously following with the nose wheel.
(If there existed some compartment of the memory reserved for first times, you think as you check that everything is switched off, you would place first take-off alongside first love-making, for the intensity of the two is identical, however curious it may seem that for you the first and most overwhelming fusion with another human being should be put on the same level as the first and most total loneliness of all – the utter solitude of the solo pilot.)
And, when you climb out of the cockpit, there can be numbered among the innovations that distant hint, if not exactly of a smile at least of a less glowering expression from Bruno, accompanied by a new informality of address that betokens friendship, but an informality which in no way reduces the distance between the two of you, quite the reverse, and which does not alter his general demeanour, even if later in his office – if office is the right word for a Forties desk, a rack of aeronautical maps, a rocking chair and a monitor showing a cloud-covered Italy as seen at this moment from a meteorological satellite – this tentative informality will permit you, while that instructor himself, dressed in his unvarying captain’s uniform of dark tie over white shirt, sits down to put his signature to your first solo take-off, to take advantage of this new-found confidentiality and ask why today precisely, why this morning of all mornings when you had just forgotten the flaps and came near to ending up in the sea; and will permit him, with a rapid, puzzled glance, to reply to you – why today?, plainly incredulous that you have not grasped. The mistake, because of the mistake, you saw the mistake yourself. The tone is offhand, whispered, as though he were repeating something obvious and, more importantly, secret. When else? he concludes, handing you back your log-book.
As soon as you are outside, you stop in the slanting light of the morning and leaf through the pages, searching out the handwriting, the signature which definitively enrols you in the halls of celestial error, where each error is a scar, but not one which will ward off further relapses.
TWO
Between Second 1423 and Second 1797
NIGHT FELL ON the airfield. the mechanics, Bruno, the men in the control tower, even the woman behind the bar, they had all gone off leaving me alone with the runway lights, those bluish, glowing insects standing silently in unbroken lines in the grass. I stared at the shadows thrown by the tables onto the moonlit terrace, I stared at the night, the boundless horizons of night, at sea and sky separated only by streaks of light on far-off coastlines and felt myself guardian of this nocturnal space. They had left me the key of the control tower, with orders to switch off the runway lights before leaving. Never had I lingered so long. The August night glided in humid heat towards its most intimate heart. Perhaps it was the heat, or perhaps I dozed off. One minute more, I thought, one minute more and then I’ll get up and go, one minute more and I’ll get up, switch everything off and leave; and perhaps I really would have. I was just on the point of rising to my feet when I became aware of their presence, two of them, seated a little way ahead of me in the darkness, how had I not seen them before now? I thought it might be no more than an image of my mind, but the sound of a voice, conveying the certainty that there really was someone there, sent a shiver down my spine.
“If only the weath
er had been like this that evening,” said the younger man, “if only there had been this moon, this stillness . . .” Then he took his eyes from the sky, lowered his head and turned to me, and I, with a fresh shudder, made out his eyes in the darkness.
The other, the older man, looked first one way and then the other, as though anxious to find his bearings and, picking at the nail of one hand with a fingernail from the other, gave the impression that speaking required an effort and suffering beyond all endurance.
“Now,” said the younger man, “now at last, we can measure the time which flashed past so rapidly that evening, a time of utter bewilderment, the bewilderment with which you said at the final moment, ‘We’re going to crash . . .’ You spoke without yelling, in a voice choked by the pressure, the gravity which was tugging us down, as though resigned to that unbelievable thing which was taking place, an incident of such stupidity, such banality as an ice-stall. You were captain, I was co-pilot, and apart from age what separated us was your greater familiarity with jets and mine with propellers . . .”
“Yes, I was captain,” said the older man, “but you had taken over for that stretch, and I only came in at the end, but it doesn’t matter now, believe me, it just doesn’t matter.”
“At second 1423,” the younger man began again, “you told the hostess to give out the meals to the passengers, don’t you remember? You spoke in a jovial tone, everything was going fine, there was no turbulence. ‘When you get to the coffee,’ you said, ‘bring me a coffee with sugar.’ You also asked her if there was an extra tray for us, and she replied that there was just the right number of trays but perhaps one of the passengers wouldn’t want anything to eat, and you said that if there was only one left over it was for me.”
“Strange, did we really talk so much about food?” said the older man, shaking his head gently.
“Yes, we discussed food, then at second 1492, when the plane was set on its ascent towards the Alps, you said, ‘let’s get a bit of rest,’ and it must have been more or less in those seconds that we passed the exact point where another plane ahead of us had turned back because of the ice, but how were we to know? We were tuned in to a different wavelength and there was no way we could pick up its communications. We continued our ascent, and it was at second 1653 that I became aware that something was going wrong, we were losing lift and speed, the same thought occurred to both of us, we both immediately thought of ice. I switched on the wing lights and peered out to see where it was forming. I asked you if you didn’t think it was along the trailing edge of the wing, and you replied yes, it’s over there, look. Ice crystals, the worst of all aeronautical ices, an ice which, the moment you enter a cloud, forms as swiftly as a blow to the face, difficult to shake off, molten water in the inside of a cloud, water which retains its liquid state even in sub-zero temperatures, invisible particles in unstable equilibrium which remain rain-drops only because a film of water envelops each single drop and stops it freezing, but the very instant something collides with the film and breaks it open, the drops solidify around whatever shattered them. We’ve ploughed into a cloud at two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour, we must have shattered millions, billions of water drops which will have immediately solidified and clung to the wings like barnacles to a ship’s hull. We’re loaded down with ice crystals, it’s changed the shape of the wings, as well as their weight. At second 1740, you told me to up the speed by another four knots, or else we’d never make it, and I did, but at second 1748 there was a sudden lurch of the wing on my side, all of a sudden the plane tilted over by forty degrees, maybe a bit less; it felt like a sharp turn. I immediately disconnected the automatic pilot and took manual control of the plane. It was all done so quickly you didn’t even notice me do it. You said ‘Switch off autopilot,’ and I said ‘I’ve already done it.’ At second 1750, the stall warning sounded. I was struggling to keep the plane steady, but it was already starting to lose height, and then the wing went down on your side. A one-hundred-degree tilt to the left, one hundred degrees ... do you have any idea of what that means?” asked the younger man, turning to me. “It means a wing hanging like a knife-blade, a passenger aircraft cutting the air like a knife,” and he shook his head in dismay. “At second 1755, I felt a jolt in the instruments as the automatic mechanism came into play, pushing the control column forward with forty kilo pressure to counteract the stall. I shouted out down . . . down . . . down, and you shouted steady . . . steady . . . steady, and took over the controls. We stalled one more time, the third, this time it was the wing on my side, another hundred degrees to the right, you cursed the plane at the top of your voice, you screamed ‘God damn you,’ I remember it very clearly . . .”
The captain listened as though he had gone over those seconds a million times. “Do you hear him?” he asked me, adjusting the brim of his cap, “do you hear how he speaks about them? 1492, 1653, 1748 as thought they were years, historical dates, but we’re talking about barely three hundred seconds, five minutes; five minutes, that’s all the time we had to grasp what was going on, to come to grips with things, to tack desperately, one night in early autumn, caught in a mass of never-ending clouds, in a sky of terrible ice. That’s all there is to it, we do nothing else, we have remained united even after the crash. He won’t give himself peace, and yet we stuck to the manual, doing exactly what it said, but you see what he’s like. Maybe it’s because he’s young, and young he’s going to remain, forever.”
All three of us fell silent, a silence broken by the cicadas and the warm heaving of the sea. We looked over towards the airfield; standing there with that moon overhead and those trees round its sides; with its Thirties-style terminal building and old, steel half-barrel-vaulted hangars, the abandoned Fascist warehouses on the far side of the runway, its grass runway and double row of lights running down to the sea, it could have been any airstrip, any airfield at any point in the world where sea and land meet, waiting for any take-off or any landing, in any of the years and decades of this, the first century of aviation, the site of every departure and arrival, every cancelled departure, every arrival awaited in vain.
Then, the young man in uniform began to speak again, “Then at second 1760 the wing on my side dropped down once again, you ordered me to cut back the engines and I did, at second 1764 the stall warning sounded yet again, the wing on your side stalled for the umpteenth time, this time as much as one hundred and thirty-five degrees, leaving the plane almost completely upside down, just imagine, a passenger plane in inverted flight,” sighed the young man, gesticulating with his hands, turning the palm of one hand upwards then letting it go limp, “you and I were upside down as well, and I don’t now how, but with the blood racing in my head and everything dancing around me, I managed to make out the anemometer among the flashing lights on the control panel, the speed was climbing from one hundred and eighty-five to two hundred and thirty-one knots, very slowly the tilt was righting itself, the wing stalls stopped and I thought to myself – ‘maybe we’re going to make it, maybe we can pull out of it,’ we attempted to regain control by raising the nose ever so gently, although the plane was still burbling a bit, it was second 1771, I yelled to you ‘Haul it up . . . haul it up . . .’ and you shouted back, ‘I am hauling it up,’ at that moment we went over two hundred and fifty knots, the maximum operational speed, triggering the overspeed alarm as well. At second 1779, you said again, ‘I am hauling,’ but we were plummeting, over three hundred and thirty knots, the upper limit of manoeuvrability and you shouted, ‘The controls have jammed on me!,’ at second 1787, you shouted once again ‘Pull hard,’ and I replied that I was pulling hard, the stall signals, the overspeed signals, everything was blaring, everything was vibrating and falling around us, and at that point, God knows where I got the strength in that position and at that speed, it was second 1789, I got onto the radio and screamed ‘Milano, Alitalia Four Six Zero, emergency . . .’ as though that message could have saved us, as though anyone could have done anything for us, or for the
plane, I knew we’d lost her, I knew we were lost, and yet it was unbelievable, we were done for but it was at that very moment, second 1797, that you said to me quietly, with that choked voice of yours, ‘We’re going to crash,’ and your voice was quiet, sad and bewildered, ‘We’re going to crash . . .’”
“The following second . . .”
“Please,” said the captain, “please,” but he spoke as though reciting a ritual prayer he did not expect to be heard, it wasn’t so much that he had no inclination to hear one more time the hubbub of those final moments as that, perhaps, he wished to calm his first officer, or perhaps did not want him to relive that final instant, wanted it banished forever from his mind, a futile prayer, because the following moment the younger man began again in the same tone, he said, “It was impossible to see a thing, we were falling at the rate of ten thousand feet a minute, I first noticed that something was the matter with the plane at second 1653, but at second 1797, less than two minutes later, it was no longer an aeroplane, we were just fifteen thousand kilos of scrap metal, fibres, plastic and people, almost overturned, tumbling into nothingness, in the thick darkness of a cloudy night, quite helplessly, with no knowledge of what had occurred, or how. Can you imagine such a thing? We had collided with a cloud, we had rammed into a cloud which a few seconds later, intact and lighter by some few pounds of ice, would proceed peacefully on its way towards the east and which would, the morning after, when they found us lying among the trees, be floating heedlessly over the Ionian Sea or over the Balkans.”
There was another silence, I considered making the effort to overcome my fear and take the first officer by the hand, what could happen to me? It would have been a gesture of solidarity and for that reason, I thought to myself, Someone, Nature or the Cosmos would exempt me from any horror and from all consequences, but the captain read the gesture in my eyes and, shaking his head gently, made a sign to desist. “Are you here every evening?” he asked, changing tack. “You re lucky, you know, it’s a lovely spot, especially at this time, in this season,” he said, adjusting the brim of his cap and gazing around with infinite, wistful nostalgia. After a moment, he said, “Could I have a look at the aircraft in the hangar?” “I’m sorry,” I replied, “I’m really sorry but I don’t have the keys. I’ve only got the keys of the control tower to switch off the runway lights.” “Pity,” said the captain, getting to his feet. The young officer rose too, as did I.
Take-Off Page 2