Take-Off

by Daniel Del Giudice

  Bruno remained silent, a sky of dark clouds rolled over the airfield, in the hangars the clash of beaten metal provided a temporary recall to reality, behind the tinted glass windows of the control tower it was just possible to make out the profiles of the individual operators, dragging on their cigarettes as they waited. The sluggishness of the afternoon seemed to have cut activities adrift one from the other, reducing them to a minimum, leaving each one enveloped in its own specific silence, the silence of the uniformed customs officers at the bar-room door, wordlessly gazing at the briefcase to which someone has attached a computer print-out “before putting your mouth in motion, make sure your brain is in gear,” (it must be this fear that makes you remain silent), or the silence of Bruno with his arms folded and his head bowed, or your more garrulous silence as you walk up and down in front of him without finding the words to say what you want to say, for instance that all this forward planning and calculating is not in your nature. Bruno, I would prefer to deal with a flight minute by minute, seeing to all that is to be done, facing up to occurrences rather than going over each flight long before clambering on board, and having then, in flight, to be always in imagination some miles or some minutes ahead of the plane. In life, once, I knew instinctively what I should be doing, but I forced myself to carry out a slow tour of all the opportunities open to me, only to return to the one which had attracted me at the outset; but whether following instinct or reason, everything always went wrong, especially when I was convinced I had done the right thing, so it’s as well to make instinctive mistakes, to make immediate, impulsive mistakes, and at least get it over with. However, in flight, instinct is another debatable matter, something which needs to be worked on, contradicted and reversed. “Anti-instinctive” manoeuvres is your term for dealing with, for instance, a stall, when you feel a wing going down, the plane begin to vibrate, and an alarm or a mechanised voice in the cabin saying over and over again – Stall! Stall! Stall! The voice will be in English, the official language used in aeronautics, even for bad news. At that moment your heart will tell you to pull at the control column, to tug hard and keep up the already dropping nose; if you do that, you may be following instinct, but the wing will definitively lose its grip on the air, instantly transforming the aircraft and all of us inside it into a dead-weight. There are many reasons why a plane goes into stall – lack of attention, an inaccurate or incomplete mental grasp of conditions, external events, like icing – but the only way to get out of it is to let yourself fall, to defy every impulse and assist the stall, to push the nose down and go with the plunge until reaching the point where speed, and air, are regained. The same applies with spin; once you go into a spin, your first inclination is to start turning the column the opposite way from the rotation, then to twist it frantically in any direction which will interrupt the spinning motion, but this only causes the wing to lose the little lift it has retained, leaving no hope of getting out of the spin. Never use the control column, the catechism instructs, restrain instinct, the spin must be managed by the pedals and tail rudder, the last to lose efficiency in such circumstances. There are many reasons why a plane goes into stall or spin – lack of attention, error, loss of lift, an inexact appreciation of one’s own position, or perhaps position in relation to others, an undue concentration on one aspect, causing every image, every meaning, every direction to be fixed by that one aspect to the exclusion of all others. In life too there are those emergency moments when the instincts cry out for immediate, resolute reactions, moments of stall when we strive to continue climbing and to keep upright at height when the only way out would be to let ourselves drift, moments when we gaze at things full on and go for the heart when the one reasonable trajectory would carry us off-centre, towards an outer edge which, once reached, should be proceeded along gingerly but undeviatingly, and other moments when we find ourselves caught up in a headlong spin and seize wildly at every available lever, succeeding only in making the spin all the more uncontrollable. You, Bruno, would undoubtedly urge “anti-instinctive manoeuvres”! but there is, in life, no knowing whether one is always capable of doing the opposite, nor of telling whether an individual really wants a way out; instinct and non-instinct can be intertwined or inverted, and the left has its own left which is not always the right. In fact, in aviation too there is a mysterious zone, the only one with any resemblance to all this, a zone of extreme conditions, the aerodynamic zone where piloting is done by inverted commands, where the relationship between velocity and power attains a threshold beyond which, by means of those “inverted commands”, you pass to a different regime, where if you wish to climb you must push the control column down and if you wish to descend you must pull it towards you. It is not easy to understand, any more than it is easy to recognise immediately that you have penetrated those zones. Rarely do you acknowledge that what is asked of you is the exact opposite of what is wanted of you, that the real question is the inverse of its formulation; in flight, if you realize in time what is going on, you can regain control, whereas in love, even if you were capable of recognising early on that you are falling into the realm of “inverted requests”, and even if you had in your turn the power to invert your replies and gestures, neither you nor she would be any more capable of escape; there is no exit from love through inverted questioning, since to produce the correct reply to an upside down question does nothing to remove the pain or the problem which overturned the question in the first place.

  We fly by mental images, Bruno, choosing between them at every moment, visualising positions in relation to a no-longer-visible earth and sky, positions which we imagine through the exercise of, if you will excuse the term, a finely honed, exquisitely gauged imagination, and there is no more to it; small hallucinations prompted by the instruments, developed one after the other throughout the flight, hallucinations which do not give rise to dreams, release or to any sort of description, but simply to a manoeuvre, to a work of the hands needed for progress to some destination. Certainly, the finely honed imagination has as its support mechanisms the panel of instruments which little by little replace the real world, the world outside the windscreen which can often be no longer seen. Of the six instruments essential for piloting an aeroplane, each one describes a “truth” directly, with at least another two doing so indirectly; each instrument is in turn of prime importance for one manoeuvre and of secondary importance for others, as happens in a Chinese game, or in infinite combinations of the same elements, or in those stories where each character knows only one part of the final truth. I speak of “truth”, Bruno, only because you insist that instruments must be believed absolutely, but it is not without a tremor that, as I break through the clouds, I switch to considering as “truths” some boxes of metal and plastic mounted on an instrument panel; it requires each time a little act of faith and forgetfulness.

  Here even emergencies become a question of habit, part of a discipline; how to make something utterly dramatic and terminal into something normal and routine. The realization dawns very quickly that while it initially seems there is nothing more to be done, there remains the speeding time itself that can be stretched out by a second-by-second concentration on each individual one of the seconds that make up that time, a cramped space that can be extended by being subdivided into acts and operations each of which is worth metres in the sky and feet of maintained height. Between being and not being airborne there is a no-man’s-land of seconds, miles, altitude, and that is our territory, Bruno, there we work, there we have our being. There’s all the time in the world, you say, casually switching off the engine in mid-air, and while I sweat over it, you ask – suppose it was an engine fire instead of a straightforward breakdown? I give the handbook reply, fuel tanks off, pump off, make no attempt to start her up again etc, etc, I go into all the details of the manoeuvre to be followed, while executing a completely different one to get us out of the mess you have got us into, but do you know what I really want to say, Bruno? If it were to happen, I think it would all
depend. No really, it would all depend. If there were passengers on board, I’d damn my soul if it were the price of bringing them down safely, but if I were on my own, if I had the utter certainty that I had one minute left, and not a second more, I wouldn’t spend it that way. I genuinely don’t know if I’d strive to the last, I think I’d prefer to throw in the towel, focus on the people I’ve loved, apologise to them for shortcomings rather than take my leave tugging frantically at levers on an aircraft flight deck.

  The pilot’s lore has an objective, which is not the immediate one of taking an aircraft from A to B, but primarily that of producing images of the state of things and of their continual advance, as well as of mastering appropriate behaviour, which must be so deeply assimilated that it will appear natural and spontaneous in an experience where everything is unnatural. This, Bruno, is second nature to you, but you will not speak of it, any more than you will speak of anything else. The naturalness of the unnatural requires special care and maintenance, it must be constantly used, like a path through vegetation which will be overgrown the moment it ceases to be trodden. To allow it to fall into disuse means to lose it bit by bit. A pilot’s knowledge is an unending apprenticeship, and this is the point of those infinite checks which you, like every other aeronautic authority, make us undergo, irrespective of age or seniority, and is probably why everything has its own training course, proceeds to its own licence. Everything has its expiry date, Bruno, here everything has a fixed time-span, here everything dies periodically; there is no means of renewal except by demonstrating that you made use of that learning by putting it into practice hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year in flights, hours airborne, hours in command. The learning of which you are master, Bruno, is more subject to reassessment than any other, and perhaps the only one liable to be revoked at any time unless it is shown that it has been applied sufficiently, and is undoubtedly the only one to carry in large print its own sell-by date, like milk.

  To assist me in this ever shifting borderland, I have a little book of prayers, a minor book, just as the guides and manuals I enjoyed as a boy were minor works. Every morning as I go up in my plane, I first open my breviary. Each subject in the text is arranged in question and answer format, so that it ought to be recited in twos, but it can be adapted for one, as more and more frequently happens. The one person has to be ready to take both parts . . .

  Master switch? On.

  Anti-collision beacon? On.

  Flaps? 10 degree

  Parking brake? On.

  Radios? Tuned and checked.

  Instruments? Set as required.

  Trimmer? Neutral.

  As with other forms of prayer, this one too has a part for the hands, to do with the switches. Further, just as there are prayers for each moment of the day, so each phase of flight has a propitiatory liturgy of its own: prior to switch-on, prior to taxying, after take-off, at cruising speed, for final approach, for landing, for parking, and of course, those special prayers for emergencies whose pages in the breviary are edged in red so they can be flicked open instantly, should the need arise. All praise to the checklist, Bruno, a modest but enormously valuable book, but a book which, fortunately or unfortunately, none can call on for the manoeuvres and emergencies of life.

  These are the things you would have liked to say to him, and it seems to you that possibly, just possibly, this could be the right time, now, in this afternoon of endless waiting, when the barometer refuses to move to “Fine” and even a fool could see that you will not be taking off, possibly, just possibly, you could break your silence and talk to him about these things. You move up to the petrol pump. Bruno is asleep, as he has been for some time, so deeply asleep that he has not even noticed the light drizzle which has started to fall, sending a few drops coursing down his bald skull.

  SEVEN

  Unreported Inbound Palermo

  Ustica is a tiny island off the Northern coast of Sicily where on 27th June 1980 one of the most mysterious incidents in recent Italian history occurred. Itavia 870, on an internal flight from Bologna to Palermo, crashed with the loss all of all eighty-one passengers. There had been no indication of any problem on board. Subsequent enquiries have failed to cast light on the causes of the accident.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  IF THIS WERE a chapter on Ustica, it would have to be the history of the aircraft. It would be the history of an aircraft which plunged to the bottom of the sea only to re-emerge from the waters, a creature of metal which sank and rose again, as in a mythical tale, a being created for the air which ended in water; water believed by humankind to be the worst of all things, worse than earth or mountain, brutal by contrast, water occasions greater fear, three thousand metres under the surface of the sea, three thousand seven hundred, and then raised from the sea piece by piece, and every piece reassembled with infinite care around the makeshift structure, the simulacrum, as that unreal skeleton in the hangar is called, every piece attached in faithful reconstruction of the original aircraft. The history might be entitled The Itigis, as if it were the tale of some ancient people or of trees older than time and not of pieces of metal which crumbled and were reassembled. In the air, on the sea bed and finally on land. And when is the next departure?

  “Bologna Ground, ready to start up engines.”

  “Itavia Eight Seven Zero cleared, temperature twenty-four degrees, stop, time on the hour. Do you have the latest weather report?” and in the silence of the hangar, at nights, a slow drip-drip could be heard, as though even now when the aircraft was on dry land, the sea, after pressing down for years on the metal molecules, was continuing its slow withdrawal, drop by drop, and as though the aircraft would never be completely free of its grip.

  “Itavia Eight Seven Zero, cleared for Palermo via Florence, Ambra One Three, climb and maintain flight level One Nine Zero. Repeat and report ready to take off.” The Itigis, I-TIGI, India Tango India Golf India, would be a first-person narrative related by the metal itself, a being which was first an aircraft, then finished on the sea bed and rose again, and was once again, later, an aircraft, a creature of reconstituted metal: but between its before and after as an aircraft, not everything can resume its place, for around eighty people, passengers and crew, are missing.

  “Itavia Eight Seven Zero, take-off at eight hundred hours, contact Padua Information.”

  “Itavia Eight Seven Zero with Padua information, Bologna goodbye,” an event which moves backwards enveloping itself within itself, as in those film sequences where a bottle of milk shatters in a thousand pieces causing the thick liquid to spurt in all directions, and then each shard, reconstituting itself, flashes back through time and space into the place it had occupied, with even the liquid flowing back into the bottle drop by drop. But in the unmaking and remaking of the event, something is missing and will be missing forever.

  “Good evening Padua, Itavia Eight Seven Zero here.”

  “Itavia Eight Seven Zero, proceed as cleared, report Florence.” Sweeping over the ocean bed, the underwater camera made out five letters of the alphabet, I-TIGI, painted in black on the underside of the left wing, and there could be no further doubt, the Itigis were there, the tail four kilometres ahead of the pilot’s cabin.

  “Good evening, Rome, Itavia Eight Seven Zero here.”

  “Good evening to you, Eight Seven Zero. go ahead.”

  “Eight Seven Zero over Florence, flight level One Six Zero climbing One Nine Zero. Estimate Bolsena at Three Four.”

  “Itavia Eight Seven Zero, roger. Squawk ident One Two Three Six. Cleared to Palermo via Bolsena, Puma, Latina, Ponza, Ambra One Three.”

  “One Two Three Six squawking. Eight Seven Zero ready for further climb.”

  “Itavia Eight Seven Zero, radar contact. Climb initially to flight level Two Three Zero. Other company traffic proceeds you, six miles ahead, flight level Two Five Zero.”

  “Rome, traffic in sight.”

  The Itigis were lying there, not far from
a Roman ship with a cargo of glass, a vessel with seventeenth-century cannons, a Second World War Messerschmitt fighter, items from the memories of transport, an involuntary sea-bed museum.

  “Itavia Eight Seven Zero, turn right, heading One Seven Zero. With traffic in sight cleared flight level Two Nine Zero. Resume own navigation to Bolsena passing flight level Two Six Zero.”

  “Eight Seven Zero up to flight level Two Nine Zero, leaving One Nine Zero.” From the beginning the sonar echo traced on the plotters the outline of uncertain, abstract magnetic masses, with the probability ranging through high, medium and low that it was not a geological object but an object of human construction; later in full view of the cameras, every piece became a numbered object, and finally, at the moment the cranes lowered it, dripping water, onto the deck, its nature was established as an exhibit.

  “Rome, Eight Seven Zero passing flight level Two Four Five with traffic in sight. Cleared to turn left?”

  “Affirmative, Itavia Eight Seven Zero. Proceed Bolsena.”

  To the east of the route, since without warning the aircraft veered to the east and so plunged into the sea, (who would have believed that the cardinal points existed even under the sea?), were found the two engines, the one a quarter of a mile from the other, another mile to the east lay the cabin and wings, a further mile and a half off the trailing rudder, another two miles to the east the stern section of the fuselage and a large portion of the left wing which had sheared off not on impact but due to extreme acceleration during descent, further still to the east a fuel tank which had got there from somewhere or other, and finally the fuselage end plate, the six rear windows on the right, the six rear windows on the left.