The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  This morning as I fly south toward the north rim the rising terrain also obscures my vision. Under me is the pine forest and the twisting, winding road that leads up to the lodge and the overlooks.

  I have the chart spread on my left knee and am watching it carefully. The National Park Service has been busy here. In the last eighteen months the Park Service, an outfit that really knows and cares about airplanes and the problems of the people who fly them, has managed to create a mandatory overflight system of such Byzantine complexity that even Odysseus Yeager couldn’t figure it out. Which is what they intended. If you can’t positively identify the turnpoints on the VFR tour routes or the boundaries of the segments with their varying altitude restrictions, you’d best avoid the place and leave canyon flying to commercial tour operators hauling planeloads of Japanese and Germans. If you want to keep your pilot’s license, that is.

  To avoid the hassles you need to fly over the Grand Canyon at an altitude above 14,499 feet above sea level. Better make it a good bit more than one foot higher because the thermals and downdrafts over this colossal ditch can be vicious.

  The Cannibal Queen might stagger up to 15,000, but I’m not going to try it today. I’m at 10,500 feet coming up over the forest toward the north rim.

  I can see little arms of the great canyon off to my right and left, but the main gorge is ahead and obscured by the rising terrain. I look longingly to my right at a finger of rim that I can see coming up from the south. There is a VFR corridor there that can be traversed above 10,000 feet, but only if you can hit the narrow north-rim entrance right on the money, and to do that you would need to acquire the FAA’s new special chart that includes photographs of the waypoints. Then you should take a few flights with an experienced canyon pilot to ensure you know what you’re looking at when you’re looking at it. Today I decide to play it safe and forget the whole thing.

  I turn eastward. I will fly around the eastern end of the canyon and then along the southern rim to Grand Canyon Airport. I dial in the radio frequency required for flight in the adjacent section of the canyon and listen to the tour pilots report their position and altitude.

  “Over the dragon at ninety-five.”

  The dragon? Why not points A, B and so forth, points labeled as such on the charts?

  I’ll be honest—I resent the government’s insistence that I avoid overflight of national landmarks so that environmental activists won’t have their “wilderness experience” disrupted by aircraft noise. You and I carefully give national parks two thousand feet of clearance when overflying while the commercial tour operators are right down in the weeds with the paying customers. This system has been carried to the point of absurdity at the Grand Canyon as a direct result of political pressure by environmental activists on Congress, which decided to let the National Park Service make the rules. The fact that general aviation is getting a raw deal delights the “environmentalists,” some of whom want jets rerouted so that they won’t have to look at contrails.

  There are a lot of people in this country who would like to see every private aircraft recycled into beer cans. The restrictions are only going to get worse unless the people who own and fly noncommercial aircraft fight back. According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, some state officials want state parks protected from overflights.

  Are you listening out there? Do you care? Or are you going to wait until general aviation is stone cold dead, then tut-tut about the swine politicians and wax nostalgic?

  This morning I do the only thing I can. I turn the damned radio off and sit looking at the view with just the engine for company.

  The view is something to look at. Reds, yellows, grays, all shades of pink highlighted by the morning sun and contrasted by stark shadows. If God ever takes a vacation, I’ll bet He comes here.

  Visibility today is good, about 60 miles. I can see Navajo Mountain 60 miles away to the northeast across the Painted Desert.

  It isn’t always this good. There are days now that the smog from Los Angeles and the emissions from the Navajo Power Plant near Page, Arizona, combine to reduce visibility to the point that you can’t see from one rim of the canyon to the other. That distance is about 12 nautical miles, call it 14 civilian miles.

  In the humid east 12 miles visibility is terrific; out here in the great west that’s the equivalent of a London fog. Things are bigger out here and the air is dry.

  Yesterday an agreement was reached to clean up the emissions from the coal-fired Navajo Plant, a process that will take twenty years and cost $2 billion. But don’t expect to see any improvement in the air until the next century. If the cleanup happens at all. And all that money will do nothing about those 14 million people in the L.A. basin.

  Once again I get the feeling that I am seeing something that my grandchildren may not be able to see. If people keep moving to California the magnificent vistas of the west may become hidden in smog. What the Grand Canyon will look like then is something to contemplate the next time you are drunk. At least there won’t be any airplane noise.

  People say that birds don’t do aerobatics. You’ve always heard that, I suspect. I have been told that by flight and aerodynamics instructors since I started in this game. And they’re wrong. Someone in the FAA forgot to give the birds a copy of the rules.

  A couple years ago I was standing on the south rim staring at the canyon and thinking big thoughts when I noticed some kind of swallow come shooting out over the canyon into the rising air. He rolled neatly upside down and did a one-G pull for a few seconds, then rolled upright. I saw another bird do it while I was getting the camera ready. Then I sat for an hour with the camera in hand, waiting, but the show was over.

  An attraction on the south rim that’s worth your time is the IMAX theater in Canyon Village, right near the airport. The show there is a special about the canyon. On that giant screen the great canyon is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

  The best part of the film is a segment filmed from an ultralight flying down a gorge into the bottom of the canyon. That is flight as you dreamed it on those warm summer nights when you were young. The final moments of the film are scenes of an ultralight flying above the canyon as the sun drops lower and lower. This scene will bring tears to your eyes.

  As you leave the theater, ponder the fact that the flying the film depicts is now illegal.

  Heading southeast out of Grand Canyon Airport, Humphreys Peak north of Flagstaff is at one o’clock. The Queen floats above the pine forest of the highlands as the Grand Canyon recedes to the north. Then finally I look and it’s gone, hidden from view.

  An old volcano, Humphreys Peak at 12,633 feet is well above me and today is hosting rain showers. Dark clouds obscure the peak. Here is a graphic illustration of the advantage that elevation bestows on living things in this desert country. Ahead of me and on my left in the lowland is the Painted Desert, and it’s not getting a drop. Oh, there are clouds out there, most spawned by Humphreys, and rain is falling from some of them. Yet the hot dry air absorbs the raindrops after they have fallen just a couple thousand feet. Nowhere today but on the big mountain is liquid water reaching the ground. So the slopes of Humphreys are covered with trees.

  Soon I am flying over a landscape that shows graphic evidence of a volcanic past. The Strawberry Crater Wilderness and Sunset Crater National Monument are two areas named after the biggest cones, but there are dozens, as well as numerous black lava flows.

  I pick up I-40 going east from Flagstaff and follow it on the south side. The desert underneath the Queen is extraordinarily green this year, as green as I have ever seen it in August. Yet it is a hard, desolate land all the same. Even the names give you a taste of it. Canyon Diablo—Devil Canyon—is normally dry this time of year—its watercourse is San Francisco Wash. The village of Two Guns sits where the highway and railroad cross Canyon Diablo. Not Gloversville or Cooperstown, but Two Guns.

  East of Two Guns and five or six miles south of the highway is Meteor Crater, which
the first white men in this area thought was volcanic in origin. Nope. At least fifty thousand years ago and probably more a 300,000-ton meteor came into the atmosphere at so steep an angle that it escaped incineration. This crater is the impact point.

  This eroded relic of an ancient catastrophe attracts me and I fly over it in the Cannibal Queen. From up here it doesn’t look so big. But that crater is 4,000 feet in diameter and 600 feet deep. I’ve stood on the rim. Big as it is, it’s still a dimple compared to the Grand Canyon, but then as meteors go, the one that hit here was a mere pebble.

  Scientists say that if a meteor over six miles in diameter ever hits the earth, life on this planet will cease. So people who like to worry about things they can’t do anything about want the federal government to spend hundreds of millions to keep an eye peeled skyward just in case. What all of us humans will do if the alarm is ever given isn’t precisely explained.

  The FBO at Winslow doesn’t answer my calls, but after the third one the FBO at Holbrook does. I ask him if he has fuel. Yes. So I overfly Winslow and continue the 30 miles to Holbrook.

  The wind is out of the west—I’ve been enjoying another tail-wind—so I enter on a right base for runway 21. As I flare the wind gets squirrelly, gusting from odd directions. This is the desert.

  Inside the FBO office they have a board with photos of some of the niftier planes that have stopped here. On the board are three photos of a Waco biplane owned and flown by a popular singer that was badly smacked in a crash here last year. The prop was bent around the cowling, the gear wiped off, the lower wing crumpled like a rag, the fuselage deformed. This was no garden-variety goundloop.

  The guy who pumped the gas explains: “What the singer told the FAA was this: A gust of wind caught him on landing, after he had touched down on the mains but before he got the tail wheel down. The plane probably weathercocked on him. So he added full power and honked it into the air.

  “But he was too slow to fly and stalled. Maybe a gust or the wind shifted while he was just a few knots above a stall. Whatever, he fell maybe fifty feet and hit with full power on, which is why the prop is bent like that. Wiped off the gear, really bent everything there was to bend.”

  Looking at the photos, I think the pilot was lucky he hit in a flat attitude. I doubt if he stalled it 50 feet up—my guess is it fell about 20 feet. Much higher and the nose would have been more down at impact.

  These pictures are a sobering lesson for a tail-wheel pilot. Once you pull the power to idle and begin the flare, never ever add power to go around. No matter what. It is better to groundloop at a low speed trying to get stopped than stall somewhere off the ground and drop it in. And in gusty, shifting winds, a stall is almost inevitable.

  This story also illustrates the benefits of the three-point, full-stall landing. When the mains arrive on deck, you want the tail wheel down simultaneously or as soon thereafter as possible. Most tail wheels are steerable, so when coupled with the effect of the rudder, you can prevent the plane from weathercocking— if the tail wheel is on the ground and you are holding it down with full back stick. If it’s up, all you have is rudder and you may not have enough.

  Some tail-wheel pilots feel more comfortable with wheel landings in gusty conditions. A wheel landing is flown at a slightly higher approach speed than a full-stall—in the Queen, 85 MPH—and the plane is literally flown onto the runway at that speed. The mains touch while the tail is still up in the flight attitude. One then lets the plane decelerate while working stick and rudder to hold the plane straight and overcome the effects of cross wind and gusts. If everything goes right these landings work out. Yet if something goes wrong, such as too much wind or a misapplication of stick or rudder, the plane will be badly damaged in the resulting accident. Perhaps totally demolished.

  The amount of dynamic energy varies with the square of the speed, so obviously an accident at 35 MPH will result in much less damage than one at 70 or 75. The old tail-wheel pros I have talked to recommend the full-stall landing, which is precisely why I use it exclusively.

  Scrub off every knot you can before you put her on the ground, then if things go to hell, all you’ll have to worry about is a scraped wingtip and damaged pride.

  As I taxi out on the narrow taxiway that parallels the Holbrook runway, the waist-high sagebrush rubs against the underside of the Queen’s wingtips. This gently rolling desert is covered with the stuff—this summer the plants are green, healthy and big. An off-field landing in this brush would probably set the Queen or any other light plane over on its nose or back.

  East of Holbrook the land loses a lot of its greenish tinge and becomes pink and beige. Somewhere here is the Petrified Forest. Today I can’t spot the park highway even with the aid of the chart. Maybe if I circled, but I don’t have time.

  I’m going to Albuquerque and park the Queen. John Weisbart has arranged for a hangar and will send one of his employees, Scott Olsen, to meet me in my Cessna T-210. I’ll spend a week or so in Colorado on business, do some writing, wash my underwear and jeans.

  I’m supposed to call John from Gallup, New Mexico, 110 nautical miles west of Albuquerque, and he’ll launch Scott to meet me. Yet there are thunderstorms building in western New Mexico. I can see them plainly now, dark clouds with high tops.

  There’s one just north of Gallup as I make my approach. The airport at Gallup consists of a single runway, 6-24, lying in a valley with ridges on both sides. Field elevation is 6,469 feet above sea level. Temperature about 90. The wind is gusting and shifting from the northwest at about 12 knots as I make my approach to runway 24. I expect trouble on final and am ready when the wind flops to almost 90 degrees cross. The landing isn’t pretty but it’s safe.

  Standing on the top of the rear seat trickling fuel into the tank, I can plainly see rain falling from that boomer to the north. Another storm is off to the southeast. Eastward seems clear enough, but for how long? I feel vaguely uneasy.

  Inside the terminal the FAA has a Flight Service Station. One man is working there today. In a few minutes he gets to me. He tells me nothing I don’t already know, but I listen carefully anyway. Isolated thunderstorms across western New Mexico moving south at ten knots, chance of thunderstorms with 35 knots of wind and reduced ceilings and visibility all afternoon at Albuquerque. Thirty-five knots? Uh-huh.

  I call John in Boulder from a pay phone in the lobby. He’ll launch Scott. “No hurry,” I tell John. “Tell Scott there’s thunderstorms around and to be careful.”

  Outside I pause to smoke my pipe, look at the sky, and study the wind sock. Sixty, seventy degrees of crosswind, about twelve knots. The thunderstorm north of town is noticeably closer. The wall of rain is only a few miles north.

  Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

  The Flight Service specialist doesn’t answer my calls as I taxi out. I decide to skip the run-up and taxi straight onto the runway. There is a Cessna 152 in the pattern on the downwind.

  I feed in throttle and rudder as I add power. Stick forward and right. The Queen accelerates slowly. The air is hot and thin.

  Come on, baby!

  As the tail rises the wind increases dramatically and shifts farther right, toward the north. Uh-oh! The adrenaline smacks me.

  Fifty MPH. Fifty-five.

  I can feel the wind trying to shove the Queen sideways. I have left rudder crammed in and the stick almost full right.

  Sixty!

  The stick is full right when the left main wheel comes off. Only the right main is on the ground.

  Sixty-five!

  I ease in back stick and the right main breaks loose. The plane immediately goes sideways toward the left edge of the runway. This I counter by a gentle turn to the right—ten degrees, fifteen, twenty.

  She’s climbing slowly, very slowly. There’s a hundred feet … two hundred. The altimeter reads 6,700 feet. I have the Queen at 70 MPH and she’s sluggish, doesn’t want to accelerate or climb faster than this snail’s pace. But she is going up.

&nb
sp; The heart rate begins to slow. Made it!

  If I turn south the wind climbing that ridge should give me a lift upward. I’ll try it.

  Gingerly I lower the left wing and keep the ball centered with rudder. The nose tracks around and I can see the ground begin to pass beneath faster as the wind starts to push. I keep the needle on the airspeed indicator right at 70.

  The ridge is coming toward me, now dead ahead. Altitude 6,800. But the needle on the altimeter is motionless.

  She’s not climbing!

  God! The air is descending here, not ascending! She’s climbing, but only as fast as the air is going down!

  The ridge ahead is getting closer. The combined velocity of the moving air and the plane drives her at that ridge at a sickening rate.

  She’s still not climbing! Maybe 150 feet above the ground now. Why, oh, why did I ever leave that valley? Coonts, you are a fool. A crash here would serve you right. You’ve earned it.

  Now the needle moves. Up 50 feet … now 100.

  If I can’t clear the ridge I’ll chop the mixture and stall her in, minimize the damage.

  But she’s climbing. Agonizingly slow. Now 6,900 feet, now 7,000.

  I decide to risk a turn to the east. If I can stop her progress southward I’ve saved this situation. Why didn’t I think of that thirty seconds ago?

  Now 7,100 feet. Wings level heading east. The land slowly falls away as the Cannibal Queen claws for the sky.

  Now I am aware of the radio. The 152 is waving off. Too much crosswind. He asks the Flight Service specialist what the wind is.

  “Ninety degrees off, eighteen gusting to twenty-one knots.”

  Mother of God! Twenty-one knots of crosswind! And I took off in that!

  Still shaking, I fly eastward climbing slowly as the 152 pilot talks to the FAA man about the wind. Now it’s out of the north, coming right out of that solid wall of rain and black cloud. The Cessna pilot decides to try an approach to runway 6.

  I don’t want to listen. I turn off the radio and meditate on the fortune that sometimes saves fools, sometimes destroys them.