After years of maneuvering, the arguments were finally presented in a federal court in Seattle, at the heart of Boeing country. They were heard in 1985, in a proceeding without a jury, by a judge named Fitzgerald. The first problem for Boeing and its codefendants was to persuade him that the artificial horizon and comparator had been well designed. This was not difficult. For every criticism of the designs made by the plaintiffs, Boeing had a credible answer. It so happened that Fitzgerald had been a pilot, and he understood the compromises – lightness, reliability, size – necessary in the practical world of flight. He must also have understood, given Boeing’s reputation, that this was simply the best technology that money could buy. When Boeing asked the plaintiffs’ experts to describe better designs, they could not. Fitzgerald decided against all claims of negligence.
Boeing’s attorneys had a more difficult problem in attempting to maintain that Chandurkar’s findings were wrong – that Air India’s artificial horizon had indeed never failed. A more likely explanation, they said, was that Kukar had succumbed to vertigo. This goes back to William Ocker’s discovery on the spinning Barany chair – that the sense of balance is worse than neutral in flight. A half-century later, while flying an airplane that Ocker could not have imagined, Kukar was overcome by a false sense of turning right, and he rolled left in response to it. His ‘My instrument!’ was an expression of his primitive disbelief. His artificial horizon showed the same extreme left bank as the copilot’s. The copilot’s ‘Mine’s is also toppled!’ was evidence that he had looked across the panel and had seen that the instruments agreed. The comparator had worked perfectly because it had never illuminated. The flight engineer’s recommendation of the standby horizon, ‘No, but go by this!’ was meant as good advice on what to do when in doubt.
Chandurkar had heard these arguments in Bombay and had found them unconvincing, but Boeing’s attorneys had now had years to refine them. To the question of how an experienced pilot could succumb to vertigo, they asked the equally difficult question of how such a pilot could succumb to a simple instrument failure.
Then they went after Kukar. He was an easy target – a heavy drinker and a diabetic who had temporarily lost his pilot’s license for medical reasons three years before the accident. This too had been known to Chandurkar and dismissed as unimportant, but Boeing’s attorneys had dug up additional dirt.
On New Year’s Eve, the night before the accident, Kukar had gone out drinking with his family. Boeing found a retired filmmaker named Saran who lived in Kukar’s Bombay apartment building and who while riding the elevator with him on New Year’s morning had noticed that Kukar was in a particularly friendly mood, and that he smelled of alcohol.
Saran was a thin and ascetic man, a strict vegetarian, and for good reason something of an anti-American. It turned out that his son had been murdered while visiting Texas, and Saran held a grudge. He had no desire to help Boeing and the American insurance industry defend themselves against the families of the Indian dead. Nonetheless he was also a moralist, and because he did not approve of Kukar’s intemperance, he allowed himself finally to be flown to Seattle for a deposition, which was recorded on video.
The camera focused tightly on Saran’s face, creating the suspicion of a halo around his head. Saran told his story of smelling Kukar’s breath.
Off camera, a voice asked aggressively, ‘How can you be sure you weren’t smelling shaving lotion?’
Another voice said sarcastically, ‘Ah yes, the famous shaving lotion defense!’
In astonishment, Saran raised his hands to his mouth and said, ‘Do you mean he drank shaving lotion?’
When Judge Fitzgerald saw the video during the hearings he smiled for the only time.
No one claimed that Kukar was drunk when he got to the airport. But Boeing discovered that he was fasting and taking an oral hypoglycemic in order to fool a glucose tolerance test that he was scheduled to take the following week. The combination of the drug, the fasting, and the drinking of the night before meant that when Kukar taxied out for takeoff he was suffering from low blood sugar – a dangerous condition for a diabetic, and potentially disturbing to the functioning of the inner ear.
That was Boeing’s pitch. Kukar was an experienced pilot but also a diabetic with a dangerous sense of balance. The sloppiness of his takeoff and departure fit the profile of someone who already was suffering from vertigo and ignoring his instruments. After he crossed the shoreline and no longer had a visible horizon, he inevitably lost control. And his copilot was simply incompetent.
The same medical evidence could have been used to explain why, after the failure of his artificial horizon, Kukar was unable to cope. Even so, Fitzgerald accepted Boeing’s scenario and declared in the end that no failure of the instrument had occurred. It is hard to know whether he really believed this or whether perhaps he was engaged instead in a deeper, airman’s understanding of justice. When later I asked the plaintiffs’ attorney about it, he called the decision terrible. On the narrow question of the instrument’s failure, he was probably right. Boeing’s attorney disagreed, and called the decision wise. And in a larger sense than he intended, he was right. The killing was all Kukar’s fault anyway.
In the final analysis, the underlying cause seems oddly enough to have been the very extent of Kukar’s flying experience. Although this is difficult for outsiders to comprehend, there comes a point in a pilot’s life when the sky feels like home. In my case it came after 4,000 flight hours, during a certain takeoff on a bright winter morning in Lincoln, Nebraska, westbound to California. Once airborne I retracted the landing gear and rolled into an early left turn, and as I looked back at the leading edge of the wing slicing stiffly above the frozen prairie, I realized that no difference existed for me between the earth and sky; it was as if with these wings I could now walk in the air.
Kukar too must have known such a moment and may have fallen into the trap which in later years can lie beyond it – a frustration with the complexities of life on the ground, and a lack of control in personal affairs heightened by love affairs or drink or failing health, which defeats old pilots and leads them to the tragic conclusion that they have ever only been truly at home when seated in their obedient airplanes in the sky.
Yes, the sky at times can seem as familiar as a familiar landscape, but on dark nights and inside the clouds its alien nature reemerges. Again then it becomes a surreal and dangerous place across which we humans may move, but only with care and wonder. The cockpit at such times is like a capsule hurtling through some distant reach of space. And yet that reach of space may lie just overhead, and may be entered only seconds after an airplane lifts off the runway. Pilots going out into those conditions need to hesitate before they power up for their takeoffs. They need that moment to run through the first critical moves of the flight, to shift their thoughts away from the ground, and to summon the concentration necessary to navigate the strange sky ahead. Kukar did none of that. He flew badly and crashed because he leaped too willingly into what even for him remained the unknown.
4
Inside an Angry Sky
The first winter of my cargo flying was the worst because my days spent writing seemed increasingly wasteful, and I had yet to understand my nights. As others sat down to their warm dinners, I headed out alone and in darkness from the San Francisco airport, on routes across all the mountainous West, through a steady succession of weather fronts and violent low-pressure systems spinning in from the North Pacific. It was dangerous, low-paid work, in battered old airplanes that were poorly maintained by mechanics who joked about ‘pencil whipping’ the equipment into the air. It taught me hard lessons about in-flight failures – of engines, electrical systems, and instruments. More important, it taught me about the cockpit as a monastic cell – to hold myself in it at the head of rain-soaked runways under heavy clouds, and to reduce the instrument panel to its barest indications, and only then to push the throttles forward and allow the wings to lift me into the storm
s and the inner landscapes of the mind.
It was during that difficult winter that I reread Night Flight, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic romanticization of self-sacrifice among the pioneering French airmail pilots in South America. Although Saint-Exupéry was one of those early pilots, he was a notoriously dreamy one; and it was as a working pilot myself now that I rejected his work as inauthentic, disdaining its sense of the common good, its maudlin emotionalism, and its overwrought musings on the glories of the mission. Closer to my own emotions then was another old novel, The Death Ship, written by the German anarchist B. Traven, which I stumbled across in paperback at the airport newsstand in El Paso among the usual cowboy stories and religious tracts. Presented as a sea adventure ‘by the author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre!’ with a cover drawing of men swimming away from a sinking ship, it was in fact a bitter political manifesto written in a false proletarian voice, the story of a doomed and nationless stoker who cursed the society that excluded him and the commerce that sent him to sea. I myself had nothing to be bitter about – I had chosen this path – but I was cold and tired and underpaid, and I could not help resenting my cargos of last-minute gifts and unimportant documents, the casual spinoffs of smarter or more certain lives than mine. That winter threatened never to end.
And then one dark night, while strapped into a cockpit spitting snow, I crossed a cloud crevasse and glimpsed the lights of a single ranch house far below. Despite my earlier disdain, a scene from Saint-Exupéry came to mind. I have read the words again since.
Sometimes, after a hundred miles of steppes as desolate as the sea, he encountered a lonely farmhouse that seemed to be sailing backwards from him in a great prairie sea, with its freight of human lives.
My airplane was running poorly, and shuddering at times as though it might shake itself apart, and staggering under a load of ice that had accumulated along its leading edges because its deicing system had once again failed, but it was the view of those lights that unnerved me.
Gathered round their lamp-lit table, those peasants do not guess that their desire carries so far, out into the vastness of the night that hems them in.
The depth of the clouds, fleetingly apparent through the crevasse, forced on me the realization of an unbridgeable distance from the world. Saint-Exupéry had after all known something about this night sky. Like one of his imagined characters, I began actively to contemplate the possibility that I would never return from it – something that previously I had believed no real pilot would take the time to do.
I told myself that I was just discouraged. But for weeks afterward I could not shake the sense of doom. The weather did not relent. Every evening I drove in isolation to the airport, away from the satisfied city crowds, away from friendships and the beauty of women, to endure the delays for takeoff under black rain, when sometimes a terrible sleepiness would overcome me. Saint-Exupéry knew that sleepiness, too; he called it an inertia which paralyzes men who face the unknown. To me it felt like complete physical relaxation, anticipation, the slowest form of fear. A more active fear took its place after takeoff, causing me to fly slavishly, without raising my eyes from the instruments. It was dangerous because I kept yearning for the ground.
The winter closed with a violent storm that flooded the rivers and blew down power lines and trees. The sheer force of that storm forced me at last to look up from the instruments again – and when I did I discovered a place fantastic even to me, far away in the wild winds, where rain fell upward and blizzards blew among cloud mountains and the walls of great caverns erupted in light. The passage of my flight through that weather attracted an electrical charge from the clouds, a flash and bang that burned a hole in the right engine nacelle and mushroomed the top of the tail – and the airplane just shrugged it off. After returning I stood in the wind-driven rain and watched the workers back their vans up to the airplane to unload its cargo. I did not tell them where I had been. How could they have understood? Even to me it was a wonder that this little metal machine, so battered and unloved, had carried me there. It was late at night, and I should have driven home and slept, but I was not tired. I felt renewed not because I had survived but because I had the means and the inclination to fly again into that angry sky. No pilot could ever be at home there, but I for one had stopped yearning for the ground.
That little piece of history may explain why, years later, I sometimes still go out hunting for bad weather, flying low in simple airplanes to explore the inner reaches of the clouds. Less experienced pilots occasionally join me, not to learn formal lessons about weather flying but with a more advanced purpose in mind – to accompany me in the slow accumulation of experience through circumstances that never repeat in a place that defies mastery. Our destinations lie in the turbulent eddies of the lower atmosphere, places called ‘cyclones’ or ‘lows’ on the weather maps, but also known simply as ‘storms,’ a word which better reflects their effect on the sky.
It is obvious that flying intentionally into such places, and lingering there, is the kind of behavior easily disapproved of. We have critics for whom the intentional pursuit of severe weather amounts to heresy; they grow angry about the risks we take, and about our apparent lack of judgement. I have always understood their concern. But the pursuit of such weather is an internal act, not a public one, and it is neither as reckless nor as arbitrary as at first it may seem. It involves dangers, of course, but to a degree unimaginable to the critics, those dangers are controllable. Because of the mental concentration required by such flying, there is never the slightest question of survival – in fact, it is such discipline that gives the exercise its content.
The secret of good storm flying is to stay low, in slow and vulnerable airplanes, and to resist the pursuit of performance. By the standards of practical transportation, therefore, it is an artificial problem. Most weather lies within the first 20,000 feet off the ground, where gravity compresses the atmospheric mass into a dense soup, and above which the airlines for economic reasons as well as safety and comfort must climb and cruise. Engineers have designed away the storms, leaving professional pilots to fret about the kind of unimportant turbulence that startles their most anxious passengers. It seems a pity. With a few simple equations, meteorologists can prove that the lower atmosphere, where the simple airplane must fly, remains rich with surprise.
That is the allure of storm flying. There is no graduation from the experience, only an end to each flight. The techniques we practice involve a certain calmness under pressure. More important, they involve ways of picturing the storms, of understanding the weather from the weather’s inside. The airplane is merely our tool. We ride it aloft, descend in it to refuel or sleep, then ride it again, mixing nights into days, listening to the changing accents of air traffic control, exploring a continent that lies entirely within the sky. We fly the forecast, turn, and probe the forecast’s flaws. But we are not theoreticians. The airplane’s forward motion imposes a crude immediacy on our thoughts, so that even when we do not understand the weather, we may pretend that we do. Flying as much as writing teaches the need for such fictions, for discerning the patterns in a disorderly world.
On a recent Christmas, for instance, a storm was born above the Pacific in a place which for most of us can exist only in the imagination. Picture an air-world of mountains and valleys through which strong eastward winds meander. The air is a gas, and like other gasses it is compressible, and has weight, and is subject to the simple physics of motion. The winds are air molecules driven by the sun’s heat and steered on a global scale by the earth’s rotation. The mountains and valleys through which they move are immense. They consist of semi-permanent ‘highs’ into which, strangely, the winds descend, and ‘lows’ into which the winds climb. The explanation for this apparently peculiar behavior lies entirely in the language: The terms ‘high’ and ‘low’ refer not to altitude but to pressure, variations caused by the sun’s unequal heating of the earth’s surface. When the molecules are cooled, they comp
ress downward into a ‘high,’ and when they are warmed, they expand upward into a ‘low.’ These pressure variations constitute the sky’s elemental topography.
Now imagine something equally elemental, an atmospheric war caused by the same solar inequality. Across the Pacific theater, past China and Siberia to Canada, lies a great front, an undulating zone of conflict between jealous masses of polar and tropical air. The front shifts with the seasons but endures year after year. It is accompanied by high-altitude winds that have been squeezed and accelerated into a jet stream flowing at speeds over 100 miles per hour. Swooping and swerving among the contours of the sky, the jet stream serves as a powerful catalyst. East of the Aleutians, it catches a high-altitude corner of the North Pacific’s largest permanent low, in a part of the sky where already the atmosphere is unsettled. The immediate effect is a further drop in air pressure as molecules begin to scatter more quickly than they can be replaced. Such high-altitude scattering, known to meteorologists as ‘horizontal divergence,’ is the most important mechanism in the life of storms. It creates a form of hunger whereby a pocket of low-pressure air sucks at the denser air immediately below.
That is what happened that Christmas. The storm’s birth was typically fast. Cooling as it rose, the Pacific air condensed into cloud and worked up an appetite of its own. The pressure continued to drop. The result was an odd sort of digging at the sky – the creation of an atmospheric hole through which the air surged upward, away from the earth. The hole steepened as it deepened, the upward surge intensified, and rain began to fall. Satellites photographed it on the second day. From across the horizons, low-altitude winds rushed forward, only to be deflected to the right by the globe’s rotation. The deflected winds gave the storm its counterclockwise twirl and an indication of its power. Inexorably it drew the opposing air masses into direct conflict. Steered by steadier winds aloft, the storm drifted eastward toward the continent like an eddy spinning downstream. By the third day it appeared on the map as a massive winter storm, centered 500 miles west of the Alaskan panhandle, sending the long arm of a cold front toward the California coast, where I waited with two other pilots.
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