Chapter 51
Chapter 51
A aron turned the plane sideways, basically eliminating our forward flight and turning the plane into a midair barn door. That door caught the wind in the face, and Aaron used it to his advantage. He brought the plane nearly to a stop, then pushed the stick forward, slipping us inside the wind and causing us to drop.
Like a rock.
As my stomach jumped into my throat, Camp—apparently unfazed by the sudden loss of altitude—tapped me on the shoulder. “You going in the front door?”
I nodded.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit rash?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
Camp nodded. “And if it’s a trap?”
“I’m not in the mood to be trapped right now.”
Camp nodded and didn’t argue with me.
I had flown inside a glider many times with Ashley, and I knew the tension for any good glider pilot was the seesaw between carrying too much energy or not enough airspeed. Without power, having shut down the engines, Ashley was maximizing the invisible. Harnessing what he could feel with his fingertips and trusting in what he knew the plane would do when put in certain situations. The point, as in any flight, was to make it to the runway and land. And do so without the aid of a motor. A glider pilot is constantly riding energy and storing energy for what comes next. Spend the energy too soon and come up short. Don’t spend it and overshoot the runway or worse, shoot through the end of it. Which is why glider pilots are possibly the most exceptional pilots bar none. They fly on feel. Period. It’s all they have. Along with a good amount of faith.
I also knew from flying with Ashley that he’d taken into account the glide ratio of the Beaver, and given the seven-mile distance to the cabin, I guessed the glide ratio of the Beaver at seven to one or better. Meaning, with the power shut down, and our current glide speed of 92 mph, we’d glide, in theory, seven feet for every one foot we descended. That, of course, would be with perfect conditions, which we did not have. The feeling in my stomach told me we were dropping like a lead weight.
Once he spotted the lake, he then had to determine wind speed and direction. Again, by feel. What his fingers told him. Ashley said almost as if to himself, “Crosswind and ten-mile-per-hour tailwind.” I had no idea how he knew that, but he seemed confident in it.
I also knew from flying gliders with Aaron that a tailwind was the kiss of death. You did not want that. Why? Because you couldn’t stop the plane.
Ashley had another problem. Skis. Once we hit the ice, he had zero control over stopping, and the lake didn’t look long enough to allow us to slide to a stop.
At fifteen hundred feet and still a mile out, Aaron harnessed the energy he needed, shoved the stick forward, dropped the nose, and sent us earthward. A sensation akin to falling off a ten-story building. My stomach jumped back into my throat, and Gunner whined as both our heads hit the top of the fuselage. We descended almost a thousand feet before Aaron pulled back on the stick, leveling us just briefly before he caught one more updraft along the ridgeline rising up along the lake. Less than a half mile from the lake, he gave it a full boot of rudder, dipped the wing, and basically turned sideways. Again. Barn door number two. He stopped our forward progress so fast, I thought Gunner would fly out of my arms. The slip once again forced our accelerated descent. I knew that at some point we had to come out of the slip and land. Come out too high and carry too much speed. That would be bad. Come out too low and carry too little. That would be bad too. Aaron came out of the slip, centered the stick, skimming treetops, centered the rudders, and then used back stick to level off. Clearing the edge of the lake, he glided out across the snow-covered landscape, hovering five to ten feet off the ice. Having leveled but still carrying too much speed, he once again pulled back on the stick, releasing energy, or airspeed, and set the plane gently on the ice.
Ashley had just put on a clinic, known only by us.
While it was a comfort to be on the ground, or at least on the frozen water beneath us, the tree line was rapidly growing larger in the windshield, and our ability to avoid it was zero. Realizing his ability to control the plane was limited to minor steering adjustments, giving him the choice of hitting either the massive pine on the left or the massive pine on the right, Ashley aimed for a small window between the two and spoke calmly. “Crack the doors open. Brace for impact.”
I wanted to ask him what he meant by “crack,” as in how far, but figured now was not the time to address that. So while Camp flung open the port side door, I opened the starboard, catching brutal cold in the face. I knew enough to know that the fuselage could crinkle, and no doubt would upon impact with something harder than itself, which was pretty much everything out here. When it did, we did not want to get trapped inside where we would freeze to death within the hour. Cracked doors offered us hope of a way out, so at least we could freeze on the outside of the plane rather than in.
In the glider world, “speed is life.” And Ashley had used it to textbook perfection flying us in undetected and safely. But now, on the ground, speed was not our friend, and neither was the ice. Matter of fact, the present combination of the two could well prove fatal. The tree line loomed large, and while my inclination was to duck, I couldn’t. Neither could Bill, who lurched left, throwing his body in front of the vice president as the tree limbs tore off the propeller and blew out the windshield. Calmly, as if driving through a car wash, Ashley threaded the needle and steered the plane between the pines, which ripped both wings off the 1947 fuselage and sent us careening into a snowbank.
Which brought us to an abrupt stop.
When the snow cleared, Gunner licked my face. His way of asking me if I was okay and telling me he never wanted to do that again. “Me neither,” I said. Then he licked me again. “I’m good, boy. Come on.” We dug ourselves out only to find that Bill had already pulled Ashley out the windshield. Ashley stood, teetering a bit, a gash on his forehead. Blood spilling down his face. Bill was mopping it up as I spoke. “You good, sir?” Any idiot could tell he wasn’t, but I also knew no power on earth was going to keep him out of that cabin.
He blinked to clear the blood from one eye. “Never better.”
Camp walked up alongside and put his hand on the vice president’s shoulder. “You really stuck that landing, sir. Almost perfect, ’cept I had to deduct two-tenths for ripping off both wings. Nine-eight is the best I can do.”
Aaron half smiled and Bill chuckled.