Aloft Read online

  Two years later, in 1929, a young military pilot and engineer from MIT named James Doolittle made a ‘blind’ landing after flying a complete circuit around an airport in a special biplane modified with a domed cockpit from which he could not see outside. The landing itself was a technical dead end. Once Doolittle was over the field he reduced the power and waited until the biplane plunked onto the grass – an impractical technique for airlines then or now. More significant were the special devices that made the precisely flown circuit possible. The airplane was equipped with navigational radios, an airspeed indicator, an improved altimeter, a turn indicator, and two new gyroscopic instruments which Sperry’s son, also named Elmer, had developed with Doolittle’s guidance – a gyroscopic compass and an artificial horizon. This combination was so effective that it still forms the core of instrument panels today. Doolittle reported that using the artificial horizon was ‘like cutting a porthole through the fog to look at the real horizon.’ But that was the easy part. There remained the more stubborn problem of belief.

  Marked for life by his near collision with the Statler Hotel, Carl Crane read the descriptions of Doolittle’s 1929 flight with fascination. He was now an Army instructor at a training base near San Antonio, Texas. Though his superior officers disapproved of instrument flying, Crane was convinced of the need for gyroscopes. He finally got permission to cover over a cockpit and turn one of the biplanes into an instrument trainer. While he was at work on this, William Ocker wandered into the hangar.

  Ocker was the man who had lost control of his airplane while flying with one of Sperry’s first turn indicators back in 1918 – and he had been worrying about it ever since. He didn’t look like much of a pilot, with his bifocals and his mournful puritan’s face, but he had a powerful mind and all the conviction of a missionary. The truth about instrument flying had come to him in 1926, during a standard medical examination at Crissy Field in San Francisco. Part of the routine was a crude test of balance involving the use of a Barany chair, a rotating seat on which the pilot spun with closed eyes. Ocker easily passed the required test, but afterward the examining doctor, who was an old friend, told him that he would now demonstrate to him that his senses could indeed be fooled. This time Ocker felt the chair begin to turn, and he guessed the direction correctly – but when the chair slowed, he felt that it had stopped, and when it stopped, he felt that it had started to turn in the opposite direction.

  For the doctor the demonstration was a parlor game, a gentle amusement with the inner ear. For William Ocker, however, it amounted to a stunning revelation: The sense of accelerating into a turn is the same as that of decelerating from the opposite turn. Here at last was the explanation for the persistence of so much confusion and death. The chair had induced the same false sensation that eight years before had caused him to lose control while flying with the turn indicator and that still today was leading even those few pilots who accepted their inability to feel the bank to distrust their instruments and roll for no apparent reason into dangerous spiral dives.

  It was a moment to equal the Wright brothers’ first full circle. The story goes that Ocker said nothing but left the doctor’s office, went immediately to his airplane, and retrieved his personal portable air-driven turn indicator, which he proceeded to rig up inside a shoe box. He cut a viewing hole into one end of the box, attached a penlight and a black fabric hood to it, and returned that afternoon to the office, where he challenged his friend the doctor to trick him again – with the difference that this time he would look into the shoe box. Again Ocker experienced the false sensations, but because he refused to believe them and relied exclusively on the turn indicator, he could not be fooled. The doctor could hardly have grasped the significance of what he was seeing, but there on his simple spinning chair the bespectacled pilot William Ocker was giving birth to modern instrument flying. He had discovered the most disturbing limitation of human flight – that instinct is worse than useless in the clouds, that it can induce deadly spirals, and that as a result having gyroscopes is not enough, that pilots must learn against all contradictory sensations the difficult discipline of an absolute belief in their instruments. Perhaps equally as important, he had invented a way to prove it.

  Ocker became so obsessed with the spinning chair that the Army hospitalized him twice for sanity tests, then banished him to Texas. Still he refused to quit. When Ocker met Crane in the hangar in Texas, he invited him for a spin in a revolving chair, and then and there Crane became Ocker’s disciple. The two men began a joint exploration of all known aspects of flight inside the clouds. In 1932 they published Blind Flight in Theory and Practice, the first systematic analysis of instrument flying. It was dedicated, no doubt with some bitterness, ‘To those courageous airmen who have risked criticism and loss of professional prestige by precisely relating their own difficult experiences during bad weather flight.’

  The book had an enormous influence, though more at first with the Russians than with the U.S. Army Air Corps, which adopted it as a training text only at the outbreak of World War II. Never mind. The authors effectively laid to rest the old faith in flying by instinct. They described the physics of the turn and the confusion experienced by the inner ear, but their most dramatic argument grew out of an experiment with pigeons. From everything humans had learned after three decades of winged flight, it now seemed likely that birds, too, must be unable to fly without a visible horizon. Ocker and Crane decided to find out. They acquired a few pigeons, blindfolded them, took them up in biplanes, and threw them out. Sure enough the birds dropped into fluttering emergency descents – they panicked and went down like feathered parachutes. It is possible, of course, that they did not like the blindfolds, which were made of Bull Durham tobacco pouches. But anyway, the experiment was the kind pilots could understand. If God had meant birds to fly in the clouds, He would have given them gyroscopes.

  Birds cannot fly through heavy rain. They get sucked up by thunderstorms, frozen by altitude, and burned by lightning. They lose control and crash, fly into obstacles, wander offshore, drift off course, get hopelessly lost, run out of fuel, and die by the millions. They would rather not migrate in bad weather, and they usually don’t. Nonetheless, it appears that Ocker and Crane may have been wrong. There is evidence now that perhaps some birds do occasionally fly inside the clouds.

  This is big news, though as time has shown it is not news of the sort that people seek out. Word of it first appeared back in 1972, in the proceedings of a NASA symposium on animal navigation. Hidden among reports like ‘When the Beachhopper Looks at the Moon’ and ‘Anemomenotactic Orientation in Beetles and Scorpions’ (When a Bug Feels the Wind) was a paper entitled ‘Nocturnal Bird Migration in Opaque Clouds.’ It was written by Donald Griffin, a Harvard zoologist who earlier had discovered the use of sonar by bats. Griffin reported that he had borrowed a military radar and on overcast nights in New York had tracked birds that seemed to be flying inside the clouds. There were only a few such birds, and Griffin was able to track them only for a couple of miles, but they appeared to be proceeding under control.

  Griffin’s biggest problem was uncertainty over the precise flight conditions at the birds’ altitude. Was the weather really as thick as it looked from below? Were the birds really flying blind? Griffin had good reasons to believe so, but as a scientist he had to be cautious. His final report, in 1973, reinforced the earlier findings but was more carefully entitled ‘Oriented Bird Migration in or between Opaque Cloud Layers.’

  To ornithologists interested in bird navigation, the difference between ‘in’ and ‘between’ seems to be an unimportant detail – their concentration being instead on the observation that Griffin’s birds could apparently find their way without reference to the stars or the ground. But to the birds, whose first job – like that of pilots – must be to control their bank angles, the distinction might be crucial. The ornithologists seem not to know that they should care, as if for all their curiosity about the birds’ earthly habitats
, the issue of the spiral dive has never even entered their minds. Griffin, a former pilot, understands the issue’s importance. I once sought him out and expressed my frustration that so many ornithologists seem to be stuck on the ground. He laughed. ‘I keep telling them, “Gee, birds fly!”’

  Assuming they fly in the clouds, the question is, How? Ornithologists have no answer, and they shy away from speculation. It is known that birds navigate by watching the ground and the positions of the sun, the moon, and the stars – none of which would help them maintain control in the clouds. But they may also use a host of nonvisual clues and may use mental ‘maps’ based on sound, smell, air currents, variations in gravitational pull, and other factors. Experiments have shown that some species are extremely sensitive to magnetic forces. The heads of these species contain magnetite crystals surrounded by nerves, which may give them an intuitive knowledge of their direction (and possibly location) in the earth’s magnetic field. A highly refined and error-free sense of direction, or of change in direction, could in theory amount to a non-gyroscopic turn indicator – a biological crutch for winged flight in the clouds.

  The other possibility is that some birds actually do have gyroscopes of a primitive sort. This is less far-fetched than it seems. The rhythmic flapping of wings could have the effect of Foucault’s pendulum, allowing a bird to sense turns without any external cue. A pendulum is more than a hanging weight; it is a hanging weight that has been pushed and is swinging freely. Swinging gives the pendulum its special ability to maintain spatial orientation. Léon Foucault was the French physicist who first used one, in 1851, to demonstrate the rotation of the earth: Though the pendulum appeared to change its direction as it swung, in fact the plane of its motion remained constant, and the apparent change was caused by the turning of the earth underneath it. Foucault knew that a spinning wheel would possess the same properties of spatial orientation, and though he never perfected such a device (largely because he could not figure out how to drive it), he coined the term ‘gyroscope’ for it – from the Greek gyros, for ‘rotation,’ and skopeein, for ‘viewing.’

  If birds do rely on the pendulum effect in some sense to ‘see’ through the clouds, they are not alone. Flies and mosquitoes (among more than 85,000 other species of Diptera) use specially adapted vibrating rods to maintain spatial orientation in flight. Not only can they turn sharply, roll inverted, and land on the underside of leaves, but they can do it in a fog.

  Pilots, too, have relied on pendulums. It is said that an airliner inbound to New York in the 1950s lost all its gyroscopes in heavy weather over Block Island. The captain was a wise old man who had risen with the airlines from the earliest airmail days and was now approaching retirement. A lesser pilot might have fallen for the trap of intuition. But the captain simply took out his pocket watch, dangled it from its chain, and began to swing it toward the instrument panel. Flying by the pendulum and the compass, he proceeded the length of Long Island in the clouds. After breaking into the clear near the airport, he landed and wished his passengers a good day.

  The story is not impossible. It came to mind one night when I flew out over the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Oregon, alone at the controls of a borrowed single-engine airplane. High clouds darkened the sky. The light of a lonely fishing boat drifted by below. Flying a mile above the water, I headed beyond the boat and into the complete blackness of approaching weather. It was an experience of solitude: in dark clouds over a wild ocean, an absolute night, the cockpit a world of its own, the instrument panel a landscape within it. The instruments glowed in a warm light, abstracting the strange story of flight’s pure motion.

  The gyroscopes functioned perfectly. The radios were blissfully silent. I hooked a metal pen to a fishing line and dangled it from a knob on the ceiling. Flying by the artificial horizon, I made a steep turn and watched the pen dangle toward the titled floor. Then I straightened out, pushed the pen toward the instrument panel, and released it. It swung for almost thirty seconds before requiring another push. The problem, of course, was that each renewal would erase the pendulum’s spatial memory. Nonetheless, I thought the device might work. After turning north, the direction in which the compass is most confused by the bank, I covered the gyroscopes with slips of paper.

  The night air was smooth. The pen swung rhythmically toward the panel and back. Eventually it redirected itself to the left. This could only have meant that the airplane had banked and turned to the right. I rolled to the left gingerly, hoping to raise the right wing just enough to return to straight flight. The pen seemed to stabilize in its new direction. I renewed the swing, shoving the pen again directly toward the panel. It soon confirmed that the airplane had indeed leveled its wings and stopped turning. The compass settled, showing that earlier I had strayed twenty degrees to the right. Lowering the left wing cautiously, watching the pen swing to the right, I crept back to the original heading. Later, when I tried to make a large turn, I lost control and spiraled and had to peek at the gyroscopes. But with the wings level again, I flew on for miles, learning to work with the swinging pen. Trust comes slowly in the indication of turns. It is a small faith that allows us to fly so deeply into the sky.

  3

  On a Bombay Night (The Turn continued)

  This is a story about that faith. On another black night, at the end of the first day of 1978, a Boeing 747 with 213 people aboard taxied for takeoff at the airport in Bombay, the great port city on India’s western coast. The airplane belonged to Air India and was operating as Flight 855 bound for Dubai, an oil-rich city of the United Arab Emirates, where many of the passengers worked. In its belly it carried a cargo of betel leaves, a mild stimulant chewed by Indian laborers and destined in this case for the homesick expatriates of the Arabian Peninsula.

  The night sky over Bombay was clear, moonless, and hazy with smoke from the city. A balmy ocean breeze blew across the airport from the nearby Arabian Sea. The Boeing had arrived from New York the day before and had flown on a local training mission, during which it had struck a bird, damaging the right wing’s leading edge. Twelve hours late now because of the subsequent repairs, it moved into position at the head of Bombay’s main west-facing runway.

  The man in command was Captain V. I. Kukar, at age fifty a senior pilot who had logged nearly 18,000 flight hours during twenty-two years with the airline. His copilot I. Virmari, age forty-three, was also highly experienced. Slightly behind them sat a man named Faria, age fifty-three, the flight engineer, whose job was to look after the 747’s intertwined and redundant operating systems. Tonight all the systems looked good. The airplane was light and had ample margins of performance. Despite the size of the cabin that trailed behind it, the cockpit itself was a contained and intimate place, glowing in the warm lights of the instrument panels and not appreciably different from the cockpits of less imposing airplanes. The crew must have felt entirely at home there.

  They expected to reach their initial cruising altitude of 31,000 feet by following a standard departure procedure known as the ‘Seaweed One,’ which called for them after crossing the coastline to make a gentle right turn and climb away from Bombay over the night ocean.

  Cleared for takeoff just before 8:09 PM, the big, well-lit Boeing rumbled down the runway and lifted gracefully into the sky. Captain Kukar was at the controls. He held the airplane’s nose a bit lower than usual, possibly for the pleasure of a good acceleration, and called in sequence for the landing gear and flap retractions. At 8:11 the Bombay departure controller spotted Flight 855 on radar and asked it to report passing through 8,000 feet.

  Kukar answered, ‘Happy New Year to you, sir. Will report leaving eight-zero, 855.’ He was a mile offshore, climbing through 1,200 feet and rolling smoothly into the expected right turn, doing about 280 miles per hour. It was his last radio transmission. Twenty-two seconds later he and everyone else on board hit the water and died.

  Air India 855 dove steeply and at high speed into the Arabian Sea. A great number of Bombay citi
zens were outdoors enjoying the evening air and mingling along the shore, and many of them saw the airplane fall. We can understand why their impressions were confused. If it is hard to believe that something as massive as a 747 can lift into the sky, it is harder still to accept, once it is engaged in forward flight, that something so stately and certain might come plunging back down. Many years later and on the other side of the world, this is what bewildered the observers of TWA’s catastrophic 747 fuel tank explosion off New York. The fireball in the sky seemed to have been caused by a missile fired from the surface, not only because the flaming fuselage soared momentarily upward, but also because the mind required some such immediate explanation for what could only have been the unthinkable reality of a great airplane going down.

  Air India went down much closer to the shore – so close that people clearly heard the boom of the impact. At least one witness believed that a meteor had fallen. Others saw the airplane explode in flight, or plunge in a streak of fire, or explode on impact, or slip fully intact beneath the waves. It was all over so very quickly. Afterward the sea lay as black and untroubled as it had lain before. The wonder is that a few witnesses actually did understand what had happened, as the subsequent investigation verified, and that they were able to describe with some precision the external appearance of the accident: the proud flight passing overhead and climbing offshore, the beginnings of the shallow right turn, then the strange reversal – the sharp roll to the left, and the dive at impossibly steep bank angles into the ocean.

  The newspapers naturally speculated on the possibility of sabotage and political terrorism. An anonymous letter described a conspiracy involving counterfeit dollars and a bomb in the betel leaves. But as the Indian Navy began to salvage pieces of the airplane, the investigators found no signs of fire, heat, or inflight breakup. The airplane’s crash-proof ‘black boxes,’ the flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders whose purpose is to provide a history of the details leading to an accident, were recovered intact. They indicated that the airplane’s engines and controls had functioned normally, but that – on the basis of the recorded conversations and control wheel positions – something in the cockpit had gone terribly wrong. The fault appeared to be Kukar’s. On a quiet night in Bombay after twenty-two years of steady service he had flown a perfectly good airplane into the water.