Mitch Cronin Posted January 7, 2005 Share Posted January 7, 2005 ....with apologies for any inaccuracies of technical reality or the flying experience... "Alternate realities?" asked Chuck. "That sounds like something out of Star Trek." They were sitting on a rock near the top of Mount Maxwell on Salt Spring Island, overlooking the Fulford valley and Burgoyne bay below them. Chuck had been in a trance while watching the ant-like motions of human logging activities in the water two thousand feet below. Sally and he had spent the better part of the day enjoying the separation the elevated view seemed to provide between reality and fantasy. Chuck preferred to think of it as the difference between getting lost in the messes of daily life, and a clear view from above it all. "Ya" said Sally, "it's like any choice we make can lead to another life... now picture a short circuit between them?... you'd have a second chance." "But we'd never know the results of one" said Chuck "before having that chance... All the choices we make come without certain knowledge of the future. Unless you're talking about some kind of time warp? Was Billy Pilgrim happy?" "What an odd thing to remember!" he thought as he and the Giant sped off down the runway... 100 knots.... 110... 120... his feet, he noticed, were somehow staying pretty busy on the rudder pedals keeping the beast on the centerline of the runway; "that was what? ten years ago!... Christ what'll Sally think of me for this now!?" He laughed it off as he considered his current choices. The trouble now was information; he didn't have quite enough! He knew none of the speeds that would normally be known for getting such a beast airborne... There'd be a speed called V1 - which he thought was like a commitment point... beyond which, no matter what happened, they'd have to keep going. "Hah!" thought Chuck... "that pretty much came as soon as I released the brakes!" Followed by a "Rotation" speed, or Vr - the speed at which he should start pulling the nose up... a stall speed, a flap speed, a gear speed, etc... but he had no idea what they were... So, leaning back on what he did know about flying, he figured all he had to do was let the thing fly itself off the ground... in fact, he could hear his instructor saying those words... 150 kts.... 160 kts... ... "Damn! this is no Cessna 150!" he said to himself as he started adding back pressure to the control column... The end of the runway was fast approaching and he could see that DJC and he weren't going to have much fun at all if he didn't take the bull by the horns... so to speak. At about 180 kts he'd finally pulled enough to get the nose off the ground and the beast started feeling like an airplane. He watched the horizon descending on the windscreen and soon after the runway disappeared from view, he realized he was indeed flying! He quickly reached for the gear handle and lifted it to retract the gear... as he sat back, he very soon realized he needed to check that nose up trend with trim... Then, as he retracted the flaps and slats, he realized he still had too much throttle into it... By the time he'd leveled it off and trimmed it nicely to stay there, he'd been up to eight thousand feet, back down to six thousand and was now managing a decent hold on seven thousand feet at about 250 kts. "Ok", he grinned... "now for some real fun!" He began rolling it left.... All he could see were lights and spaces with no light. So far there wasn't anything he could recognize, so he pulled a little as he rolled it harder. "Not too much Chuck!" he scolded himself as he remembered some basics of flying... a stable bank angle, a little back pressure to maintain altitude...and hold it there... Pretty soon he could see what must surely be the airport he'd come from. It was quite a bit further than he'd expected, but as he brought it around to his nose and leveled his wings, he could make out the runway lights that clearly distinguished it as being YYZ. "Three parallels one way and two the other, yet they only ever seem to use one at a time! What a place!" he thought to himself as he pushed the nose down a bit while thumbing the pickle switches on the column to keep it trimmed. He kept the airport centered in his windscreen and laughed out loud over visions of angry little ants scurrying like mad to get away from the giant coming toward them... "Who's Billy Pilgrim?" Sally asked. "You never read that? asked Chuck. "Slaughterhouse Five?" "No.. but you know..." her voice fading off as Chuck found himself trying to remember if Billy had been happy or not... He thought he could at least remember that he'd been terrified by some of it. Some of Billy Pilgrim's experiences had been pretty horrifying, and to become "unstuck in time" to the degree that he could find himself within any of those moments at any time... "Wow! You'd want to have control over that!" he said, to himself it turned out... "Are you listening to me?" asked Sally... The airspeed was climbing as the altitude rolled steadily downward. They were approaching 300kts before Chuck started to think this beautiful machine might not be so happy if he let it get too fast while so low... He eased back on throttles, a bit at a time, until he could see the airspeed had stopped increasing, and he held it at 320 kts. "Perfect" he said out loud... "The radio!" he remembered as the sound of his voice seemed to resonate in a silence within his head. He grabbed the microphone and turned the radio on again... "Hey guys?" he chuckled, "Delta Juliett Charlie is coming back for a visit, can you see us?" and with that, he reached up and switched all the exterior lights on. They were fast approaching the field now but still at about 1000 ft. Chuck decided he'd ignore the speed for the next little while, as all he wanted was the right trajectory at the moment... so he left the throttles where they were, and pushed the nose down a little harder to keep the tower, who's silhouette he could now just make out, at the top of his windscreen. He hadn't been listening... "Sorry" he said "I was still thinking about the notion of popping back and forth in time." "Well that's sort of what I was talking about." said Sally "You know those moments you sometimes get just as you're falling asleep, when you're somewhere half way in between sleeping and awake... when something suddenly causes your whole body to jump?" "Yeah!" said Chuck, "I get that all the time... it's like a part of me is dreaming something happens but the rest of my consciousness isn't ready to accept that I'm dreaming...?" "Well what if..." Sally continued, "in those moments, that connection is made?!" "I'm not sure I follow you?" he answered as he gazed down at what looked like little toy boats coming in and out of the Swartz bay ferry terminal over on Vancouver Island in the distance far below. Chuck had been working as an Oiler for the BC Ferry Corp. for a little while now, and he enjoyed seeing the ships from this vantage point. It was easy to put work in a distant perspective from here. "What I'm suggesting" she said, "is maybe we get another chance sometimes? "Maybe it's those moments we jump back to when we've chosen a path that was wrong, and our lives, in that alternate reality, were going wrong?" "Hah!" he said, "Now you're teasing me! You mean I could find a way to go back and stay at home, and stay in school?" he grinned.... "Well" said Sally, "maybe it's not those kinds of choices? ...I don't know?" "Come on" said Chuck, "it's time we got off this mountain." The tower was looming large in the windscreen now. There was some excited chatter coming from the radio and though he wasn't listening, Chuck figured it was mostly about his current activities, so he turned it off again. There was no wind at all, so he and the giant were tracking straight at the bulge at the top of the control tower where a lot of those excited voices were coming from... he just wanted to give them something to tell their friends about. "Christ this is fast!" he said as he hauled back on the control column and thumbed the pickle switches to ease the pressure at the same time... his left wing had just missed the top - or so he thought... it was probably more like fifty feet above it, but it seemed like about as close as he could've made it to him. He imagined people diving to the floor as he blasted by and he grinned as he thought of how many times those same folks had looked down on him and made him so nervous as he'd tried to do all the right things while towing airplanes back and forth with their permission. "Looks good on ya, you buggers!" he thought... He was trimming again now trying to get the nose settled about 20 degrees above the horizon and he realized his airspeed was slipping back to 200 kts. He added some throttle again to keep it there as he climbed through ten thousand feet now, heading east... "Ok, now what?" he wondered... This felt like a slice of heaven to him as he pondered what he was doing... Here he was, the soul occupant of a massive hunk of flying machinery that, had Orville and Wilbur been able to see, they surely would have gasped in awe! This monstrous beast... this giant aircraft, CF-DJC, was a truly beautiful thing. So awkward and mountain-like while on the ground... he'd often marvelled at how much it felt like an immovable object as he'd walked on it's wings, or got lost in its bowels while performing various maintenance tasks... yet out here, in the open sky, it felt so right! ...So birdlike... So much like a weightless thing that was a part of the sky... he pictured the dancers he'd seen doing Highland dancing, and how the good ones could make themselves appear to have found a way to turn off most of the effects of gravity... He leveled it off at about 20,000 feet and fiddled with the trim for a bit until he needed no pressure on the control column to stay there, and he gazed out at the darkness and the few lights he could see on the ground below. ... and he began to think... "Choices", he said to himself. He wasn't happy with some of the choices he'd made in his life. Most of the one's he'd made that had the most impact on his life were made long before he'd had the chance to gain the wisdom to make good ones. He'd often wished he'd had the chance to remake some of those choices. All except Sally. She was almost the only part of his life that had gone right so far. He thought again of that day, several years ago when they'd sat at the top of Mount Maxwell and decided to get married. The conversation they'd had about the possibility of alternate realities, and the thoughts Sally had about getting second chances.... There to his left, there suddenly appeared another aircraft... it was an F18 fighter jet, he realized with a jump! It was close to him, matching his speed, and he could just make out the figure of a helmeted head turned his way. "Oh crap!" he said out loud, and suddenly all the events of the past twenty five years of his life danced before him like a high speed slide show... The slide show began to slow down as he came to the conversation in the lunchroom... the walk down the hall toward the hangar... the foreman asking him to put power on DJC... the climb from the nose wheel through the main electrical center to the lower deck and the spiral staircase and sitting at the FE's panel.... suddenly his whole body jerked and he realized he was falling asleep at the panel. He sat upright and flicked on the battery switch and began going through the APU start procedure and he recalled that long ago conversation with Sally about what she thought that jump that sometimes happens just as you're falling asleep might mean. ... After he'd got the APU powered up and found a set of airstairs to put on the beast, he stopped to stare and admire the giant aircraft... as he headed back inside the hangar he wondered what his life would be like now if he'd stuck to flying instead of getting into aircraft maintenance... "Oh well", he thought, "I'm still a lucky man to be able to play with airplanes like this." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.O. Posted January 7, 2005 Share Posted January 7, 2005 I like it, Mitch! Thoughtful, exciting and plausible all in one. I'm sure "Sally" would be thrilled with the notion that she was Chuck's one perfect choice in life. I vote that this be submitted to Wings magazine for publication. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatSlave Posted January 7, 2005 Share Posted January 7, 2005 'Morning Mitch, Please let me be the first (Okay, second...that damned J.O. can obviously type with more than two fingers) to congratulate you on an excellent story. I found it an enjoyable, exciting and introspective read. Right on. If you're interested in perhaps doing some published, non fiction writing, I know a magazine editor who might be interested in your obvious literary talents and maintenance perspective. PM me if I can make some introductions. Once again, bravo. Kev Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boestar Posted January 7, 2005 Share Posted January 7, 2005 Great writing Mitch....Well done. b Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Cronin Posted January 7, 2005 Author Share Posted January 7, 2005 Thanks gents... I had some fun with that. J.O., She knows.... I have my doubts that "Wings" would want it, but if anyone does, they're certainly welcome to it! Kev, I have no idea what I might be able to offer for any magazine, but if you think it's worth exploring, I'll see if I can swallow this lump in my throat long enough to send you a PM... Cheers, Mitch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatSlave Posted January 8, 2005 Share Posted January 8, 2005 Mitch, Watch for a PM in the next day or so. I have an idea or two for your introduction to Canadian Aviator Magazine. (An absolutely shameless plug ) Don't sell yourself short... leave that to "Sally" talking to her girlfriends. Kev Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Check Pilot Posted January 9, 2005 Share Posted January 9, 2005 Mitch Somehow you have got to tie in Kip's hissing pits in with Chuck and the Giant. I'm now a writer, but I know potential when I see it. Check here: http://forum.aeforum.net/index.php?showtopic=115159 CP Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kip Powick Posted January 9, 2005 Share Posted January 9, 2005 Please see my post of 09 January concerning this wee story... ..... http://forum.aeforum.net/index.php?showtopic=115159 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrlupin Posted January 9, 2005 Share Posted January 9, 2005 Great writting Mitch, keep it up!! Eric Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Cronin Posted January 9, 2005 Author Share Posted January 9, 2005 I'm just guessing here Eric, but it sounds to me as though "Check Pilot" wouldn't agree... I wonder if he has a hat? Cheers mate, Mitch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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