FIRE FLIGHT
a memoir
FIRE FLIGHT
It’s happened to me twice! Neither time was catastrophic. Obviously or I wouldn’t be writing now. The first time in 1963 was scarier. The second time was just a week ago on a flight from Honolulu to Maui. Not scary at all, not even very dramatic, just bloody inconvenient and wearisome. Extra hours in an airport lobby can’t be rated very high on the scale of catastrophes.
Linda and I were en route to Maui, a trip involving three flights: Adelaide to Sydney two hours, Sydney to Honolulu ten hours, and finally Honolulu to Maui another two hours aloft. Add a couple hours hunkered in each airport, you have sixteen hours travel time, not counting delays. Linda is my travel agent. She’s also my wife. The roles overlap. We were flying to Hawaii chiefly to spend time with Linda’s brother Barry, her niece Jessica, Jessica’s husband Michael, and their sons Reuben and Levi. Linda loves Hawaii but reunions with brother Barry have a history of drama and Reuben and Levi, now teenagers, have hardly ever been delightful company. I’ve had my share of awkward moments with Barry but he and Linda are combustible together. Still, Linda adores her niece and Jessica adores Linda. I had to go along. I’d be Linda’s sag wagon.
Linda prefers red-eyes … night flights. Easy to see why: she falls asleep at the first click of a seatbelt. I don’t sleep well on airplanes. That’s an understatement. I lie awake the whole flight, constrained in a seat designed by the Spanish Inquisition, consigned by boredom to actually eat the crap served on purpose to interrupt any success at napping, condemned to start and abandon dumbass film after film that I wouldn’t willingly watch in a multiplex in the malls of Hell. Have I convinced you that I don’t like flying?
The night flight from Sydney to Honolulu was an exception. I slept most of the way. Why? Because I took a sleeping pill big enough to assuage a car salesman’s conscience. Most big airports are modeled on the aforementioned malls of Hell. Honolulu is no exception. Our connecting flight on Hawaiian Airlines was already boarding by the time we trudged from Gate C3 to Gate A69 with buying a single T-shirt, trinket, or tax-free sex toy. Linda had paid for “extra leg room” throughout our aviation ordeal, which put us in the emergency exit seats with an excellent view of the airplane’s wing. The plane showed its age like a Motel 6 on a pre-Interstate highway, but it climbed to cruising altitude before the pilot or anyone else noticed the smoke from one of its two engines, the one on my wing. “Sorry, folks,” came the rich baritone of the pilot’s voice, “but we’re having a slight technical problem and we’ll need to return to Honolulu.”
We landed softly, got in line for seats on the next flight to Maui, waited wearily, boarded, deboarded in Kahului, found that our luggage hadn’t arrived, filed a claim for it, took a shuttle train to the car rental center, simultaneously got a car and a call that our luggage had arrived after all, looped back to the terminal and gathered our bags, and drove straight to Wailea, the posh side of the island, in time for sunset. Not much of an adventure. Hardly worth writing about but it reminded me of the other time an engine caught fire on a plane I was flying in.
It was a Convair 440 twin-engine propeller aircraft, popular across the USA for quick ‘n easy shuttle flights between major cities. You could buy a ticket at the departure gate. Seats were not assigned. Eastern Airlines offered six flights daily from Logan to LaGuardia – Boston to New York – with no frills except booze aboard. Airtime was just an hour so you had to drink fast. No way I could ever guzzle as much or as fast as my Irish poet friend Desmond O’Grady! He and I were flying to New York for a poetry reading at the New School in Greenwich Village, the Big Apple’s radical heart. Desmond was a Harvard Fellow and I was – let’s say it – a hot shit undergraduate, editor of the Harvard Advocate, newly published in the Atlantic Monthly, winner of a flurry of poetry prizes … at the pinnacle of my literary glory from which it’s been a long slide downhill.
You had to take yourself pretty seriously to be a Poet in 20th C America. You had to claim a whiff of divine afflatus. A decade later, it was a puff of mundane deflatus that told me to stop writing. O’Grady never stopped. You may remember him from the Fellini film La Dolce Vita, in which he played the role of … an Irish Poet. He was still the poetic lion of Limerick when he died in 2014, having made narcissism into an art for most of 78 years. Amazing that he lived so long, considering how he drank and staggered! Many nights I rescued him from stumbling into traffic. I literally Saint Christophered his scrawny Celtic ass across Memorial Drive in Cambridge and later across the Lungotevere in Rome. We didn’t stay friends after Rome. My fault, I know now. I was an amoral, opportunistic, womanizing bastard then. A typical Poet.
Desmond was poetically contemptuous of timetables so we were among the last to board the shuttle, which put us in seats over the wing. Better than in the rear, O’Grady said, where drinks are served last. Cloudy anyway and not much worth seeing over Connecticut. The clouds were thicker over New York, as was O’Grady’s brogue. Stewardesses in1963 were chosen for looks and shapeliness. Desmond had the aisle seat. One could spout lascivious blarney from Boston to Buenos Aires back then without being accused of harassment. It’s fair to say that the stewardesses on our flight responded in kind. If other passengers were offended, they kept it to themselves.
Our one-hour flight had stretched to ninety minutes before passengers started to grumble. The stewardesses did what they could to quell our discontent by passing out pretzels. Eventually the pilot told us what we already knew, that we were in a holding pattern, waiting for clearance to land in foggy conditions, a square in the air over New York and New Jersey with the plane tipping sideways through the corners every seven minutes.
Thirty minutes more in the holding pattern and another passage of the booze cart … the crew trying to hold the fine line between disgruntlement and rowdiness. O’Grady of course was plastered. Feckin stocious he was! Gone to God in his own holding pattern that would tilt soon from jolly to belligerent. Nothing more from the pilot … but then: “Bad news, folks, the control tower at LaGuardia is telling us conditions are getting worse and advising us to head back to Logan. The stewardesses will circulate with refund vouchers. I’ll be turning on the seatbelt light for the duration of the flight. Eastern Airlines extends a sincere apology for the inconvenience.” O’Grady was out of his seat in a flash. It took both stewardesses to wrestle him down while our flight-mates got a crash course in Joycean obscenities. “A thousand gorgeous co-ed colleens are stackin’ their gowls to hear us recite, ye fecking eejits!”
A thousand humans of any description at a poetry reading? Poetic hyperbole.
Our twin-engine flying penitentiary banked north and its cellblocks of prisoners rattled their bars. What could we do? We were strapped in our seats. Even in a dentist’s chair, you have the option of flinging the scalers and curettes out of your mouth and hopping free. Think! You’re 30,000 feet toward Heaven. What’s the difference between an airplane seat and the electric chair? The electric chair is roomier.
As I said, I was belted in the window seat above the left wing of the plane but my attention was fixed on the antics of my manic fellow poet, so I wasn’t the first to notice the flames. “Holy shit,” the guy behind me hollered, “The engine is on fire!” That put a stop to anybody’s consternation about travel plans. Half the passengers on the far side of the aisle jumped up to lean across and gape at the wing, causing the plane to lurch and tumbling one of our stewardesses onto O’Grady’s shoulder. “Take your seats immediately,” shouted the pilot over the intercom. “Take your seats and fasten your seatbelts! We’ve just received clearance to land at La Guardia. Please stay calm!” I think that’s what he said. It was hard to hear over the screaming.
Six, maybe ten minutes of terror in the air and we jolted to a safe landing, four fire engines on the runway, firemen pointing hoses. A lot of elbows were deployed exiting to the tarmac but nobody got hurt, just stunned. If it hadn’t been cold and wet, I might have kissed the ground. Desmond was hopping like a toad on an oil slick. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I nearly had that bird in me lap and we’d’ve gone down fookin’!”
We did our reading on schedule the next afternoon, to an audience of eighty or ninety.
Two aerial incidences, sixty years apart! Neither one as scary as the turbulence I survived over the Rockies in 2010 or the time I flew in a Cessna Skyhawk piloted by a girlfriend’s father determined to test my manhood or to make me piss my pants. Think about this: flying is still science fiction. We’re just hairless apes, a few thousand generations out of the trees, but we’ve built machines that give us wings.
Now we have to figure out how to survive …
