Peter Garrison

Someone once suggested that if you want to know how you would feel crossing an ocean in a single-engine aeroplane, you should just fly out to sea for a couple of hours and then turn around and come back.

There’s something about being out of sight of land that, to parrot Samuel Johnson’s remark about the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight, “concentrates the mind wonderfully.” It also gives new and sinister meaning to random engine sounds.

My erstwhile flying companion Nancy – she has now changed her mind and sworn off flying in anything smaller than an A320 – had a strict rule that all flying in which she participated had to have a clear purpose. It couldn’t just be frivolous, like going up on a beautiful afternoon to enjoy the sights or “dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings.” You had to be going somewhere.

Flying out to sea for a couple of hours just to find out what automatic rough sounds like wouldn’t cut it. For some reason I share her view of that particular experiment, though I don’t know why. I have flown single engine across the Atlantic and the Pacific, and even Lake Michigan, but I would feel uneasy flying two hours out to sea for no reason at all.

I guess Nancy’s idea was that you shouldn’t be insolent toward the universe. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris.

Hubris attracts the attention of easily irritated gods. Niobe boasted of her many and fine children only to have Apollo and Artemis kill them; Arachne claimed to be a better weaver than Athena, and was transformed into a spider for her pains. Those tales from mythology arise from some ancient superstitious stratum in our brains that warns us not to stretch our luck.

Luck is notoriously fickle. Another of those useful Greeks, the lawmaker Solon, told wealthy King Croesus, who thought himself the luckiest man alive, that no man could be counted lucky until he was dead. In other words, you never know until it’s all over when your luck might turn.

Good luck or bad? It’s often a matter of framing. In 1982 I was holding short of a runway when an out-of-control 210, propeller whirling, slammed into me, cutting my plane to pieces. I emerged unhurt. A local TV news team soon appeared, and the reporter asked me if I didn’t feel lucky.

This was an odd question, it seemed to me. I was obviously the unfortunate victim of a very costly accident. An hour earlier I had had an aeroplane; now I didn’t. But the reporter was looking at it differently. From his perspective, I had survived an aeroplane accident, an occurrence so reliably fatal that I was extraordinarily lucky just to be talking to him.

Another dose of mixed luck befell me one day at 11,500 feet over California’s central valley. I was cruising happily in fine weather when suddenly grey smoke started pouring from the cooling air outlets on the sides of the cowling. Convinced the engine was on fire, I shut off the fuel, popped the airbrakes and pointed the nose downward. A conveniently empty road presented itself, and in four minutes I was on it.

The aeroplane was covered with oil. Dripping onto the road, it made a Melmoth-shaped stain. I soon found the problem: a hose going to the turbocharger had broken off, squirting oil onto the hot turbo. It had made tons of smoke, but luckily no fire. No oil to speak of remained in the engine.

I left the aeroplane in the centre of the little-travelled road – it seemed to me that it was most conspicuous there, and therefore least likely to be hit – and hitched a ride to the nearest town. The first car to come along contained a trio of strait-laced Latina women; they deliberated for some time about the propriety of taking an unknown man aboard, but finally bought my story, which was, admittedly, far-fetched, but for which I had, I thought, very convincing evidence.

A few miles up the road in Dos Palos I found a pilot who gave me eight quarts of aviation oil and a ride back to the aeroplane with some tools. We did a temporary repair to stanch the bleeding and stop the turbo from spinning without oil, and replaced the lost oil in the engine; then my benefactor went on his way.

I’d been thinking that I would fly down to the next airport, Coalinga, and land to check the integrity of the repair. But it was dusk now, and I hesitated to risk another failure in darkness. So I pushed the plane onto a bare patch beside the road. There I spent a starry night, sometimes dozing in the cockpit, sometimes lounging on the wing, sometimes chatting with a passing Highway Patrol officer who turned out to be a pilot himself or with field workers who brought me a dinner of cantaloupe melons and salsa.

I was back in Los Angeles by ten the next morning.

Good luck or bad? It’s usually bad luck when part of an aeroplane breaks, but that failed fitting had given me an uncommonly interesting night, full of emotion and mystery and the slowly wheeling Milky Way and the kindness of strangers, a night I will never forget. That’s the etymology of “adventure” – something that just comes to you, uninvited.

Sometimes luck is precisely targeted – something unusual that arrives just when it’s needed. One of those strokes of luck probably saved my life. It was during a period of ill-advised experimentation with my first homebuilt. For some reason I got the idea I ought to mute the exhaust, and I built two mufflers consisting of concentric tubes, the inner one perforated, with fiberglass packing between them. I slung them underneath the belly, connected to the exhaust pipes by short lengths of spiral-wound flexible stainless-steel tubing

They were made of aluminium, because I had it on good authority that the gases leaving the exhaust were at 500 degrees Fahrenheit or so, which aluminium could tolerate. But that was for an open pipe. I failed to consider that enclosing the exhaust flow in mufflers might raise its temperature considerably.

And so it did. I was at about 300 feet over a landscape of railroad tracks, power lines, trucks and cars when there was a loud thud and the engine lost power. But there was still a little left. I limped around the pattern without gaining another inch of altitude. As I turned base smoke began rising from the right side of the cabin floor. By the time I was on the ground it was getting hard to breathe.

What had happened was that my mufflers had lasted about half a minute before collapsing into solid plugs of crumpled aluminium and glass fibre. Not a wisp of gas could get through them. But by sheer luck the flexible steel link on the right side had cracked – or maybe it already had a crack – and just enough exhaust leaked from that crack to keep the three cylinders on the right side of the engine working. It was the jet of exhaust gas from that crack that was burning a hole in the cabin floor.

It’s said that luck favours the prepared, but sometimes luck just favours the stupid. Or maybe “luck” is just another word for “what happened.”