‘You keep straight,’ I told Kris. ‘I’ll get us down to an airfield.’
‘You get us down,’ he repeated, making a joke of it, ‘and I’ll crash.’
Such a damned stupid way to die, I thought. Blinded by oil... the only thing worse would be to switch on the windscreen wipers, which would fatally smear the oil into a thick continuous curtain, whereas now it was just possible to see through the thread lines to the ground far beneath.
Far... Kris was giving in to the temptation of losing height so as to see the ground better, but height gave us a better chance of clear radio reception by any airfield.
‘Go back up,’ I said coaxingly.
‘It’s my bloody aeroplane.’
‘It’s my bloody life.’
We needed a big airport as soon as possible, and fortune smiled on us for once. I asked Kris dryly if he had any objection to Luton, almost dead ahead.
‘You’re joking! A real live airport? Not so much of the dead.’
I told the area radio controller about the oil and said we would aim for Luton, approximately thirty miles away. There was an incredulous silence at Luton at our lack of any radio aid except radio itself, and we got only a laid-back assessment of our chances (slim) from a useful man in Luton’s control tower, who said he could put us over the runway and clear everything else off it, and after that it was up to us.
He gave us a private frequency for talking to him direct, so as not to clutter other air traffic.
‘On second thoughts, better than trains, perhaps,’ Kris yelled to me, grinning, manic spirits ascendant in the actual face of mortal danger.
I said, ‘A suicidal pilot is the last thing I need!’
‘It may be the last thing you get.’
‘I’ll never forgive you...’
The man at Luton said in our ears, ‘We’ve an old D/F machine here. Do you know how to fly a QDM?’
Kris said, ‘Sure’, and I said ‘Yes’, but we should both have correctly said, ‘Affirmative’, which would still not, in my case, have been the truth. D/F meant Direction Finding and QDM was an air code asking for a direction to steer, and that was the extent of my own knowledge. Kris, I thanked the fates, muttered that he had done a QDM approach once, years before, when he had got lost.
Did he remember the procedure?
Not clearly, he said. A joke, he thought it. He typically would.
Our helper at Luton resignedly told Kris to press the ‘transmit’ button and say nothing, then turn left and after two minutes transmit again, and he told us he now knew which blip we were on his dial, and he knew what we should steer to reach him, but he couldn’t tell how far away we were from him, and he wouldn’t know until he could see us on his doorstep.
He might see us, we told him, but we couldn’t see him. Oil seemed to be coming out faster. Forward visibility had reduced pretty much to zero. The side windows were starting to fog, with droplets blowing backwards in streaks.
We travelled straight to Luton airport with his expert help, Kris again flying on instruments as if born to it and telling weak jokes all the way. Lights were starting to show on the ground in the still see-through bits of glass along the lower edge of the side windows. Kris’s stream of jokes dried as the radio operator carefully steered him round in a pear-shaped sky pattern that ended with the Cherokee lined up with the single wide runway, that now lay a mile straight ahead.
The runway ran from west to east. We were to land towards the west, into the prevailing wind.
To my private dismay, landing to the west meant also facing into the setting sun. The last rays of sunset hit the oil and made the windscreen a glowing golden enclosing glory, exciting and beautiful and more deadly than ever.
‘Jeez,’ Kris said. ‘I’ll write a poem.’
‘Not just now.’
‘Say your prayers.’
‘You keep your mind on getting us down.’
‘We’ll get down anyway.’
‘Safely,’ I said.
He grinned.
The voice from the control tower said in our ears, ‘I see you clearly. Lower flaps... descend to two hundred feet... maintain heading... allow for a ten knot crosswind from the left...’
Kris checked that I’d set the altimeter to match the height of Luton’s airfield above sea level and lowered the flaps, the wing sections that gave greater lift at slow speed.
‘This isn’t Odin,’ he said. ‘Pity really. We could do with a nice warm sea here for a splash-down landing.’
I’d thought the same. The oil was thicker on the windows, and getting progressively worse.
‘You’re about a hundred feet up...’ the radio said in my ear. ‘The runway’s straight ahead. Can you see the ground at all?’
‘Can I, shit,’ Kris said, which wasn’t in the air manual.
He throttled back the power to settle onto his normal landing speed and held the heading straight.
The tower said, ‘Stay straight... good... reduce power... no, increase power... hold it steady... reduce power... sink... straighten the rudder. I said straighten... straighten.’
Travelling at landing speed we hit the ground extremely hard and bounced back into the air with every bone shaking, with even our eyes insecure in their sockets.
Our airspeed read 80 miles an hour on the dial and was now dropping too fast. At 60 we’d be going too slowly for the wings to keep us aloft.
‘Power on,’ yelled the tower. ‘Power... level out... left rudder.’
‘I can’t see a bloody thing,’ Kris said, his teeth grating from the shock through our bodies.
‘Power... POWER...’
Kris pushed the throttle open and held the nose steady, and again we hit the ground with a frightful crash, though this time we bounced off grass, not off the hard runway, and were heading heaven knew where, still with a lethal but necessary airspeed giving us lift enough for a liveable landing and still with the setting sun golden-red in our eyes.
Kris said loudly, ‘To hell with this,’ and pulled the throttle right back, chopping off the fuel and stopping the engine, which would have been fine if we’d had any wheels on the ground, instead of ten feet or more of air beneath us.
Normally Kris’s landings consisted of a smooth nose-up float followed by a feather-soft transference of wheels to earth. This time with the speed dropping off alarmingly fast, leaving Kris progressively without any effective control, we hit the ground again and bounced again into the air and bounced again, slowing, slowing, each bounce shallower but at the wrong angle for the wheels to stay down.
Kris from instinct finally pulled the control column yoke right back, raising the nose until the wings stalled and, with no lift left, the aeroplane’s propeller dipped down and dug a deep groove in the earth. There was a screeching and a banging of metal and there were two human bodies being flung about. There was a terrifying sudden and final standstill with the fuselage and tail plane pointing half way to the sky.
The oil on the windscreen still shone radiantly, the glass unbroken, the last red-gold gleams of sunset slanting across towards a motionless dusk.
Silence. Stillness. My head rang.
It had been a miraculous deliverance and a splendid piece of flying, and within a minute we were surrounded by foam trucks and ambulances and police cars and half the county of Bedfordshire that had been listening on the so-called ‘private’ frequency dedicated to our troubles.
Chapter 9
Kris had been knocked out by the last going-nowhere impact and was half hanging in his seat belt and half lying on the control column. I’d felt in myself a sort of resilient cracking bounce in my chest, disorienting but not disabling, nothing to stop me from trying to unlatch the door which, when it came to the point, I couldn’t do as it seemed to be bent.