"I hear it," she said as the sound filled the cabin.
"At nine hundred feet above the ground, or, about eleven hundred feet on the altimeter, I'm going to bank us left until we're on a compass heading of ninety degrees, or, due east."
"Right," she said, looking at the altimeter that Jake had pointed out to her earlier. When it reached eleven hundred, Jake put them into a thirty-six degree bank.
"Wow," Celia said, her voice slightly broken. "This is a steep turn."
"Yeah," Jake said. "Those commercial pilots are a bunch of pussies. They give you nice shallow banks so they don't scare you."
"And I appreciate them for that," Celia said.
Jake chuckled and continued the bank. When he straightened them out at compass heading 090, Celia relaxed a little — just a little.
"Throttling down a little," Jake said. "Shallowing out the climb."
Celia gripped the chair again as the nose dropped down. Again, this was done considerably quicker than in a commercial jet and the uncomfortable, though false, sensation that they were dropping, was magnified from what she was used to.
"Okay," Jake said. "You see that nav readout there." He pointed to the indicator.
"Yeah," she said. "I see it."
"It's locked onto our first VOR station. That's in Pasadena. As you can see by the DME there, its twenty-seven knots away. The needle, as you'll notice, is not centered currently. That's because we're not on course to it as of yet. We have to keep going at a heading of ninety degrees until we're clear of the air traffic going in and out of LAX."
"Are we close to any of those airplanes?" she asked.
Jake looked out over his left shoulder and slightly behind and, sure enough, he could see what appeared to be a 747 making it's descent about four thousand feet above them. "There's one there," he said, pointing it out to her.
"Isn't it dangerous having two airports so close together?" she asked.
"It's not just one," he said, "but several major airports in this section. There's LAX to the south, there's Burbank to the northeast, and, a little further east on our route, there's Ontario. All of them have planes coming in and going out at all hours. As long as everyone stays where they're supposed to be, we all stay separated by altitude, if not flight path."
"What do you mean by that?" she asked.
"Every airport has a specific departure and arrival corridor for aircraft coming in from any of the four major compass headings. Our departure corridor, for a flight path that takes us eastward, is to take off, spin around to ninety degrees, and continue to ascend — just like we're doing now. That way we're too low to interfere with traffic going into or out of LAX or Burbank even though we'll cross paths with some of it. Once we hit six thousand feet, I'll turn left and center that needle on the VOR. By the time we reach Pasadena, we'll be up just above nine thousand feet. From there, we'll turn right and lock onto the VOR station in San Bernardino. We'll be traveling due east at that point and we'll pass about ten miles north of Ontario Airport. However, we'll be almost at our cruising altitude of seventeen thousand feet, so any aircraft coming in or going out will be at least eight thousand feet below us."
Celia was becoming interested in spite of her fear. "It all sounds so complex," she said. "I always thought you just jumped in the plane, took off, and flew to wherever it was you wanted to go."
"It is like that in a lot of places," Jake said. "Here in LA, though, it's kind of a dance. That was one of the reasons I liked flying out of Brannigan so much. It was further away from my house, but there weren't as many restrictions on where you could turn and fly to once you left the ground."
Celia nodded. She knew why Jake had had to take his planes away from Brannigan and move them to Santa Monica.
By the time they reached the Pasadena VOR station, Celia was thoroughly caught up in the mechanics of flying and navigation. She had watched the altimeter wind upward and the DME click off miles. Normally, Jake would have engaged the autopilot by this point, but instead he kept control of the aircraft himself in order to make it look more dramatic to her. It was only after he cleared Pasadena and locked onto San Bernardino that he finally flipped the switch and took his hands off the controls.
Celia continued to alternate her stares from the instrument panel to the scenery outside the windows. The rolling San Gabriels and the Angeles National Forest were on their left, the bulk of the Los Angeles northeastern suburbs were on the right. She watched in fascination as they passed through the Ontario flight path and she was able to spot three arriving and two departing jet airliners far below them.
"You see?" Jake said. "We're safely up here and they're safely down there. The system works."
"It looks like it," she said. "And I've been so interested in all of this that I've actually forgotten to be afraid, even though it is bumpy as hell up here."
"No worse than riding in a car down any LA street," Jake said, sipping from a bottle of water.
"That is true," she allowed.
The autopilot leveled them off at seventeen thousand feet and they continued on their course. Their speed kicked up to two hundred knots now that they weren't climbing and the suburbs below them began to thin out a little bit, with much more open space between each patch of housing. Celia settled back in her seat and seemed to actually relax, likely because she was taking Jake's words to heart and not worrying unless he looked worried.
"So how's Brazil?" Jake asked her after a routine check-in with the regional ATC. "It must be nice to be back on your own continent again."
"Are you kidding?" she asked. "We're in the middle of a goddamn jungle there. There are snakes, monkeys, spiders, and bugs like I've only seen in nightmares. It's absolutely nothing like Barquisimeto, or any other place in Venezuela I've ever been."
"You don't like the jungle?" Jake asked.
"It scares the hell out of me," she said. "It's hot and muggy and it rains every day at some point. And I'm not talking about rain like we see in Los Angeles or even Kansas and Nebraska. I'm talking torrential downpour so heavy that you can't see. And then when the rain goes away it still drips from the trees for hours. Everything is muddy and wet. The mosquitoes there look like bats and I'm always afraid I'm going to get malaria or some other tropical disease from them."
"That does sound kind of unpleasant," Jake admitted. "Why are they filming there? Couldn't they duplicate the jungle in a studio somehow? Or at least film it in Hawaii where you don't have to take your life in your hands."
"It's part of the mystique they're trying to instill in the movie," she said. "It's not like they're trying to represent the actual Amazon rain forest or anything. The film is actually a post-apocalyptic piece that takes place after global warming has wiped out most of the population. They're filming it in the Brazilian jungle just so they can say that it was filmed in the Brazilian jungle and impress everyone."
"How does global warming wipe out most of the population?" Jake asked.
"I don't know," she said. "Greg was never really clear on that. Anyway, the jungle they're in is supposed to be what's left of Seattle and the Cascades after the apocalypse. Greg's character is this loner that comes in to do some trade with them and gets caught up in a war the Seattle people are having."
"The Battle of Seattle, huh?" Jake said, turning that over in his head. "It sounds interesting enough."
"I suppose," Celia said dubiously. "I'm sure you've heard all the hype they're putting out about it. Greg thinks it's going to be his Oscar next year, that it'll be the most significant film he's ever done. It's certainly expensive enough. The budget for the film is $80 million. That's pretty close to the record."
"Jesus," Jake said, shaking his head a little.
"And they've already run into a bunch of cost overruns that are pushing them up toward a hundred million."