Daughter of the sky

by Jr. Paul L. Briand

Amelia felt guilty and somewhat silly, but she certainly had not been frightened. She was ashamed of her rotten landing, but took some comfort in what John Montijo had once told her. All landings are good ones, he said, if you can walk away from them. Amelia was proud that she had finally soloed; by flying only on weekends, she had taken months to do what others had done in just a few weeks of constant instruction. She turned to one of the men standing near her plane and asked him to take her picture out in front of the Kinner. She posed like a wistful maiden who is going to announce her engagement in the society section of the Sunday newspapers. She smiled softly and held her arms out from her body, her hands angled, her fingers pointed. The camera clicked.

12. The Girl and the Machine

The remembered sound was enough to snap Amelia back from her reverie. She looked at the chronometer on the instrument panel of her Vega. Time had passed quickly. She checked the fuel-flow indicator. Everything normal. It was 11:30 P.M. She glanced at the air-speed indicator: 180 mph. She wondered what ground speed she was making along her track: that depended on the direction and velocity of the wind. To the right of the air-speed dial she noticed the dials of the altimeter; suddenly they started to spin crazily around and around. In her twelve years of flying this had never happened before. With the altimeter out, she would have to fly by carefully watching the air-speed needle.

She looked out. The moon slid behind a tall build-up of clouds. Then more clouds grew and thickened about the plane. The Vega started to buffet, then to buck like an unbroken horse. Rain pinged and splattered against the metal wings and fuselage, hit and spread like gravel against the windshield, and streamed across the width and off the trailing edges of the wings. Whips of lightning cracked across the nose of the plane.

Amelia set her jaw hard and flew the plane by the needle and ball. She hoped the driving downdrafts of the storm were not nosing her too far down to the water. She could only trust to luck. For an hour she fought the plane through.

Fleetingly she saw the moon. If she could only pull out on top of the clouds. She added throttle and applied back pressure to the stick. She watched her instruments. For thirty minutes the Vega climbed. Amelia felt the controls getting sluggish. The dial of the rate-of-climb indicator fell off. The wings were picking up ice. Slush now splattered on the windshield. Amelia checked the engine rpm’s. Like the altimeter, the tachometer now began to spin wildly. It had picked up ice from the freezing outside temperature. The stick and rudder became sloppy and unresponsive.

Suddenly one wing lurched up high and snapped over. The plane, heavy with ice, spun out of control down through the clouds to the ocean below. Amelia quickly jammed opposite rudder, drove the stick all the way forward, and slowly brought the nose of the plane up out of the dive. She looked out. The gun-metal waves of the Atlantic rose and fell less than a hundred feet beneath her. She inhaled deeply against the pounding of her heart.

Amelia continued to fly near the water, hoping the lower altitude would melt the ice. Then fog and clouds gathered and spread over the ocean. Without the altimeter she dared not fly that low, and she climbed again to what she hoped was a safer altitude: low enough to escape the ice and high enough to avoid the water.

She would have to depend on her remaining instruments to make it across. She did not look out of her cockpit again until morning. The Sperry directional gyrocompass became her savior. She believed in it and followed it. Setting the gyro every fifteen minutes to a new heading, she pursued it across the night and through the engulfing clouds. For Amelia, it was now a grim, dogged, and stubborn refusal to be overcome. As long as the Wasp engine kept firing, she would fly her plane. The last hours became the worst of the flight.

Toward dawn the exhaust manifold began to vibrate badly. Then the stinging odor of gasoline filled the cockpit. The gasoline gauges of the reserve wing tanks leaked drops of fuel on the floor by her feet. Her eyes and nostrils smarted from the strong smell. From about her neck Amelia brought her kerchief to her eyes and wiped away the tears.