Chapter 4 of 13
Some men carry a road not taken all their lives. For John it is flying. He wanted to be a pilot from boyhood, and a boy who could not read or write was never going to become one — and yet, in his eighties, he can talk a jetliner down onto a runway by the numbers, because he taught himself on the airlines’ own simulators.
This is his great passion let off its leash, and it is a pleasure to sit inside. But it is also, quietly, a chapter about limits and about a marriage. He gave up the real thing partly for the cost and partly because his wife could not bear the risk, and he counts that surrender — without a trace of bitterness — as the mark of a good marriage. Listen for the man still out at the airport fence, counting the planes, loving every bit of it from the ground.
I was out at the airport again the other day, just to watch the planes. Went the day before that too, and then, you know, I went right back. I’ve always done it, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever stop. You’d think a man would get tired of it. I don’t. I sit and I watch them come and go, the big ones and the little ones, and I can pretty near tell you where each one’s headed and what it’s up to. My great-grandson asked me not long ago.
“Do you like flying, Grandpa?”
“Love it,” I told him. I love, love flying. And there I am out at the fence, proving it to him.
And I count them, too. That’s a thing I do. I’ll sit and count the planes coming and going, and I know just about what to expect. Vancouver, on a day like that, I’ll count a dozen or so, ten, twelve of them. But I’ll tell you what surprised me — Seattle’s got more. Sixteen I counted one day down there, coming and going, and I never would have figured Seattle for such a big, busy place. And the Vancouver I’ve got on my computer, it might as well be the real thing — the whole airport laid out, all the advertising and the works. And the one here in Abbotsford, that one I get out to in person plenty. I like to be right up at the fence where I can see them.
My dream, my whole life, was to be a pilot. That’s the honest truth. And I can tell you exactly the thing that stood in the way of it: I had no education. None. I couldn’t read and I couldn’t write, not even in my own language, never mind the English. So how is a man like that ever going to be a pilot? You can’t, and that’s all there is to it. But I know now — I know it for sure — that I would have made it. I had it in me. See, I’ve got a cousin who hasn’t got much more schooling than I do, and he’s flown jets for years and years; he flies a big cargo jet now for some European outfit out of Hong Kong. He started off small, same as anybody. So it can be done. It just wasn’t done by me.
It started a long way back, before any of that, back in Paraguay when I was a boy. Out there in the Chaco the only road we had was the dirt one, the Transchaco, and when the heavy rains came, well, that road was finished. They wouldn’t let the buses go, sometimes for up to a week at a stretch. So if you had to travel, you went up in a plane. They’d fly the passengers out on the DC-3 — that’s the big one with the propellers on each side, the same plane they used in the war, the Second World War — and they’d load about twenty of us onto it. Now those planes belonged to the government, every one of them, to the military, because the military ran the whole country in those days. Nobody owned a plane of his own. You just hired one off the government when you needed it, and that was that.
I’ve got books somewhere in the house that’ll tell you all about a plane like that. Every airplane ever built, when it was built, how many they made of it, and even how many of them are still up there flying. That DC-3, now — I don’t hold the number exact anymore, but they built somewhere around forty-eight hundred of them through that time. Forty-eight hundred. And I’ve always kept that sort of number in my head. Rio de Janeiro to New York, now, that’s ten hours, and they put down at Caracas along the way to take on more fuel. Though they’ve got a plane now that’ll fly you eighteen hours on the one tank — eighteen, no stopping. That’s the kind of thing I keep track of.
And then, right before we came to Canada, they went and built an airport in our little town. Just a small thing then, you know, only for the little planes. But I hear now it’s full of them — planes parked there all the time. There’s a man I knew, he moved back down there, and he went and bought himself his own little plane. Imagine that. From two oxen and a wagon to a man with his own airplane, and all of it inside one lifetime.
My own first time up in the air was the day we left. We took off out of Asunción on a big jet, seven o’clock in the evening, and I’ll tell you, we felt like we were in a jail. That’s the honest way to put it — a strange, shut-in feeling none of us had ever had before in our lives. And then they brought us some food to eat, this meat, and it looked for all the world like frog legs. Me and my brother, we sat there looking at it, and we thought, well, they’re feeding us frog legs. We hadn’t the first idea what it was. Then there was the first time we ever took off in the daytime — that one was a four-propeller plane, and I had the window seat. And all of a sudden it looked to me like the plane just stopped, dead still in the air. A very funny feeling, that, sitting there looking out and feeling her hang.
I did get up in the air a good many times after that, here in Canada, when I was younger — riding along, mind you, in the passenger seat, never once at the controls. Before I was married I had a friend who had his pilot’s license, and one Saturday he up and rented a plane, and off we went. We flew over to Kelowna for our lunch — going to see a builder I used to frame for here in Abbotsford. He picked us up right there at the airport, took us out, and brought us back after. Oh, I loved that. A man rents himself a plane in the morning and flies off for his lunch. What a thing.
Now my friend had a plan made up for that flight, a proper one, filed out ahead the way you’re supposed to. We’d follow Highway 3 up to Princeton, and from Princeton on through Keremeos, and from there down into Penticton. That was the route on paper. But once we got up over Princeton, he changed his mind on it. Made up his mind right there in the air to cut straight across to Kelowna, the direct way, the short way — and he never told a soul. Never filed the change, never notified anybody where we’d got to. Now that’s totally against the aviation rule, and it bothers me to this day. See, every leg you fly, you’re supposed to let the next station know where you are. You take off out of Abbotsford headed for Hope, you tell Abbotsford that’s where you’re going. And the minute you make any little change to it, you’ve got to notify somebody. Because if we’d have gone down out there, cutting across the way he did, off the plan and nobody the wiser, why, nobody on God’s green earth would have known where to look for us. We’d just be gone, gone. That’s the part that stays with me.
Another time a friend of mine, a dairy farmer, rented a plane to fly up to Williams Lake after some tractor parts, and he asked me to come along, so I did. He flew, I rode. We came up as far as Spences Bridge, and it was getting awful cloudy on us, getting dark, so we decided to swing up and follow the Coquihalla on toward Merritt. You learn to read the sky on a trip like that, and I can tell you exactly where the turbulence comes from, same as any pilot would. See, when you’re up over the heavy clouds, the heavy rain clouds especially, the heat comes bouncing up off them, up and down, up and down — and that’s your turbulence right there. And it lifts off the hills the same way, coming into a place like Calgary from the south. Four years ago we came home from Hawaii, and we sat strapped into those seats for better than two hours of it, the plane shaking and shaking above the storm clouds. And then all of a sudden the cloud started thinning out, less and less of it, and just like that it went smooth as anything. And I’ll tell you a thing about me — I don’t mind the turbulence one bit. I love it. I love going right into it.
The worst flight I ever had, though, that was another one — heavy clouds and rain, real bad weather all around, and the plane made a funny noise and it felt like she just fell out from under us and then jerked, hard. That was the worst one I ever experienced. Now people don’t know how far a plane really drops when a thing like that happens. I’ve got a second cousin, Ed Ensen’s his name, and he went and became a pilot. My dad asked him once — when it feels like you fall about a foot, how far do you really go down? And Ed told him: two hundred feet or more. More. That’s how far she drops when it feels like nothing to you back in the seat.
So these days I keep my seatbelt on the whole time, always, because that’s just what the pilots wish everybody would do. I’ve heard of it happening — the plane gives a real jerk, and some folks who weren’t belted in jumped right up and hit the ceiling. Cracked their heads on it. But with your belt on, see, that can’t happen to you. So I keep mine done up.
Now here’s the thing that gives me my flying, all of it. It was about 2010, and I was laid up recovering from the surgery on my foot, and the kids went and bought me a flight simulator package for the computer. A simple little one. And I thought, well, what a waste of money — I told them, “Why are you spending that? I haven’t got a clue what to do with the thing.” But I started fooling around with it, just fooling around, you know, and the next thing I know I’m flying an ultralight on the thing, and I passed the little test it puts you through right there on the screen, and that was me started.
So then I went and bought myself a bigger package, somewhere over in Richmond, and I’ll tell you, that one near fried my brain. So computerized, that thing. And the instructor, he went way too fast for me — he was fine, I suppose, for your experienced pilots, but for a fellow like me just starting, you’ve got to take your time, and he wouldn’t, so I never even finished my hours on it. But then I had a friend, a fellow I’ve known thirty years who flew for his living, and he took me under his wing. A lot of mentoring, that man did. He showed me all the procedures, all the little tricks of the thing. And he’s the one who first got me into a real flight simulator — the big kind, the proper kind, the kind the airlines themselves use.
That first time, that was February of 2016. My friend phones me up out of nowhere and asks what I’m doing on the twenty-fourth.
“Oh, nothing,” I says.
“Write it down,” he says. “It’s going to be a big day.”
And he wouldn’t tell me one thing more than that. So comes the day, a freezing cold one with a northeast wind blowing, and they get me out on the freeway and I haven’t got the faintest idea what’s happening to me. And then we turn off at Lake Monroe, heading in toward the airport there — holy moly, I thought, what’s going on here? I felt like I’d been kidnapped. And Grandma, it turns out, she knew the whole thing all along — she was in on it from the very start.
Well, they walk me into a full cockpit, the whole works laid out in front of me, and there’s the Vancouver runways right there ahead, and it’s night. My stomach about came right out of me. See, you’ve got to be ready for a thing like that in your mind, even a little, and I had no preparation for it, none whatsoever. And then, to top it off, the computers weren’t talking to each other yet, weren’t working right, so the instructor hands us a couple of tickets for our lunch and sends us off to wait. Well, I wasn’t one bit hungry anymore, I’ll tell you that. I sat there the whole time praying those computers wouldn’t be talking by the time we got back.
But of course they were, so I strapped myself in like a pilot does, and I set my seat just the way you’re supposed to — you bring it forward off the back wall and up, up until your shin is level with the dashboard. The instructor started in asking me his questions, and I could answer every last one of them. He showed me the starter buttons, one for each engine, and I fired one up, and oh, it sounded just like the real thing. That was something, I tell you.
And then it’s all by the numbers, and the numbers I had cold. Taking off, see, you hold her at twenty percent — any more than that and your tail drags on you. And you want to be off the ground at a hundred and eighty knots, because past that the tires take on too much heat under all that weight, and you can blow them right out. Those tires, now — they get so hot that an hour after you’ve landed you still can’t lay a bare hand on them. You can see them smoking. That’s how hot they get, from all that weight coming down.
Coming down in a 737 you don’t want to be going any faster than a hundred and forty knots, or you can snap your landing gear clean off. That’s just exactly what happened to a plane in Toronto a long while back. Came in too fast, broke the gear, and flipped right over. Nobody got killed on that one — a couple folks banged up, but they were all right. I try to be down to a hundred and thirty at least. And turning, now, you never bank her more than thirty percent, or she starts losing altitude on you.
So the instructor shows me the autopilot — three buttons, that’s the whole of it — and pushes me into it, and there I am, flying along on the autopilot. And then, half by accident I’ll admit it, I turned her around and brought her down and landed clean in Vancouver. The fellow looked at me and said, “Congratulations. I couldn’t have done that any better myself.” But you know, when I got home that day I was literally sick. Sick to my stomach over it.
“Grandma, honey,” I said, “why didn’t you warn me — a thing like that, I’d have got myself ready in my head a little.”
No warning, nothing, just like that. It was a bit too much for the brain all at once.
I went back to the simulator, though. Sure I did. Another time, over in Richmond, the instructor set me up to take off out of Seattle, and I flew her in the simulator all the way to Vancouver, and I says to him, “Leave the landing to me, I’ll bring her in.” And I set her down nice, a real nice landing. And he looked over at me and said, “You can’t convince me that you’re not a pilot.” Now that one I carry around with me. And I’ll tell you honest, I believe to this day that if a big plane was ever in real trouble up there, I could go up to the front and handle her, because I know all the procedures. I do. I know them.
There’s a great deal to it people never think about. See, once you come in close to the airport, the tower’s got complete control of you — they’re telling you constantly which way to turn, what heading to take, telling you when you’re coming in too fast. You press your button, you dial in your numbers, and around she comes.
And even up on the autopilot you can’t just sit back and leave her be — you’ve got to watch her and keep adjusting your heading for the curve of the earth. Say I’m flying to Japan: I take off out of Vancouver pointed straight west, but the plane doesn’t hold straight, she wants to bend away up to the northwest, so I’m forever correcting her. Toronto’s another one — I take off at nought-point-six degrees and I come in on Toronto at over a hundred and twenty, because Toronto lines up down toward California, the way he explained it to me. So I’m constantly having to go and adjust the autopilot the whole way. The only one that doesn’t need it is Los Cabos over to Honolulu — that one’s near enough straight west, and you don’t touch a thing. And at the busy ones — Chicago, now, or New York, or Atlanta — you don’t even expect to land your first time through. There’s just too many planes. The one ahead of you isn’t off the runway yet, so the tower waves you around, “Go around, go around,” and sometimes I’ve had to do it twice before they’d let me down.
One time I took my son Michael into the simulator with me, over at Abbotsford. The instructor — Strucker, his name was — sits Michael down and says, “You’re the co-pilot now, you sit right there beside your dad and he’ll tell you what to do.” See, that’s the whole idea of the co-pilot — when the one pilot’s busy with the flying, the other fellow takes it over so the first can do his work. And here’s a thing: the slower you come in on your final approach, the less air there is moving over her, so you lose that steady airflow, and you’ve just got to sit there and hold her by hand, full power, holding her steady the whole way down.
Not every day of it was a good one. There was the one session I didn’t enjoy at all — the instructor there was brand new, only been at it a month, an experienced commercial fellow out of New Zealand, but he was too fast for me, just not the right teacher. He had me set up in Toronto, and I knew that airport cold. I asked him, “Which runway are we on, three-three right or three-three left?” And we ran what they call touch-and-go, where you touch your wheels down and lift straight back off, over and over. He couldn’t get over it, that I knew all the numbers. See, up until about a year ago I had every runway memorized. Vancouver, now, coming in from the east, that’s twenty-six left and twenty-six right; coming in from the west it’s the other pair, zero right and zero left. And Calgary, from the north it’s seventeen left and seventeen right, and from the south the other end of those same runways, zero-five left and zero-five right. I don’t carry all that in my head anymore — the tower tells me where to go now, and once I’m down a blue guideline comes up and takes me right to the gate. But it’s all timed, every bit of it, all of it. If your timing’s off, that guideline isn’t there for you, and you can run into real trouble out on the runway if you don’t follow the pattern.
The 737 now, the Dreamliner, I fly her no trouble at all — I get her into the autopilot just fine. But there’s an older plane on there I could never master. I can’t ever seem to push the right button to get her into the autopilot, and once she’s locked in I can’t break her back out of it. I lose control of her, and down I go. Right away. I crash.
And that’s just what happened to those poor fellows — those two Boeing crashes I listened to on the YouTube, the new 737 MAX, one over in Indonesia and one in Africa not long after. The plane had a system on it that read the nose wrong and kept pushing it down on them, down and down, and the pilots couldn’t get the better of it, couldn’t wrestle her back, and down they went, the both of them. Boeing made a big booboo there, a big one — cost them billions, all those people gone. The computer wouldn’t let them back out. Same as me on that old plane.
There’s one other thing on the simulator I’ve never been able to crack, and that’s the GPS. Cannot get into it. A buddy of mine told me which button I’m supposed to push for the GPS, and I’ve tried it, tried it just like he said, and it doesn’t work for me. There’s some other trick to it I haven’t figured out yet.
I learned one thing on the real simulator I never knew before, too. It’s the spoilers and the engine reverse, and how they work together on the touchdown. The spoilers, those are the flaps that stand straight up on the wing. Now here’s the part I didn’t know until he showed me: there’s just the one lever you click in a little bit beforehand, you arm it, and then the minute the wheels touch, it all happens on its own. Up come the spoilers, automatic, and the engine reverse comes on too, automatic, the both of them, all off that one lever. You don’t do a thing. I never knew that till then.
And you know, even the real pilots have to go into those simulators twice a year, the whole day long, and run through every emergency procedure there is, so the airline can be sure they’ll do the right thing when the time comes. Twice a year, every year. That tells you something.
We went on a tour of the Boeing plant one time, and I’ll never forget it. You go through real tight security to get in there — one checkpoint at the main building, and then another one before they’ll even let you onto the factory floor. And no cameras allowed, none. One fellow got brave and hung back and snapped himself a picture anyway, and the tour lady, she was right onto him — went over and took his camera and all his film away from him on the spot. Just like that.
That lady, she figured me out pretty quick. She could see my whole mind was on the flying, that it’s all I was thinking about the entire time. And she told me straight out, you should have come and asked us for a job — you’d have been hired on the spot, because that’s exactly the kind of person Boeing’s looking for, somebody whose mind is all about flying. Well, that stayed with me, I’ll tell you.
And the building itself, my goodness. Ninety acres it sat on. Ninety. And it had five doors on it, a hundred and twenty-five feet wide each one, so they could open her up and move the planes out. A million lights up in that place — a million — and they threw off so much heat that in the wintertime the men worked in their short sleeves with no heating at all, the lights kept it that warm. And come summer they’d swing open all five of those big doors and let the breeze come in off the ocean, and they didn’t need a lick of air conditioning either. Two things stuck with me off that line. One, they paint a whole airplane in forty minutes — the whole thing, forty minutes in the paint building. And two, they don’t put the engines on until the plane’s just about ready to ship out the door, and that’s on purpose — the buyer doesn’t have to pay for the engines until they’re hung on the plane. Isn’t that something. I could’ve stood there all day.
I’ll tell you why I never went past the simulator, why I never trained for the real thing. It was Grandma. If she hadn’t said no, I’d have done it, no question. See, she got it into her head that if I went up as a pilot, why, it was as good as me trying to commit suicide. And I told her, “Honey, more people die down here on the ground from the drink than ever die up in the air — I won’t go one minute sooner up there than I’d go right here. Why are you so afraid?” But the real thing underneath it, the truth of it, was the money. Real pilot training, that costs too much, way too much. So I let it go. And I’d put it this way, you know: it shows a good marriage, to give a thing like that up. A good marriage comes before the flying. That’s how it is.
And I’ll tell you something else, looking back on it now. I was very successful at what I did with my life, the framing, the building, all of it. And I don’t know — I honestly don’t know — if I’d have been so successful had I gone and become a pilot. Maybe I would have, maybe I wouldn’t. But the life I built, the way it went, it worked out. It worked out just fine.
So I’m a passenger now, and I’ve made my peace with that, and I still love every bit of it. We’ve done a lot of flying down to Mexico over the years — Puerto Vallarta the most, maybe six times, and that’s my favorite of the whole lot; Los Cabos and Mazatlán three or four times each, and Cancun in there too. Cancun’s the one I don’t care for, I’ll be honest. It’s a freaking long flight for one thing, six hours out of Vancouver, and the time we went we landed smack in the middle of a thunderstorm, and it stayed windy and cold near the whole trip. My favorite airports, now? Vancouver and San Francisco, and then those Mexico ones — Puerto Vallarta, Los Cabos, Cancun, Mazatlán. That last one’s a smaller one, quieter, not so busy, and I like that.
I’ve never flown the first class, mind you. It’s just not affordable, way too dear. I’ve got a friend, John Tanraby, and he flies it down to Mexico, and he pays around three thousand dollars for that first-class seat — more than the resort costs him. Not for me, no. And my taste in it has changed anyhow as I’ve got older. Four hours, that’s about all I want in a plane now. I always used to take the window seat, but not anymore — I’ll take the aisle, where I can stretch my legs out a bit. The plane gets there just the same either way, you know, and what is there to see out the window? You’re up so freaking high there’s nothing to look at down there anyhow.
The airlines have changed too. I’ve watched Flair come up from nothing — they’re into Abbotsford four or five times now, more than WestJet even. The family flew Flair out the Christmas they came to see us.
And flying with us was never a dull thing, I’ll tell you. Our very first trip down to Mexico turned into a whole saga. We were meant to go Alaska down to Seattle, and there was just no plane — they made some announcement about a problem with it, and one fellow stood right up and said, “They’re lying to us,” and you know, he was right. There simply weren’t enough passengers to bother running it. So they put us on Delta through Portland, and there was a shuttle waiting for us, and a motel, and they gave us our choice of a breakfast or thirty dollars U.S. We took the thirty. And our Eric, now, he was seventeen or eighteen then, and he’d stayed back to play a hockey game — so after his game he had to find his own way through all that rerouting, got himself his own motel and everything, and met up with us clear down in Los Angeles. We walked onto the plane, and there he was, sitting in it. Another time, years on, we were running late — there’d been an accident on the highway, traffic stopped dead, and then we ended up in the wrong parking lot at the airport — and we missed our nine-thirty by ten minutes. Couldn’t catch it. But they bumped us onto the eleven o’clock, and that one put us right in the section behind first class, where you get your drinks and all of it for free. So it worked out better than if we’d been on time, didn’t it.
I’ve been on a real plane twice, too, where she had to break off her takeoff partway and try it all again. A thing like that, you don’t forget. You’re rolling and rolling, picking up your speed, and then all of a sudden she eases right off and slows herself down, and you’re sitting there wondering what in the world has gone wrong now.
But mostly it’s smooth, and mostly I just settle in. That’s the thing of it now — I take my aisle seat, I stretch out my legs, and I let somebody else fly her. I know every bit of what’s going on up front, every number, every turn the tower’s calling for, and there’s a kind of peace in that, riding along and knowing. I never did get to the controls of a real one. But I get to go up. And I’ll tell you, from right there in that seat, I love it just the same.