Lawn Darts
Helicopters have a part called the Jesus Bolt. It is the bolt (it's a little more elaborate than that actually) that holds the twirly bits onto the stationary bits. The twirly bits fly, the stationary bits do not. You sit in the stationary bits. If the Jesus bolt fails, the flying bits continue doing so; you, being in the stationary bits, get to meet Jesus. Jesus Bolt. Things in the flying business get funny names in direct relation to how terrifying they are. For instance, in a fixed wing aircraft, there is no Jesus Bolt but there are two ways you can approximate the failure of one. The first way is by contacting the ground with the belly of the aircraft. This is called Pancaking, like throwing a pancake onto the floor and it lands level. Not very funny, because it doesn't have to be fatal. In fact most pilots have done a pancake landing at some point by flaring too high and stalling out a few feet above the ground, resulting in an abrupt landing. I've even been on commercial jets where this has happened and most people don't even notice. The second way of approximating the failure of a Jesus Bolt in a fixed wing aircraft is by striking the ground with the nose of the plane. This is called Doing a Lawn Dart. Nowadays, lawn darts are little plastic toys that aren't very impressive, and Aviation has likely come up with a different term for flying into the ground. Back in the day, however, a lawn dart was a weapon made of steel and when it hit the ground it drove itself into said ground for a quarter of its length. So Doing a Lawn Dart was a very funny name to give to an otherwise terrifying situation. A lawn dart happens at a much higher speed than a pancake, and in every single case is unintentional and fatal. This is a story about that last thing.
The weather on and around Lake Superior can change in an instant at the best of times, no matter the time of year. On November 10, 1975, a particularly vicious storm cost the lives of 29 sailors on board the Edmund Fitzgerald. The meteorologist on duty that day at the Sault Airport said it was the most dramatic change in air pressure (for the worse) that he had ever seen, although, severity aside, a dramatic loss of air pressure was not uncommon in November. Thankfully, this was February, in fact the third February since the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy, and that same meteorologist was recounting this story to me and my buddy Ron. We were both there to get our weather briefing prior to our separate cross-country flights which we were doing to burn up hours towards our Commercial pilot's licenses, for which you needed 200 hours of pilot-in-command time. Ron was going to fly west towards Escanaba, then North to Grand Island and then back home skirting the south shore of Superior while I decided (for no particular reason) to fly east to Sudbury. The meteorologist said that the forecast so far was good and all stations were reporting CAVU (ceiling and visibility unlimited) but that his confidence was less in a westerly direction as that was Lake Superior, which was in a mood, February or not. This was back in the days before weather satellites were everywhere. Weather forecasts and observations relied on people to do them, and their observations were limited to what they could see. It was assumed that if the weather stations were sufficiently close to each other, then the weather would be somewhat uniform in between stations, but there were no guarantees. To make up for this shortfall you could read the PIREPs, or Pilot Reports, of people who had recently flown your route. These all looked good although they weren't too fresh as not too many people were out and about this particular day. I suggested that Ron could come with me to Sudbury, but of course planning a flight takes a lot of time and his plan was in place for Escanaba. So we went back to the clubhouse, had a coffee, finalized our flight plans, filed them, and off we went in our separate directions.
The flight east started out uneventfully. I climbed to my cruising altitude of 3,000 feet and then started my trip over a convenient point - the giant belchy smoke stack of the steel plant - and off I went. This was the third time flying to Sudbury for me; once with an instructor and once by myself. Both of those flights were done at altitude (or at least such altitude as you can get out of a Cessna 152) because there's a lot of nothing between Sault and Sudbury and height is safety. But flying really high is like cheating, because things on the ground look pretty much the same as they do on your map. So I decided this trip I'd be a little lower and have to work a bit. The weather was very much CAVU.
Somewhere after Echo Bay there was a bit of a haze to the air and driving a bit lower seemed to be the thing to do. The haze intensified but not alarmingly so. Then it started to snow, but not a terrible amount. It was around Wharncliffe that everything went to hell. I was in the middle of what would be a pretty snowfall on the ground, but in the air it was quickly exceeding my skill level. I suddenly had no idea where I was or where I was going, and totally forgot the first rule of being lost, which is Don't Do Anything. Keep on your heading. Instead I started driving around looking for a point on the ground that I could identify and within a few minutes I was totally and utterly lost. Forward visibility was low - perhaps a half a mile. That implied that vertical visibility was about the same - 3,000 feet (a nautical mile is 6,080 feet), but the useable ceiling would be something like half of that if you wanted to see anything. So staying in the air was a tradeoff between flying high enough to avoid obstacles and flying low enough to see the trees, as the trees below me were the only frame of reference in an otherwise all white world.
A visual frame of reference is vitally important to greenhorn pilots. The average training aircraft at the time had the standard six pack of instruments and also one or two radio navigation instruments. With all of this stuff an experienced and properly trained pilot can drive anywhere with or without looking out the window. But to a greenhorn these instruments are the forbidden fruit. At this point, all of us students had had a fam flight or two in the simulator and the very basic kind of instrument training needed for your night rating, but nothing in depth, and in particular no exposure to Unusual Attitudes, the skill of being able to instantly diagnose and correct any unusual combinations of instrument readings. To someone at this level of skill, the instruments appear straightforward - you just have to keep the little picture of the airplane level and make sure the needle and ball are in the middle and not to one side or the other. In practice, however, without a visual frame of reference inexperienced pilots immediately get what is called vertigo, where your body tells you that you are turning, diving, flying upside down and backwards all at the same time and within seconds such an inexperienced pilot will give in to these sensations and cause them to become true. The solution is exactly the same as the solution for being lost - don't do anything. In fact, let go of the controls and the airplane will fly through anything all on its own as long as you're high enough to miss stuff. But an inexperienced pilot who can't see the ground will wrestle with the aircraft trying to make the sensations of vertigo go away, which will always end badly.
There are four possible outcomes to a case of vertigo if the pilot is wrestling the aircraft. The first is the one we all hope for; that is where the visibilty suddenly improves before ground level, such as when you fly into a cloud accidentally or otherwise, and the pilot simply recovers and stays away from clouds thereafter. The other three scenarios occur when the visibility is poor all the way to the ground, such as when it is snowing. They are the different variations of the lawn dart. If the pilot manages to stall one wing but not the other, then the aircraft will spin into the ground like a large, heavy, and very fast maple key. If the pilot thinks he's climbing at a steep angle and he therefore overcompensates and then is in fact diving at a steep angle then he will plow into the ground like a piledriver. Apart from the wreckage, the investigators will know either of these situations has happened because every single bone in the pilot's body will be broken. The more likely scenario, though, is the spiral dive. This is where the pilot sees that he is losing altitude on the altimeter but doesn't have enough experience to cross check properly with the other instruments. He pulls back on the column to make things go up, but since he is actually in a steep turn at the time he simply pulls the aircraft into an even steeper turn and descent. Quickly, almost instantly, the G forces build up and the pilot blacks out. Unfortunately, of the three scenarios, the spiral dive is stable and will continue with no pilot, whereas the absence of a pilot would fix the other two situations. A spiral dive is evidenced by a body with not so many broken bones.
I was about to find all this out firsthand. Visibility forward was approaching nil and everything was white anyway. I could see swirly white trees below me so I knew where down was but at any moment I could find myself over a lake and then I would be flying through cotton. Then, suddenly, the weather broke and was actually quite nice. I found a sizeable community and I circled that until I could find it on the map; it was Elliot Lake. Coincidentally, Elliot Lake Airport was one of the weather stations reporting CAVU, and it certainly was that. The rest of the trip to Sudbury was routine, and I was paying more attention to haze and ready for a quick turnabout on the way home if the weather deteriorated but it stayed nice.
Back at the clubhouse I had a great story to tell and it was just a matter of playing some pool and drinking some coffee and waiting for everyone's flights to finish so we could all go home. Ron hadn't come back yet; he had probably had lunch in Michigan somewhere and took an extra hour.
All of the shorter flights finished up and it was getting kind of late and still no Ron. We called the tower who hadn't heard anything but they'd let us know as soon as Ron was in the area.
Still no Ron, so we phoned Flight Services and asked if they'd heard anything. They said no, but he was overdue and they would keep us posted.
Still nothing, so we phoned the Major who was in charge of flight training. He said he'd look into it and we may as well go on home. So we all went home and then, not knowing what else to do, called an informal vigil in the room of the guy who had a phone and waited for news.
After a time there was still no news, so we all went back to our own pods and rooms and did whatever else there was to do.
In fact it would be two days later before there would be any news. The U.S. coast guard found Ron on an ice flow on Lake Superior. He had spiraled in. He had undoubtedly found the same conditions I had; bands of roving snow showers exactly in between the weather stations, which were all reporting CAVU. But whereas I was over land and had the trees for reference, he was over ice and had white on white. He would have had a few seconds of utter terror and then he would have simply gone to sleep. We all raised a glass to our fallen comrade later that night, at the Purple Latrine, a good venue for such a thing because they would supply you with all of the beer that you required, even on a Sunday, so long as you ordered an eggroll, and there were seldom any other patrons there.
In due time, Ron would be followed by Stugots, who would discover that the control zones over Detroit and Windsor overlap a little. Then sometime later, Fat Frank would find out that a 310 has a mind of its own. Sometime during all this I would complete all of my licenses and ratings, and get my first job. I would be replacing the guy who had died over the course of many hours in a tangled ball of aluminum foil the year previously. I've lost touch over the years with my flying buddies, but I'm sure there have been a few more fallen comrades for whom to raise a glass.
Flying can be years of boredom, punctuated occasionally by a few moments of sheer terror. All you can do is keep on smiling, and give the terrifying things funny names so they don't haunt your dreams.