Slipping the Surly Bonds

A very long time ago (or was it just yesterday?!), The Mister and I spent much of our time and energy out at Williams Air Force Base, which is now Williams Gateway, and the home of ASU Polytechnic as well as some other businesses. We were mostly involved with the base chapel, as civilians; but it didn't hurt that The Mister has been hooked on aviation since his youth, and there were plenty of airplanes and pilots and flying stories, and so some lifelong friendships were formed during those years. The Mister often quips, "When you go into a room full of people, how do you know which ones are pilots? Just wait ten minutes and they'll tell you!" That's another way of saying that pilots are a special breed.

One of the things that we were privileged to be a part of was the graduation ceremonies for the young officers getting their wings. We would dress up, go to the theater, have a long ceremony, and then go to the Officer's club for food. During that ceremony, there would inevitably be the video clip of an airplane, set to music, while the narrator read the famous poem by John Magee, that starts like this:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --

It always made me cry, and probably would still today if I saw it.

There's an article in today's East Valley Tribune about the chance for some EVIT youngsters to get their pilot's licenses; what a great opportunity for those students.

I bring all this up because many folks have been asking The Mister for his theory of what happened to Cory Lidle and his instructor in New York last week. They ask because they know The Mister is a pilot (see joke above) and they ask because they know that The Mister flies a similar plane to the one that crashed. Mr. Lidle's model was the Cirrus SR-20 and The Mister and The Water Expert co-own an Cirrus SR-22. Here's a closeup of The Mister with the then-newly purchased plane, and the instructor that helped fly it back to Arizona:




The unique thing about this plane is that is has a parachute; not for the occupants to wear, but for the entire airplane. There's a big red handle on the ceiling between the pilot and front passenger's seats that, when pulled, blows a chute out of the top of the airplane right behined the back passenger seats, and lets the entire craft float down to the ground. In the nine times that parachutes on Cirrus aircraft been deployed in various situations, the occupants have almost always walked away unhurt (excluding the pilot who died of a heart attack, thus causing the passengers to pull the handle).

So what happened in New York? Well, there's an excellent article in Popular Mechanics here, written by a pilot who traversed the same route as Cory Lidle. He explains better than I ever could about the class B airspace and the corridor that they were flying. No one really knows at this point (although The Mister is fairly certain that the NTSB will have an exact answer in several months- their investigations would put CSI to shame) what happened when the plane got to end of the corridor, but since they didn't have permission to cross the class B airspace, it seems logical that they tried to pull a U-turn in a tight space. The Mister surmises that they likely stalled as they did this (and here I must insert the explanation that whenever you read the word "stall" in a story about an airplane, please don't confuse that with the stalling of a car engine. It does NOT mean that the engine stops; it means that the wing stops flying due to the angle, causing the airplane to drop down out of the sky) and then confusion ensued for a critical 3 or 4 seconds. Perhaps the instructor was waiting for Mr. Lidle to recover (since he was now pilot in command as well as owner of the aircrafte), or perhaps Mr. Lidle was waiting for his instructor to recover from the stall (as the instructor had kept him safe all through flight training), and when neither did they were already below the 400 foot minimum to deploy the chute, and perhaps even in a spin, though that's less sure; but it was too late at that point. That's The Mister's theory. He agrees wholeheartedly with the Popular Mechanics pilot's conclusion, though:

Some people who aren’t pilots don’t understand why some of us risk our lives for what seems to be a pointless thrill. For them, the logical course of action would be to shut down the VFR flyway to prevent more deaths. But pilots see things differently. To us, flying is a great privilege that, yes, carries a certain amount of inherent risk. But living in the presence of danger and accepting responsibility for it is one of the things that makes life meaningful. We don’t want to live in a world that’s foolproof and accident-free. We want one where prudence and respect can be rewarded with an indescribable freedom—a freedom that too few people are lucky enough to enjoy.

The appropriate response to the death of Lidle and Stanger is not to ban similar flights. It’s for fellow pilots to study what happened, learn from it, and go on to be safer flyers.

It seems ironic that we heard about this crash as we were finishing lunch out at Williams Gateway airport. The First Cousin was craving their gyro sandwich, and the pilots in the office don't mind looking at airplanes while eating, so there we were.

"And speaking of flying..."- the phrase used in our office to introduce any number of mundane details about the topic - you might be surprised at how a family of farmers can contain so many pilots. For The Mister, it started when he was a youngster hanging over the back of his couch watching crop dusters fly over his house through the window. He got his pilot's license when he was 17. His older brother was a Navy pilot. There are some uncles and great-uncles who are pilots. Two recent converts to the love of flying are The Water Expert, and Bias For Action's wife, who got their tickets to fly in the last few years and months, respectively. It seems to me that flying really gets under the skin of some folks; it becomes a passion, you might say. That's why they resonate with Magee's poem. Here are the last few lines:

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

And to answer your question, yes; I got my pilot's license right after The Mister and I got married.