For the Pilots in the Audience - Life Science

If you've ever come in to land and it felt like you were going sideways for a while. . welcome to the world of the crosswind. When one is present, the aircraft will adopt a yaw orientation with respect to the runway and will drift laterally as it approaches the runway. These pose significant safety issues when safe operation of the undercarriage requires the body and the velocity of the aircraft to be aligned with the runway at touch down. The landing gear on the B-52 included an unusual feature to counteract the problem: all landing gear bogies could be steered, allowing the aircraft to land with the wheels facing the direction of travel even if the nose was not pointed in the same direction. Cool. Unfortunately not standard.

I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts of it. If you're a pilot you understand, and if you would like to be a pilot there's a myriad of sources where you can learn. Suffice to say, the crosswind landing is a complex maneuver to execute, involving change forces to juggle and evaluate simultaneously, and a high degree of control coordinating and timing seldom required in normal flight. There are times it's a rush of excitement, there are times you think that it would have been wiser to make love standing up in a hammock over a pit of alligators.

The earth was formed of chaos and wind, and does not suffer fools or the arrogant. A while back in the news someone fell into an active volcano while peering over the edge for a good picture. I'm continually amazed by the small markers in cemeteries under which lies someone whose last thought was likely "I probably shouldn't have done this". The Darwin awards are only the tip of the iceberg, the rest, small words in an obituary page that do not give credit to the blind trust of a world that cares little whether you draw your next breath. I pay attention to the weather, the forecasts the wind, I calculate the odds but I've learned that nature is always more than happy to cut off your breath with a choking whisper of disregard


You never know from whence your own moment will come. Years back I read in a story of a fellow who drowned during his baptism in a river. The zealous preacher held him under just a tad too long and he panicked, and in his floundering, broke away into deeper current and drowned. Perhaps just fiction, but I could almost picture those last minutes, as his form shouted it's reluctance to go into the dark void quite yet. Father, Son and Holy Spirit there to guide you, but not always to save you. Trinity, chosen as the name of the atomic bomb tests in New Mexico.



My family had a rented vacation place on the coast, a small cabin really, nothing fancy, and we surfed and boogie boarded in all kinds of weather. Great Whites roamed the area with no invisible fence to keep them out of our yard, as we paddled around dressed like a seal in the frigid water. But I never had a run in, or even saw a shark though they'd munch on a surfer every few years. I did meet Mr. Undertow more than once, and I stumbled from the water, shaking and shivering, trembling with the knowledge of mortality that I did not wear when I entered the water. Time to "sit one out", my board resting on the sand, light bouncing off its surface, shedding a feeble and sultry glare at me that said "coward". But despite that and the wave of more experienced boarder still in the water, I looked hard at the ocean, the growing waves looking like long, frayed ribbons ripped from flat darkness and flung out to air.

But for some of us, we can't give it up. The movement, the motion, the risk. Being aloft is nothing like being on the ground. Nature shows her utter dominion over man. Realms unfold as if painted by the masters, colors shimmering through their spectrum. Clouds stack up, releasing their fury in violent rays of light. I can point my craft west and watch the sun follow me upward.


Each atom of every cloud, each raindrop on the windshield, unique. Time itself shifts with my passing, an experience no other endeavor grants or asks of its participants. Day turns to night and back into day, the earth revolving between my feet. Stars fall from the sky as St. Elmo's fire frolics in the ether. The sky falls away as my feet dance on the rudder pedals in the wind. I take last big breath of air as I touch down, to sustain me in the airless days ahead.

But despite the risks, the wind is a force I follow, shaping it to my dreams; to experience flight to the fullest, knowing that the end could some suddenly, and without warning. One of my non flying friends once said we were all "adrenalin junkies", though when he told me that I was parked on the couch in my robe watching Firefly, eating Nacho Cheese Doritos - not exactly the picture of the adventuress I'm supposed to be. Yet I probably shouldn't think about some of the corners I mop myself into. I fully expect to see on my gravestone "we buried all the pieces we could find!". I don't write a new will, because it's as if that if I do, I'm admitting that I might die doing what I seem to do and then I should have to stop. Like that will work.

Mountaineer Jim Wickwire once said "I had this notion, that if I was out there on the edge willing to push the edge, then I was somehow pushing back the limits of mortality. That by looking at death and then coming back to life I have made that mortality recede". Balancing the deep satisfaction of that with the need for caution, for weighing all the odds, the options, the infinity of what you are launching yourself into, is not easy. Sometimes you come home uplifted, blood racing, feeling as alive as you ever will. Sometimes you have a date with a tox box. Sometimes you just carry it home alone.


You can't always save the world, and sometimes you can't even save yourself. But the wonder is often worth it. If you're lucky, your brushes with life will only leave a few small physical scars. If I raise up my bangs, there at at the hairline, a tiny, faint little scar from a tumble from my bike down a hill. Another scar where I took a few stitches in my toe after tripping over a barbed tent stake chasing my big brother around the yard. But for most people like myself, the bigger scars are internal and you only touch them, gingerly, and with trepidation, in late night hours of retrospection.

Pilots get that. So, usually, does anyone with scars. There are times when all is going to hell in a hand basket around you, and there's a sense of this huge elemental power and you think "what the #^@& am I doing this, this is insane!", and you get out of it alive and you go "well that wasn't so bad was it?" And as you're going home you're already thinking about going out and doing it again. It's a sense of communion with the infinite, when you've stretched yourself to the absolute limits of your everything in you, senses cranked up to red line with the knowledge that if you screw up, you will die. But if you don't, then the world will, for that instant anyway, have one moment of equilibrium, of order, of joy.

Those moments, narrow moments of perfection. Moments almost worthy of the price.

Fate is a science of physics
the summation of eddies and currents
your life nothing more than the component
of what you do with the variants
of velocity, of direction, of speed.

Risk is the science of math
the pull of gravity plus the power of will
with additions made for skill and cunning
factored into your final answer.
an answer which will be final.

Wind is science of chaotic truths
it twists and turns with disregard
of goals of dreams, of plans yet made
simply the heave and pull, the how and when
as you push against wind and time

For nature is a science of geometry
of bases of force and will
a cold breeze that has two edges
one of triumph, one of loss
that can cut the heart asunder.