Chapter 4: Taiga

I pushed the throttle levers forward and our steed picked up speed readily. Although we were close to maximum take-off weight, mainly because all tanks were filled to the brim, we had the luxury of a seemingly endless runway, so we were not in any rush.

When Fred finally called out the rotation speed I gently pulled back on the yoke and we sailed towards the sky. Even at this weight the PC-12 was a pretty good climber and by the time we had cleaned up the surfaces, we were already at our initial climbing attitude. The controller in the tower bade us a rather friendly farewell, which made Fred suspect that one of the twenty dollar bills had apparently made it all the way to the tower.

I continued the manual flight up to seven thousand feet and handed things over to the auto pilot. From now on it would be a matter of monitoring the instruments and occasional adjustments to the auto pilot configuration for the next four hours or so. The hospitality in Anadyr had been somewhat lacking, but thankfully we were supplied with drinks and meals by our lovely bare-breasted passenger.

“I could get used to that type of service,” Fred said with a grin.

“You will, when you take up a job with me,” I quipped back.

“Wait, you want to fly with topless stewardesses?” he asked, chuckling in disbelief.

“Only on some charters,” I explained. “It was actually Sofia’s idea. I don’t even know if we will get that past the authorities, but I could imagine there’s a market for it. Only showing, not touching of course. I don’t want to end up in jail for abetting prostitution.”

“Now that’s one hell of a business idea if I ever heard one,” he answered, laughing. “Any long term plans?”

“I have so many ideas, but I’ll have to see what’s really possible once we get there. From what I gathered, we’ll probably be able to snatch up a contract with dad’s company fairly easily, which means I’ll need a Beech-1900, preferably a D-model fairly soon.”

“Nah, boy, you better go for a Dornier 328 or an Embraer-120 for regular business shuttles,” he said.

“I would need flight attendants for those, but not for the Beech,” I argued.

“Yeah, but the other two have lavatories, and one thing you can be sure of with business travellers is that they’re well loaded with coffee or beer, depending on whether it is the morning or the evening flight.”

“Good point, actually,” I conceded.

“Trust me, they aint coming back when they had to pee in a bottle in a full cabin.”

“I guess finding a Dornier shouldn’t be that difficult, seeing that we’ll be in Germany,” I pondered aloud.

Fred nodded. “And if you want an Embraer, the Dutch and French have a lot of those.”

“Man, you’re an even bigger aviation geek than I am,” I told Fred. He just shrugged with a grin.

We continued discussing my ideas for a while longer, and I even took down some notes. Most of the flight went by quietly though. We were on our third flight, nearing twelve hours in the air and the landscape did little to provide any variety. For most of the flight we were cruising 25.000 feet above an endless sea of boreal forest. Getting lost in one of those looked like sure way to get yourself killed as we hardly saw any signs of settlements anywhere.

When we were finally nearing Magadan Sokol airport, Fred realised we had indeed been given what he called the ‘suicide approach’ to runway 10. He offered to take over for the landing, but I declined, and asked him to be be ready to if necessary. I was relatively inexperienced, especially on this type, but just chickening out wasn’t really an option. I was type-rated on the PC-12, and that meant I was supposed to be able to fly any legal approach with it.

The trouble was that the assigned approach stretched the definition of ‘legal’ to its limits, at least in terms of what we were accustomed to in the states. We would be weaving our path in between the hills that surrounded the airport and by the time we were supposed to be on a straight and stabilized approach already we would have to do a sharp ninety degree right turn at just 1.200 feet above ground, leaving little time for last-minute corrections if something went wrong.

Fred put his hand on the thrust leaver, ready to initiate a go-around if necessary as I wrestled the shaking plane on our descent towards the last turn. Being just a few miles out, I could see the airport when I looked out of my side window.

“Heading one-zero-four, thirty degree bank. Hold ‘er steady,” Fred called out and I brought us into a steep turn, rolling ourselves back level when the needle neared the required mark.

“Watch the attitude indicator,” I was reminded and saw that I had dipped the nose a little during the turn, a not uncommon mistake for inexperienced pilots like me, but a potentially deadly one just a thousand feet above ground, after all we weren’t doing this in level flight, but during the actual descent towards the runway.

With Fred’s hand resting on the thrust lever, I put my hand on his and gently gave the engine a lick more thrust. What to an outside party would have looked like an attempt to get touchy-feely with my fellow aviator was standard practice during an approach. Fred’s hand was required to be on the lever as he had to be ready to initiate a go-around at any moment, yet I as the pilot flying, was in command of the plane and therefore responsible for any thrust corrections.

My last minute correction caused us to come in about thirty feet too high, but with three and a half kilometres of runway ahead of us, it didn’t matter that I overshot the touchdown zone by about fifty metres. I put the plane down firmly and applied the breaks. With half a county’s worth of runway in front of us we didn’t need reverse thrust.

“Well done, boy,” Fred said and gave me a thumbs up. I wasn’t quite convinced yet.

“How close were you to slamming it on the table and going around?” I asked.

“Had you hesitated for just one second to make that thrust correction, I would take taken over,” he explained. “Most pilots don’t want to make such a late change and then they end up with a bent landing gear, but you handled it nicely.”

“Thanks, Fred.”

“Don’t get too cocky over it, but from what I’ve seen today, you know what you’re doing.”

Since Sokol airport was a full fifty kilometres from downtown Magadan, we had booked into one of the airport hotels, an old Soviet slab of concrete with all the glamour and amenities of a Mexican prison. But glamour wasn’t what we were after anyway. Fred had made it pretty clear that whatever plans I and the ‘damn fine lady’ had would better be postponable until we took a breather in Moscow.

Duly warned that I would learn just how short eight hours of sleep would feel like, I ate what had to be the worst interpretation of a steak ever in the hotel restaurant, took a shower and crawled into bed, shortly followed by Sofia.

I was about to get really miffed with her about waking me up shortly after we had gone to bed, until I saw the wall mounted clock and that it was actually three o’clock in the morning. I had slept a full eight hours and thirty minutes in what literally felt like a blink of the eyes. There had been absolutely nothing between closing and opening them.

“I thought I would need to call an ambulance,” Sofia said and looked at me with concern.

“It’s okay, dear,” I said and gave her a peck on the nose. “I guess Fred was right yet again when he said that I would sleep like dead. I’ll take a shower and have a look what the people around here think a breakfast looks like.”

Of course there was no breakfast. That started at six o’clock in the morning and by that time we had already been in the air for two hours, on our way to Yakutsk. Thankfully the galley was well-stocked enough to easily take us through the day with meals and drinks and our second and third stops of the day, Irkutsk and Novosibirsk were large hubs of Siberia Airlines, which meant we would be able to restock from their catering partner along the route.

The day itself turned out to be an endless drag. Even the stops along the route were all the same - a big Siberian city on a very large river and in between them taiga, nothing but taiga, the endless forests of Siberia.

Since we alternated duty as pilot flying and pilot monitoring, Fred got to fly the first and last leg, while I was in command for the flight from Yakutsk to Irkutsk. The only respite we got on an otherwise ridiculously boring day were the few times when Sofia came to the cockpit with food and drink deliveries, during which we got a few seconds of looking at something a helluva lot more entertaining than our instruments or bazillions of conifers twenty-five thousand feet below.