Chapter 68: Crash

Author’s note.

As usual thanks to all of you who have continued to support me, to Dr Mark for his amazing editing and theswiss for his excellent server management.

PM

“My plane,” Arnie barked, grabbing the yoke and taking control of the aircraft.

Every instinct I had said that I should take back control, but he was the instructor, and as far as anyone, even he, was concerned he was by far the more experienced pilot.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” Arnie said as he keyed the PTT on the radio. “Seattle Center this is N734GR declaring an emergency.” He went on to give our position. Thankfully we had taken advantage of flight following so Seattle Center at least knew we were out here. He said that we were making for Oakridge State airport, but I could already tell that we had nowhere near the altitude to make that distance. As he was talking, I noted him change the transponder code to 7700.

“N734GR when able, state number of souls and fuel on board in hours please.” The response came from ATC.

We’d been cruising at just over nine thousand feet, but given the terrain we were only about 3,000 to 4,000 feet above the ground. According to what Gerry’s memories were telling me, this would have given us between six and eight miles of optimal glide. While Arnie was setting us up for maximum glide, I guesstimated we had probably less than three miles before we were below the highest of the terrain, and possibly less than five, before we hit ground, depending on where we got to. Arnie was looking around, surprisingly calm, searching for somewhere we could put down. All we could see at the moment were trees and, although it was a warm day, there was still mist in the valleys below us where the sun hadn’t gotten high enough to burn it off.

“I can’t see any good spots,” he said to me, his voice calm. “Can you see anything?”

“Nothing so far,” I replied. “The mist is shrouding everything. We’re not going to be able to see anything until we get lower.”

“By which time,” he said, “we’ll be in a valley and committed to landing there, whatever is at the bottom.”

He tried to answer the question for ATC, but we were pretty close to the peaks around us, and it appeared that it was blocking our radio. Our one hope from that respect would be that an aircraft above us would pick it up and relay it. We were effectively out of communication now.

“There’s a ridge ahead,” I pointed out and Arnie nodded.

“We’ll clear it,” he replied, but not by much.”

He was right. We made it over the ridge and found ourselves being forced to turn right to avoid another ridge about a mile ahead. That put us into a valley that we now had to follow, since we didn’t have the height to escape either side. Whatever was at the bottom was still shrouded in mist, so we had no idea what we were coming down on.

We were down to about four and a half thousand feet now and I could see the sides of the valley closing in. I figured that we didn’t have much left below us. From what I remembered of the charts, the valleys around here were between three and four thousand feet above sea level. We were just entering the mist that lay in the bottom of the valley, with no idea what was below us. Arnie was keeping us as close to the centre of the valley as he could, figuring that would be where the most likelihood of flat ground, or even a road, might be.

While Arnie was concentrating on flying, I was reaching out with my TK trying to find something to push against.

As I’d found in the past, I couldn’t use my TK to fly. I needed to push against something. I could jump really really high, and even use my TK to ‘pseudo fly’ in a series of ‘hops’ by jumping and then pushing against things as I moved over them. I’d tried this a few times, but not really extensively since I didn’t have anywhere to train this where people wouldn’t notice someone flying through the air.

A moment later I found the ground, estimating to be maybe five hundred feet below us. We were still in the mist so we couldn’t see anything. I could feel that there was no road, but there was a river meandering through the base of the valley. It seemed to be a fairly small, and tortuous, watercourse. There wasn’t going to be an easy landing here.

“I just caught a glimpse of the ground,” I told Arnie. “Were about five hundred feet up. There’s a river in the base of the valley but its only small.”

“Shit,” he said. “This is going to hurt.”

I could feel that as we moved further up the valley, the floor was getting higher. We were dropping faster, relative to the ground, than it appeared from our instruments. It was at that point that the mist thinned, and we could see what we were in for.

As I’d felt, there was a thin river, not much more than a creek, flowing quite quickly down the floor of the valley. The last couple of days rain had obviously done much to swell what would normally be a much smaller watercourse.

The river, such as it was, switched backwards and forwards across the floor, slipping between boulders and flowing over dams and rocks. There were trees almost to the waters edge on both sides. Arnie glanced across at me.

“We’re going to have to go for the treetops,” he said. “There’s nowhere else.”

I nodded, agreeing with him. The forest around here looked to be fairly dense and made up of what looked like Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock, with a few Red Cedar’s thrown in.

We were less than fifty feet from the canopy by this time, our airspeed still around seventy knots. Seeing that we had what looked to be about a mile of canopy ahead of us, before another ridgeline started to rise, Arnie pulled the nose up to try and bleed off some more speed. I assisted by pushing against the trees, and slowing the forward momentum of the plane. I knew this bird would stall out at just less than fifty knots, so we still had a little leeway. We dropped lower.

The slap of the main gear hitting the very top of the trees was the opening salvo in what turned out to be a maelstrom of crashes and bangs. We’d skimmed the top of a couple of trees but then, as we slipped lower, a thicker branch had caught on the gear, pulling the nose down.

The plane plunged into the treetops, branches whipping against the windshield. The left wing caught on the trunk of a particularly tall tree, both ripping it free, and twisting the fuselage brutally to the left, leaving us heading directly towards a thicker trunk directly in front of us. Using TK I pushed the nose further left, so we missed the trunk, and it slid to the right of the front of the plane, ripping off the right wing, and causing us to twist again to the right.

Our forward momentum had been severely depleted now, but gravity was starting to make itself known. We started to slide down, and across, several larger branches as we headed toward the ground. I guessed that we were, at this point, probably still about eighty feet in the air. If the plane were to fall directly to the ground, nose first, from here, we’d likely not survive the experience.

Instead, I pushed against the floor, forcing the nose of the aircraft to lift and skate along the top of branches rather than slip between them. A slight push to the right avoided yet another trunk. We finally came to rest with Arnie’s side of the plane lodged against the trunk of another tree, supported by two or three thicker branches.

The windshield had been badly cracked and I could smell fuel which must have been coating the outside of the fuselage since both wings had been ripped off.

Arnie had killed all the power in the plane isolating the electrics to prevent any sparks that would cause a fire.

I looked at him, and he at me.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m alive,” I said with a grin. “Good job.”

“We still have to find a way down,” he remarked, not able to see out of his side of the plane, which was lodged up against the tree. “How high up are we?”

I opened the door on my side, and peered over the edge.

“About sixty feet,” I said.

“Can you see a way down?” he asked.

I looked again.

“Nope,” I said. “Not from here.”

“I can’t open my door,” he said.

“Through the windshield?” I asked looking at the cracked glass in front of us. That didn’t appear to be a viable way out either, even if we were able to break it out.

“Let me take another look,” I said, undoing my harness.

I slid sideways on my seat, moving slowly in case my movement caused the plane to shift. The last thing I wanted was for the whole thing to come crashing down to earth. It seemed to be pretty tightly wedged into its current position though.

I leaned out, still not seeing any way down. Or at least no way that didn’t include me using my powers. I looked back at Arnie, and pulled him into an illusion.

“There’s a big branch just below and behind us,” I said. “It’s going to be a bit hairy getting onto it, but once we’re there it looks like a reasonable climb down. We might have to jump the last ten feet or so.”

I eased myself out of the plane and lowered myself until I was holding onto the door ledge, swinging my legs forward until I could reach the branch with my foot. Once I had my feet on the branch I used the door ledge, and then one of the branches supporting the plane, to ‘walk’ myself onto the branch until I was able to grab some smaller branches and pull myself completely onto it.

I felt the plane shift slightly as Arnie climbed across from the right seat, and then I saw his feet appear as he eased himself down onto the door ledge and then followed me onto the branch. What followed was a slow but steady descent, from branch to branch, until at long last we were dangling from the lowest branch, our feet about eight feet from the sloping forest floor. We dropped almost together, tumbling to the ground, ending up flat on our backs looking up at the plane, a white smudge visible only in glimpses through the branches above us.

While Arnie enjoyed the illusion, I jumped out of the plane, into the clear space, controlling my fall using TK, and landing lightly on the ground. I looked up, and lifted Arnie out of his seat, across the cabin and brought him down to ground level, lying him flat on the floor. I lay down beside him and dropped the illusion.

“Fuck,” Arnie said. “They say any landing you can walk away from...”

“Considering the circumstances,” I chimed in, “that was an amazing landing.”

“My dad’s not going to think so,” he replied.

“I’m sure he’ll be happy enough to see you survived,” I said. “I know I would be, and I’m certain Sarah will be.”

He looked over at me. “Did she say something about me?” he asked.

“Oh come on,” I said. “She’ll be all over you like a rash when she finds out that you crashed. Also, the fact that you saved her brother’s life won’t do you any harm.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I just...”

“You got us on the ground,” I said. “In one piece. I would say that counts as saving my life.”

He grinned at me. “Well if you put it like that,” he said.

“Now,” I said. “All you have to do is get me home.”

He sighed and sat up.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “Somewhere in the Opal Pool falls area, I think. I’ve no signal on my phone, and all our maps are still up there.” I pointed to the plane, still a good sixty feet above us.

Arnie pulled out his phone, and looked at it.

“I don’t have a signal either,” he said. “The ELT will have triggered, but its one of the old ones, which aren’t monitored by satellite any more. ATC will have a rough idea where we are because of the flight following. Once they get near enough they’d pick up the ELT”

The ELT, I knew, was a device that was mandatory to mount in any aircraft registered in the US. It would transmit a signal, enabling rescue services to find a downed airplane. There were a number of different types, each fitted and used slightly differently. I assumed that the one fitted to the Cessna was of the type that would trigger automatically given G-forces above a certain threshold. Gerry remembered about 2.5g would be enough to trigger them. Arnie telling me it was of the old type suggested it worked on the old frequencies of 125Mhz or 242Mhz instead of the modern 406Mhz devices.

“Well,” I said, pointing down the hill to the creek, “we’ve got plenty of water, it’s not too cold. If the ELT is working, we’re better off staying near the aircraft. It will be easier to find us. We could walk into the next valley and find a McDonalds, or we could walk miles and find nothing. We just don’t know.”

I wondered if ATC had contacted Danny yet. I was certain he’d be worried, and that he might contact the girls. I decided to let them know what had happened.

“Hey Mary,” I sent to her, going for a light tone.

“Hey Caleb,” she returned. “How’s the flight going.”

“Not good,” I responded. “The propellor fell off the plane. We kind of crashed a bit.”

I winced at the spike of emotion that I felt from her, and then the secondary spikes I got from all the other girls as they felt hers, and then found out what it was about. All four of the other girls tried to send to me at once.

“We’re fine,” I sent back, “We’re just stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Any ideas where you are?” Asked Mary.

“Somewhere south southwest of Oakridge State airport, probably about ten to fifteen miles out. We were trying to make it back there when we ran out of air and came down in the trees. Can you let Danny know? I’m sure ATC have informed him that we went down. He’ll be worried sick.”

“And how am I supposed to have talked to you. I’m guessing no cell service out there?” She remarked.

I sighed. She was right. Danny would have to worry at least until SAR found us. I knew that the 304^th Rescue squadron was based at Portland International and that there were two Civil Air Patrol squadrons, one at Eugene and one at Bend, closer than that. There were also a couple of Coast Guard Air Stations a bit further out. I assumed that one of those units, if not more, would have been alerted by now. In terms of Search and Rescue, we couldn’t have crashed in a better place.

Looking around, I saw that there wasn’t really any clear space where a helicopter could touch down. The trees grew almost to the edge of the ‘river’ which, as I said, was not much more than a swollen creek. We did move a little down hill towards the river, which was really the only break in the trees that would allow us to be seen from the air. I was certain that we’d hear any aircraft above us.

I sat on the ground with my back against the trunk of one of the trees. We were maybe one hundred yards from the tree in which the plane rested, so there was no danger of the thing falling on us and finishing the job it had started at 9,000 feet.

Arnie came and sat beside me. “I guess we just wait,” he said. “We could be here a while.” I noticed he was shivering, although it wasn’t cold.

“Are you okay?” I asked him. He gave me a wan smile.

“I guess,” he said. “It just hit me what happened. We crashed, Caleb. We could have been killed.”

I trawled back through Gerry’s memories. Over his career, he’d had what he called, ‘alternate landings’ three times, including having to eject from his plane in the desert once. He hadn’t been shot down, but his plane had malfunctioned and he’d been forced to eject on the way home from a patrol. Fortunately, he was within sight of the airfield and was picked up by their rescue helicopter within fifteen minutes of going down.

I examined my own feelings about the event and found that it didn’t really register as a problem. I’d known that I had the power to protect myself and Arnie with the most limiting factor being trying to act without revealing those powers to him.

I put my arm around his shoulders. “You did brilliantly,” I said. “You did everything right. Nobody could have done anything better. We’re on the ground, and look, not even a scratch.”

He turned into me, seeking comfort, and I held him, his shivering getting worse as his mind went over the events of the end of the flight. I could see so many ‘what if’s’ running through his head. He’d heard stories of people being impaled on branches that pierced windshields, or others where the plane had caught fire as it crashed killing those inside.

He didn’t know that I’d diverted the plane a couple of times to keep us safe, but his imagination was running wild.

I was reminded of his relative youth. He was barely eighteen and this, apparently, was the first time a flight had ended in any way other than the way it was intended. He’d trained extensively for emergencies, which had stood him in good stead for what had happened, but he’d regarded those exercises as fun. They’d given him an adrenaline buzz, but he’d always known that they were training and that he was perfectly safe.

Although I was only three years his senior, the years of flying experience I had memory of from Gerry made me feel much older, and much less traumatized by the experience.

“Whatever is running through your mind right now,” I said to him, now holding his shaking form to me, “didn’t happen. We’re safe, and whole, and you have a great story to tell people. You’ll be a hero.”

“I don’t feel much like a hero,” he said relaxing a little against me. “I was so scared.”

I gently rolled my power over him, reassurance, safety, security. I felt him relax further, and he snuggled into me.

“Being scared is okay,” I said. “It’s normal. But you didn’t let it stop you. You did everything you needed to, to get us down in one piece.”

We sat for a few minutes like that, until the distant sound of a helicopter made us both look up. Arnie pulled away from me, flushing. I deliberately didn’t catch his eye, scanning the sky for the source of the sound.

We moved as far into the clear as we could manage without wading out into the creek. There was about fifteen yards of clear space, where the creek switched back on itself, and we could walk out onto a small rocky outcropping.

We were about one hundred and fifty yards from where the plane sat, still perched in the crook of the tree, sixty to eighty feet above the ground. It was even higher relative to us since we’d come down quite a steep slope to get to the creek and out into the open.

We stood side by side, watching as the helicopter drew nearer. They didn’t fly directly over us while they were homing in on the plane’s ELT. I recognized the bird as a HH60G Pave Hawk, the Air Force sibling of the UH60 Black Hawk that the army used. I didn’t bother to shout and wave, knowing full well that the helicopter was equipped with IR sensing and that they would sweep the immediate area of the downed aircraft. They would spot us without all of that undignified prancing about, and shouting was an exercise in futility given the amount of noise that the rotors made. I could be standing next to the bird and they still wouldn’t hear any noise I was capable of producing.

Arnie wasn’t quite so restrained though. He started dancing up and down, waving his arms, and yelling.

As the aircraft came into view over the trees, I held both my arms up, in a Y shape, to indicate that we were in need of rescue, and not just some hikers who’d stopped to ogle a low flying helicopter. The helicopter rocked slightly to acknowledge.

Less than ten minutes later the bird was hovering directly over us, its rotor just clearing the canopy. The exceptionally skilled pilot held the helicopter rock steady about a hundred feet above us. Seconds later we saw a crewman being lowered towards us on a winch line.

I stepped back, gently pulling Arnie with me, to give the crewman a space to touch down. Even this far below the helicopter, the downdraft was savage, blasting dirt and debris, and not a little water into the air. We retreated a little way, and watched the crewman descend, until his boots touched the dirt. Then we approached.

“How many are you?” the crewman shouted to us. I held up two fingers, since he was wearing ear defenders and I didn’t know if he’d be able to hear a verbal response.

“Anyone hurt?” he asked looking us up and down. We both shook our heads and he grinned at us. “Great landing then,” he said. “Who’s first?”

I indicated Arnie, who was just about to tell me to go first. I felt his sense of responsibility as the Instructor reasserting itself, and he felt that he should make sure I was alright before he was rescued, but I beat him to it.

It took only a couple of seconds for the crewman to get Arnie into the rescue sling, and then they lifted off, winched up toward the helicopter, which was hovering solidly in the air above us. It wasn’t a particularly windy day, but still, I knew how much skill it took for a pilot to hold such a craft so steady.

Gerry had never flown a Pave hawk, but had flown Black Hawks on several occasions and I was confident that given the need, I would be able to fly the bird currently hovering above me. I had no illusions that I’d have the same kind of skill as the current pilot was displaying though.

“Helicopter is here,” I sent to Mary. “I guess we’ll be back at the airport in about twenty to thirty minutes.”

“We’ll meet you there,” she returned. I wanted to tell her not to bother, but knew that they wouldn’t be dissuaded.

I watched as they loaded Arnie into the helicopter. A couple of minutes later the crewman reappeared and began his descent to collect me.

The winch ride up to the helicopter was quite a ride, and I got a great view of the surrounding area as we lifted. I couldn’t see the remains of the Cessna which was buried in the canopy. I wondered if it could be seen at all from the air. Then I was inside the helicopter. The crewman directed me to a seat, and looked at me a little strangely as I automatically buckled myself in. He handed me a headset which I put on.

“You looked like you’ve done that before,” he said indicating the harness. I smiled at him.

“Once or twice,” I said to him, not wanting to elaborate. I’d personally never been inside a military helicopter before. The only ones I’d travelled in were the FBI’s, and they had different harness types.

I saw the winchman close the side door, and then felt the helicopter start to move, headed back toward the airport.

“We’ll be wheels down in about twenty five minutes,” said the crewman. “There’ll be a paramedic waiting for us on the ground.”

“We’re fine,” I said to him. “Arnie did a great job.”

He looked from me to the Arnie.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I was just having a flying lesson,” I said. “We started to feel a weird vibration, and turned back toward Oakridge State, next thing the prop just fell off the plane.”

“Shit,” he said. “That’s not good.”

“I thought that myself,” I returned with a little grin.

“He’s your instructor?” he asked, and I nodded.

“He was amazing,” I said. “So cool and professional. I was shitting myself, but he was just like, ‘yeah we’ll put down in this tree here.’”

Arnie, who could hear our conversation through the headset was looking at me wide eyed.

“It was a bit of a climb down from the parking slot,” I said with a laugh, “but I guess you can’t have everything.”

The crewman laughed.

“I don’t envy the person tasked with recovering the plane,” I said. “Although my headset and logbook are still in there.”

“Someone will figure it out,” he said. “Not your problem, although I think the flying school is going to have some questions to answer.”

I wondered about that. I knew that the NTSB would investigate. We’d be interviewed by them, possibly as soon as we landed, and I guessed that Danny was going to have a difficult time. Although, I suspected, not as much as if it had been the Cirrus that had gone down. Danny had rented the plane from someone, and it was that someone that would be responsible for the maintenance of the aircraft.

I wondered where the prop had landed. It would be somewhere in the valleys we’d been flying over. I hoped that it hadn’t caused any major damage or, heaven forbid, injured anyone when it hit the ground. I doubted it though, given the terrain.

As we came into land at the airbase at Portland International, I expected to see a crowd gathered, but there were only three people. There was an ambulance waiting near the landing pad and a non-descript man in Jeans and a sweater. The helicopter touched down, and I heard the engines spooling down almost immediately.

The crewman opened the side door, but bade us wait until the rotors had stopped spinning before we were allowed to alight. Finally he nodded to us, and helped us down from the helicopter. I allowed myself to be helped, although I would have been perfectly fine getting down on my own.

We were taken over to the ambulance, where we spent ten minutes answering questions and being checked over by the Paramedics. They pronounced us uninjured and, after giving us instruction as to what to do if we suddenly developed any symptoms, they climbed into their vehicle and left.

That left the man in the sweater. He’d stood back while we were being examined but as soon as we were declared fit, he came over.

“Hi,” he said, holding up a badge.

“I’m Agent Derek Lyons, NTSB. I need to ask you some questions.”

“Sure,” I said. “Did you want to ask them here, or can we go and meet our families first?”

“I’ll walk with you to meet them,” he said. “But the sooner we can get this done, the better. While your memories are still fresh.”

For some reason he was talking to me, rather than Arnie. I guess he figured that as the older of the two – I was in charge. I soon disabused him of that notion.”

“Arnie was the pilot in charge,” I said. “He was my instructor on the flight.”

“You were the instructor?” he looked at Arnie a little surprised. I saw Arnie bristle a little at that.

“Yes,” Arnie said, a little stiffly.

“Oh,” Lyons said, regaining his composure. “I’ll need a statement from your pupil, but I’ll need to talk to you at length, along with the owner of the flight school.”

We were interrupted as the pilot of the Helicopter came over. He offered his hand to Arnie.

“My crew told me you were flying when you lost your prop,” he said, “and that you managed to pull off that landing. Great job young man. I wouldn’t have liked to have to try that over that terrain.”

“It wasn’t exactly a landing,” Arnie said.

“You’re both here, and not a scratch,” said the pilot. “That’s a landing to be proud of given the circumstances.”

Arnie flushed as he shook the pilot’s hand.

“Thanks for the ride home,” he said finally. The pilot grinned.

“Any time,” he said. “But try not to make a habit of it.”

He looked at me. “You changed your mind about learning to fly?” he asked.

“Hell no,” I said. “I’m going to fly one of these birds one day,” I said indicating his aircraft.

He grinned at me. “I’ll look forward to seeing you in the air,” he said shaking my hand.

“Thanks,” I said, “and thanks for the rescue.”

He nodded, and then left to carry on with his day.

We were escorted off the base and made our way over to the flight school, where Danny and all the girls were waiting for us.

Arnie seemed to get more and more nervous as we approached the school. He seemed to think that his father would somehow hold him responsible for what had happened to the plane. We’d checked the aircraft as usual before the flight. Nothing untoward had been flagged. Whatever it was that caused the failure, it wasn’t something that we could have anticipated.

As we approached the front of the school, the door opened, and a stream of bodies rushed out. Most of them heading toward me. I was surrounded in an instant by all my girls, Sarah included. They each hugged me tightly and bombarded me with questions about what had happened.

From the corner of my eye I saw Danny hug his son, relief clearly evident on his face. Then I saw Sarah detach from my group and walk over to the pair, who had just separated. She pulled Arnie into a hug, and kissed him with abandon.

Outside of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, I’d never seen someone affected so profoundly by a kiss before. I could literally see his toes curling and by the time she released him he seemed to be floating about a foot off the floor.

“That’s for saving my brother’s life,” she told him, while he stood dumbfounded and scarlet. His father stood off to one side, a wide grin on his face.

The NTSB agent gave us a few minutes, but then cleared his throat.

“I need to speak to you please,” he said. “If I could talk to the pupil first, I can let you get on your way.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is there somewhere we can use?” he asked Danny who indicated inside the flight school. We went into the back office and the NTSB agent pulled out a recorder from his pocket and set it on the desk.

He asked me to identify myself, and then asked about my flight experience. I told him that I was just coming to the end of my instructor sessions and had planned on doing my first cross country solo flight that day. We talked about the planning of the flight, the pre-flight checks that we’d done, and then the flight itself.