Chapter 6: I Just Wanna Fly

Bogota, Colombia

July 1, 1996

“There’s our ride,” Jake told Laura as they stepped out of the international terminal of El Dorado International Airport after their five-hour flight from DFW. The loading and unloading area was very crowded, with taxicabs, a few limousines, and large SUV vehicles all vying for the limited parking spaces. Skycaps, passengers, and family and friends were everywhere, mostly speaking Spanish, but some speaking English or Portuguese.

Laura looked where he was pointing and saw a man in dress slacks and a white shirt holding up a sign with their names on it. He was standing next to a black SUV. “No limousine?” she asked, a little breathless from the elevation, which was actually three hundred feet higher than the aircraft they had flown on had been pressurized to.

“I learned a thing or two the last time I was here,” Jake said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well ... uh ... it was suggested to me by the hotel staff and by Mr. Gomez himself that riding around in a limousine in Bogota is not a real good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Uh ... well ... Bogota is known for being the ... uh ... the kidnapping capital of the world.”

“Kidnapping?” she asked, her eyes widening.

“Yeah, you know, for ransom. Apparently, it’s a very lucrative business model that contributes considerably to the local economy. Anyway, riding around in a shiny-ass limo is apparently the equivalent of holding up a sign that says: ‘I’m a rich motherfucker, please kidnap me for ransom.’”

This information did not serve to comfort his wife. “Sweetie, are we safe here?”

He shrugged. “Almost as safe as we would be in Detroit or Baltimore,” he said.

“That does not make me feel better,” she said. She had been to both of those places, after all.

“We’ll be fine,” he assured her. “The guy picking us up works for the hotel and we’ll use him anytime we need to go anywhere. Besides, we’re not going to be here very long.”

Their driver’s English was heavily accented, but at least he spoke it. His name was Jorge, pronounced ‘Hore-hey’. He loaded their luggage into the back of the SUV and then held the doors open for them to climb into the back.

“Would you like to go to the hotel, Señor Kingsley?” he asked once he was behind the wheel.

He and Laura had talked about this on the plane. They were here to take possession of their new aircraft, which had closed escrow as of the opening of business hours Bogota time today. Though they did not plan to actually start the long journey home until tomorrow, both wanted to lay their eyes and hands on the plane as soon as possible.

“Actually,” Jake told the driver, “can you take us to Guaymaral Airport? Just for a few minutes?”

“As you wish, Señor,” he replied politely.

The ride to Guaymaral took about forty-five minutes, which brought them there just before sunset. Jorge said little during the trip, just drove and listened to a pop music station. All of the songs they played were in Spanish except for one: Celia Valdez’s latest release, Wounded Love, a moderately hard rocker that had a lot of Jake Kingsley on the distorted electric. Jorge made no mention of the tune, though he did sing along with the choruses.

He parked in front of the airport services building and opened the doors to let them out. They walked inside, finding the usual collection of pilots and their companions sitting at the desks and putting together their flight plans. Jake and Laura walked up to the counter and explained to the early twenties, limited English-speaking female who staffed it that they were here to take official possession of their new plane that was parked in Señor Gomez’s personal hangar.

“Oh, si,” she said. “Señor Gomez let us know to expect you. May I just see your ... how you say ... your identificacion?”

“Por supuesto que si,” Jake replied, pretty much exhausting his supply of Spanish phrases for this encounter. He pulled out his passport, flipped it open to the picture, and handed it to her.

She looked at it carefully for a moment, reading the name and then looking at the photograph and then looking at his face. “Your hair much shorter in picture,” she told him. “And you had bigote.” She pointed to the mustache that Jake had sported at the time of that photo.

“It was a phase I went through,” he explained.

She nodded and then handed the passport back to him. “Even though you look different, I still recognize you. I hear your music on la radio all the time. You are muy talentoso.”

“Gracias,” Jake told her.

She reached into a drawer and removed a key that had a label on it with Jake’s name. She slid it across to him. “Senor Gomez’s hangar is numero dos ocho uno. He asks that you return the key when you remove the plane from the hangar for the final time.”

“Will do,” Jake promised. “We’re just going to look at it today. We’ll take it out of there tomorrow.”

“Muy bien,” she replied.

The walk to the hangar took about ten minutes. Both of them were a little breathless from the thin air by the time they got there. Jake inserted the key in the handle of the large door and turned it, causing the mechanism to click. He turned the handle and then pushed up on the door. It was well lubricated and slid up easily and quietly. Inside the hangar was the Cessna Citation that belonged to Señor Gomez and the Avanti that now officially belonged to the Kingsleys. Jake found the light switch on the wall inside the door and turned it on.

“Oh wow,” Laura said, taking it in for the first time. She had seen pictures of it, of course, but this was the first time she had actually laid her actual eyeballs on the actual aircraft.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Jake asked, admiring it much the same way he admired Laura’s naked body when she emerged from her shower.

“For four point seven-five million dollars, it had better be freakin’ beautiful,” she said slyly. As promised, she made a point to reference that amount whenever she could.

He let the remark go, as he normally did.

Jake opened up the main entrance on the left side of the plane, just aft of the cockpit, by punching a five-digit code into the locking mechanism and then manipulating the handle. They stepped inside and took in the layout.

“Okay,” Laura said as she looked at the plush seats, the reasonably wide aisle between them, the small bar, and the couch, “this really is pretty nice.”

“It should be for four point seven-five million, huh?” Jake asked her.

“Right,” she said.

“Why don’t you check out the bathroom,” he suggested next. “After all, that’s what got us into this whole deal.”

She walked to the very back of the plane and opened the narrow door, revealing a tiny, cramped room with a ceiling so low that even she could not stand up straight in it. The only thing in the room was a small airline toilet, a roll of toilet paper, and a flush button. Jake was doubtful that he personally would even be able to accomplish a sit-down in there with the door closed (even if he would have dared perform such an act in flight without another qualified pilot to take the controls), it was that cramped. Laura, as petite as she was, would still have her legs touching the walls on both sides.

“It’s a little bit small,” she said doubtfully.

“What were you expecting?” he asked. “A luxury shitter with a shower and enclosed bath?”

“Kind of,” she said.

“Will it be better than peeing in the female urinal?”

“Well ... yeah, it would have to be,” she admitted.

“There you go then,” he said.

While she continued to peruse the bathroom and the sink/bar combo outside of it, Jake made his way back forward and took a look at the darkened cockpit. He was very nervous about tomorrow’s flight, much more nervous than he had ever been at the thought of taking to the air before. True, he had taken the two-week course at the Piaggio facility in Greenville, South Carolina to acquire his type-rating for the aircraft and had now logged twenty-two hours of flight time behind the controls of the same model and year as this one, including eleven takeoffs and landings and twenty-seven touch and goes, but he had had an instructor with him for all of those hours. And now, his official type rating in hand, he was planning to take off from an airfield that sat 8390 feet above sea level—two thousand feet higher than Jake had ever taken off from before—and then fly across a South American border to a major international airport located in a valley surrounded by steep mountain peaks, with no one but himself to rely on. Was this really a good idea? Would it not be a better idea to just hire someone to ferry the aircraft back to California for him?

It would be a better idea, but he was not going to do it. He yearned to get behind the controls of his new plane. That was why he and Laura had made the decision to fly all the way to Bogota in the first place. She was as enthusiastic about this trip as he was. But it was she that he was worried about.

“Hon,” he said softly as she made her way up to where he was staring at the controls.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Are you sure I can’t talk you into flying commercial for this first leg of the trip?”

Her expression clouded. “Why in the world would I do that?”

He explained to her about high altitude takeoffs, about crossing international borders, about landing in a valley at one of the five busiest airports in South America, about a pilot mostly inexperienced in a new aircraft type trying to do all of this on his very first solo flight.

“Are you saying you might crash this plane?” she asked.

“Well ... probably not,” he said. “It’s just that, when you add everything up, this first flight is statistically more dangerous than any other flight I will likely have on this journey home or in the future.”

She thought this over for a moment and then shook her head. “No way,” she said. “If we go down, we go down together. Besides, how much safer would I be flying on a local Venezuelan airliner?”

“Considerably safer, I would imagine.”

She shook her head. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” she said. “I’m going with you.”

They closed up the plane, turned off the lights, and shut the door to the hangar. They then strolled back to Jorge and the SUV and he took them to the Hotel Charleston, the same hotel that Jake had stayed in during his last visit to Bogota. Jake tipped Jorge a cool one hundred thousand pesos—the equivalent of about thirty US dollars—for his trouble. Jorge was extremely happy with this amount and assured Jake and Laura that he would be overjoyed to drive them anywhere they wanted to go for as long as they wanted to stay.

“Thanks, Jorge,” Jake told him. “We’ll just be taking one more trip though, back to Guaymaral at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“I will drive you,” he promised.

“Gracias,” he said.

They checked in and made their way up to their suite on the top floor, tipping the bell boy another fifty thousand pesos for his trouble.

“This is nice,” Laura said, taking in the furnishings and the view.

“Isn’t it?” he replied. “What do you want to do, go down to dinner, or fuck first?”

“Let’s go down to dinner first,” she suggested. “I’m starving.”

“Fair enough.”

They went to dinner. They then went back up to their suite and fucked. After that, they went to bed and slept quite soundly thanks to the heavy Colombian meal, the jet lag, the thin air, and the fucking.

Jorge drove them back to Guaymaral Airport at ten o’clock the next morning. They went into the airport services building and Jake composed his flight plan to Simon Bolivar International airport just outside Caracas, Venezuela, the first stop on their trip home. He had never flown into such a busy airport before but, in this case, he really had no choice. Since he was coming in from Colombia and had to clear customs with a recently purchased aircraft, the only place in the area he could do that was at SBIA. He carefully calculated the weight of the aircraft, he and Laura, and their baggage, cross referencing it with the distance he planned to fly and the amount of fuel he would need to carry and then factoring in the weight of that fuel and then cross-referencing all of that with the altitude and the runway length at Guaymaral in order to figure out his V1 and VR speeds. He whistled as he came up with the final numbers. V1 was one hundred and twenty-five knots and VR was one hundred thirty, both about fifteen knots faster than a similarly loaded plane on the same length of runway at sea level. Assuming his engines worked as they were supposed to, he would have less than a thousand feet of runway remaining when his wheels left the ground. He would then have to make a quick right turn to a heading of 350 in order to avoid the high terrain immediately to the west, and then climb at least two thousand feet per minute in order to clear the high terrain a little further out to the north.

“Everything okay?” Laura asked him after watching him stare intently at his figures and take more than twice the time it usually took him to compose a flight plan into an unfamiliar airport.

“Yeah, everything is cool,” he assured her, taking care to keep the worry out of his expression and tone. “Let’s do this thing.”

He filed the plan with the clerk on duty and they walked to the hangar. Jake used Señor Gomez’s key to open the door and then he and Laura used one of the tugs to pull the aircraft out of the building. While Laura ran the key back to the office, Jake began the process of preflighting the aircraft. He was still working on the external examination when Laura returned.

Finally, it was time to get inside. He turned on the batteries and then the avionics, checking first to see how much fuel was in the tanks. There was hardly any, maybe enough to get airborne, but not much more. And so, the first step was to use the radio in the plane to call for a fuel truck to pump eight hundred kilograms of jet fuel into the tanks, enough to cover the flight and give him nearly an hour and a half of reserve flight time in case of unexpected circumstances. After paying for the fuel with his credit card and watching the truck drive away, he visually confirmed the presence of the fuel in the tanks with a flashlight and a metal rod and then sealed the tank, triple checking that he had put the cap on correctly.

Jake and Laura got into the aircraft and he closed and sealed the main door. They took their seats in the cockpit, Jake on the left, Laura on the right, and buckled in. It was time for engine start. He fired up the number one engine first, watching over his left shoulder to confirm that the prop was actually turning. He then fired up the number two engine, making Laura confirm prop turn on that side. Since the bleed air flow was set to automatically keep the aircraft pressurized to eight thousand feet apparent altitude, and since they were sitting almost four hundred feet higher than that while still on the ground, their ears popped a little as the system started doing its job right way. This gave Jake yet another burst of apprehension as he considered the ramifications. I’m actually going to take off from eighty-four hundred fucking feet! Am I crazy?

“It’s a very quiet plane,” Laura remarked as she donned her headset.

“Shush!” Jake barked at her, a little sharper than he had intended. “Sterile cockpit is in effect.”

“Sorry,” she said quietly.

“Me too,” he said, feeling badly. “I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just a little nervous about this.”

“You’ll do fine,” she assured him, though she had absolutely no evidence to back this up. “I have faith in you.”

He gave her a smile and then started punching his navigation, flight information, and radio frequencies into the flight computer. Once that was all in, he opened up his pre-departure checklist on the computer screen before him (it really was nice to have a computerized checklist instead of a tattered hard copy) and began to go through the items one by one, checking them off as they were accomplished. Finally, it was time to get the show on the road. He called the clearance center and asked for his flight plan to be activated. They did so, telling him the clearance would expire in thirty minutes if he was not airborne by then. He then called Guaymaral tower and asked for permission to taxi to Runway 29R for departure. They granted this permission, directing him on the route he should take to get there.

He took a deep breath and then released the parking brake on the aircraft. He throttled up a bit and they began to move. He drove them carefully out of the hangar area and onto the taxiways, using the rudder pedals to steer. It took nearly five minutes to get to the hold line, where he was told to do just that and hold for incoming aircraft. While waiting, he went carefully through the takeoff checklist, making sure he was properly configured for a high-altitude departure.

“Flaps to takeoff setting,” he recited, pulling the lever and watching as the surfaces moved. “V1, VR bugs set. Auto-throttle set at two zero zero knots indicated. Autopilot off. Landing lights on. Barometer set to two-eight, decimal six. Elevator trim to takeoff.” He looked over at Laura. “Configuration complete.”

“Good to know,” she told him, not looking the least bit nervous.

He smiled and they waited while a Mooney Bravo and then a King Air touched down in front of them. The tower controller then told him he was clear for takeoff with departure to the north.

Jake acknowledged the instruction and throttled up once again, steering them onto the runway. Once they were facing down the runway, roughly into the five-knot wind, he took one more deep breath and then advanced the two throttle levers slowly forward to ninety-five percent thrust. The engine noise increased, but still was very quiet compared to the Chancellor. The airframe began to vibrate gently and they began to pick up speed. He kept them on the centerline instinctively, using the rudder pedals. He glanced continuously back and forth between outside the window and his airspeed indicator, watching it roll upward, past fifty, sixty, seventy, a hundred, until it reached V1 and then VR.

“Rotate,” he said softly and then pulled gently back on the yoke.

The nose came up and there was a thump as the wheels broke contact with the ground. The ground dropped away below them.

“Positive rate of climb,” Jake said, watching as the altimeter began to wind upward. He reached down and flipped up the lever for the landing gear. The sound of machinery winding began from beneath and behind. By the time he got lights out on the gear, they were seven hundred feet above the ground, well beyond the perimeter fence, and climbing at twenty-five hundred feet per minute.

Jake was pleased with the takeoff. It had gone smoothly, and, despite the high altitude, he was still climbing more than fifty percent faster than his Chancellor had been capable of even at sea level takeoff and traveling nearly twice as fast as the Chancellor could even dream of on climb-out. He turned to the right, marveling over how nicely the aircraft handled, watching as the compass spun to the heading of 350. After rolling out of the turn, he retracted the flaps, which brought the nose down a bit, settling them into a climb of two thousand three hundred feet per minute. A glance forward told him he was in no danger of not clearing the high terrain ahead as long as this rate of climb was maintained.

Guaymaral Approach handed him off to Bogota Center. He gave his position and they confirmed it matched with what their radar was getting from his transponder. They directed him to turn to 005 and to climb to flight level 200 for now but to expect to climb out to flight level 310.”

“Three one zero?” Laura asked, once again violating the sterile cockpit rule but they were well past ten thousand feet now, so it did not really matter much. “That’s thirty-one thousand feet, right?”

“That’s right,” Jake confirmed. “We’re in the freakin’ stratosphere now, hon. Literally.”

“Cool,” she said, genuinely impressed.

As soon as they intersected Airway J9, which led to the CVD VOR station just across the Venezuelan border, the point in their flight plan where they would make a left turn toward Caracas, Jake turned on the autopilot and let it take over. He set the auto-throttle for 220 knots and then turned on the GPS navigation and the flight director. The plane obediently heeled over a bit and lined up exactly with the airway, continuing to climb to the altitude he had set. Though the autopilot was using GPS to find its way, Jake kept the nav radio programmed to switch to each upcoming VOR on their route as a backup. When they reached flight level 200, they were directed to climb to flight level 250. He adjusted the altitude setting accordingly and they continued their assent. Once they reached 250, he was directed to climb and maintain flight level 310. He programmed that in, and they ascended some more. Finally, when they reached 310 sixteen minutes after liftoff, he set the auto-throttle to 235 knots indicated—the most fuel-efficient setting at that altitude—and they began to pick up speed. 235 knots indicated at 31,000 feet equated to a true airspeed of 350 knots, or about 400 miles per hour over the ground at a throttle setting of only sixty-two percent.

“That’s pretty fast,” Laura remarked when he explained that to her.

“Yep,” Jake agreed, still a bit nervous about the upcoming descent and landing at SBIA but feeling much more confident now that he had got them airborne and on course without even a minor incident.

“The scenery is incredible,” Laura said.

And it was. They were flying over the Tropical Andes Mountains—the northernmost section of the largest mountain range on Earth. Below, as far as the eye could see in every direction, was a huge expanse of peaks ranging from fifteen to twenty thousand feet in elevation. Snow capped most of the taller peaks but down lower was dense tropical rainforest. Steep canyons cut over millions of years by the flowing rainwater could be seen between the peaks, their rivers twisting and turning, occasionally forming small lakes. Clouds drifted in between the peaks just below the snowline.

“Yeah,” Jake agreed. “You can’t get a view like this through the little window on a commercial jet.”

“Nope,” she said. “It is a little bumpy though.”

That was true as well. They were flying over a huge mountain range in a plane that was considerably smaller than an airliner. The turbulent air being pushed upward by wind flowing over and through the mountains was making them bounce and bump around considerably.

“It’ll smooth out once we get over the plains,” Jake promised, his eyes still taking in the view. “You know, this is why I really love flying. Not just because it gets me where I’m going fast, but because I get to see things like this. I get to see how big our planet really is and how much empty, desolate space there is down there.”

“That’s deep, sweetie,” Laura said, reaching over and patting his leg. “I wish I had some smoke so I could ponder that properly.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I thought it might be a bad idea to bring marijuana from Colombia into Venezuela when we have to go through a customs check in a plane we just purchased from an alleged Colombian drug lord.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “I can see your concern with that.”

“I just hope Señor Gomez made sure to empty all of his stashes before we took possession.”

“Yeah ... me too,” she said, seemingly more nervous about that thought than anything else that had happened today.

They bounced and bumped their way along for about twenty minutes and then came out of the mountains over the Llanos Plains, a vast expanse of tropical jungle terrain. As Jake had promised, the turbulence mellowed out considerably when they left the mountains behind.

“All right!” Laura announced, unbuckling her restraint. “It’s time.”

“Time for what?” Jake asked.

“Time to pee in the plane,” she said. “I deliberately didn’t go before we left just so I could try out the facilities.”

“You realize that once you actually go in that toilet, I have to arrange to have the tank dumped out at some point.”

“No, I did not really think about that,” she said, “but I’m still going to pee. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since you first told me about this plane.”

As she worked her way back there, Jake sighed and looked up at the overhead panel. Just next to the exterior light switches was a switch labeled LAV VAC. He flipped it to the on position and watched as the little light illuminated. Her toilet was now hot.

She opened the door and shut it behind her. After about three minutes or so, Jake faintly heard the sound of the toilet whooshing. The door opened again and she stopped at the sink to wash her hands. She tried to turn it on and nothing happened.

“Hey,” she said. “There’s no water.”

“Sorry,” Jake said, thinking it was testament to how quiet the plane was that he could even hear her. He reached up and flipped another switch on the overhead panel, this one labelled INT H2O. “Try it now.”

He heard the sound of water running a moment later. “That did it,” she announced. She washed her hands and then dried them with paper towels from a roll installed next to the bar. She threw the towels in a little trash receptacle and then made her way back forward.

“How was it?” Jake asked as she sat back down in the copilot’s seat.

“A little cramped,” she said. “A little awkward during the wiping process, but otherwise very nice.”

“That’s good to know,” he said. “I learned at the type-rating that the toilet seat is certified safe to use for takeoffs and landings.”

“Really? Why would someone want to do that?”

“Most of these planes are used by charter companies,” he said. “I’m guessing that that is where the flight attendant sits if all the other seats are full.”

“Wow,” she said, marveling over that. “I was wondering why there were seatbelts on the side of the toilet. I just thought it was in case you had to go while there was turbulence.”

“I guess you could use it for that too,” he said with a shrug.

“I’d have to go really bad to try that trick.”

They flew onward for another minute or so and then Jake looked over at her. “You better put your seatbelt back on. We’re going to pass pretty close to the mountains again as we cross into Venezuela.”

“I’ll put it back on in a bit,” she said. “Right now, there’s another first I need to accomplish.”

“What do you mean?”

She smiled her come hither smile at him. “I notice this cockpit is a lot roomier than in the Chancellor.”

“Yes, it really is,” he confirmed.

Her smile got bigger, more come hithery. “There seems to be a fair amount of distance now between your stick and your yoke.”

Understanding washed over him. “Uh ... yes, there is,” he agreed, “but I don’t think doing that right now, on my first flight, is a really good idea.”

“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” she said. “The autopilot has the plane now, right?”

“Well, yes, but...”

“No buts,” she said. “I’m sucking your dick, sweetie. You can either cooperate or I’ll take it by force.”

He looked over at her and smiled again. “Well ... I wouldn’t want things to get violent up here.”

“Good decision,” she said. “Now, break it out.”

He broke it out. And they officially broke in the new plane before he even managed to make his first successful landing.

As had been the takeoff, the landing at Simon Bolivar International Airport was anticlimactic and went rather smoothly. Jake was directed step by step by Caracas Center to descend and enter the landing pattern for an ILS approach to Runway 27. He was slid in between a Viasa Airlines MD80 that was three minutes ahead of him and a LASAR Airlines 727 that was three minutes behind him. Jake, as was his habit, had his nav radio tuned to the ILS frequency so he could see the glide scope on his instruments, but hand-flew the actual approach himself. He touched down neatly on the centerline at exactly the spot he wanted to only four minutes behind the ETA he had calculated. Though the runway was long enough that he did not really need to use reverse thrust to slow down, he used it anyway, partially because simply having it was a novelty that his Chancellor did not enjoy, but mostly because the thought of a fully loaded 727 right behind him on its own approach made him want to get his ass off the runway as quickly as he could.

The ground controller directed Jake to go immediately to the international terminal alongside Runway 10 and to park there and await the customs officers. Jake acknowledged this and followed the route he had been given. The terminal had multiple gates, at which were parked about half a dozen commercial airliners from three different countries. Jake’s assigned parking slot was on the tarmac well away from any of the gates. There were no other aircraft parked there currently. He brought the plane to a halt and then shut down the engines and the avionics. Since there was no APU, the air conditioning and air circulation died with the engines.