“Both jammed. I'll freeze up on rudder and ailerons now, you can't use them.”
Long silence. “That can't happen.”
“Happened to me,” said the instructor. “Toolkit slid under the rudder pedals, sleeve of a little girl's jacket got pulled into an aileron cable pulley. That's how I learned what you're learning right now.”
“I don't know.”
“Doors, Paolo. Open the doors and watch what happens.”
The student unlatched the door, pushed against the torrent of wind outside.
“Man! It turns the airplane!”
“Sure enough. Give me a ninety-degree turn left, then one to the right. Doors only.”
Near the end of the lesson, the question had grown:
“What would you do if the rudder jammed, and the ailerons and the elevator, and the trim cable broke, and all the instruments failed and all the radios, and the throttle stuck full open, maximum takeoff power?”
“I'd . . . I'd use the doors, and the mixture control to shut the engine on and off . . .”
“Show me.”
It was hard work for his students, these chapters of their training, but instead of scared they flew away confident, after his lessons, came back for more.
At two thousand feet, he pulled the throttle back to idle. “Miss Cavett, that engine has quit yet again! Where will you land?”
The student relaxed for the fifth forced-landing practice of the flight. All routine: instructor pulls the power, student finds a field, glides into a landing pattern as though it were a runway. When her instructor sees that she'd make a safe landing, he advances power, airplane climbs back up to altitude.
But this time was different.
“That's where you're going to land?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “The brown field, next to the dirt road.”
“You'll land crosswind, across the rows?”
“No. Into the wind, with the rows.”
“You're sure you can make it?”
“Yes, sir. I'll make it, easy.”
Jamie Forbes pulled the mixture control to CUTOFF. The engine dropped from idle RPM to zero, the propeller shuddered to a stop, soft hushing silence of the wind, airplane become glider.
“Excuse me, sir, did you just . . .”
“Yes. Give me your best full stop landing, Miss Cavett, into your field.”
Jamie Forbes had thought that he specialized in flight instruction that pilots can't find, this side of their first emergency in the air. Now he knew it was something different.
I don't teach, he realized. I suggest, and the students teach themselves.
I offer ideas. Why not try opening the doors? Why not try flying by feel instead of instruments? Why not try landing in that hayfield full stop, then get out of the airplane and jump up and down in the hay, prove to yourself that bare ground's as good as any runway when you have to land?
Who said it? “You're not an instructor, you're a hypnotist!”
Maria! Flicker of a second, he was in the air over Wyoming.