Our Metro, registered N61NE, is painted red and gray in the uniform of our corporate big brother and supplier of passengers, Northwest Airlines. Below the cockpit window near the main cabin door, it says "Spirit of Partnership" in both English and Russian. A couple of years earlier, this same plane completed a round-the-world publicity flight with an American and Russian crew, the gist of which is now immortalized in white stenciled letters. Beneath the English inscription, the Cyrillic figures of the Russian alphabet are reminiscent of the old CCCP jerseys of Soviet hockey players.
It is our tradition prior to every takeoff to dedicate the flight, in a kind of pre-takeoff prayer, to whichever attractive female celebrity is idling in our lust-addled minds at the time. Tonight, our journey to PEI has been launched in honor of Janine Turner, cherub-faced beauty of TV's "Northern Exposure."
"Northeast 3762, cleared for takeoff, two-two right," I acknowledge. "Here's to Janine," answers Mike, slowly bringing the power levers forward.
Lifting off from Logan's Runway 22R, we climb quickly in the frigid air and turn out over the coast. Mike is flying the plane while I handle ATC, twisting a few knobs and gazing into the boreal skyscape. We level at 19,000 feet. In the cold, clear sky, the whitish halos of several cities are visible. Boston, Providence, Worcester, Manchester, Portland.
The lights of the rocky coast of Maine, around the area of Kennebunkport, are off to the left, when I first notice the smoke. I smell it first, followed by Mike about 10 seconds later.
"Um," I say.
"Smells like insulation," says Mike. He's talking about wiring -- the burning of the rubbery insulation that wires are wrapped in. Electrical smoke is very distinct -- acrid, with a glint of ammonia. It's hard to explain, but if there could be such a thing as a "high-pitched" odor, it would be that of electrical smoke. It's not a smell you generally like to discover in an airplane at night over the water.
The stink is faint, but it's unequivocally a stink. It seems to be coming from a circuit breaker panel just to my left -- an encasement of wires at roughly the height of my armrest and running aft behind the cockpit.
I run my hands across the panel, sticking my face into the dusty plastic to find the trouble spot. While I sniff around like a dog, my thumb comes to rest on a big metal switch, a lever almost, called an electrical bus transfer. A half-second later I'm yelling, "Shit!" and yanking my arm away. That switch is as hot as an iron.
"Mike, this transfer switch is messed up."
"Hmm."
"Something's not right in there."
"What's it, hot?"
"Yeah."
"Hmm."
There are no flames, no noises, and nothing beyond the ordinary on the instruments in front of us. No alarms, lights, failed meters or dancing needles. There's not even any smoke, exactly -- no curling wisps to trace to their source. The problem is teasing and totally unseen. But something's wrong and there's a nose-wrinkling stink and my burned thumb to prove it. "Get out the book," I say to Mike.
With that I will excuse the reader from the technical babble of the checklists and procedural esoterica that follows. I'll only make mention of how different a heat-of-battle problem feels versus the ones pilots grow accustomed to in the simulators. It's always new and different when the show is live. There's no audience, for one thing -- no churlish instructor hovering over our shoulders to congratulate or cajole us either way. Neither is there a reset button. After an incident, those who listen to the black boxes' confessional might detect only a perfunctory recitation of a checklist or a flawless execution of good sense. They cannot taste the adrenaline or feel the pangs of worry, for those exist only in the guts and minds of the crew, often as unobservable as the strange odor Mike and I are preoccupied with. (Though other times not: voices raised and breaking, curses shouted, a situation gone to hell -- the kind of thing even the most hardened investigator, like a cop at a really bad crime scene, never gets used to.)
Fortunately, tonight, there's little drama and nothing for the tapes. The smoke remains invisible and undetectable to anyone else on board. In fact the scent grows increasingly faint, sparing us the discomfort, if not the indignity, of putting on oxygen masks. In a matter of minutes it has all but vanished.
What has happened, however, is we've turned the plane 180 degrees and headed back to Logan.
"Look, Mike," I say. "I really don't think there's a fire in there, but something is burned out. That transfer switch shouldn't be like that. How about we head back to Boston?"
"Sure," says Mike without the vaguest hint of emotion. He is wearing a blue cardigan, and at 6-foot-2 seems oversized in our cramped cockpit. I'm still partially hunched over from sniffing at the circuit breakers. Mike looks down at me and raises a dark eyebrow. "Sure," he repeats.
"If anything changes we'll duck into Portland or Portsmouth. There are airports the whole way."
"Sure."
There is talk of declaring an emergency. In the press and media, "emergency landing" is a catch-all for virtually any precautionary landing or turn-back, but for air crews it has particular meaning and consequences. With certain problems -- an engine fire, for instance -- emergency declarations are mandatory. Other times it is left to the captain's discretion. This is one of those times, and neither of us feels the situation is sufficiently urgent.
Nevertheless, I double-check the pressure on the portable fire extinguisher behind us. I unbuckle it from the harness and place it near me on the floor. Then I call our dispatcher on company frequency and let him know what's going on. He puts a mechanic on the line. The mechanic asks what the trouble is, and basically agrees with our assessment.
Air traffic control is looking for info. "Why are you turning back?" they want to know. "How much fuel have you got? How many souls on board?"
I was waiting for that. The souls thing comes up even in the most mildly abnormal situations. The galley doesn't work and they're asking about "souls on board." And it isn't passengers or people they're concerned with, it's souls. The intent, should the worst occur, is to have an accurate count of all infants, crew members and other sentient entities perhaps not listed on the manifest. But still, the overtones of anyone's inquiry about souls needs no discussion, and suffice to say it has always made me uneasy. It's for the firemen.
It happens there are 19 souls in the cabin behind us -- a full complement. And these 19, belted into their gray leather seats, need to know what the hell is going on. While Mike is guiding us expertly on a southwesterly course, back toward runway 22L at Logan, I decide to make an announcement. I rehearse its finer points a couple of times in my head: Slight electrical problem. No danger. Turning back as a precaution. Perfect weather at Logan. Back to Canada as soon as we can. No mention of Janine Turner.
I pick up the microphone to make my speech. But wait, there's music playing. Shit, Mike, we left the tape running. The Spirit of Partnership, like most of our Metros, has a built-in, automobile-style cassette player through which all regulatory announcements are taken care of by a sober-sounding fellow with a voice like James Earl Jones. Side A is the before-takeoff safety demo. Later, we flip to Side B for the pre-landing spiel. With the tape decks on hand, I sometimes carry albums to work. Out on the apron between flights, I listen to music and have lunch.
Every now and then I leave the music playing by mistake. Once we're up, neither I nor the first officer can hear a note of it, strapped with headsets and busy reading "HOW TO FLY." Surely some people dig it. What's more consoling to passengers, already agitated and uncomfortable, than belligerent rock music, especially when mixed with the din of thousand-horsepower engines? En route to Burlington, Vt., one evening, the noise was enough to prompt a weary-looking businessman to stick his head into the cockpit and ask, "Could you please turn that racket off?" Dammit, the tape! I reached for the player, then paused with my finger on the switch and asked him, "You mean the music, or the engines?"
I punch out the tape, pause a few seconds, and make my announcement. I am pleased at how crisp, fluid and tight it comes out. I congratulate myself. Nice job. However, when I look behind me into the cabin, I don't see that look of collective nervousness I expect. I don't see uncertain calm and tentative grins of confidence in my and Mike's expertise. I suddenly realize that of the 19 souls back there, not one of them has a working knowledge of the English language.
And what do they speak? What would you expect a Maritime-bound group of passengers to speak, if not English? French? Acadian Creole?
How about Japanese? Yes, Japanese. We are carrying a Japanese package tour from Boston to Prince Edward Island. Behind me are 19 Japanese faces nodding and smiling ear-to-ear, as if I'd told them we've all won the lottery. A man in the back row gives me a thumbs up.
Mike laughs.
Next week: Part 2 -- What brings a group of Japanese tourists to the most diminutive of Canadian provinces?
Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.
About the writer
Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. His column is archived here.
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