Luckily, I stumbled upon the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF), an African-based organization with headquarters in Nairobi, which owned and ran the Flying Doctors Service of East Africa. Their work seemed like a noble cause; more importantly, they needed someone to help reorganize their small entrepreneurial Flying Doctors Service division into a more stable self-sustaining organization and they felt I had the requisite skills.
By chance, the director general of AMREF, Dr. Michael Gerber, had arrived in Toronto in September 1996. We met over breakfast and hit it off immediately. He said he could use my help, but the Flying Doctors Service could not afford to pay me a salary, although out-of-pocket expenses would be covered. I was familiar enough with charitable organizations to understand this, so I signed up for two years. I informed him that I would fly my single-engine plane to Nairobi, arriving in Kenya in approximately a month’s time. He agreed that having a plane would provide enormous opportunities to explore East Africa, but he expressed concern at my proposal to fly there alone.
Later that day my wife and I walked through the neighbourhood park together. Krystyne was supportive—even sympathetic— to pulling up stakes and spending two years in Nairobi, providing she did not have to fly the Atlantic with me. She was giving up more than I was. Her life was in order and she was content. She had a successful career as a fashion-design consultant and here was I suggesting we leave our comfortable Toronto life of the last twenty years for what could easily be a dead end. In our late fifties we were no longer youngsters, and we had no pensions. Was this a wise move? I shall never forget that day: walking in silence along the edge of the ravine, hand in hand, minds racing; a soft drizzle falling into the fading light of a September afternoon. The first hint of autumn had thrown a chill into the air. Doubts crowded in on the muted promise of adventure. Was the excitement of Africa sufficiently strong to make us overthrow our lives in Toronto? I glanced at her, smiling, as her hand tightened on mine, and with that it was decided.
Seven hours into the flight and the engine gauges were holding in the green. Daylight had ushered in a sense of confidence. The cockpit had expanded into the wider world of morning light; the dove-grey sea lay calm under a thin veil of cirrus over a milky sky. There was no human sign within sight and no sound apart from the vibrating drone of the motor.
Suddenly, to my amazement, I heard a voice come over the VHF emergency frequency 121.5. It was Jerry Childers, a professional pilot I’d met in St. John’s the night before my departure. He was flying a plane that was sixty knots faster than mine and, although he had left three hours later, he was now overtaking me. While it was comforting to have another soul somewhere out there in that endless reach of sea and sky, given his speed, our radio link would not last more than two hours. So my only contact with the outside world was now through Jerry, who relayed my position back to Gander, indicating that my HF radio was defective.
Jerry and his partner were in an old twin-engine Nordo that had no air pressurization and no heat, which made flying at fifteen thousand feet uncomfortable—but they needed the altitude to maximize fuel efficiency and to maintain speed. Their discomfort was compensated by less flying time to the Azores. It was November and they wanted to make a quick crossing; the weather was holding, but at that time of year it would not last long.
The hours slipped through the day. Gradually, the sky darkened into threatening weather. Waves of incoming cloud gathered into soft, undulating swirls of grey wool, masking the white-tipped waves below. Soon, a thicker blanket of stratus, charcoal and ominous, drew nearer. Off in the distance, a reef of cirrus cloud imprisoned a band of yellow sky. The afternoon slid into premature evening, the precursor of an approaching storm. Enormous cumulonimbus clouds, heavy with moisture, induced a light skimming of rime ice that slowly accumulated on the leading edges of the propeller and wings. The sky coiled in on itself with increasing intensity. Sudden spectacular flashes of lightning illuminated the outside markings of the fuselage. Unrelenting rain beat against the windscreen.
I radioed Jerry requesting that he seek Gander’s permission for me to fly at a higher altitude, so that I could rise above the bad weather. “Don’t wait for permission, go up,” he volunteered useful but unnecessary advice. I struggled to gain altitude above thirteen thousand feet; however, the extra weight of fuel and the rapid accumulation of ice on the fuselage were dragging me down. In addition, the engine repeatedly misfired, indicating icing in the carburetor. Turbulence made holding a course, even controlling the plane, increasingly difficult. The thought of Jerry riding above the weather while I was doomed to penetrate the brunt of the storm had me envious. I would have gladly sacrificed heat for altitude.
“Jerry, I can’t get higher. I need to go lower to melt the ice off the airframe.” Turbulence made it difficult even to hold the transmit button of the radio.
“You’re breaking up, I can’t read you,” was all I got from Jerry; the rest was garbled. Descending at a thousand feet a minute, I lost radio contact. I was back on my own.
The next hour required my full concentration to hold a steady course. Turbulence increased from moderate to severe; I cinched the seat belt and shoulder strap tight across my chest. Sudden vicious jolts to the plane were so violent I could no longer turn the dials of the radio or navigational instruments for fear of snapping the knobs off the panel. The instrument gauges spiked up and down in a crazy manner, rendering me nauseous. Any semblance of order in the cockpit vanished. Loose gear shifted out of position and catapulted about the cabin as if possessed.
Unable to communicate, alone in the dark, I realized that I might be forced to ditch. Could the plane withstand the stress of such relentless pounding? I had visions of a wing tearing free of the fuselage, the plane in a sickening stall, tripping over into a spin, and then plunging through the darkness into the roaring maw of the sea below. Amazingly, I viewed the prospect with calm, knowing there was little I could do beyond trying to steer with the pedals while leaving the ailerons free to find their own equilibrium.
I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of regret over my cavalier parting with Krystyne; we had not said a proper goodbye. Leaving Toronto in a blush of self-confidence and eager to get started on my flight to Africa, I had thought it a bad omen to dwell on the possibility of ditching, wrong to invite the unthinkable.
Lightning flashed incandescent through cloud, each electrical discharge spraying the storm-scope with a myriad of small crosses. There was a sudden, shocking, pistol-like report. A lightning strike slammed into the cockpit, knocking out the ADF (automatic direction finding) instrument and firing the cockpit with an acrid smell of burnt electronics. A thin curl of blue smoke rose from under the instrument panel to settle beneath the concave hood of the windscreen. I was more surprised than frightened. The storm’s ferocity seemed out of proportion to the neatly defined cold front recorded on Gander’s seven-hundred-millibar weather chart prepared nine hours earlier. High over the Atlantic those same small, thinly spaced isobars had translated themselves into forces of nature that threatened to pull me down into a raging ocean with little chance of survival.
I descended to an altitude of four thousand feet, searching for higher temperatures that would herald the melting point. A thick accumulation of ice on the plane gradually turned soft and began to run. Large chunks of ice, thrown by the prop, struck the fuselage with a terrifying noise, like the spray of machine-gun bullets. The warmer temperatures drove sheets of rain onto the plane, so thick I thought the engine air intake might choke with water. The windshield became a river, like being trapped in the underside of a waterfall.
I had passed the point of no return with not enough fuel to make it back to Newfoundland. I was committed to reaching the Azores or ditching into the Atlantic. Proper navigation had now given way to mere survival. I needed to punch through the cold front, ride out the turbulence while trying to maintain control of the airplane. In the meantime the satellite-directed GPS instrument continued faithfully to record my progress from North America, seemingly unperturbed by the surrounding chaos. I was ten degrees to the left of my course, three hours away from the Azores.
My shoulders ached. I longed for relief. The relentless struggle to control the plane had become a series of linked crises. It