Detour in the Sky

Posted On October 18, 2018

I came to realize that owning my own airplane would be beneficial in many ways. I had always dreamed of being a pilot, so the next step was to complete the training and get my license. This wasn’t an easy task. Read more about the obstacles I had to overcome to accomplish this in my memoir.

I used the Piper Apache a lot. One day I was traveling from Seattle to Eureka, California, where we were completing a new high school. I talked with the FAA Flight Service Center and got a complete report on weather along my route.

I took a heading, picked it up on the gyrocompass, and flew for about 45 minutes toward Eureka. The gyro was holding firm to the magnetic compass, so I quit worrying about any precessing. From previous flights I’d made in this region, I knew I’d soon be picking up the Crescent City aviation radio. But strangely, I couldn’t get a signal. My brain and body clicked into alert.

Something was out of whack, something I couldn’t see or hadn’t noticed. A pilot’s heartbeat kicks up a few notches in uncertainty like this. I decided to maintain my current course for only another 15 minutes, then make a decision.

Fifteen minutes later, I was still flying without receiving any radio calls. I made some outgoing calls to the airport frequency but got only silence in return. Working to suppress a natural panic and suspecting I was in serious trouble, I then turned to the emergency frequency, VHF 121.5, and put out emergency calls to see if anyone would respond. The radio was dead silent. My heartbeat ratcheted up so quickly, it startled me. It was almost as if the radio silence told me I didn’t exist.

Searching for the problem, I wondered if I’d made an error entering the airport radio-frequency settings. To check that out, I reached for Jeppesen’sPrivate Pilot Manual, nicknamed “The Pilot’s Bible.” It’s packed with information on every airport, including highly-detailed airport diagrams and all radio frequencies. In the split-second it took me to reach over slightly and lift my Jeppesen guide off the dash, my eye caught a glimpse of my magnetic compass making a big spin. Whoa!

My heart nearly stopped beating. I did stop breathing.

In that flash of a second, I realized the truth. The metal spine of the Jeppesen manual had corrupted the magnetic compass into giving me false information. It had told me I was flying south, when I was actually flying west over the Pacific Ocean, heading into a certain doom!

In a millisecond, I instinctively wheeled my plane around to a heading I thought might be the general direction of the California coastline. My mouth went dry as I frantically reset my plane’s course and sent a flurry of prayers heavenward.

 I was in huge trouble—unable to see anything because of the thick overcast below, unable to hear any airport radio transmission since I had flown out of range, and unable to be heard by any airport or ship on the emergency frequency.

For the next 20 to 30 minutes of nonstop terror, I realized I was lost somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. If I went down over this vast space, no one would ever know it. They’d never discover where or when I disappeared.

By now fuel was running low. I continued to ask God for help in finding my way back to land and to sustain me in flight. Instinctively, I started to conserve fuel every way I knew. I throttled back the engines and adjusted the propellers to their most economical slow-flight performance mode, trying to squeeze every mile possible out of each ounce of gas left. But despite my fuel-saving efforts, the fuel-gauge needle dipped lower and lower. That gauge took on another dimension. Now it was also a life gauge, predicting my life span.

Suddenly, I saw the needle on my Omni gauge move…

Stay tuned for the next blog to hear what happened next during my detour in the sky!

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This is an excerpt from my new book, Detours to Destiny: A Memoir, available in Kindle and a version for all other e-readers. Now you can read the entire story to discover what happened after my detour over the Pacific Ocean. Watch for details about the paperback version soon to be released.

© 2018 Elling Halvorson. All rights reserved.