Month: February 2018

Emergency Landing!

Soon after Brother Dave took off from Douglas Municipal Airport in Charlotte it was obvious even to me that something was wrong — we had stopped gaining speed and altitude.

Imagine yourself in a car, going 45 miles an hour on an interstate access ramp. You try to accelerate to 65 mph so you can merge into traffic, but your car won’t go any faster.  You’re stuck at 45. That’s was our problem – the plane had enough speed to take off but it wouldn’t accelerate.

 

Mark, L, and Bo, boarding the plane.
Mark, L, and Bo, boarding the plane.

Dave was carrying valuable cargo, my sons, Bo and Mark.  The four of us were on our way to Atlanta. Dave was treating us to an afternoon at the zoo at Grant Park and an evening of baseball, an Atlanta Braves game.

He opened his mike, radioed the tower, and declared an emergency. And then he turned the single engine plane around and headed back toward Douglas.

braveDeclaring an emergency is a drastic measure, something no pilot wants to do. It puts all of the airport’s assets at the pilot’s disposal – to start with he get his choice of runways and he goes to the head of the line of planes waiting to land. But when he gets down there will be questions — and it better have been an emergency.

At the plane approached the end of the runway Dave had chosen he tried to reduce power. But he couldn’t. It was like the throttle was stuck, he couldn’t make the plane go faster, and he couldn’t slow it down, either.

That’s when he switched off the engine, pressed the button of his mike, and began talking, fast, describing what he thought was wrong with the plane. I knew what he was doing, and it finally dawned on me that we might be in trouble.  Every word he spoke was being recorded and he was leaving a record for the crash investigators.

Only we didn’t crash. We glided, silently, landed softly on the runway and coasted to a stop.

And then we went home?

Oh, no, no, no. Dave rented another plane and flew us to Atlanta. We had a wonderful time.

Coming Friday: The Hike Of A Lifetime Lottery

The Good Fairy – Part 2 of 2

The trash can in the third floor men’s room in Charlotte’s city hall was a gold mine.

All sorts of documents were tossed into that can, 0ld records, current records too, slightly delayed. The typewriters used by the secretaries for the mayor and the city manger had once-through carbons and, every few days, they changed the carbon and threw the old one away. You could hold them up the a light and read every word they had typed.

Try to imagine Christmas coming twice a week. That’s the way it was for the fulltime city hall reporter, and me, too, when I filled in for him.

To help protect this source from discovery we called it “The Good Fairy.”    We never talked about where those documents came from –the less said the better– we’d just say they were a gift from the Good Fairy.

One afternoon she smiled on me. In the trash can in the men’s room I found a copy of the city’s plan to break the next garbage strike. That’s a 1A lead.  The problem was, publishing a story about how the city planned to break a strike might precipitate a strike — which we did not want to do. We wanted to cover news, not make it.

My editor, Perry Morgan, had reservations about publishing it, but he left the call up to me. I thought about it and decided to try to have my cake and eat it too.

Bill Veeder was the city manager back then.  By all accounts, he did an excellent job.  But for some reason I never got along with him; he didn’t like me, from the very beginning.

The first time he laid eyes on me — I was fresh out of college and had just gone to work in the “foreign office” in the basement of City Hall, covering county government — he stood in front my desk and told another reporter, “This one’s not going to make it,” meaning me.

Two years later when I switched beats and started covering city hall I did everything I could to turn him around, to no avail. I even tried being extra nice, which was not exactly my nature.

And now I had him in a vice.

I telephoned him and I said, “Bill, I have a copy of your plan to break the next garbage strike. I’m going to put it in the paper this afternoon. Do you have any comment?”

And he said, “No, you don’t.”

And I said, “Oh, yes, I do, Bill. Would you like me to read it to you?”

I didn’t have to read long before he stopped me and asked — his tone was low and ugly — “What do you want?”

Now we’re getting down to business. That mean man was going to have to deal and I must tell you — I loved it.

There were two 1A stories on the horizon that I wanted, and I wanted him to see to it that I got both them first — before any of my competition. Give me those two stories, I told him, and I won’t write about the strike breaking plan until you actually have a strike.

He agreed, and he delivered. Twice in the next couple of weeks his secretary came down to the foreign office, handed me a brown envelope and, “Mr. Veeder said this is for you.”

It was delicious.

Postscript:  The Good Fairy was finally exposed by an unhappy reporter who had been fired. But she sure was good to us while she lasted.

Coming Monday: “Emergency Landing!”