Funny narrative

This story originally appeared in Airways magazine.

By Patrick Smith Oct. 3, 2002

There is a tired old adage that defines the business of flying planes
as long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Moments of sheer ridiculousness may be equally as harrowing.

One young pilot, when he was 22 and trying to impress the pretty
Christine Collingworth by taking her up for a twilight sightseeing
circuit in a friend's Cessna, highlighted the seduction by whacking
his forehead into the jutting metal pitot tube hanging from the 172's
wing. Earning himself a famous "Cessna dimple," so he chose to think,
this would be the stupidest thing he'd ever do in or around an
airplane.

That was more than a decade ago, and a long way from this same pilot's
mind during a recent cargo flight. It's 11 p.m. and the airplane, an
old DC-8 freighter loaded with 50 thousand pounds of pineapples, is
somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle, bound from San Juan, Puerto Rico,
to Cincinnati. The night is dark and quiet, void of moonlight,
conversation, and for that matter worry. The crew of three are tired,
and this will be their last leg in a week's rotation that has sent
them from New York to Belgium and back again, onward to Mexico, and
then to the Caribbean.

They are mesmerized by the calming drone of high-bypass turbofans and
the deceptively peaceful noise of 500 knots of sub-zero air cleaving
past the cockpit windows. Such a setting, when you really think about
it, ought to be enough to scare the living **** out of any sensible
person. We have no business, maybe, being up there, participants in
such an inherently dangerous balance between naive solitude and
instant death, distracted by paperwork and chicken sandwiches while
screaming along, higher than Mount Everest and at the speed of sound,
in a 40-year-old assemblage of machinery.

But such philosophizing is for poets, not pilots, and also makes for
exceptionally bad karma. Neither poetry nor any kind of mystical
rumination is in the job description for these three airmen,
consummate professionals who long ago sold their souls to the gods of
technology and luck.

One of these consummate professionals is a 34-year-old from
Massachusetts.

He's been flying planes since he was 16 but has seen his career stray
oddly from its intended course, his ambitions of flying gleaming new
passenger jets to exotic ports-of-call have given way to the much
coarser world of air cargo, to sleepless, back-of-the-clock
timetables, the greasy glare of warehouse lights, and the roar of
forklifts -- realities that have aroused a low note of disappointment
that rings constantly in the back of his brain.

He is the second officer. His station, a sideways-turned chair and a
great, blackboard-size panel of instruments, is set against the
starboard wall behind the captain and first officer.

He stands up from the second officer's seat and walks out of the
cockpit, closing the door behind him. Here he enters the only other
area of the plane accessible to the pilots in flight, the small
vestibule adjacent to the main cabin door. It contains a life raft, an
oven, a cooler, some storage space and the lavatory. His plan is
simple enough -- to get himself a Diet Coke or, to be international
about things, since we're coming from the land of paycheck-fattening
"override" pay and a king's-ransom's worth of per diem, a Coca-Cola
Light -- the extra-saccharined, less-carbonated version of our own
domestic product.

The soft drinks are in a cardboard box on the floor, in a six-pack
strapped together with one of those clear plastic harnesses so
dangerous to sea turtles and small children. These plastic rings are
banned at home, but apparently perfectly legal in the Caribbean, where
there are, of course, lots of sea turtles and small children. The
pilot is thinking about this as he reaches for a can, weighing the
injustices of the world, philosophizing, daydreaming, ruminating --
things that, again, his manuals neither command nor endorse for
perhaps good reason.

He unstraps a Coke and decides to put the remaining ones in the cooler
to chill. The cooler, a red lift-top Coleman that you'd buy in Sears,
sits in front of the lavatory and is packed with bags of ice. The
pilot drops in the cans, but now the cooler will not close. There's
too much ice. One of the bags will have to go. So he pulls one out and
shuts the lid. Decisions, decisions: Which checklist does he initiate?
Which shutoff valve does he yank closed? Which circuit breakers does
he pull? Which buttons does he press to keep everyone alive and this
contraption intact? And what to do, now, with an extra, sopping-wet
bag of ice? The pilot will do what he always does with an extra bag of
ice. He will open the bag and dump it down the toilet. This he has
done so often that the sound of a hundred cubes hitting the metal bowl
is a familiar one.

This time, though, for reasons he hasn't realized yet, there are no
cubes; or, more correctly, there is one huge cube. He rips open the
bag, which is greenish and slightly opaque, and out slides a long,
single block of ice, probably two pounds' worth, that clatters off the
rim and splashes into the bowl. There it is met, of course, by the
caustic blue liquid one always finds in airplane toilets, the strange
chemical cocktail that so efficiently, and brightly, neutralizes our
usual organic contributions. The fluid washes over the ice. He hits
the flush lever and it's drawn into the hole and out of sight. He
turns, clutching the empty bag, worrying still about the dangers of
plastic rings and turtles, picturing some poor endangered hawksbill
choking to death. It just isn't fair.

And it's now that the noise begins. As he steps away, the pilot hears
a deep and powerful burble, which immediately repeats itself and seems
to emanate from somewhere in the bowels of the plane. How to describe
it? It's similar to the sound your own innards might make if you've
eaten an entire pizza or, perhaps, swallowed Drano, amplified a
thousand times over. The pilot stops and a quick shot of adrenaline
pulses into his veins. What was that? It grows louder. Then there's a
rumble, a vibration passes up through his feet, and from behind him
comes a loud swishing noise.

He turns and looks at the toilet. But it has, for all practical
purposes, disappeared, and where it once rested he now finds what he
will later describe only as a vision. In place of the commode roars a
fluorescent blue waterfall, a huge, heaving cascade of toilet fluid
thrust waist-high into the air and splashing into all four corners of
the lavatory. Pouring from the top of this volcano, like smoke out of
a factory chimney, is a rapidly spreading pall of what looks like
steam. He closes his eyes tight for a second, then reopens them. He
does this not for the benefit of unwitnessed theatrics, or even to
create an embellishing detail for eventual use in a story. He does so
because, for the first time in his life, he truly does not believe
what has cast itself before him. The fountain grows taller, and he
sees now that the toilet is not actually spraying, but bubbling -- a
geyser of boiling, lathering blue foam topped with a thick white fog.
And suddenly he realizes what has happened. It was not a block of ice,
exactly, that he fed to the toilet. It was a block of dry ice.

To combine dry ice with any sort of liquid is to initiate the
turbulent, and rather unstoppable, chemical reaction now underway in
front of our unfortunate friend. The effect, though in our case on a
much grander scale, is similar to the mixing of baking soda with
vinegar, or dumping water into a Fryolator, an exciting experiment
those of you who've worked in restaurants have probably experienced:
The boiling oil will have nothing to do with the water, discharging
its elements in a violent surge of bubbles. Normally, on those rare
occasions when the caterers employ dry ice, it's packed apart in
smaller, square-shaped bags you can't miss. Today, though, an
extra-large allotment was stuffed into a regular old ice-cube bag --
two pounds of solid carbon dioxide mixing quite unhappily with a
tankful of acid.

Within seconds a wide blue river begins to flow out of the lav and
across the floor, where a series of tracks, panels, and gullies
promptly splits it into several smaller rivers, each leading away to a
different nether region beneath the main deck of the DC-8. The liquid
moves rapidly along these paths, spilling off into the corners and
crevasses. It's your worst bathroom nightmare at home or in a hotel --
clogging up the ****ter at midnight and watching it overflow. Except
this time it's a Technicolor eruption of flesh-eating poison,
dribbling between the floor seams of an airplane at
33,000 feet, down into the entrails of the beast to freeze itself
around cables or short out bundles of vital wiring. Our pilot once
read a report about a toilet reservoir somehow becoming frozen in the
back of a 727. A chunk of blue ice was ejected overboard and sucked
into an engine, causing the entire engine, pylon and all, to tear away
and drop to earth.

And the pilot knows this cataract is not going to stop until either
the CO2 is entirely evaporated or the tank of blue death is entirely
drained.

Meanwhile, the white steam, the evaporating carbon dioxide, is filling
the cabin with vapor like the smoke show at a rock concert. He decides
to get the captain.

Our captain tonight, as fate would have it, is a boisterous and
slightly crazy Scandinavian. Let's call him Jens. Jens is tall and
square-jawed, with graying, closely cropped curls and an animated air
of fiery, charismatic cocksure. Jens is one of those guys who make
everybody laugh simply by walking into a room, though whether he's
trying to is never made entirely clear. He is sitting in the captain's
chair. The sun has set hours ago but he is still wearing mirrored
Ray-Bans.

"Jens, come here fast! I need your help."

Jens nods to the first officer, unbuckles his belt, and moves quickly
toward the cockpit door. This is an airline captain, a confident
four-striper trained and ready for any assortment of airborne calamity
-- engine failures, fires, bombs, wind shear. What will he find back
there? Jens steps into the entryway and is greeted not by any of a
thousand different training scenarios but by a psychedelic fantasy of
color and smoke, a wall of white fog and a fuming blue witch's
cauldron, the outfall from which now covers the entire floor, from the
entrance of the cockpit to the enormous nylon safety net that
separates the crew from its load of pineapples.

Jens stares. Then he turns to his young second officer and puts a hand
on his shoulder, a gesture of both fatherly comfort and surrendering
camaraderie, as if to say, "Don't worry son, I'll clean all this up,"
or maybe, "Down with the ship we go, my friend." He sighs, gestures
toward the fizzing, angrily disgorging bowl and says, with a tone of
surprisingly unironic pride: "She's got quite a head on her, doesn't
she?"

But what can they do? In one of those dreaded realizations that pilots
are advised to avoid, the insulation between cockpit calm and
atmospheric anarchy looks thin indeed. An extrapolated vision of
horror: the riveted aluminum planks bending apart, the wind rushing
in, explosive depressurization, death, the first airliner -- no, the
first vehicle -- in history to crash because of an overflowing toilet.
Into the sea, where divers and salvage ships will haul up the
wreckage, detritus trailing from mauled, unrecognizable pieces while
investigators shake their heads. At least, the pilot thinks, odds are
nobody will ever know the truth; the cold ocean will carry away the
evidence. He's as good as dead but saved, maybe, from immortal
embarrassment. A dash of mystique awaits him, the same that met St.
Exupéry at the dark bottom of the Mediterranean, another lousy pilot
who got philosophical and paid the price. Maybe he blew up the toilet
too.

Probable cause: unknown.

"Call flight control," commands Jens, hoping a dose of authority will
inject some clarity into a scene that is obviously and hopelessly
absurd. "Get a patch with maintenance and explain what happened."

The pilot rushes back to the cockpit to call the company's maintenance
staff. He fires up the HF radios, small black boxes that can bounce
the human voice, and any of its associated embarrassments, up off the
ionosphere and halfway around the world if need be. He will announce
his predicament to the mechanics, but also to any of dozens of other
crews who happen to be monitoring the same frequency. Even before
keying the mike he can see the looks and hear the wisecracks from the
Delta and United pilots in their state-of-the-art 777s, Mozart
soothing their passengers through Bose headsets, flight attendants
wiping down the basins while somewhere in the night sky three poor
souls in a Cold War relic are trapped in a blue scatological hell,
struggling helplessly with a flood of **** and chemicals.

"You say the toilet exploded?" Maintenance is on the line, incredulous
but not particularly helpful. "Well, um, not sure. Should be OK.
Nothing below the cabin there to worry about. Press on, I guess."
Thanks. Click.




Jens has now grabbed the extension wand for the fire extinguisher --
a hollow metal pole the length of a harpoon -- and is shoving it down
into the bowl trying to agitate the mixture to a stop. Several minutes
have passed, and a good 10 gallons have streamed their way onto the
floor and beyond. Up front, the first officer has no idea what's going
on. Looking behind him, his view mostly blocked by the circuit-breaker
panels and cockpit door, this is what he sees: a haze of white
odorless smoke, and his captain yelping with laughter and thrusting at
something with a long metal pole.

The pilot stands aside, watching Jens do battle. This was a little kid
who dreamed of becoming a 747 captain for Pan Am, the embodiment of
all that was, and could still be, elegant and glamorous about
aviation. And poor Jens, whose ancestors plowed this same Atlantic in
longboats, ravenous for adventure and conquest, a 21st century Viking
jousting with a broken toilet.

So it goes, and by the time the airplane touches down safely, its
plumbing finally at rest, each and every employee at the cargo hub,
clued in by the amused mechanics who received our distress call,
already knows the story of the idiot who poured dry ice into the
crapper. His socks and hundred-dollar Rockports have been badly
damaged, while the cargo net, walls, panels and placards aboard
aircraft 806 are forever dyed a heavenly azure.

The crew bus pulls up to the stairs, and as the pilots step aboard
the driver looks up and says excitedly, "So which one of you did it?"

Greasy Rider @ invalid.com wrote:

This story originally appeared in Airways magazine.

By Patrick Smith Oct. 3, 2002

There is a tired old adage that defines the business of flying planes
as long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Moments of sheer ridiculousness may be equally as harrowing.

Very well done...thanks...
--

-Gord.
(use gordon in email)