For the first time in forty years, here is my story.
—Capt. Dale Black
1
FLIGHT INTO ETERNITY
TUESDAY, MAY 22—01:16—41,000 FEET SOMEWHERE OVER ZAMBIA, AFRICA
All passengers and crew
will be dead in twenty-seven minutes if something drastic doesn’t change.
And I will be responsible.
With very little fuel remaining in our tanks, I’m out of options and out of time. And a lot of things just don’t make sense.
The copilot’s hand trembles as he brings the microphone close to his ashen face. “Lusaka Approach, Lusaka Tower, Zambia Center. Anyone? Learjet Four-Alpha-Echo. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
Still no response.
Thirty-eight-year-old veteran copilot Steve Holmes peers through the jet’s windshield from the right seat and demands an answer.
“Where is the city? What is going on here?” He shakes his head slowly in stunned disbelief, for he too has weighed our options, and they are dwindling fast.
Our gleaming luxury jet is equipped with the latest modern avionics package, including dual global navigation systems, but both became INOP (inoperative) over an hour ago. We have no idea why. No one is responding to our radio transmissions either, and in my sixteen years of professional flying, nothing has prepared me for what is happening now. Nothing could have. I feel my chest constricting as I reach behind me and lock the cockpit door.
Transmitting on one-two-one-point-five, the emergency frequency that all controllers monitor, we try again.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Learjet November-Four-Two-Four-Alpha-Echo. Can anyone read? Over.”
Again nothing. Only the hiss of static.
Trying to slow my breathing and focus my thoughts, I lean forward, looking out the jet’s multilayered Plexiglas windshield.
“I’ve seen campfires from forty thousand feet before, Steve. I don’t want to start our descent until we can see the lights of the city. Something should be visible. Keep looking.”
Guilt gnaws at my stomach. My heart pounds wildly.
How could I have allowed this to happen? How can so many things go wrong—all at the same time?
As an airline pilot on temporary furlough from Trans World Airlines (TWA), I started a jet pilot training and jet sales corporation in Southern California. I donated airplanes, pilots, and maintenance services to help train and transport individuals to supply Bibles, gospel tracts, medical personnel, and supplies to those in need.
This two-week-long volunteer flight is one of hundreds I’ve conducted over the last several years, feeling compelled to share God’s overwhelming love with others in a hurting world.
This month takes us throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
So far God has provided the means and the protection to accomplish our mission, but on this flight everything is starting to fall apart. Events are beginning to spiral out of control.
Along with a professional flight planning service, both Steve and I have prepared meticulously for this flight. Three full-time professionals, for three full days, conducted intense flight planning. We accessed the latest international flight data resources and arranged for every foreseeable contingency. We dotted every i and crossed every t—or so we thought.
The latest weather forecast indicated visibility would be unlimited for hundreds of miles around the capital of Zambia, our planned fuel stop. This flight should have been routine even with the extended holding delay required earlier by Sudanese Air Traffic Control.
I pray silently.
Steve rips off his headset and flings it across the cockpit pedestal.
Trying to breathe, trying to steel myself, I speak slowly but firmly. “Steve, we need to work together. Let’s believe that God will help us get this aircraft on the ground safely, during our first and only approach. Can you do that?”
Steve shoots me a hard look. “Sure.” Then he slams the thick checklist into the Learjet’s side pocket. “
Approach Descent Checklist
complete.” As a self-proclaimed agnostic, Steve doesn’t appreciate my reliance on God. At least not yet.
“I’ll land on any runway I can see, Steve. We may be in thin clouds or above a layer of low stratus. The lights of the entire city, the whole country for that matter, may be out for some reason. Now, I’ve never seen this before, and I’ve got to admit I’ve never heard of it either. I know that doesn’t explain why we can’t see lights from a car, a truck, a campfire, or something. But, Steve, we’ll get this aircraft on the ground in just a few minutes, I assure you.”
“Flaps 10 degrees,” I command.
I hear the familiar whine of flap actuators responding.
Both NAV needles move steadily toward the center of my HSI (horizontal situation indicator), verifying that we are on course. But to where?
Lusaka, right?
Yes, Lusaka, our planned destination. It must be Lusaka,
I tell myself.
“
Glide slope
alive,” I continue. “Give me gear down, flaps 20, and the
Before Landing Checklist
.”
“Roger, gear coming down, flaps 20, and the Before Landing Checklist.”
Seconds later.
“Flaps 40, please.”
I hear the tremor in Steve’s voice. “Flaps 40 selected, 40 indicated, the Before Landing Checklist is complete.”
The sleek jet is all set for landing. No switches need to be moved again until safely on the ground—if we can find a runway. Making minor adjustments on the power levers and flight controls, I keep the speed at precisely 127 knots while adjusting heading and pitch to stay on course and on glide slope. I fly using reference to the instruments only, while Steve peers into the blackness, straining for any sign of an airport and cross-checking my every move.
The muscles in Steve’s face visibly tighten as he speaks.
“One thousand feet above
minimums
.”
Minimums
means two hundred feet above the runway and the lowest altitude we can safely fly on instruments. Unless we can see a visible runway, we cannot descend below minimums . . . period.
With a feather-like touch on the power levers, I reduce speed a tad while turning right just one degree to stay on course, on speed, and on glide slope.
We will find this runway, on our first approach
, I assure myself.
“Five hundred feet above minimums.”
“Do you have visual?” I feel my stomach tighten.
“Negative. No visual. No ground contact. One hundred feet above minimums.”
Steve shakes his head slowly.
“Keep looking outside, Steve, but call minimums.”
A few seconds pass, then Steve winces and barks, “Minimums, minimums. No contact.”
For a split second I tear my eyes away from the cockpit instruments to look outside just above the aircraft’s long slender nose. Directly ahead there should be a visible runway—only utter blackness stares back. That’s when my heart stops.
On the outside I appear calm and cool, but it’s only an act.
Forcing my mind to stay in control, I advance the throttles to
go around
thrust for the
missed approach
and pitch the aircraft up to a 15-degree nose-high attitude. My stomach cringes, knowing that the jet’s two engines are now guzzling our limited fuel reserves with the force of two fire hoses. At this altitude and with the high drag, we’re burning fuel four times faster than at cruise speed. Fuel, our aircraft’s life blood, is being sucked dry.
Fighting to keep my thoughts from running wild, Steve and I review our in-flight scenario. There are no clouds, no fog or weather of any kind, verified by the crescent-moon light reflecting off our jet’s shiny wings—all the way down to two hundred feet. With a population of over a million people, the city of Lusaka seems to have disappeared. Not a car or truck light is seen. There are no street lights or campfires. We are about down to fumes remaining in the fuel tanks, and at two hundred feet we see no runway—no airport—not even any trace of the
ground.
It’s not just fear that silently strangles me. It’s total disbelief. And I can barely breathe.
The radios continue their silence.
In my sixteen years of flying jets and training pilots, I have never heard of this before.
Are we way off course? If so, how far? Are we flying over water? Are we above some invisible layer of fog? Are the altimeters grossly in error?
Nothing makes sense. My once-starched white-collared shirt is now damp and wilted, and my heart is racing.
In a voice just above a whisper I pray out loud, “Lord, what should I do? You always answer prayer; so God, what should I do now?”
While flying a worthless holding pattern twelve-thousand feet somewhere over Zambia, trying to sort out our in-flight midnight emergency, with only minutes of fuel remaining in the Learjet’s tanks, my mind flashes back to another flight . . . the life-changing airplane crash in which I was just a passenger—yet the only survivor.
The flight that changed how I see things.
The flight that changed me forever.
The single flight that has defined my very existence.
FRIDAY, JULY 18, 1969
I was nineteen.
It was before daybreak in my hometown of Los Alamitos, about half past four, and the sky was a dove gray with only a light feathering of low clouds. The morning paper had yet to arrive, but the day before, the
LA Times
announced: “Astronauts Prepare Landing Craft as Apollo Nears Moon.” The Apollo 11 flight had dominated the news that week. All eyes and ears were on the heavens, tracking the spacecraft’s every move, listening to its every transmission. The world was mesmerized. At the moment, though, most of my part of the world, Southern California, was asleep—oblivious to Apollo 11 speeding through space and oblivious to my MGB speeding through its streets on the way to Burbank Airport.
1
A lightweight dark green roadster, it could do 0 to 60 in just over eleven seconds.
What can I say? I was nineteen, with testosterone racing through my veins.
I was an athlete, playing shortstop for Pasadena College, and an aviator on my way to flying jets. I was a driven person, particularly at that time in my life. I went to school full time, played baseball, and worked at my family’s business, which manufactured redwood shavings, hauling truckloads off to various places in California for use in landscaping everything from freeways to golf courses. Since childhood I worked in the trucking division, loading and unloading trucks, and performing routine maintenance on the big rigs. Several times a week I came to the plant after hours, looking for some additional work. I often spent my evenings catching up on truck maintenance. Sometimes I would run the packaging machine or baler all night to fill an order for the next day. But most of the time I would drive an 18-wheeler all night long, filled with bulk redwood shavings, and usually returned just in time to make my morning classes. After paying my way through college, any time and money I had left I spent taking flying lessons at Brackett Air Service in La Verne.
Looking back, I don’t know how I did it. The “why” was easy. I wanted everything life had to offer. That meant logging a lot of hours in the classroom, on the playing field, and in the air. All of which took money. I wasn’t a trust-fund kid. I didn’t get an allowance. I didn’t get any help with school, let alone my extracurricular activities. Flying was expensive. Cars were expensive. School was expensive. And though my parents didn’t help financially, they did give me the opportunity to work as many hours as I wanted so I could earn the money to pay for those things.
One of those things was the British-made convertible I was driving into the sunrise of a beautiful Southern California morning. Two days of Santa Ana winds had cleared the haze from the San Fernando Valley. The only color in the sky was a streak of orange. The only sound the rpms in my four-cylinder engine, whining for me to shift.
Did I mention I was nineteen?
And did I also mention that a month earlier the college had expelled me? It wasn’t a slap-on-the-wrist suspension. It was permanent.
But it didn’t matter. With my hand on the gearshift and my pilot’s license in my hip pocket, I was living my dream, the star of my own movie.
My life was an action-adventure film waiting for the opening credits to finish so the story could get started and the adrenaline kick in. I was so close to getting that story started. For me, the opening credits were courses taken in school and hours logged in flight.
I shaved a curb with the tires screeching.
Even with Vietnam breathing down my neck, I didn’t give a thought to losing my student deferment. After all, I was nineteen, and I was invincible. There were other colleges. And I reasoned that if I didn’t get a baseball scholarship to one of them, I’d get one playing football. Other than flying, nothing made me feel more alive than a hard-hitting game of tackle.