Missing Man

We all want to die in our sleep

We had all planned to gather at New Bedford Regional Airport for a briefing and practice run before a missing man formation over a nearby airfield. Four pilots: Steve, Michael, Joe and myself had all landed and carefully lined up our planes in preparation for a synchronized start-up. The only one missing was Robert, the leader of the flight and the man who taught us the discipline of formation flight. 

Joe was standing on the wing of his Beechcraft Bonanza, looking at his phone. “I just got a text from my brother-in-law making sure I got here okay,” Joe said. “He’s a fireman and heard a plane had gone down in Long Island Sound.” We all made nothing of it. “He reminds me of my mother,” Joe said. “Any time a plane went down anywhere in the world she’d call me to make sure I was okay. Didn’t matter where it was or what kind of plane… she just worried.”

New Bedford was a good staging airfield, with long runways and a control tower overseeing traffic. Robert was flying his Bonanza from his home airport in Islip, Long Island, accompanied by his girlfriend, Susan, and their dog, Coco. While Robert flew with us, Susan planned to take Coco and go off with Robert’s brother, Jack, who lived nearby and was now introducing himself to the group as we waited for our fifth plane to arrive.

“Where’s Robert?” I asked. “It’s not like him to be late. Remind me to chew him out the way he chewed me out the last time I was late.”

I first met Robert five years ago at a formation clinic at Barnes Municipal Airport in Westfield, Mass. The clinic was for Bonanzas to Oshkosh, or B2Osh, an annual event in which pilots of single-engine Beechcraft Bonanzas and twin-engine Beechcraft Barons gather to conduct a massive formation flight to the giant Experimental Aircraft Association’s fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. 

Developed by the military as a way of compounding the destructiveness of aerial bombing and the capability of air-to-air combat, formation flying has little practical use in general aviation for other than show. For one thing,it violates that most primary of aviation tenets: Thou shalt avoid other aircraft. For another, it requires pilots to surrender much of what it means to be pilot in command, entrusting the success of the flight, the well-being of their plane, indeed, their very life to the pilot leading the formation.

Bonanzas to Oshkosh started in 1990 when a group of Bonanza pilots realized that the only way they could guarantee they could all park and camp together was to fly in at the same time, in formation. Since then, the tradition has grown to include more than 100 planes flying in a more than 30-mile formation of aircraft from a staging airport in Rockford, Ill., to Oshkosh.

Though I fly a Piper, not a Beechcraft, and thus could not participate in the mass arrival, the clinic organizers welcomed me as a curious, if inferior, interloper. My interest in formation was simply to push my abilities, learn something new, and, yes, show off a bit.

Robert was my mentor. He was a big man with a broad smile—friendly and easygoing, but also exacting and demanding.  He took his flying very seriously. He had flown with B2Osh since 1994, racking up hundreds of hours in formation and teaching legions of other pilots the discipline. 

My first flight was simply riding alongside Robert as he flew the last plane in a formation of four aircraft. From the ground formation flight all looks very smooth and precise. In the air, given the constant jostling, the sawing of the throttle, the changes in pitch and yaw, and the overwhelming sense of mortality flying so close to another aircraft made me wonder if this was really such a good idea. (How close do they fly, you ask? Close enough so that if the lead pilot sneezed, you’d say, “God bless you.”)

            

As I prepared for my first flight piloting my plane just a few feet from another aircraft, I was more nervous than I had been since my first solo flight 30 years ago.    

            

Robert must have recognized the look on my face. He pulled me aside and said, “Some pilots can’t do it. They simply don’t have the skills, or worse, they freeze up.” He recalled the first time he tried flying formation. “I thought these guys were nuts, that they were suicidal.” But he decided to give it another try. Now, he said, “There are times I’m so in the moment that feel like I’m almost controlling the plane in front of me.”

My first flight I was paired with another newbie to practice basic maneuvers: flying wing, making turns, crossing from one side to the other and landing side-by-side. At first, the abrupt changes in power and pitch necessary to stay in position, or rather get back into position, were startling. The concentration needed to focus on nothing but my relative position to the other plane left me drenched in sweat. But by the end I began to anticipate things a bit better, my control movements smoothed out, and by the time I shut down, I had the feeling that I was actually beginning to “get it,” and with it came a feeling of both exhaustion and accomplishment. 

Afterwards, Robert shook my hand with a look that said, “See, I told you so.” 

Since then, I’d flown maybe a 100 hours of formation, a good chunk of it with Robert. Along the way, I got to know and admire him, not just as a pilot, but as a person. There is something to be said about the bond that forms between men who have to entrust their life so completely to another.

After several minutes of chatting, Joe asked one of us to look up Robert’s tail number on Flightaware, the live flight-tracking website. Using my Ipad, I plugged in Robert’s N-number, N8014T. The ground track showed him leaving Islip in a straight line toward New Bedford. He climbed to an altitude of 3,000 feet. Near the north fork of Long Island, not far from Westhampton Beach, the flight track jogged from the shoreline to over land, where it ended at a place where there is no airfield. Not good.

We hunched in the shadow of a wing analyzing Robert’s flight track. The aircraft’s turned inland and made a controlled descent, a good sign. We guessed Robert had engine problems and had to make a forced landing. He lately had some issues with his engine. But if there was any pilot who could put a plane down into an open field like a baby into a bassinette it would be Robert. He was one of the best pilots we knew. 

            

We stood around, trying to make conversation as we anxiously waited for a phone call from Robert. “Hey, guys, will one of you call me an Uber?”

Jack, who was not a pilot, struggled to make sense of what was going on.  We all tried to reassure him that there was nothing to worry about. The area the flight track ended was mostly large, flat farms—perfect places to put a plane down. And again, this was Robert.

“I can’t take it,” Joe announced as he climbed into his plane. “I have to go see for myself.”  A minute later, he was taxiing to the runway.

Michael, a commercial pilot who also assists in search-and-rescue missions, said he too needed to see if he could be of help. Jack, who was understandably getting more nervous and agitated, asked to fly with him.

Steve and I agreed to stay behind, doing whatever we could.  We walked over to an old terminal building to get out of the sun and await any news. Sitting in hard, plastic chairs in the building’s tiny boarding area, we looked at our phones, made small talk, studied the vintage photographs mounted on the walls, bought snacks from the vending machines, and tried basically to keep our thoughts from going into dark places.

Steve’s phone rang. It was Joe, calling from his airplane. His brother-n-law called to say he heard there were two fatalities from a plane crash near Westhampton. But there was no confirmation on the tail number or type of plane. Steve and I told each other it could be just a tragic coincidence. Perhaps there was hope.

Minutes later, Steve’s phone rang again. Another friend of Robert’s, also named Joe, through tears said he just hung up with a retired air traffic controller who confirmed the plane was Robert’s. It was at 1,500 feet when the pilot radioed to say he had lost his engine. He told the controller he was going to put the plane down in a field. The controller asked for fuel and souls on board. The pilot calmly said, “Fuel not important. Two souls on board and a dog.” There was a post-crash fire. Two people were dead. The dog miraculously escaped.

Our hearts sank. The worst was true. Robert was gone. As we struggled to comprehend the news, we began the grim task of calling those whom we knew were close to Robert. After an hour or so, we decided we needed to get home. Though just a 10-minute flight, it was the longest 10-minute flight I ever made.

Later, we learned that in the last moments before touchdown, Robert attempted to maneuver the plane to the left in order to avoid crashing into a field of stakes laid out for a new vineyard. But his wingtip apparently caught, causing the plane to cartwheel and slam upside down into the earth. Robert and Susan were likely crushed.

All that, however, is speculation. The investigation is just beginning.

            

As pilots, we accept risk. It’s part of the bargain we make. For despite all the advances in training, aircraft technology and reliability, weather forecasting and navigation, flying will always be inherently dangerous. 

To come to terms with this, we are taught to manage risk. We check the weather. We plan every flight. We carefully go over the plane. We use checklists. We go through a process of self-evaluation, deciding where, when and under what conditions we’ll fly. Do we fly in weather? At night? Over open water? Over mountains? We get recurrent training, having a trained eye evaluate our ability, polish our skills or point out our bad habits. 

Part of this process is reading through accident reports, the dry, anonymous investigations of crashes put together by the National Transportation Safety Board. Without naming the pilots, these reports review the circumstances and causes of crashes, offering the rest of us a “there by the grace of God go I” window into a doomed flight, and a lesson to be learned by another pilot’s mistake. 

But I’m not ready to learn Robert’s final lesson. It’s too soon. Besides, Robert isn’t some anonymous pilot. He was my friend. He was also a pilot so experienced, so knowledgeable and so level-headed that there’s no pilot I’d rather have in the left seat when things go wrong. Which is to say: If this can happen to Robert, where does that leave the rest of us?

Statistically, 90 percent of forced landings are survivable. In this case, knowing the pilot Robert was and the circumstances—in which he had both enough time to set up for a landing and the fortuity to be over an area with wide, long fields—I’m certain that 99 times out of a hundred he would have walked away from this event. We should have caught him later that day; he'd have given us that wisecracking grin of his, apologized for missing the flight, and said, “First round’s on me.” 

But that didn’t happen. While most of the aviation world tries to figure out what Robert did wrong to get himself killed, I refuse. I’m convinced that it wasn’t bad piloting that killed him, but bad luck. He just never had the 99 other engine outs to prove me right. 

Pilots, despite our bluster, our risk-taking and the exaggerated hangar stories we tell each other, are like everybody else: We all wish to die in our sleep. And like everybody else, some of us may be lucky enough to achieve this, but many of us won’t—but not because we'll die in a fiery plane crash.

Yes, Robert’s death has shaken me, but I won’t quit flying. As writer and pilot Ernest Gann wrote, “The confidence which lures man to a life of flight in the first place is almost indestructible. He believes, he must believe absolutely, in his personal fortune and destiny.” (Fate is the Hunter). 

As for Robert, I just wish I had a chance to say good-bye.