Saturday, May 17, 2008
By popular demand: The full, unexpurgated story of what happens when dry ice is mixed with blue toilet acid at 33,000 feet.
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, 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 shit out of any sensible person. We have no business, maybe, being up there, participants in such an inherently dangerous balance between naïve 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.
Get Salon in your mailbox!