Vigilia's Tempest

Much to John’s alarm, the hole in the clouds above him was threatening to close up before he got there. Huge white hands seemed to grab at the Jungmann from all sides. The throttle was already against the stop. John carefully leaned the fuel mixture, coaxing the last bit of power from his gasping engine. The biplane was rocking up and down, struggling with the downdrafts coming off the clouds. The sky around John grew darker. He raised his tinted goggles, and hunched lower under the windscreen. John could feel the temperature dropping. It was becoming very cold in the open cockpit. Lifting his head back up, John encountered total blindness. He was completely wrapped in the cloud vapors.

The buffeting from the freezing wind forced John Vigilia to duck his head back down inside the cockpit. His eyes fell on the vertical speed indicator. John was startled to discover that the Bücker was climbing at 3000 feet-per-minute, more than three times its normal rate. The biplane was in an updraft. It had been sucked up into the air mass, not an ordinary cloud, but a building cumulonimbus, a developing thunderstorm.

Words memorized from his pilot’s meteorology text flashed in John’s mind: The cumulonimbus cloud marks an area of most turbulent air, with probable hail and torrential rain. The sensible pilot never attempts to fly through such a cloud, but always goes around it.

The textbook had become a reality. The Jungmann was being drawn up into an immense, luminous dome, the damp white insides of which revealed streaks of its own heavenly geography. The aircraft raced upward in air that was becoming difficult to breathe. John peered over the side at the cloud, which was growing darker, a green twilight, almost as if he and his airplane were under water. Rain, mixed with hail, began to beat on the taut fabric covering the wings and fuselage. He was locked in the first stages of a thunderstorm. Until that moment John had not been quite sure of what he was encountering, and so had not known what to fear. With the realization of his situation came terror—a panic that dulled John’s responses and slowed his reactions.

Although his hands gripped the control stick, John Vigilia was not flying the airplane. In the violent air the Jungmann had taken on a life of its own, climbing and diving, while all the time being forced upward. The severe turbulence inside a storm cloud was lethal. An airplane, even an aerobatic one like the Bücker, could become overstressed and eventually come apart. He had to slow the airspeed down.

With his left hand, numb from the cold and trembling with fright, John pulled back the throttle. There was no response. His eyes flashed to the tachometer, where the needle rested on zero. It took John but an instant to realize that the carburetor’s intake must have iced over. The engine was dead. Looking out the side caused John’s stomach to tighten further. The pounding rain was turning to ice—it was as if summer had for some reason hibernated at this altitude. The ice was adhering to the wings and struts, not only adding weight to the airplane, but also destroying the airfoil, decreasing the lift just when it was needed most. This condition increased the speed at which the aircraft stalled, which at high altitudes was not that far below its cruise speed in level flight. John checked his altimeter; the gauge showed the incorrect altitude of 666 feet, the pitot tube was frozen. The Jungmann’s airspeed indicator, which shared the same tube, would be inaccurate also.

Fighting his fear, John hunkered down under the now completely frosted-over windscreen. The covering of ice did not matter, as John had no outside visibility anywhere. He had to regain control of the aircraft, to fly it by what few instruments that still functioned before it went into a spin. It was cold, extremely cold. John’s body was shaking. The attitude indicator showed the aircraft to be in a sixty degree left bank. Tilting the control stick cautiously to the right, John tried to level the wings. The gauge showed no response. The venturi too was frozen over. He felt the airplane beginning to shake, the subtle buffet that came just before a stall which, without the pilot being in control, could turn into a spin. A spin in these clouds would tighten up before he could stop it, and take John Vigilia, in his confusion and helplessness, all the way back to surface of the lake—and below.

John could hear the thin air being breathed in and out of his nostrils, fast and hard like a piston. All the winds of the world were being sucked through his brain. John sat there resigned to the fact that he had never been as important in his life as he hoped to be. This final spin would be the ultimate consequence of his all too many failures. He was considering the possibility of bailing out, abandoning the foundering airplane, as he had abandoned so many other things in his life when they appeared not to be going as planned. Then, as if the forces of nature were intent on denying John Vigilia the innate fulfillment of his tragic destiny, the clouds began to part, and the Jungmann bounced free of the mist and out into the brilliant sunshine.