Reflections from the Blue Sky to the Earth

Richard Bach begins his novel The Seagull by describing a morning sparkling with the golden sun. On a fishing boat embracing the deep blue waters, he describes the seagulls in the sky struggling for a morsel of food, their voices, their flights, their efforts.

I was a child when I read the book for the first time, I didn't know anything about the author, nor did I know how to research it. What I was exposed to was nature told through the eyes of a seagull. Over the years, each time I picked up the book and read it, I attached different meanings to it.  This work, written by the precious pen of a pilot who gave philosophy of flight lessons in America, became the favorite of my bookshelf.

There was also The Little Prince. The book he remembers that I left halfway through reading when I picked it up in the second grade of elementary school. We used to swim in the sea with my friends until we were exhausted at the cottage, and who knows how many times The Little Prince fell on my pillow while I was taking my afternoon nap with the August ceremony of crickets. Its author, Antonie De Saınt-Exupery, passed away with the avoided end of the flight. When he joined the French air force in North Africa, he was shot down during a reconnaissance flight. He flew away from us on the spot.

If we asked jet pilots about the pleasure of flying in the sky where there are no borders, most of them would tell us about becoming one with the airplane they fly, feeling the speed like a fireball on their wings. The pleasure of speed, the feeling of greatness that comes from looking at the world from above must be the nirvana of emotions experienced by those who choose the profession of piloting.

Aristotle attributes feeling good and being happy in life to two reasons. Establishing meaningful relationships and finding meaningful goals. When we look at it from this point of view, I think that the goal of a pilot who holds himself and his airplane as if they are one with a living being would be to keep the airplane he lives in alive with him, to save his airplane. 

I would like to continue with a quote from a novel: "The sky was cloudless and windless. Cemil was in a blue atlas. He was on a training flight in a combat readiness squadron. He was soaring and then suddenly diving to hit designated targets in the empty field below. He was used to it, like a child glued to a game console playing a game he knew very well. But he shouldn't have been mesmerized by the target. After taking aim and pressing the bomb button, looking at the target to see if the bomb had hit its target was a deadly danger for the pilot. He must not fall into this trap. Otherwise, it was easy to lose control of such a fast airplane and then crash. 

But this time it wasn't target fascination that awaited him, but something else, a nasty surprise. In the blink of an eye, during one of the dives, he saw a white blob coming towards him, growing rapidly. There was a sudden tremor in the plane. There was a metallic scraping sound coming from the steel parts of the engine's air intake, which rotated like sharp blades. The engine started coughing. The jolt was so strong that Cemil, despite his shoulder straps, clung to the control panel in front of him. He was surprised. He tried to make sense of this situation, which his instructors had never mentioned and which he had never read in the flight instructions. "What did I do wrong? I was never rough with my airplane while settling in the cockpit! Why is he angry?"

"You should caress it like a girl while pulling the yoke to yourself, Cemil!" his Evren instructor used to say. Had he pulled the yoke hard without realizing it at the moment of the shot? No, he hadn't done that either. He couldn't understand why he was in trouble. Sweat was pouring out of every pore of his skin. Despite his mind telling him he had done everything right, something had gone wrong with his plane. That's why his emotions were rebelling against him like a novice pilot. His body felt light, his legs numb. White smoke, like fog, poured out from the slots of each screw and from the air vents. The smell of burnt meat mixed with this thick smoke. Only then did Cemil realize that the rattling coming from the engine was coming from the shattered bones. The engine had pulled the stork he had just seen between its gears, ground it up and burned it. That was the cause of the smell that burned his nostrils. The plane was spitting out flames intermittently, and every time the flames hit the cockpit window, Cemil was face to face with hell. The oil from the disintegrating engine filled the interior as if it had been sprayed. The canopy that provided Cemil's vision was obscured by smoke and oil. This was the moment when the pilot was blinded and reliant only on the control panel to steer the plane. Survival flew out of his hands and left to miracles. But the angels came to his aid, clearing a palm-sized area of the canopy and giving him visibility.

As Cemil tried to see out of this small window of light, the sweat dripping from his forehead mixed with the greasy snow and stung his eyes. The thought occurred to him that the engine's violent coughing might turn into an explosion. Strangely, instead of being scared, he became angry. "What have I done to you! If you want to explode, explode! Go to hell!" he shouted through clenched teeth. He was furious. There was so much to do until the engine gave up, he would try everything he had learned until the last moment. The plane was going forward and then stalling, pushing Cemil forward hard. He began to quickly run through in his mind all he had learned during his flight training. Fortunately, the engine hadn't broken off while making coughing attacks. He hadn't made the mistake of giving reverse control on the upward climb until the engine gave out. Nor had he descended at right angles to the earth from the altitude he had ascended and made the twisting motion around his axis that they call a viril. His plane didn't seem to crash. In that case, there was no need to pull the jump lever under his chair. For a moment, Cemil could no longer hear his heart beating. "God help me. I can do it! I can land!" he thought.

Then he kept his composure and radioed his flight instructor: "I think a bird hit my plane, smoke filled the inside. I am going back to the square!" His instructor, who was accompanying him on the flight arm, only half-understood the "...filled with smoke" part of the intermittent conversation. His voice came over the radio: "Put on the speed brake!" The command sounded strange to Cemil, and he wondered if his flight instructor had fully understood the problem. But there were only a few seconds between life and death. So, without much questioning, he did as his instructor said and started descending rapidly. As Cemil's plane descended, his instructor, who had given the command "Put on the speed brake!" a few seconds earlier, realized his mistake when he saw the flames shooting out of the engine. He shouted a warning to Cemil: "Increase your speed right now, get higher!" 

This time Cemil tried to raise his plane. But the engine was cunning, it didn't want to eat the gas. Moreover, his flaming cough increased. Cemil was going through the biggest test of his life. He was so close to the runway. "I can't get up, I can't get up!" he shouted over the radio. "I'm switching to a turn pattern," but there was no response from the flight tower. The tower was silent and the radio channels were left only to the pilot who was struggling with his plane and his instructors who were guiding him.

The small window through which he could see ahead was also closed. Cemil was now a blind pilot. His instructors would try to land him by guiding him with radio conversations. This time the voice of the flight instructor on the ground was heard over the radio: "Keep going, buddy, I'm following you, you're very close, my lion. I will land you, no problem. Calm down!" Peace filled Cemil's heart when he heard this stern voice. His fading sense of confidence was restored. When he opened the landing gear on his instructor's command, his plane started to lose altitude rapidly. The sky was dislodged. His teacher shouted again with his loud voice: "Open the throttle, Cemil! Open the throttle!" 

When Cemil opened the throttle, that momentary slight rise allowed his plane to reach the beginning of the runway. As soon as the wheels touched the runway, all the mechanics and flight instructors jumped out of their seats and started running towards the runway. They pulled the exhausted lieutenant out of the plane that landed on the runway. He had survived a major nervous breakdown. They were horrified to see that the plane's engine was wrecked, but they tried not to let Cemil realize it. They all knew it was a real miracle that he had landed with such an engine. 

In this excerpt from the book "If you don't fly today", Cemil, the protagonist of the story, is portrayed as a pilot who has postponed the awareness of saving himself from the failure in his combat readiness training and is trying to save his plane.

It reminds us that being a pilot is not limited to looking at the world from above, and that this profession is lived with its risks...