Recovered from “Fugitive Memoirs Volume II”
Jim had this habit of slipping into an orbit around random features in the rainforest below, convinced, or so he claimed, that he had seen some sign of extraterrestrial activity. Susan and I would roll our eyes, but Jim was an unflappable conspiracy theorist, and our many reasoned objections and counter-arguments only fuelled the persecution complex that entrenches such personalities (or perhaps he just loved to egg on our indignant protests).
Flying at 2,000 feet or so above the emergent layer, an out-of-place clear patch or a bit of burnt ground would attract his eye and with great violence, but somehow also real grace, he would drop the left wing and peg a perfect circle around the point of interest as if aiming a waist gun at it and holding the target rock-solid in the crosshairs.
I was always enthralled with the way Jim seemed to naturally correct for winds during these turns. Even with the GPS showing a 15-20 knot headwind before he banged out the manoeuvre, if his aerial orbits were oblong, I couldn’t tell. Jim and Susan were like that. They had, to borrow a term Jim would later use to describe my flying ability, “The Touch.” An instinct for flying that transcended technical knowledge or ability, and traversed into a wholly sublime (even as I write it that term comes off in an offensively religious way, but I can articulate it no better) instinct for the craft. They had an unconscious competence, a flying muse of sorts that somehow telegraphed the perfect control inputs through their hands directly into the aircraft’s systems. I doubt Jim even knew he was perfectly correcting for cross, then head, then cross, then tailwinds as he ran his orbits around “the most obvious sign of extraterrestrial landings I have seen down here.” If you asked him at any random moment where the wind was coming from he would instantly point a vector out of the cockpit, and give you its speed to boot.
Graced by the inspiration of a flying muse. “The Touch.” I always objected to that term, at least as Jim had a habit of applying it to me. My life on the estate hadn’t prepared me to accept compliments. They were rarely given to anyone in that environment, and even if one was bestowed upon you, basking in it was considered one of the brusquer forms of classlessness you could exhibit. Still, I should have eventually accepted Jim’s accolades gracefully, especially as Susan, who was as sharp a critic of pilot ability as I have ever known, began to echo them in the weeks and months that followed.
Someday perhaps I shall attempt to catalogue the flying muses, for sure as Aoidḗ, Melétē, and Mnḗmē are as distinct as can be, so the muses that guided Jim and Susan’s hands were different. They both had the most astounding situational awareness, able to track multiple, airborne targets in their head as they came into a busy pattern somewhere, but there was more than that to both of them. Susan was an accomplished twin pilot to be sure, but the Cessna 185 was her bird, and she could thread the eye of a rainforest needle with her high-wing of choice (I once right-seated while she slipped through a tree-lined gap that exceeded our wingspan by no more than five feet at what must have approached 140 knots, and she could put that bird down in spaces that would curl the toes of the most hardened bush pilots), and while Jim might have flown singles well, it was between the big nacelles of the King Airs that he was most at home. No one could coax performance out of those birds (or knew how to service them in the middle of the rainforest with not much more than a flathead screwdriver and a wrench) like Jim.
Now that they are gone to all but my memory, I find that I often wonder after the two of them, and whether part of the reason their relationship was so rocky might not be explained by a tendency of the muse of high-wing single pilots to bicker with her rival, the muse of low-wing twin turboprop drivers.