Island in the Sky

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ISLAND IN THE SKY

ERNEST K. GANN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

Foreword 6

I 7

II 13

III 24

IV 37

V 48

VI 67

VII 80

VIII 96

IX 108

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 132

DEDICATION

TO TOBY HUNT—

and all his kind.

• • •

Thou born to match the gale (thou art all wings),

To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,

Thou ship of air that never furl’st thy sails,

Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,

At dusk that look’d on Senegal, at morn America,

That sport’st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,

In them, in thy experiences, had’st thou my soul,

What joys! what joys were thine!

—Walt Whitman To the Man-of-War Bird

Foreword

This is not a war book. It could have been written at any time since man took to the air seriously. This is a story about professional pilots and their special, guarded world—their island in the sky.

Before take-off, a professional pilot is keen, anxious, but lest someone read his true feelings, he is elaborately casual. The reason for this is that he is about to enter a new though familiar world. The process of entrance begins a short time before he leaves the ground and is completed the instant he is in the air. From that moment on, not only his body but his spirit and personality exist in a separate world known only to himself and his comrades.

As the years go by, he returns to this invisible world rather than to earth for peace and solace. There also he finds a profound enchantment, although he can seldom describe it. He can discuss it with others of his kind, and because they too know and feel its power they understand. But his attempts to communicate his feelings to his wife or other earthly confidants invariably end in failure.

Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are willing victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it. Professional pilots are, of necessity, uncomplicated, simple men. Their thinking must remain straightforward, or they die—violently.

The men in this book are fictitious characters but their counterparts can be found in cockpits all over the world. Now they are flying a war. Tomorrow they will be flying a peace, for, regardless of the world’s condition, flying is their life.

Like the men in this book, a large number of professional airline pilots were attached to the Army Air Transport Command soon after the war began. They were of the Army but not in it. Flying alongside regular Army pilots, they continued to wear their usual airline uniforms when conditions permitted, which was seldom. Extremes of cold and heat, the dirt and rigors of far-flung operations, reduced them frequently to an identifying cap. The rest was more often a plaid shirt and heavy flying jacket, or shorts and mosquito boots, as the case might be.

The story of the Corsair and its occupants is based upon a true incident. The writer selected this story because he knew it best—there are hundreds of other stories, some of them even more heroic, that speak of professional flying with perhaps more eloquence than this one. But no matter what story might be selected, or wherever on earth or in the air it might take place, the men involved would be much the same as Dooley and Stannish, Stutz and Willie Moon, and all the others.

E. K. G.

Old Greenwich, Conn.

1944

I

Dooley rubbed the gray stubble on his chin and stared into the evening. His heavy, sharp-cut face, Chinese red from the glow behind the overcast, made no secret of the disgust that filled his being.

I don’t like, he mumbled in a leathery voice, the look of that there God damned cloud bank. Dooley always referred to things as that there—it pleased him immensely. It was an exact impression, something you could depend upon, something everyone in Dooley’s vast experience had always been able to understand. He looked down 10,000 feet to the placid waters of Davis Strait. For a moment, the deep-cut lines about his mouth ceased to look like spokes around a wagon wheel. I don’t like the look of it, he repeated to the world aloft in general, and then his attention returned to the cloud bank straight ahead. His eyes shifted and sought out the temperature gauge on the crowded instrument panel. The narrow pointer on the needle indicated precisely 20 degrees above zero.

Dooley lolled back in his seat and alternately rubbed his miserably chapped lips and the shock of gray hair that stood defiantly forward from the top of his head. He was tired. His eyes burned and his legs ached. His stomach, a recent host to a quantity of canned meat, felt as if it belonged to some other person. His tongue was dry. He placed an oxygen mask over his face for a moment, breathed deeply, and stared again at the cloud bank ahead. His lungs temporarily satisfied, he placed the mask carefully upon his knee and spoke to the young man at his side.

We are going to pick up some ice. He said it thoughtfully and very quietly. He seemed not to care. There was no twinkle in his blue eyes. Dooley had to think—and think swiftly too, as swiftly as his passage through the upper atmosphere. He had to balance things, many things, one against the other. He had to work into nice juxtaposition a series of related facts that were constantly at odds with each other. In addition, they were facts that grew and changed with rapidity. Failure on Dooley’s part to compromise with them would result in disaster.

Most of his preliminary thinking was automatic, based on long-established conditions. He was the captain of a four-engined transport airplane, presently somewhere between Greenland and North America. The logistics of modern warfare had brought Dooley to this forsaken portion of the sky. The Army Air Transport Command had provided the airplane, which someone had named the Corsair. The name was prominently lettered in yellow paint along its nose. A commercial airline had provided Dooley and his crew. It was a satisfactory arrangement for everyone concerned, including Dooley, whose forty-three years would otherwise have bound him to an Army desk. Now he was proceeding toward the Labrador Coast at an estimated speed of 200 miles per hour. Beneath him, far below in the twilight vastness, were numerous icebergs, strangely linked together by vagrant wisps of sea mist. Above his head, the plexiglass window revealed the Arctic evening sky. Just ahead, a scant few feet, the instrument panel offered assorted information on the airspeed, altitude, course, engine temperatures, manifold pressures, and revolutions per minute. They were pleasantly old, familiar, hard facts—easy to comprehend and easy to observe. Dooley’s twenty years of flying had taught him over and over again that he must not be content with them alone.

It was the things you couldn’t see that counted—the hidden, never tangible series of upper world plots and fancies. They invariably joined company with the unwary, always with an air of deceptive innocence. They frequently killed the unwary.

Dooley twisted about in his seat and faced the radio operator.

D’Annunzia, he said in a voice pitched just loud enough to compete with the four engines, see if you can get a cross-bearing from Consolation Island. The black-haired young man removed his earphones and bent forward in his leather jacket. Been trying for the past hour. I can’t raise ‘em.

How about Chapel Inlet?

Nothing doing. He threw up his hands. ‘

Who can you raise? Are they all asleep?

It’s the damn Northern Lights...we gotta wait.

Dooley looked at the floor, then swung completely around in his seat and eyed the young man who sat directly behind him. He had the air of someone peering into a goldfish bowl. It was difficult for him to approach this youngster with the close-cropped hair and the apple cheeks. Like all his comrades, Dooley had been accustomed to doing his own navigation through space. Through the years it had become a deep-seated habit, an almost unconscious mental manipulation that seldom failed. Now the groundlings in power had seen fit to place a navigator beneath his wing. The compass in Dooley’s head, they maintained, was not sufficiently accurate. Dooley was open-minded but skeptical. He could not for the life of him decide whether the youngster, who lent the cockpit rather an air of the college dormitory, was a nuisance or a help.

Murray, he said patiently, "where do you think we are?" Murray snapped his head up. His eyes were alive with enthusiasm. With a sudden jerky movement he retrieved the pencil from behind his ear and placed its point upon the chart before him.

Right here, Captain, he answered confidently. I got a sun line an hour ago and just advanced it.

Where’s here? Dooley twisted his neck around so he could see better. There was a small cross near the middle of the chart. How far to the coast?

Two hundred...perhaps two twenty...

Dooley breathed deeply and thought for a moment. He continued to stare at the blank white representation of a thousand miles of open ocean.

How high was the sun when you shot it?

Thirteen degrees and ten minutes.

Do you think that was high enough to trust? Dooley raised an eyebrow.

I had perfect shooting—steady as a rock. Very small area with the marks.

I’d be inclined to doubt it. My guess is we’re coming up on the coast right now. He looked over his shoulder at the now fast approaching cloud bank. It was a cinch they wouldn’t be able to top it. He turned back to Murray.

Figure up what kind of a ground speed we’d have to make to be over that there Martin River peninsula about ten minutes from right now.

Murray picked up a small round celluloid disk, made a few gestures with his dividers on the chart, and frowned.

We’d have to make 260 miles per hour, Captain...that could just hardly be possible!

Dooley squinted at the sky above and noted the high wraiths of cirrus clouds. A tolerant smile played across his lips. He must remember when he got back on the ground to tell those bastards in the snug, warm offices so far over the horizon, that he was not running an aerial kindergarten, and that furthermore he, Dooley, wanted a say in the training of navigators—among many other things. He rubbed his eyes and sighed.

Murray, he said in the manner of a high priest delivering a dictum, anything...anything, mind you, Murray...can happen up here.

Something wrong? For the first time Murray’s easy confidence seemed shaken.

No...that is, not yet. You’d better split the difference between your assumed position and the Martin River peninsula. That’ll put us a hundred or so offshore. Keep careful track of your dead reckoning from now on.

Yes, sir. The answer was barely audible above the engine drone. Dooley turned around and faced the task ahead.

There was a jagged cut in the gray shapeless cloud mass. Dooley turned the Corsair so as to split the exact center of the cut. He wanted to slip in easily. He half hoped there might be layers within the great mass itself, layers that would enable him to change altitude from time to time and thus remain in contact flight. Although the big ship would then become even more obviously a fly speck in creation, Dooley was not concerned with futile comparisons. To remain in contact meant there would be no ice. The ice crystals and snow which swept hand in hand through the upper world would not leave his radios a pile of useless metal boxes.

For a time, the false horizon moved with the Corsair. A few low-hanging tendrils of mist from the upper cloud deck whipped past the wings. Then suddenly, as if crushed within a vise, the horizon merged into nothing. The bulbous snout of the Corsair was enveloped in dank, heavy vapor. Dooley flipped on the cockpit lights and glanced at the outside temperature gauge—that was the important thing, it must not get any warmer. He knew that now there was no postponing the encounter and he wanted as many things on his side as he could muster. As they penetrated more deeply into the overcast, certain elements, most of them invisible, would oppose the Corsair’s swift passage. Working together, they might stop it altogether. They were old and familiar enemies to Dooley. They were merciless and unforgiving enemies. They were tricky and powerful.

Dooley was neither helpless nor afraid. He had a few tricks of his own and a certain number of weapons at his disposal, which when called upon in emergencies were invariably able to perform greater miracles than anyone ever had a right to expect. It was, however, a characteristic of Dooley’s trade to keep the point of expectancy low, thus preventing disappointment, particularly when disappointment was but a prelude to instant death.

The most valuable of Dooley’s weapons was his experience in the air, a quality matched only by his comrade captains. It dated back to the real beginning of flying, to the barnstorming days of the Twenties, when Dooley, a red-faced irrepressible youth, managed a precarious living by walking the wings of a wood and fabric biplane. He learned then, although it failed to turn him to other pursuits, the number one rule of flight—that human beings were completely out of their element when attempting it. He learned the law of gravity, not in school but at first hand, when he assisted in separating the various remains of his fellows from the torn earth and the smoking, twisted metal parts of an OX-5 engine. Some five thousand air hours later, and it was in air hours that all of Dooley’s kind marked the passage of time, he learned that although his engines were a little more powerful and his airplanes faster, the fundamental penalty for aerial carelessness had not changed. When the air mail came along, he saw that ignorance could kill as quickly as anything else, and that unless he gained some scientific knowledge as to the causes and movements within the upper atmosphere, his new engine and new airplane must remain only a transport to destruction.

At ten thousand hours, Dooley was suspicious, cynical, and most of all humble. Personal modesty had become almost a fetish in his profession. The old-timers, the tough guys, the goggled heroes of derring-do, had almost without exception made their last take-off. Dooley stood now on a pinnacle of fifteen thousand hours. Behind him were the days and nights of airline flying—the simple formula that if he took good care of his own neck, his passengers would likewise remain in good health. In war, there were problems to be solved that reached into the very foundations of Dooley’s experience.

Dooley’s second aid was the airplane in which he sat. With certain major limitations it was a remarkable contrivance, almost as versatile as his own knowledge. The Corsair had been conceived in a sprawling California plant. Its 1200 horsepower engines swung four heavy black propellers usually at 2000 revolutions per minute. When properly synchronized, and it was Dooley’s art and pleasure to see that they were, a smooth tremor spaced at even periods ran the length of the ship. The four propellers blended perfectly together in an even rhythm. Dooley knew that unless his luck had run out altogether, he could depend upon their muffled harmony until the fuel supply was exhausted. Fuel was one more very important factor Dooley had to think about. He pointed a stumpy finger at the two quivering flow meter gauges on the instrument panel and leaned over to the broad-nosed young man who occupied the other pilot’s seat.

Frank, he said, without taking his eyes from the flight instruments before him, I gotta hunch we’re in for a long ride. We can’t get a bearing from Consolation Island. The damn static has knocked out the Chapel Inlet range. I think I know where we are but I can’t be sure until we get something on the radio.

Frank Lovatt’s pale face remained expressionless as he listened to the older man. It was his duty to aid Dooley in the actual flying of the Corsair. Like Dooley, he was a pilot. The unpleasant did not surprise him since he had learned to keep a low point of expectancy. Between him and Dooley rested a peculiar respect, a mysterious bond that ties all pilots together. Frank’s four years of itinerary flying had brought him to the threshold of a professional career. He knew that