The runway at the ancient temple site of Tikal in Guatemala was no more than a wide place on a dirt road. My airplane, less than a year old, was an alien being beside it, glowing against the shades of the forest and the faces of the inhabitants like a marble statue freshly sunken to the bottom of the sea.
From Tikal it was to be an easy trip south to Guatemala City. But we needed fuel, and for that we stopped nearby at Flores. The airport, it turned out, was out of fuel. By the time we had arranged to buy some—just enough—from a private forestry firm it was midafternoon. Impatient, we took off without checking the weather, a cumbersome process those days.
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Cumulonimbus had been building over the mountains north of the capital, however, and after 40 minutes we were close enough to see that there were no gaps. The tops were too high for us. I changed heading slightly to the west, hoping for a low spot. As we approached the gray wall, I veered more and more westward. Eventually, we were heading west by northwest—back toward Mexico.
Our borrowed, jerry-rigged VOR was useless. There was no VOR transmitter within a hundred miles other than the one at Guatemala City itself, silent to us behind the mountains. The forest below us was limitless and without landmarks.
I turned back toward the northeast.
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Where were we? In my hasty confidence that we would fly toward Guatemala City until we picked up its VOR, I had been careless about keeping track of the headings flown and the time spent flying them.
Now I could only guess at our position over the carpet of green that spread to all horizons. Through it wandered enigmatic brown rivers, to us all alike and anonymous. Between us and them, thin, patchy mists had begun to form.
Time ordinarily undulates, now swift, now lazy, an anemone wavering uncertainly between past and future. Grazed by my fears, it now contracted into a lump of intense present. I had never been in this situation before. If we did not find Flores again—and if clouds covered it, we would not—we would have to choose from among many unpalatable alternatives, the most exotic of which involved the two parachutes, relics of recent flight testing, which still occupied our seat backs.
We discussed our options—or rather shouted them at each other, since the plane was so noisy. Nancy was for putting the plane down on a river sandbar while we had daylight. Her fear was that I would go to such lengths to save the newborn plane that I would pass up a dozen perfectly hospitable clearings into which I could safely put it, and from which we—but not the plane—might eventually be rescued, and that the engine would sputter its last in darkness.
As for the parachutes, the idea of climbing out of the cabin onto the wing and jumping off did not appeal to her at all. In retrospect, I have a little trouble with it myself, but I was young then.
I sat up straighter in my seat. My feet pressed the rudder pedals more firmly. The engine, unconscious of our predicament, droned unperturbed. My only clue to our position was the pencil line that I had put on the Shell road map that was, remarkably, the only one of Guatemala that I had brought along. (As I later learned, that map was equivalent to the corresponding aeronautical chart in depicting the area as, essentially, a blank.)
If my scribbles were accurate, fine. But they were just one casual guess built upon another. I could not match the sinuosities of the rivers below us to any on our map. But what was there to do but ignore the rivers and trust the scribbles? So I took a heading to Flores from the end of the penciled trace and estimated a time. I flew northeast, as attentive now to my heading as I had been negligent before.
In 45 minutes, I thought, we would have traveled 130 miles, and we should be able to glimpse Lake Peten Itza and the airport on its south shore. Under other circumstances, 45 minutes is a short time. Under these, it was a season.
So now here we were, alone above the open arms of the rain forest, with the clock ticking the minutes away, clouds condensing out of the air below, and the sun sinking slowly behind us. I clung for dear life to that heading that was at once as precise as a number and as nebulous as a hunch.
After 45 minutes, a gap seemed to appear in the forest ahead of us. Metallic gray at first, obscure, indistinct, it gradually took on shape and color. It was Lake Peten Itza squarely in front of us.
To me, our safe return to Flores happily reaffirmed the power of grade-school arithmetic. Heading, speed, and time; time, speed and heading: It was nice to see that even when there was no radio beam to follow, no landmark to recognize, no spoor or smell, mere numbers could still take us where we wanted to go.
Back in the tail cone an iron ring had swung and settled, electrons had swarmed through wires that I had strung through frames and grommets and connectors, and on the instrument panel magnets had tugged at a needle and it had pointed to a painted digit. So we had dinner at the Casablanca in Flores, instead of a handful of Life Savers on a riverbank among the capybaras.
But what seemed mysterious—though it could easily have been a matter of pure luck—was that the heading I had calculated, based on the sketchiest of indications on my map, had turned out to be exactly correct. That meant that my casual pencil marks had been more accurate than I had any reason to expect.
The following year we would dead-reckon across the Atlantic Ocean. Again, I would scribble guessed positions on a blank chart. When we finally established VHF contact with Shanwick Oceanic controllers, we were within half a mile of the “gate” through which
arriving traffic is supposed to enter Irish airspace. Half a mile in 2,000—equivalent to an angular error of one-70th of a degree.
Was it possible that I, and any pilot who had done many hours of flying by pilotage and dead reckoning—a vanishing breed, I fear—possessed a sort of built-in inertial navigation system whose operations were normally eclipsed by radio beacons and airways? Were my guesses more accurate than I believed, precisely because I had not been thinking consciously about navigation?
It was 50 years ago. I still don’t know the answer.
This column first appeared in the May Issue 970 of the FLYING print edition.