Unfortunately, a man’s plane crash-lands on a desert island, and he is the sole survivor.
His first and greatest mistake was becoming a ferry pilot.
It had been a hard offer to refuse. Rich folks too lazy to take care of their own toys would pay him to fly their planes, light aircraft so packed with ferry tanks and extra gear that he had to fly solo. No boss breathing down his shoulder, not even a copilot to force him into smalltalk. He could scratch his privates with impunity and fart into the wind at 10,000 feet, all while enjoying a view of creation the envy of just about everyone short of the ISS crew. Oh, and he got all the hours he could clock.
Those had all seemed like selling points, at first. But a few twenty-hour flights in cramped cockpits quickly took the magic out of the job. Packed between steel boxes full of fuel, a thermos of thick coffee, and a control column, he spent hours over the oceans, bumping his knees on the instrument panel, radioing dull reports to Control, and pissing in a bottle that spent most of the flight jammed next to his chair. An endless blue carpet of waves sloshed beneath him in daylight, and, at night, it vanished into a darkness broken only by the glow of his flight instruments.
He was constantly occupied by nothing. He scanned in all directions at nothing. He listened intently to nothing on the emergency frequencies. He ate nothing for hours on end. He concentrated on the nothing on his indicators, thought of nothing for as long as he could take, and, when he got bored, talked to nothing while it said nothing back.
Now, flying a Piper PA-28 Cherokee through the purgatory of the upper troposphere, he kicked himself for ever seeking solitude in the skies. Or, he would have, had his legs had enough space and freedom to so.
And then, suddenly, he felt a kick from something else entirely. The plane lurched around him, rattling him against the side of the cockpit. Damn, he thought. He’d hit an air-pocket. Had he let his altitude drift? The altimeter didn’t seem to think so. He tapped at the analog dial, as if it mattered.
Again, the plane jerked under him, tossing his thermos from his lap. He clung tight to the control column and wrestled with the wind shear. He fought to control the plane, and the sky fought back. The ferry tanks rattled in their restraints, and the horizon bobbed up and down in the distance. He pressed the plane to descend.
All at once, the turbulence stopped, and the plane returned to nothing. Too much nothing. In fact, there was so much nothing that he now realized he had lost something. The abrupt quiet hinted at what his indicators confirmed: his engine had died.
He clawed at the ignition. What the hell was this? How does a little turbulence knock out the engines? He was no mechanic, but he was pretty sure this kind of thing was something designed out of most aircraft. He fumbled at the controls, but the engine ignored him, and the propeller waved lifelessly in front of him.
Okay, keep your head. This could be worse. He was just thousands of feet above the middle of an ocean, strapped to a hunk of slowly falling metal along with several tanks of fuel. He’d be fine.
He tried to recall the specs on this plane. It had a glide ratio of, what, nine to one? That meant he could go at least a dozen miles before he hit the water. Maybe he’d get lucky and the engine would spring back to life before then. That could happen, right?
He thought he felt the return of turbulence, but he realized that he was the one trembling this time, not the plane. He remembered his training. Radio his Mayday signal. Soar as long as he can.
Time passed. The horizon crept slowly higher, and he began to make out the troughs and crests of the waves below. No contact on the radio, despite his repeated calls. Nothing had held him on its tongue for too long, and now it would swallow him.
A dot appeared in the distance, on the water. It lay almost dead ahead, growing slowly as he approached. He banked gently toward the whatever-it-was, hoping he had enough altitude left to reach it. The dot became a speck became a blob became a smudge of green and brown.
An island! A small one, yes, but even small islands featured the marvelous perk that you couldn’t drown on them. Since the ocean could produce no better counter-offer, he committed his remaining time in the air to reaching the isle.
As the island grew ever larger, he considered his plan of action. He’d never had to ditch before, and the fact that he hadn’t had always felt like a good thing until this moment. Now he felt he could have used the practice, though he couldn’t think of any safe way he could have gotten it. In principle, a water landing (more of a “watering” than a “landing,” really) wasn’t too different from a runway landing, up until the part where the plane made contact with the ocean. The tricky part only started right after the plane stopped flying.
Palm trees dotted the coasts of the tiny island. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than a half mile in diameter, and there were no signs of man-made structures anywhere. He looked for a clearing large enough to land on. There were none.
He wondered if he would die in this cockpit, trapped between containers of fuel, coffee, and his own urine. The water was getting awfully close, now, and he thought he could smell the salt below him. He veered slightly away from the island so as to touch down next to it, not into it, estimating based on nothing in particular what a safe distance from the shore would be. He had the urge to use the urine bottle one last time, but decided there would be time for that later.
He pulled the brake lever and nosed up. The stall warning went off, and he braced himself.
The cockpit quaked as the plane skimmed the water. The drag of the ocean surface threw him forward in his seat, and a curtain of saltwater threw itself against the glass. The plane tipped forward, and the propeller submerged itself under the now vertical fuselage. The sky and ocean traded places, and he hung by his seat restraints as the unfastened contents of the plane bolted to the ceiling.
Water entered the cabin. His hands scrambled furiously at his safety belt as the ocean seeped into the mangled flyer. He freed himself, cracked his head against the ceiling, and righted himself to the new orientation of the plane. He tore off his headset and threw his weight against the door, every cell in his body determined not to drown in this tiny room. The door swung slowly open, and water rushed in at the opportunity. The water line rose against the windows. He pulled himself through the opening and into the open sea.
He grabbed on to the overturned wing beside him and thrashed his legs to stay afloat. He gasped for air, though he had only been submerged for a moment, and searched his surroundings. The island was no more than a hundred yards away, an easy distance for any frequent patron of a community swimming pool, but an impossible-looking one for the panicked survivor of an only moments-old plane crash. Still, the wing sank under his grasp, leaving him with no other choice.
He pushed off against the wing and swam shoreward. He tried to maintain a straight frontstroke, but his execution was sloppy and furious, creating high splashes as he slapped the water with his arms and legs in only piecemeal coordination. His sneakers, waterlogged and heavy, resisted the motion of his legs, and the cuffs of his khaki pants dragged through the water like loose sails. Saltwater stung at his eyes and invaded his mouth and nose. He couldn’t keep his bearings with his face submerged, so he raised his head from the water every few strokes to reorient himself; the water took these opportunities to envelop the rest of him, and he would flail harder to return himself to the surface. The island was still a hundred feet distant, and he could feel nothing solid beneath him.
A wave lifted him, and, for a moment, he felt optimistic that the current might bring him closer to his goal, but then the wave crashed down on him, and he realized that, while the waves might eventually take him to shore, they had no intention of keeping his head above water. He writhed underwater for a moment, found the surface in an unexpected direction, then, righted himself just in time for another wave to pummel him back down. Several times over, this cycle continued, oscillating between breath and brine until at last the waves flung him against a wall of wet sand.
Not a wall, but a floor, he thought, as the water receded again. He crawled forward on the wet, grainy terrain. The waves slammed him down, a little less fiercely this time, and he continued forward and upward. Under his palms, he felt the sand transition to a dry, hot gravel, and the waves licked his heels one final time as he collapsed on the beach.
