China Airborne Read Online Free

Claeys, who understood the descriptionin Chinese (as I did not), blanched. A little later he let me know what they had said.
    At most airports, fuel comes out by way of a motor-driven pump, like at a gas station. At a few of the most remote, you might use a hand-cranked system to drive fuel through the hose and into the airplane’s gas tank. In this case, we had the barrel on the truck bed, a gas tank opening on top of each wing of the plane, and a ten-foot-long, inch-wide plastic hose with which to connect them. A luckless member of the Broad Corporation’s Aviation Department team began sucking fuel through the hose to siphon it from the barrel into the wing tanks.
    At first he dreamed that he could start a flow going without getting gasoline all over his tongue and teeth. But each time he tried, yanking the hose from his mouth just before the gasoline reached his lips and jerking the hose toward the plane, the gas retreated back down the hose as soon as he stopped sucking. Not liking it a bit, and to the laughter of his fellow team members, he faced the fact that he would have to suck the gas along until it was spewing into his mouth—and then hand the hose to one of us to stick in the tank, while he began spitting and wiping off his tongue with a cloth. The Chinese term
chi ku
, “eat bitterness,” is shorthand for being tough, doing what it takes, bearing hardship. I imagined that in Changsha they might someday say
he you
, “drink gas,” for the same concept.
    An hour of this—the flow got slower and slower as the level in the barrel went down—with ever-darkening skies, and we were ready to go. In pilot school, you’re taught to be hyperconscious of the quality of the fuel going into the gas tank. After all, it is what will keep you in the air and alive. Claeys and I rationalized that if the fuel was bad enough—who knows how long it had been in those Soviet-airplane tanks, or where else it might have been—the engine wouldn’t start at all. And if it wasgood enough to get the plane through the engine start and the test runup, or trial revving of the propellers before takeoff, it would probably at least get us up to an altitude from which we could deploy the parachute if need be. This is not the way I had been taught to operate an airplane, and not what Claeys would have liked to do, but, I told myself, This is China. Meanwhile, Walter Wang was reading peacefully.
    Into the plane; onto the runway; preparing for takeoff. Before the flight, Claeys had spent weeks getting the clearances he needed to operate a foreign-registered airplane, as a foreign citizen, through Chinese military airspace—which virtually all the airspace in China is. As we prepared for a southbound departure on the very long, military-scale runway, Claeys revved the engine repeatedly, to make sure that the gas was actually supporting combustion, and as a proxy for seeing that it would keep doing so once we took off.
    The most dangerous time in a small-plane flight is the first thirty or forty seconds after the wheels leave the runway. If the engine fails then, because the fuel flow is obstructed or the engine hesitates when suddenly pushed to full power, you are in danger precisely because you’re so close to the ground. If the engine fails when an airplane is 10,000 feet up, that’s not good. But because airplanes are designed to glide down relatively slowly even without engine power, rather than plummeting like a rock, the higher an airplane is when the trouble starts, the more time the pilot has to decide what to do, and the wider the range of territory and possible landing sites the plane could reach in a glide. Even with its parachute, the Cirrus is in trouble if an engine fails before it gets at least 400 feet above the ground—there is just not enough time for the parachute to deploy fully and slow the descent. So Claeys tested and retested the engine; I kept my eye on the parachute handle, to use if wegot far enough into the