Dead Reckoning

  Twenty minutes later we’d found one medium sized cargo ship and a small white sail boat that seemed much too small to be so far out at sea but no Stormin’ Norman.  We were running out of time and needed help.  I knew that if we could get the current exact longitude and latitude of the disabled ship I could put it into the GPS and fly right to it.  But how to get an updated position report from the Coast Guard this far out at sea?  As a ferry pilot I spend a lot of time in the middle of the ocean out of normal radio range.  Usually I bring along a HF radio to make position reports and call for help if needed but if that doesn’t work there’s always one last chance of yelling for help available, commercial airliners.  Cruising along at thirty eight thousand feet an airliner can pick up a small plane’s transmissions over one hundred miles away and is a great last ditch chance for help for a pilot in a bind.  I tuned in the frequency that I knew that airliners use to chat with each other and called in the blind.
“Any plane, any plane, is there anybody out there who can assist in a search and rescue operation?”
“This is American 325, how can we be of assistance?”
I told the pilot of the Airbus flying high overhead what we were doing and asked if he could possibly get in touch with the Coast Guard and see if they could get us an updated position report of the Stormin’ Norman.  The captain of the American flight told me to standby while he made the attempt.  The minutes ticked by as the airliner got farther and farther away.  Finally the pilot came back with the good news, he’d somehow managed to contact the Coast Guard in Puerto Rico and had gotten a new position report for me.  With his radio signal already fading away the captain read of the coordinates while I copied them down.  I thanked the captain for his help and his reply was almost unreadable as his aircraft flew out of range.

It might seem like I’m a reckless pilot who takes foolish and unnecessary chances, I am, but I at least put a little effort into planning the dumb things that I do.  The owner of the Stormin’ Norman told us that he received a position report from the ships EPIRB beacon via Coast Guard every six hours and could get a new report just prior to take off.  The ship was supposedly drifting east at three knots so using a little Kentucky windage I should be able to put a Latitude Longitude into my GPS that would get us close enough to their position to find them in the open ocean.
The next problem to address was how to drop a fuel pump from a moving plane so that the crew of the disable fishing boat could retrieve it.  The owner actually had put some thought into it.  He’d put the pump into a hollowed out Styrofoam fishing net float about the size of a beach ball and attached to the float was about fifty feet of nylon rope that the crew could use to snag their prize.  In addition to the actual float to be dropped he had another one the same size that we could use on a practice drop.  One of the things we really had going for us was because the 182 was a jump plane it only had one seat for the pilot leaving the rest of the cabin floor area open.  That would make moving around inside the aircraft and dropping the floats much easier.
While we were planning this our friend Rocky  the owner of the hanger we were operating out of offered to let me use his new Garmin GPS that was bigger, newer and just plain nicer than mine.  Always one who likes shiny new things I gratefully accepted Rocky’s offer.

  Not wanting to miss all the fun my partner John decided to join us on this little adventure so he and the owner climbed into the plane and sat on the floor with the Styrofoam floats next to them, ready for action.
I input the fresh position report the Stormin’ Norman’s owner got from the Coast Guard into the GPS, taxied onto the runway, took off and headed out to open ocean.  Two hours later as we arrived at the location where the GPS said the stranded boat should be but all we saw was empty ocean.  I wasn’t terribly surprised, the ocean is a big place and based on an hours old position report and a wild guess on drift speed and heading finding a sixty foot fishing boat bobbing in the waves would be tough.  I started an expanding grid search while keeping a close eye on the dropping fuel gauges, I figured we had about an hour before being forced to abandon the search.

Try to stay in the middle of the air. Do not go near the edges of it. The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.

Over the next few weeks, a twin-engined Jetstream will fly from the Warton Aerodrome in Lancashire towards Scotland but it won’t be an ordinary flight as the aircraft will be pilotless according to the Economist. That’s not entirely accurate as there will be a pilot. Its just the pilot will be flying the aircraft from a control room on the ground (but just in case things go wrong with the experiment, there will be a pilot in the cockpit to take over). The flight itself is part of a project to develop the technologies and procedures that ultimately will allow large commercial aircraft to operate pilotless.

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HT/GHW