Challenge 899 Response

Piloting the Plover

with Michael E. Lloyd

[Editor’s note: Michael E. Lloyd is distinguished not only as a novelist at Bewildering Stories but as an editor and as manager of our comprehensive index for many years. He also has years of experience in piloting aircraft.]

Challenge 899 asks: In Peter D. McQuade’s The Flight of the Golden Plover:

Why can the story not be told from the pilot’s first-person point of view?

What might be gained if the story were told from the pilot’s third-person point of view? What would be lost?

Why does the aircraft not maintain an altitude that would allow it to clear any bridges over the Mississippi River?

Why can the story not be told from the pilot’s first-person point of view?

Because that would violate a fundamental Bewildering Stories principle: “No dead narrators, please!”

[Editor’s note: In dry, technical terms, the “dead narrator” guideline says that someone must live to tell the tale.]

What might be gained if the story were told from the pilot’s third-person point of view? What would be lost?

There are three possibilities for such a third-person account.

One is a story told by a conventional “omniscient narrator,” who could provide the same “back story” and additionally demonstrate a complete insight into the events of the flight and the pilot’s state of mind and his decisions, and could reveal the actual cause of the disaster. The concerns of those waiting back at home base could also be portrayed, equally secondhand. A classic “Boys’ Own” action story. What would be lost? See further below ....

But first-hand “reportage” can be far more dramatic, and two options exist, though the first is here unavailable and the second is infeasible. In the stated absence of an on-board radio (in which case a wireless correspondent might have been able to give an extremely piecemeal and unimpressive account of events), a third-person personal account of what happened in the aeroplane would demand the presence of a co-pilot who (see above) had survived to tell the tale. And this situation would anyway be well-nigh impossible: the plane was already grossly overloaded for takeoff with its huge extra fuel tanks.

But what would be gained if it were viable? Well, the recovered co-pilot could relate the final stage of the flight in all its experienced vividity, including his subsequent rescue (!!!). But that would be a very different story again. And what would be lost? Well, almost everything in the drama of the actual story, as recounted by Brad’s partner (who is instead forced by the situation to be a largely “nihilscient” narrator!): a study in tension, impotence, uncertainty and something close to love in loco uxoris).

Except ... there is really little uncertainty. It is almost certain, from the opening paragraph, that the flight is doomed to failure. In that sense, its fate seems (for the reader) pre-determined “by the heavens” in the shape of the weather. But then, at the very end, its fate is shown to have been essentially due to the careless exercise of its pilot’s free will. Nicely Dantean!

Why does the aircraft not maintain an altitude that would allow it to clear any bridges over the Mississippi River?

Technically: in the circumstances in which he finds himself (an unexpected thunderstorm with deadly cumulonimbus clouds extending down to the ground) the correct pilot actions are, as the wise but powerless Daedalus-narrator stresses and reiterates to himself, preferably to put down in a field as soon as the danger becomes apparent or, if that proves impossible because of a sudden entry into cloud, to turn tail at once and speed much faster than the wind up and rapidly back out of the cloud; or, at worst, to climb “blind” as quickly as possible, ideally to left or right away from the storm and then to circumnavigate it above the cloud using “dead-reckoning” until once again in sight of the ground. But by then he’d probably be very low on fuel and have to put down in a field after all.

But metaphysically: this pilot Brad, driven by a raft of vainglorious motives, is reckless and ignores the wise counsels that were probably the last words of his closest supporter. Instead, he descends lower and lower as he strains to visually follow the river in the dark (!) until he finds himself forced to fly in a vertical corridor, between the cloud and the water, that is probably only a matter of feet in height (!!). He has to concentrate so hard on staying within that constricted window that his attention is too much focused downwards than ahead; and he will have forgotten completely about the upcoming bridge .......

Brad basically makes all the mistakes that pilots are (today) trained not to make. In particular, he allows himself to be stricken with “get-home-itis,” and that proves literally to be the downfall of this latter-day Icarus.