NIGHT FELL ON the airfield. the mechanics, Bruno, the men in the control tower, even the woman behind the bar, they had all gone off leaving me alone with the runway lights, those bluish, glowing insects standing silently in unbroken lines in the grass. I stared at the shadows thrown by the tables onto the moonlit terrace, I stared at the night, the boundless horizons of night, at sea and sky separated only by streaks of light on far-off coastlines and felt myself guardian of this nocturnal space. They had left me the key of the control tower, with orders to switch off the runway lights before leaving. Never had I lingered so long. The August night glided in humid heat towards its most intimate heart. Perhaps it was the heat, or perhaps I dozed off. One minute more, I thought, one minute more and then I’ll get up and go, one minute more and I’ll get up, switch everything off and leave; and perhaps I really would have. I was just on the point of rising to my feet when I became aware of their presence, two of them, seated a little way ahead of me in the darkness, how had I not seen them before now? I thought it might be no more than an image of my mind, but the sound of a voice, conveying the certainty that there really was someone there, sent a shiver down my spine.
“If only the weather had been like this that evening,” said the younger man, “if only there had been this moon, this stillness . . .” Then he took his eyes from the sky, lowered his head and turned to me, and I, with a fresh shudder, made out his eyes in the darkness.
The other, the older man, looked first one way and then the other, as though anxious to find his bearings and, picking at the nail of one hand with a fingernail from the other, gave the impression that speaking required an effort and suffering beyond all endurance.
“Now,” said the younger man, “now at last, we can measure the time which flashed past so rapidly that evening, a time of utter bewilderment, the bewilderment with which you said at the final moment, ‘We’re going to crash . . .’ You spoke without yelling, in a voice choked by the pressure, the gravity which was tugging us down, as though resigned to that unbelievable thing which was taking place, an incident of such stupidity, such banality as an ice-stall. You were captain, I was co-pilot, and apart from age what separated us was your greater familiarity with jets and mine with propellers . . .”
“Yes, I was captain,” said the older man, “but you had taken over for that stretch, and I only came in at the end, but it doesn’t matter now, believe me, it just doesn’t matter.”
“At second 1423,” the younger man began again, “you told the hostess to give out the meals to the passengers, don’t you remember? You spoke in a jovial tone, everything was going fine, there was no turbulence. ‘When you get to the coffee,’ you said, ‘bring me a coffee with sugar.’ You also asked her if there was an extra tray for us, and she replied that there was just the right number of trays but perhaps one of the passengers wouldn’t want anything to eat, and you said that if there was only one left over it was for me.”
“Strange, did we really talk so much about food?” said the older man, shaking his head gently.
“Yes, we discussed food, then at second 1492, when the plane was set on its ascent towards the Alps, you said, ‘let’s get a bit of rest,’ and it must have been more or less in those seconds that we passed the exact point where another plane ahead of us had turned back because of the ice, but how were we to know? We were tuned in to a different wavelength and there was no way we could pick up its communications. We continued our ascent, and it was at second 1653 that I became aware that something was going wrong, we were losing lift and speed, the same thought occurred to both of us, we both immediately thought of ice. I switched on the wing lights and peered out to see where it was forming. I asked you if you didn’t think it was along the trailing edge of the wing, and you replied yes, it’s over there, look. Ice crystals, the worst of all aeronautical ices, an ice which, the moment you enter a cloud, forms as swiftly as a blow to the face, difficult to shake off, molten water in the inside of a cloud, water which retains its liquid state even in sub-zero temperatures, invisible particles in unstable equilibrium which remain rain-drops only because a film of water envelops each single drop and stops it freezing, but the very instant something collides with the film and breaks it open, the drops solidify around whatever shattered them. We’ve ploughed into a cloud at two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour, we must have shattered millions, billions of water drops which will have immediately solidified and clung to the wings like barnacles to a ship’s hull. We’re loaded down with ice crystals, it’s changed the shape of the wings, as well as their weight. At second 1740, you told me to up the speed by another four knots, or else we’d never make it, and I did, but at second 1748 there was a sudden lurch of the wing on my side, all of a sudden the plane tilted over by forty degrees, maybe a bit less; it felt like a sharp turn. I immediately disconnected the automatic pilot and took manual control of the plane. It was all done so quickly you didn’t even notice me do it. You said ‘Switch off autopilot,’ and I said ‘I’ve already done it.’ At second 1750, the stall warning sounded. I was struggling to keep the plane steady, but it was already starting to lose height, and then the wing went down on your side. A one-hundred-degree tilt to the left, one hundred degrees ... do you have any idea of what that means?” asked the younger man, turning to me. “It means a wing hanging like a knife-blade, a passenger aircraft cutting the air like a knife,” and he shook his head in dismay. “At second 1755, I felt a jolt in the instruments as the automatic mechanism came into play, pushing the control column forward with forty kilo pressure to counteract the stall. I shouted out down . . . down . . . down, and you shouted steady . . . steady . . . steady, and took over the controls. We stalled one more time, the third, this time it was the wing on my side, another hundred degrees to the right, you cursed the plane at the top of your voice, you screamed ‘God damn you,’ I remember it very clearly . . .”
The captain listened as though he had gone over those seconds a million times. “Do you hear him?” he asked me, adjusting the brim of his cap, “do you hear how he speaks about them? 1492, 1653, 1748 as thought they were years, historical dates, but we’re talking about barely three hundred seconds, five minutes; five minutes, that’s all the time we had to grasp what was going on, to come to grips with things, to tack desperately, one night in early autumn, caught in a mass of never-ending clouds, in a sky of terrible ice. That’s all there is to it, we do nothing else, we have remained united even after the crash. He won’t give himself peace, and yet we stuck to the manual, doing exactly what it said, but you see what he’s like. Maybe it’s because he’s young, and young he’s going to remain, forever.”
All three of us fell silent, a silence broken by the cicadas and the warm heaving of the sea. We looked over towards the airfield; standing there with that moon overhead and those trees round its sides; with its Thirties-style terminal building and old, steel half-barrel-vaulted hangars, the abandoned Fascist warehouses on the far side of the runway, its grass runway and double row of lights running down to the sea, it could have been any airstrip, any airfield at any point in the world where sea and land meet, waiting for any take-off or any landing, in any of the years and decades of this, the first century of aviation, the site of every departure and arrival, every cancelled departure, every arrival awaited in vain.
Then, the young man in uniform began to speak again, “Then at second 1760 the wing on my side dropped down once again, you ordered me to cut back the engines and I did, at second 1764 the stall warning sounded yet again, the wing on your side stalled for the umpteenth time, this time as much as one hundred and thirty-five degrees, leaving the plane almost completely upside down, just imagine, a passenger plane in inverted flight,” sighed the young man, gesticulating with his hands, turning the palm of one hand upwards then letting it go limp, “you and I were upside down as well, and I don’t now how, but with the blood racing in my head and everything dancing around me, I managed to make out the anemometer among the flashing lights on the control panel, the speed was climbing from one hundred and eighty-five to two hundred and thirty-one knots, very slowly the tilt was righting itself, the wing stalls stopped and I thought to myself – ‘maybe we’re going to make it, maybe we can pull out of it,’ we attempted to regain control by raising the nose ever so gently, although the plane was still burbling a bit, it was second 1771, I yelled to you ‘Haul it up . . . haul it up . . .’ and you shouted back, ‘I am hauling it up,’ at that moment we went over two hundred and fifty knots, the maximum operational speed, triggering the overspeed alarm as well. At second 1779, you said again, ‘I am hauling,’ but we were plummeting, over three hundred and thirty knots, the upper limit of manoeuvrability and you shouted, ‘The controls have jammed on me!,’ at second 1787, you shouted once again ‘Pull hard,’ and I replied that I was pulling hard, the stall signals, the overspeed signals, everything was blaring, everything was vibrating and falling around us, and at that point, God knows where I got the strength in that position and at that speed, it was second 1789, I got onto the radio and screamed ‘Milano, Alitalia Four Six Zero, emergency . . .’ as though that message could have saved us, as though anyone could have done anything for us, or for the plane, I knew we’d lost her, I knew we were lost, and yet it was unbelievable, we were done for but it was at that very moment, second 1797, that you said to me quietly, with that choked voice of yours, ‘We’re going to crash,’ and your voice was quiet, sad and bewildered, ‘We’re going to crash . . .’”
“The following second . . .”
“Please,” said the captain, “please,” but he spoke as though reciting a ritual prayer he did not expect to be heard, it wasn’t so much that he had no inclination to hear one more time the hubbub of those final moments as that, perhaps, he wished to calm his first officer, or perhaps did not want him to relive that final instant, wanted it banished forever from his mind, a futile prayer, because the following moment the younger man began again in the same tone, he said, “It was impossible to see a thing, we were falling at the rate of ten thousand feet a minute, I first noticed that something was the matter with the plane at second 1653, but at second 1797, less than two minutes later, it was no longer an aeroplane, we were just fifteen thousand kilos of scrap metal, fibres, plastic and people, almost overturned, tumbling into nothingness, in the thick darkness of a cloudy night, quite helplessly, with no knowledge of what had occurred, or how. Can you imagine such a thing? We had collided with a cloud, we had rammed into a cloud which a few seconds later, intact and lighter by some few pounds of ice, would proceed peacefully on its way towards the east and which would, the morning after, when they found us lying among the trees, be floating heedlessly over the Ionian Sea or over the Balkans.”
There was another silence, I considered making the effort to overcome my fear and take the first officer by the hand, what could happen to me? It would have been a gesture of solidarity and for that reason, I thought to myself, Someone, Nature or the Cosmos would exempt me from any horror and from all consequences, but the captain read the gesture in my eyes and, shaking his head gently, made a sign to desist. “Are you here every evening?” he asked, changing tack. “You re lucky, you know, it’s a lovely spot, especially at this time, in this season,” he said, adjusting the brim of his cap and gazing around with infinite, wistful nostalgia. After a moment, he said, “Could I have a look at the aircraft in the hangar?” “I’m sorry,” I replied, “I’m really sorry but I don’t have the keys. I’ve only got the keys of the control tower to switch off the runway lights.” “Pity,” said the captain, getting to his feet. The young officer rose too, as did I.
We walked towards the tower, unhurriedly, each man caught up in his own thoughts, everything that could happen had already happened, terribly and irrevocably happened, and this certainty, together with the beauty of the place and the moonlight, seemed to imbue each of us with a total sense of oneness with the landscape, an utter acceptance of what is, as it is.
Even the tone of the younger officer had become more tranquil and distant, he was walking forward with hands deep in his pockets and his eyes fixed on the grass, “We plunged into a cloud,” he was saying, “and we never emerged again, there was no chance of understanding anything, the only thing I could understand was that you were determined to keep climbing higher and higher, to break through the clouds as though you were piloting a jet, to give it more power and get clear, while I was anxious to descend and pick up speed, as you would do with a propeller plane. Who would have guessed that we would have gone back to propeller-driven planes in the run-up to the year Two Thousand? And yet we did everything by the book, never deviating one iota, we followed the manual to the letter, so there must have been a mistake or something missing,” said the young man, staring me straight in the eyes. The captain answered for me, “What’s the point of going over it?” he asked in tones of ritual consolation, “with that ice we could never have made it, whatever we did, severe ice conditions, ice crystals, believe me, no one could ever have pulled out of it.”
(“Do you know,” said the younger man, “I’ve often wondered what they think when they listen to the voices of dead pilots in the voice recorder, the one of the two black boxes which picks up what is said in the cockpit.” “I used to know someone who did that job,” said the captain, “he was an old flight engineer who had retired but carried on working with investigation teams who looked into airline accidents, I once asked him if it didn’t upset him to listen to those voices, and he said, ‘No, why?’ ‘But what do you expect to find that’s not already in the flight recorder, in the record of the various flight manoeuvres?’ ‘I’m interested in the tone of the voices,’ he said, ‘that’s what matters, the tones of voice.’”)
In the buoyed approach channel, a passenger ship festooned with coloured lights shining brightly in the night was gliding, slowly and noiselessly, out from the harbour towards the open sea. All three of us stopped to stare at this majestic, imperturbable moving shadow framed by its own lights. “Did you hear the passengers behind us?” asked the younger man. The captain, with his eyes still fixed on the ship, nodded, “During the last moments,” he said, “in the dying moments, I became aware of what they really were, those noises, those voices coming through our closed doors, and not only the voices. But only at the very last . . .”
At the foot of the control tower, feeling guilty at not being able to allow them into the hangar, I turned back and invited them to come up, but the captain, after a moment’s hesitation, said “No, I’m very grateful, but better not.”
“I understand,” I said, “just give me a minute and I’ll be back down,” I looked at the older man in his uniform and, raising his shoulders ever so slightly, he said, “Of course.” A second later I bounded up the stairs four at a time, went into the darkened room, located the switch by the light of the moon which came flooding in through the great windows, bathing the small, circular room and instrument panels in its light, I pulled down the lever and the two rows of blue lights in the grass disappeared into the night, a road dissolving into the darkness, I thought, even the runway goes to sleep, and one instant later I was rushing down the steps, another second and I was out on the path. I looked around, with no idea of what second it was, but they were nowhere to be seen. I raced over the grass, towards the trees, towards the hangar, towards the terrace, and finally I caught sight of them making their way along the unlighted runway, slowly, in the distance, their backs to me, one of them debating with himself, cutting the air with his hand, or turning the palms of his hands upwards, while the other, the older of the two, seemed to be keeping him company, but his face was turned away, towards the moon and the liner out at sea. I stood watching them until they faded into the dawn, the sea, the sky.