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Flying
With the Newly Dead
May 22, 2012
I don't know, but when I look back at the almost 50 years
I've spent in aviation, it seems to me that my career didn't
unfold as it really should have. Rather than the orderly,
planned and supervised tempering of my peers, my progression
into and through the various aviation endeavors always seemed to
happen in spasmodic bursts that left me with Alice in
Wonderland-like bewilderment, looking around at my next role, as
a flight instructor, or a survey pilot or whatever new phase I
found myself in, totally clueless about how to properly proceed.
For one thing, I had no real mentors, other than the
odd instructors that popped up at vital times, and then were
gone. I was a restless student pilot with my own airplane, and
by keeping it at small, out of the way strips I managed to stay
under the radar for about 500 hour of dangerous wandering before
settling down enough to get my Private License. Adding the
Commercial License seemed like a natural thing to do since my
log book was fat with hours, and when the examiner told me I
flew well enough to pass the Flight Instructor's exam I decided
to get that rating too.
Up to this point most all of
my aviation formatting had taken place in wild and wonderful
West Virginia. And while it was truly a beautiful and peaceful
place to fly and to live, the sixties there offered scant
opportunity for me to attach myself to a successful FBO and
learn the nuances of the aviation business from people who had
actually done it. I pondered what to do with my new ratings.
And so it was the late sixties found me teaching
flying at a small sod airport in central West Virginia, where I
was probably learning more from my students than my students
were learning from me. I had leased the almost deserted field
and with the entrepreneurial zeal of the young and the dumb, I
had started a flying school which I had inexplicitly named, 'The
Charlie Brown Flying School'. To everyone's amazement, mine most
of all, the students swarmed the place. I was instructing in a
Champ and a Citabria and the prices were much lower that the
surrounding schools with their new Cherokees and Cessna 150's
and the little business boomed.
Then, never being one
to leave well enough alone, I started thinking about a charter
service. That because I was getting repeated requests for it
from local businessmen and they all told me they would use it if
I had it. They were desperate because at this time the
interstate highway system had not yet arrived in West Virginia
and driving a hundred straight line miles meant three hours and
150 miles of nausea inducing, serpentine, secondary roads. This
was a harvest awaiting the reaper I thought, and I decided to
get an airplane suitable for transporting passengers. After
looking and comparing different aircraft I decided on a five
year old Cherokee Six that I found in Trade-A-Plane.
 The
Six had arrived at our airport with much fanfare and as I was
admiring it and getting ready to hang out my new 'Charter
Flights Available' shingle, a friend who worked for a large
charter operator out of state came by. As we stood talking about
my new venture into the people transport business, he asked if
I'd had trouble getting my 135 certificate from the Feds. My
deer-in-the-headlights look was followed with a gulped 'what is
a 135?' My friend proceeded to enlighten me about how the days
of having a Commercial License and an airplane with a 100 hour
inspection was enough to do charter were over, and had been
since half the country stars in Nashville had been wiped out by
airplane crashes. I discontentedly placed a call to the FAA.
During the next several weeks I proceeded to get the
education that I should have gotten before I bought the airplane
that was now setting in the hangar, munching on cash flow and
contributing nothing. Six long and frustrating months later I
was holding the vaunted certificate in my hand and I put out the
word to the local businesses that we were now open for the
charter business.
The trips started to come in, slowly
at first, then increasingly, and the flights started fanning out
like spokes from a hub in the middle of the West Virginia. As I
135ed my way around the country I was learning, but I had the
nagging feeling that what I learned today I really could have
used yesterday. All this was legally done, as hard as it is to
believe now, without benefit of an Instrument ticket.
Early
on, one part of our business that started off briskly and
remained steady was the transport of the deceased for the local
funeral homes. In those days West Virginia was pretty much a one
industry state and a boy learned early that upon graduation his
employment choices pretty much were; 'coal mines, moonshine or
moving on down the line'. Thousands of our people moved down
that line, to Ohio, to Michigan and to the Carolinas and other
progressive states to gain work. They lived their lives apart
from their beloved land and most of them hated it. Almost all of
them though, came home when they died, to be buried beside loved
ones in the hallowed soil that had failed to support them, and
it became our job to provide them the last ride home.
Our
transport service (as it was called in the funeral business)
provided some of the most interesting flying that I did and led
to some heart stopping (for me) moments that I remember well.
One such occasion occurred at night while transporting
in the 172. By experimenting we had found that fitting a prone
and totally inflexible passenger into a 172 was very difficult,
but not impossible. To get the stretcher with the sheet shrouded
body strapped to it into the airplane, the copilot's seat was
removed and the head of the stretcher placed on the floor by the
rudder pedals with the foot of it resting on the back seat. This
created what would have been a very uncomfortable head down
angle for the deceased if they hadn't been deceased, but gave
just enough clearance to make the whole thing work. This
position of the stretcher created of course, a very intimate
setting for the transported and the transporter.
On
this particular flight, over the forbidding Appalachians on a
dark and stormy night, I found myself thinking about an old
movie that I had attended with my parents when I was very young.
Really, the only part that I remembered in any detail was the
scene where an old horse drawn funeral coach was plodding
through the night, flickering carriage lanterns accompanied by
intermittent lightning from an approaching storm. The driver was
bowed miserably over his reins and the music told us that
something really bad was about to happen. The camera was focused
from about where the horse's backs would have been and it showed
the grim countenance of the driver with the wrapped form of the
dead man in the back behind him. Suddenly and horribly the body
sat up and even more horribly, the driver didn't know it.
I
couldn't remember anything else, so I can't say what the fate of
the driver turned out to be, but as I flew along I was
reflecting how odd it was that I'd be in a situation so eerily
reminiscent of that long ago movie.
In this setting
then, out of the corner of my eye I saw in the red glow of the
overhead instrument light, something moving. Something to my
right and way down low. Something that was just about, well, I
had to face it, it was just about where the dead man's head was
resting.
I can't say how long it was until I actually
looked over and down and saw the hair on the corpse blowing in
the stream of air from the overhead vent, but enough time passed
to convince me that I probably wouldn't consider undertaking as
a second profession and also that I had a very strong heart that
was at that moment making every effort to beat its way out of my
chest.
Another recalled flight happened when I was
taking a rare day off and was at the family farm. I got a call
from my not-really-big-on-details airport helper, Russ. The
funeral home had called, he said, and we needed to pick up a
body at such and so airport in Delaware. I inquired which
funeral home that might be, and I really should have known from
the three beat hesitation before he replied that I needed to
confirmed it with the home. Ford Funeral Home, he replied
confidently. They were one of our regular customers and located
in the town of Grafton. I didn't confirm it.
I
scrambled to the airport and made my way to Delaware where the
pickup went smoothly. By late afternoon I was in the pattern for
Roy Airport, a 1600 foot dirt strip that served as Grafton's
airport and where you put it down on the numbers each time and
every time, or else, because there was no go around here, due to
a very high hill at the south end.
The owner and
strips namesake, Bob Roy met me as I taxied up to the barn that
served as the activity headquarters, delighted as always to have
activity at his strip. I failed to see the funeral home's
hearse, which I thought was odd, since the director was always
there to meet me when I made a delivery We walked out to the
house where I called the funeral home. Mr Ford was out and the
person I spoke with didn't know about the delivery. I asked them
to have Mr. Ford call when he came in and we trooped back to the
airplane.
 Since
the day was warm, I asked Bob if we could transfer the body to
the basement of his house where it would be cooler while we
awaited the hearse. This was accomplished and Bob and I sat
beside the couch where the body rested and we visited in
reverent tones, much as if conducting and impromptu wake. At
this moment Bob's wife, whom we belatedly realized hadn't been
made privy to the arrangements concerning the visiting dead man,
walked into the room. I'm almost sure she would have swooned but
for the fact that the only couch was occupied.
A few
minutes later Mr Ford called and, no surprise at this point, it
wasn't his body. I then called another funeral home in Elkins
which also used us, and through judicious phrasing, managed to
find out for sure that it was they who were expecting the body
without them realizing that we were asking the question. We then
loaded up the overly transported, who by then if he could have,
surely would have been inquiring if we knew what the hell we
were doing, and made our way to Elkins.
 There
remain several snap shots in my brain of my time in the
transport business, those few seconds when something bazaar
occurs during a routine flight and which your mind chooses to
remember totally out of context.
In one I see me
crouching over the transported, laying on him really, and
reaching through the aft bulkhead of the Six, trying to free a
frozen trim while my copilot flew, high above the frozen
mountains. In another (I still feel bad about this) I see myself
running across one very cold and windy ramp, trying to reclaim
the sheet that had so recently wrapped the aged and otherwise
naked body of the transported.
I always tried to do
this important job with the reverence that it deserved, but
without the protection of the casket the dignity of the deceased
sometimes suffered. I suppose that today this sort of transport
isn't done. At least I hope it isn't before it's time for my
final flight.
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