Two hours ago. How many heartbeats is that?

I practice Martial Arts; used to play Judo years back. Now Kick-boxing and Krav Maga. That said I have not been in the Dojo for about six weeks since I injured my knee sparring. It is taking a while to heal. I know myself well enough – if I go back in before my body is ready, I will just push it again and maybe re-injure. I am disciplining myself to give myself time to heal properly. This has meant over the last few weeks I have not got a really good sweat on. Until this morning.

Fires.

A company I work with is based in Southern Washington. My client is looking forward to having my software integrated with this companies’ hardware to take to the UK at the end of this week. Time is tight to bring this together. A five-hour drive plus ferry ride away, or 90 minutes if I fly. It is summer. I am a pilot. What could go wrong? I even have my Canadian passport now.

Smoke.

I booked an aircraft for the trip with an option for an overnight at my destination. In the last 48 hours a ridge of high pressure has led to disorganized slow winds over the southern island, lower mainland, Washington and Oregon. The forest fire smoke is hanging around. There has even been a gentle, almost imperceptible fall of ash at my home in Cordova Bay, north of Victoria. Planes have no problem flying through this. However pilots do. This pilot in particular.

I fly 15-20hrs a year. Enough to keep my hand in and my Visual flying skills up. I am not an instrument-rated pilot. I practice my instrument skills when I fly, and especially when I fly at night. However I am not practiced at ONLY flying on instruments. Not enough. And more to the point – my flying solely on instruments is not legal. I practice so if I make a poor decision and get into marginal conditions I have enough to get me out again and stay alive. Making it legal is a bunch more training.

Looking at the weather yesterday I got an idea of what I might be getting myself into. The massive amounts of smoke from the forest fires are making visibility poor. Where normally reports might say 15 miles or better, now the news is the view is down to 6 miles, five, three… So I came up with a plan A, B and C for my destination. Once I made the first hop across the border I would work it out from there. That was the plan.

I got a coffee and sat down to complete my planning after arriving at the flying club this morning and checking over the aircraft. The walk-around, documentation checks and planning went smoothly. All that was left was to prepare for customs into the US, file my flight plan – and, prepare the pilot. The first two were trivial. The last of these; well, let’s just say my spidey-sense was way up. There was a little hiccup requiring me to cancel my original customs plan and re-route to Port Angeles instead of my original plan of Port Townsend. I wrote every one of the steps down. Distances. Altitudes. Times. I talked myself through it. And, at 10am there was nothing left to do except fly my plan.

Startup, taxi, takeoff were all uneventful – except for the fact that damn-it I was flying again! I do love it. The high pressure meant smooth air for flying. I climbed out and, because strangely not a lot of people were flying in this haze, Victoria ATC allowed me to route pretty much exactly where I wanted to. I set course for my first reference point. A planned 14 minutes away. With just me on board the 172 climbed rapidly to 2,500’. I switched over to talk to Victoria Terminal who manage the airspace above and around Victoria’s airport. My original plan was to fly at 5,500’ to cross the straight over to Port Angeles. My revised plan was 4,000’. There was a thicker smoke layer below 1,000’ and at 2,500’ things looked – well to be honest, kinda spooky. Mountains poked out from underneath this milky haze. However at this altitude the visibility was clearly better.

Then with terminal’s blessing I began my climb up to 4,000’. The ground began to vanish. Over the nose features became indistinct; a shadow. To either side of me I could see land – hazy, but it was land and recognizable. Mt. Finlayson. The cockpit GPS concurred with where I thought I would be. I thought 3,500’ might be better and so I asked terminal to clear me to descend that 500’. My personal limit for crossing the water here was 3,000’. Any lower and the engine deciding to stop or any number of incredibly unlikely failures over a critical short period would have me hitting the water. Ditching does not have good statistics. I wear a life jacket when I am flying over water – but still. It is a layer of life-insurance I have no desire to test.

I arrived overhead west of Metchosin. I could see the ghost of Spirit Bay below and to the left. Ahead of me there was no visual reference left. No horizon.

Fortunately of course, aircraft have a spare horizon – a gyroscopic instrument in the panel with brown below and blue above a line representing the level of the aircraft. Lots of people died before this piece of genius became a feature of virtually all aircraft cockpits. Normally the horizon outside of the aircraft is enough and I only glance at this for confirmation of bank angles in turns. Right now it was rapidly becoming all the horizon I had.

I looked to my side as the land began to recede behind me. I arrived at my reference point. Eight minutes until I should arrive at Port Angeles. I started the clock – and began to check frequencies and procedures for my arrival. And I looked up. The artificial horizon was 20 degrees off to the left. The turn co-ordinator showed I was yawing to the left. I corrected. Gently. Lining things back up again. I looked down to check the numbers. I looked up again – and again, I was off. The best thing to do – let go of the yoke and steer with rudder alone. That was really hard to do. Theoretically I was in legal VFR conditions. Practically the features of the sea a half mile plus change beneath blended with the grey of the smoke so that below, beside, ahead and above me began to look identical. Over my shoulder I could still see a decent slice of hazy land. I noticed I was sweating. Writing this now my heart-rate has gone up.

The statistics for VFR pilots who fly into IMC (Instrument Meteorological Conditions – ie. low visibility meaning loss of outside visual references) are not good. The average is less than 2 minutes before loss of control. A euphemism for game over. I believe I am a good VFR pilot. I won an award for it in 2001 when I got my license. I have flown plenty of ‘IMC’ on a flight simulator. But a flight simulator does not move, vibrate or show you it is alive like a real aircraft in flight does, no matter how good the eye-candy. I have flown in ‘simulated’ IMC, with a hood on that prevents you seeing outside the cockpit. It has been a while. And then I had an instructor sitting next to me. If anything went wrong I knew I was safe. On the ground, my body knows down is down. It is frighteningly subtle, but in an actual aircraft down is no longer down. Those slight slides into a turn were imperceptible until I looked back at the panel. My inner ear and usual balance systems were worse than useless and I knew the ONLY thing that told me it was happening were six little dials in front of me; artificial horizon, turn co-ordinator, gyro-compass, airspeed, altitude, rate-of-climb.

The artificial horizon is the most comforting of these and is placed in the middle of the panel. However if you execute a well co-ordinated turn, it takes a few moments for that instrument to correctly show you straight and level again. A well co-ordinated turn is one that you do not feel. The turn co-ordinator is far more responsive in a turn. All the instruments give you a piece of the picture. So you are left with mentally integrating these snippets into a coherent whole to tell you exactly what is going on. It takes practice. Vertigo is dangerous. I knew this. The gap between vertigo and where I was – my margin for error.

As I had been doing for the last few minutes I continued practicing my scan. A steady tick-tick-tick moving attention between the instruments, ensuring not to fixate and keep up a steady stream of information to my brain to construct a detailed picture of what the aircraft is doing. Meanwhile planning for what comes next. It takes practice. I flew at night last week – which requires a fair amount of fluency with the instruments – but it is not IMC. It is not flying inside a box where there is literally nothing to tell you what is going on except the panel. There is no space to do this wrong. Consistency takes a lot of practice. Time for the ego to shut the hell up. More practice than I had.

“Tango-Delta-Kilo; radar service terminated – switch en-route frequency.” I acknowledge and went to select the en-route frequency.

It dawned on me – I was completely on my own. Any illusion that I had that I was not (let’s face it, every time I fly it is completely, 100% up to me how things go) disappeared. Checkpoint +3 minutes. Almost half way across the water. In theory.

I looked over my shoulder. A sliver of land was all I could see, and through the haze the sea below me. I could not tell what angle I was at relative to it. I looked back to the panel and out ahead.

Nothing.

Those mountains ahead are big. I should be able to see something by now. Almost half way.

Their weather report at my destination said visibility 5 miles.

That sliver of land.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Sweat. Breathe. Slowly. And again.

And, in my next breath I realized I was out of my depth. The margin between my mental state and vertigo was narrowing.

I still had terminal’s frequency on the radio. I switched back and told them I was turning around.

In pilot training there is a critical maneuver that is taught. I practiced it more when I did my night rating. I have heard it called the survival turn. Simply put, using the turn co-ordinator as reference put the aircraft into a rate-1, or 3-degree-per-second turn and start counting. In sixty seconds your course will be reversed and you will be heading back towards what you know, to safety. For thirty of those long seconds you will still be moving away. I could barely see the sliver of land behind me, and now as I began the turn it disappeared beneath the wing. I moved my head slowly back to the instruments. I was down to 3,000’. Terminal informed me of the restricted area I was approaching with a ceiling at 3,000’ and asked me to climb to 3,500’. I complied and complicated the scan now managing the turn and climb together. One minute. How many heartbeats? Slow breathing.

Ahead of me I began to see shapes emerging from the haze. Ghost-like. I noticed my almost visceral desire for land. To see the ground; something familiar. As I completed the minute and stopped the turn it began, slowly, to become more real again. I had dialed in the Victoria VOR into the cockpit instrument before I left, and now I adjusted amongst my scan to line up the needle to give me the pointer home. The GPS showed me the same thing. ATC gave me clearance down to 2,500’. I jumped at the chance for better visibility. In 10 minutes I was down to 2,000’ over Brentwood Bay. Less than five minutes later I was on final and then in short order back on familiar ground.

I taxied back in and shut the engine down. Then I got back on the radio to close my flight plan and give a pilot report. The only information flight planners have to give in situations like this is what people who have been there can tell them. I could not tell them everything as I was relying on my ability to estimate – but my slant visual range estimate of about 3 miles was the best I had to give them. I gave it. A warning to others.

A more practiced VFR pilot might have taken this in their stride. That is not me. I do not fly every day. I do not do this for a living. I have a great respect for those who do; theirs is a world I get to glimpse. Maybe one day I will join their ranks by getting my instrument rating. Mentally I am one step closer to committing to that training after today.

Now, my trip is still important. I had plan A, B and C yesterday. Now I am on Plan D. On the ferry to Tsawassen; barely visible as Point Roberts emerges from the haze. Sixty feet above the water with the line of the real horizon clear and comforting all around. It will take me until 11pm tonight rather than being at my destination for lunchtime as was my original plan.

Gives me time to write, and breathe – and appreciate…