Different Circles

It would be a better idea, but he was not going to do it. He yearned to get behind the controls of his new plane. That was why he and Laura had made the decision to fly all the way to Bogota in the first place. She was as enthusiastic about this trip as he was. But it was she that he was worried about.

“Hon,” he said softly as she made her way up to where he was staring at the controls.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Are you sure I can’t talk you into flying commercial for this first leg of the trip?”

Her expression clouded. “Why in the world would I do that?”

He explained to her about high altitude takeoffs, about crossing international borders, about landing in a valley at one of the five busiest airports in South America, about a pilot mostly inexperienced in a new aircraft type trying to do all of this on his very first solo flight.

“Are you saying you might crash this plane?” she asked.

“Well ... probably not,” he said. “It’s just that, when you add everything up, this first flight is statistically more dangerous than any other flight I will likely have on this journey home or in the future.”

She thought this over for a moment and then shook her head. “No way,” she said. “If we go down, we go down together. Besides, how much safer would I be flying on a local Venezuelan airliner?”

“Considerably safer, I would imagine.”

She shook her head. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” she said. “I’m going with you.”

They closed up the plane, turned off the lights, and shut the door to the hangar. They then strolled back to Jorge and the SUV and he took them to the Hotel Charleston, the same hotel that Jake had stayed in during his last visit to Bogota. Jake tipped Jorge a cool one hundred thousand pesos—the equivalent of about thirty US dollars—for his trouble. Jorge was extremely happy with this amount and assured Jake and Laura that he would be overjoyed to drive them anywhere they wanted to go for as long as they wanted to stay.

“Thanks, Jorge,” Jake told him. “We’ll just be taking one more trip though, back to Guaymaral at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“I will drive you,” he promised.

“Gracias,” he said.

They checked in and made their way up to their suite on the top floor, tipping the bell boy another fifty thousand pesos for his trouble.

“This is nice,” Laura said, taking in the furnishings and the view.

“Isn’t it?” he replied. “What do you want to do, go down to dinner, or fuck first?”

“Let’s go down to dinner first,” she suggested. “I’m starving.”

“Fair enough.”

They went to dinner. They then went back up to their suite and fucked. After that, they went to bed and slept quite soundly thanks to the heavy Colombian meal, the jet lag, the thin air, and the fucking.

Jorge drove them back to Guaymaral Airport at ten o’clock the next morning. They went into the airport services building and Jake composed his flight plan to Simon Bolivar International airport just outside Caracas, Venezuela, the first stop on their trip home. He had never flown into such a busy airport before but, in this case, he really had no choice. Since he was coming in from Colombia and had to clear customs with a recently purchased aircraft, the only place in the area he could do that was at SBIA. He carefully calculated the weight of the aircraft, he and Laura, and their baggage, cross referencing it with the distance he planned to fly and the amount of fuel he would need to carry and then factoring in the weight of that fuel and then cross-referencing all of that with the altitude and the runway length at Guaymaral in order to figure out his V1 and VR speeds. He whistled as he came up with the final numbers. V1 was one hundred and twenty-five knots and VR was one hundred thirty, both about fifteen knots faster than a similarly loaded plane on the same length of runway at sea level. Assuming his engines worked as they were supposed to, he would have less than a thousand feet of runway remaining when his wheels left the ground. He would then have to make a quick right turn to a heading of 350 in order to avoid the high terrain immediately to the west, and then climb at least two thousand feet per minute in order to clear the high terrain a little further out to the north.

“Everything okay?” Laura asked him after watching him stare intently at his figures and take more than twice the time it usually took him to compose a flight plan into an unfamiliar airport.

“Yeah, everything is cool,” he assured her, taking care to keep the worry out of his expression and tone. “Let’s do this thing.”

He filed the plan with the clerk on duty and they walked to the hangar. Jake used Señor Gomez’s key to open the door and then he and Laura used one of the tugs to pull the aircraft out of the building. While Laura ran the key back to the office, Jake began the process of preflighting the aircraft. He was still working on the external examination when Laura returned.