Flight Following

This picture is the best that I have on my computer for this story. As a side note – this is the day Milly started to sink during a frio while we were all at church. It happened when I was quite young, and I only vaguely remember that it happened. I think I got the picture from my aunt Alice.

Now about flight following. Steven and I worked in the radio tower afternoons after school and occasionally on weekends when we were needed. Our responsibility was to maintain regular contact with the pilots who were out flying, keeping track of the planes’ progress as they flew around the jungle. The job was somewhat of a bother because we never knew if we would be working until we called after school to see if any flights were still out. Inside the radio tower, the burden of the job increased with the very nature of radio communication. Our radios were very noisy and did a very good job of distorting voices to the point where you almost had to anticipate what the person on the other end was going to say if you were to understand them plainly. Then there was the stress that resulted from the occasional missed radio call. One day we lost track of a plane for about an hour and were really starting to sweat it, when the plane landed and taxied past our window. As it turned out, our radio had drifted and we were no longer using the same frequency as the pilot was. Another challenge of the job was running skeds. When the pilot or someone in a village needed to talk to someone on the center, it was our job to connect them through the radio switchboard to the telephone. What made the task difficult is the fact that a radio doesn’t transmit and receive at the same time like a telephone does, so the switchboard operator (i.e. me) had to flip the transmit switch back and forth every time the conversation switched from the person on the phone to the person on the radio and vice-versa. Skeds make the use of “over” at the end of each thought very useful, and some people were actually very good at it. Case in point – to this day whenever I receive a voice mail message from my Grandpa Nystrom, it ends with “over.” Others were not so accomplished at this detail of radio conversation, and that just made my job really difficult. As it turned out, however, missed bits of conversation were far from the most stressful thing that would happen during my career as a flight follower.

One afternoon I was alone in the radio tower when I got a call from the pilot who was on the ground out in a village somewhere. Although he had been planning on flying back to Yarina that afternoon, the weather was closing in and he decided it would be best if he spent the night out there. Naturally, he wanted to talk to his wife before signing off for the night. This meant that I would have to run a sked. I had thought that it was Paul Smith who was out that day, but when he gave me his phone number, it was quite plainly Jim Roberts’ number. So, I figured it was just the distortion of the radio that had deceived me into thinking that I had been talking to Paul, and I called Paula Roberts and told her that her husband wanted to talk to her on the radio. She sounded a bit surprised at that, but I just blundered on ahead with that sked. As soon as the conversation began I started to second guess myself, and after just a few sentences I realized that I had indeed connected Paul Smith with the wrong pilot’s wife! I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t think of what to do. So, I did nothing. Actually, that is not entirely true, because in order to do nothing, I still had to flip that switch back and forth throughout their whole conversation. After the “I love you’s” and the final farewells were said, I had to act quickly to catch the pilot before he turned his radio off for the night. “I’m so sorry, Paul,” I began with my stomach on the floor, “but… that was… Jim’s wife you were just talking to.” Then we started all over again with a second sked, this time with the right wife, and it all ended with one last humiliating phone call, apologizing to Paula Roberts and explaining that her husband would in fact be home for supper.