“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.
Finally, it was time to get inside. He turned on the batteries and then the avionics, checking first to see how much fuel was in the tanks. There was hardly any, maybe enough to get airborne, but not much more. And so, the first step was to use the radio in the plane to call for a fuel truck to pump eight hundred kilograms of jet fuel into the tanks, enough to cover the flight and give him nearly an hour and a half of reserve flight time in case of unexpected circumstances. After paying for the fuel with his credit card and watching the truck drive away, he visually confirmed the presence of the fuel in the tanks with a flashlight and a metal rod and then sealed the tank, triple checking that he had put the cap on correctly.
Jake and Laura got into the aircraft and he closed and sealed the main door. They took their seats in the cockpit, Jake on the left, Laura on the right, and buckled in. It was time for engine start. He fired up the number one engine first, watching over his left shoulder to confirm that the prop was actually turning. He then fired up the number two engine, making Laura confirm prop turn on that side. Since the bleed air flow was set to automatically keep the aircraft pressurized to eight thousand feet apparent altitude, and since they were sitting almost four hundred feet higher than that while still on the ground, their ears popped a little as the system started doing its job right way. This gave Jake yet another burst of apprehension as he considered the ramifications. I’m actually going to take off from eighty-four hundred fucking feet! Am I crazy?
“It’s a very quiet plane,” Laura remarked as she donned her headset.
“Shush!” Jake barked at her, a little sharper than he had intended. “Sterile cockpit is in effect.”
“Sorry,” she said quietly.
“Me too,” he said, feeling badly. “I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just a little nervous about this.”
“You’ll do fine,” she assured him, though she had absolutely no evidence to back this up. “I have faith in you.”
He gave her a smile and then started punching his navigation, flight information, and radio frequencies into the flight computer. Once that was all in, he opened up his pre-departure checklist on the computer screen before him (it really was nice to have a computerized checklist instead of a tattered hard copy) and began to go through the items one by one, checking them off as they were accomplished. Finally, it was time to get the show on the road. He called the clearance center and asked for his flight plan to be activated. They did so, telling him the clearance would expire in thirty minutes if he was not airborne by then. He then called Guaymaral tower and asked for permission to taxi to Runway 29R for departure. They granted this permission, directing him on the route he should take to get there.
He took a deep breath and then released the parking brake on the aircraft. He throttled up a bit and they began to move. He drove them carefully out of the hangar area and onto the taxiways, using the rudder pedals to steer. It took nearly five minutes to get to the hold line, where he was told to do just that and hold for incoming aircraft. While waiting, he went carefully through the takeoff checklist, making sure he was properly configured for a high-altitude departure.
“Flaps to takeoff setting,” he recited, pulling the lever and watching as the surfaces moved. “V1, VR bugs set. Auto-throttle set at two zero zero knots indicated. Autopilot off. Landing lights on. Barometer set to two-eight, decimal six. Elevator trim to takeoff.” He looked over at Laura. “Configuration complete.”
“Good to know,” she told him, not looking the least bit nervous.
He smiled and they waited while a Mooney Bravo and then a King Air touched down in front of them. The tower controller then told him he was clear for takeoff with departure to the north.
Jake acknowledged the instruction and throttled up once again, steering them onto the runway. Once they were facing down the runway, roughly into the five-knot wind, he took one more deep breath and then advanced the two throttle levers slowly forward to ninety-five percent thrust. The engine noise increased, but still was very quiet compared to the Chancellor. The airframe began to vibrate gently and they began to pick up speed. He kept them on the centerline instinctively, using the rudder pedals. He glanced continuously back and forth between outside the window and his airspeed indicator, watching it roll upward, past fifty, sixty, seventy, a hundred, until it reached V1 and then VR.
“Rotate,” he said softly and then pulled gently back on the yoke.
The nose came up and there was a thump as the wheels broke contact with the ground. The ground dropped away below them.
“Positive rate of climb,” Jake said, watching as the altimeter began to wind upward. He reached down and flipped up the lever for the landing gear. The sound of machinery winding began from beneath and behind. By the time he got lights out on the gear, they were seven hundred feet above the ground, well beyond the perimeter fence, and climbing at twenty-five hundred feet per minute.