‘Indeed, our Filipino pilots – with special shoutout to the pilots of Philippine Airlines – are some of the best that you can find in the world of aviation.’
OUR fearful trip is done. The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won…”
So goes the opening lines of a poem, an elegy that was a favorite of grade school declaration contestants during my time, and lines that played through my head for maybe 10 minutes at noon yesterday.
Written by Walt Whitman in 1865, it was a tribute to Abraham Lincoln the “Captain” and “father” who could neither feel nor hear the celebration following the arrival of the “victor ship” at port – referring to the victory of the Union forces over the Confederacy in the 1861-1865 Civil War that pit the anti-slavery North against the pro-slavery South. Whitman spoke of his captain lying “on the deck…fallen, cold and dead.”
That was because Lincoln had been assassinated in April of that year, just as the Union was mopping up the last resistance following the surrender of the Confederates. So while the Union was celebrating victory, it was doing so without its Commander-in-Chief.
For one reason or another, my thoughts were focused on the “captain of my ship” while I was on board the noontime Philippine Airlines flight from Manila to Puerto Princesa yesterday. The usual flight route takes you over Cavite and Batangas, crosses over the western area of Mindoro, before heading for the Busuanga area. Then it flies near or close to El Nido at the northern tip of the main island, proceeds west of San Vicente, before crossing the island to the eastern part above Honda Bay and then making a right turn into the Puerto airport.
The flight usually begins descending towards Puerto as it flies above the El Nido area and this is a slow descent.
Usually.
Yesterday, however, there were weather systems along the route, the effect of the habagat and the storm system off the Quezon/Isabela coast. This is why even when we were flying at 34,000 feet, visibility was “bad” as cloud cover extended that high up. The sun was bearing down on my window from above the top of the clouds, so I knew we were flying through the highest layers already.
I also knew what this meant – that during descent we would need to plow through them clouds.
And that’s why I noticed two things. First, upon the Captain’s “prepare for arrival” announcement, the seatbelt sign was switched on. During good weather, this isn’t done – not until you hear the “prepare for landing” order usually given some five to ten minutes out. “Prepare for landing,” on the other hand, is in my experience given some 15 or more minutes out. And so I suspected…
The second thing I noticed was our rate of descent. We were at 34,000 feet, some twenty-five minutes out of Puerto and instead of descending some 10 or even 20 feet per second (I have an altimeter app on my phone), we were descending at a rate faster than that. I figured the captain wanted to get to the lower altitudes as quickly as he could because turbulence would be more manageable. And that’s what he did, stabilizing the plane when we got to 20,000 feet and then started descending at a much less incline.
But the short duration of going from 34,000 to 20,000 was, well; exciting. During those few minutes, I could imagine one or two or even a hundred passengers in the plane silently whispering God’s name. I didn’t, because I was thinking of the Captain – a Captain Anipan, to be precise.
So instead of thinking that my life was in God’s hands, what I was muttering to myself as we shook and turned right and shook again was simply “Let’s do this, Captain!”
That I was able to write this piece tells you that I (we) got through those few minutes of “Shake, rattle and roll – and start again” in one piece. Indeed, our Filipino pilots – with special shoutout to the pilots of Philippine Airlines – are some of the best that you can find in the world of aviation.
Mabuhay to Filipino pilots flying the skies!
