on both planes were spilled; a TWA stewardess was scalded by hot coffee. No one but the flightcrews knew how close it had been. The co-pilot on the Delta plane ran a hot special-delivery into his pants, laughed hysterically all the way to Boston, and quit flying forever two days later.
In 1974 a Big Sky charter jet loaded with happy gamblers bound for Las Vegas from Bangor and the Canadian Maritimes lost power in one engine over Haven and had to return to Bangor. When the engine was restarted on the ground, it ran fine.
There was another near-miss in 1975. By 1979, all commercial air traffic had been routed out of the area. If you had asked an FAA controller about it, he only would have shrugged and called it a dragon. It was a word they used. There were such places here and there; no one knew why. It was easier to route planes away and forget it.
By 1982, private air traffic was also being routinely vectored away from G-3 by controllers in Augusta, Waterville, and Bangor. So no pilot had seen the great shiny object winking up from the exact center of map-square G-3 on FAA Map ECUS-2.
Not until Peter Bailey saw it on the afternoon of August 5th.
Bailey was a private pilot with two hundred hours on his own in the air. He flew a Cessna Hawk XP, and he would have been the first to tell you that it had cost him a few banana-skins. This was Peter Bailey's phrase for money. He found it hilarious. The Hawk cruised at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and had good sky capability; 17,000 feet without breathing hard. The Cessna nav-pack made it hard to get lost (the optional nav antenna had also cost a few banana-skins). In other words it was a good plane, one that could damn near fly itself - only it didn't have to with a good pilot like him driving.
If Peter Bailey had a bitch, it was the goddam insurance. It was highway robbery, and he had bored his golfing partners to tears with the outrage the insurance companies had foisted on him.
He had friends who flew, he assured them grimly, plenty of them. A lot with less hours on their licenses than he had were forking over fewer banana-skins to the insurance heathens than he was. Some were guys he wouldn't have flown with, he said, if they owned the last plane on earth and his wife was in Denver dying of a brain hemorrhage. And the amount wasn't the greatest humiliation of all. The greatest humiliation of all was that he, Peter Bailey, he, a respected neurosurgeon who made well over three hundred thousand banana-skins a year, had to accept pool coverage if he wanted to fly. Well, he told his captive audiences (who often wished fervently that they had only played the front nine, or, better, had stayed in the bar and soaked up a few Bloody Marys), pool coverage was assigned-risk coverage, the sort teenagers and convicted drunks had to carry on their cars. Shit! If that wasn't goddam discrimination he didn't know what was. If he wasn't such a busy man he'd slap the bastards with a class action suit and he'd win, too.
Many of Bailey's golf companions were lawyers, and most knew it wouldn't wash. Risk coverage was made on the basis of actuarial tables, and the fact was, Peter Bailey wasn't just a neurosurgeon; he was a doctor, and doctors have the worst record as private pilots of any professional group in the world.
After escaping one of these foursomes, one of the players remarked as Bailey headed toward the clubhouse, still fuming: 'I wouldn't even drive to Denver with the long-winded son of a bitch if my wife was dying of a brain hemorrhage.'
Peter Bailey was exactly the sort of flier for whom the tables had been invented. There were undoubtedly doctors all over America who were exemplary pilots. Bailey wasn't one of them. Quick and decisive in the operating theater when a patient lay before him with a window of skull cut away to reveal the pinkish-gray brain tissue, as delicate as a dancer with scalpel and laser knife, he was a ham-fisted pilot who constantly violated assigned altitudes, FAA safety rules, and his own flight patterns. He was a bold pilot, but with only two hundred hours on his license, he could by no stretch of the imagination be called an old pilot.