Turbulence

By John W. Van Kleeff

This memoir is extraordinarily interesting. It goes through a mans life from childhoodat six years old, Johns father sent him away to Holland to live with foster parents, leaving lingering psychological scars on John and his mother)until he retires from his last airline job.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499035063

John W. Van Kleeff

John has been in over fifty countries, lived and worked in at least nine, and dealt with many different cultures and languages. As an executive pilot, he also flew for people like the Bin Laden family, Adnan Kashoggi, the arms dealer, the Saudi Royal family, and many more celebrities around the world.

Book preview

Preface

FIRE TRUCKS ON THE RUNWAY

The fire trucks were waiting. That was all I could think about as I guided the plane toward the Miami airport, that and the azure waters of the Atlantic Ocean thirty-five thousand feet below, sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight of a perfect day. But all I could think of was the awaiting fire trucks.

Get a hold of yourself, John, I whispered to myself behind my headset. You knew this day would come. I tried to calm myself as I again checked the instrument panels. I could see my image reflected back in the glass of the radar screen. My American Airlines pilot’s uniform was neatly pressed and spotlessly clean. Even all these years after Vietnam, I never lost the military precision of a soldier.

The radar was absolutely clear with none of the sharp colors that would denote oncoming weather patterns or dangerous thunderstorms. The only colors in the glass were my grey hair and blue eyes staring back at me. Still, there was just hint of panic around the corners of those eyes. The fire trucks were on the runway.

Tropical paradises streaked by as we hurtled through the air at five hundred twenty-five miles per hour. The north coast of Puerto Rico gave way to the beauty of Hispaniola on the left hand side of the plane. Then to the right, the familiar white beaches of Grand Turk sprawled below. I checked our speed, course, and remaining fuel. Right where they should be under optimal cruising condition, 0.80 mach. The Providenciales islands floating in the now deep blue ocean looked like green flowers ringed by white sand. Before I knew it, the Bahamas were visible off to the right.

The air traffic control hailed us on the radio by our flight number as we buzzed over Andros Island, and all the right responses came from my first officer. After so many years, I could have repeated the whole conversation in my sleep. I snatched a few minutes of peace as my mind was taken up with the final approach over Key Biscayne before the thought again hit me. The fire trucks were waiting.

I had to do this, so I determined to do it right. As the flight attendant explained to the passengers what was coming and not to be alarmed, I started our approach and resolved to make the landing as smooth as possible. Air Traffic Control confirmed us for runway 09 left as I slowed the plane to two hundred fifty knots, and we started down.

Descending at around one thousand feet per minute, there were precious few moments before touchdown. I thought about my forty plus years as a pilot, while the runway and the fire trucks grew larger and larger through the glass of the cockpit growing from the size of children’s toys to the real thing.

It was a perfect landing—so smooth it wouldn’t have knocked over a cup of coffee. The passengers applauded. The plane slowed. And we taxied between the fire trucks while they sprayed a huge arch of water above us high into the air.

It was the time-honored salute for a pilot on his last flight, and now I couldn’t hold small tears from my eyes as I realized this was really it—my last flight as an airline captain. As we pulled up to the gate, my copilot and the flight crew congratulated me on a landing worthy of a distinguished career and wished me well.

I spent extra time on board, reluctant to leave—after all, I had sacrificed so much to be a jet pilot, and now it was over. The passengers were especially warm, and I shook hands and hugged the strangers who suddenly found themselves part of another person’s major life event. Sensing the importance, one passenger insisted on giving me the only gift she had at hand—a touristy trinket purchased as a memento of San Juan. I put it in my pocket, straightened my hat, and walked off the aircraft.

It felt like I was leaving home rather than going home to retire. Most of my life had been spent aboard aircraft, and now I had to somehow make a life on the ground, something that never came easy to me.

I paused as I took in the airport terminal. The odd smell that airports the world over share hit me—a mixture of industrial cleaner, thousands of people rushing to make their flights, and that indefinable something on the air that I’ve always associated with adventure.

My emotions assailed me as my wife, who had been flying back with the passengers, came forward to take my hand. It was July 14, 2002, and two days before my sixtieth birthday—the mandatory retirement age. I could no longer continue as Captain John W. van Kleeff but had to go back to being just John. We sat for a moment outside the gate. I felt the comfort of her hand in mine and was transported back to 1950 to the first time I ever sat alone in an airport terminal longing for a loving touch. I was seven years old, and tears were in my eyes then too. My father never got along well with me, and he had finally sent me away.

I was alone and miserable. My mother was far away in Venezuela, and I would have given anything to have somehow gotten back to her. Before I left, she told me that losing me had broken her heart. My father did not share the feeling and walked me to my flight in Venezuela’s La Guardia airport to make sure I was on board and out of his life.

I was being sent to live with an old couple in Holland. There happened to be a Dutch couple traveling the same way as me, and my dad asked them if they would look out for me while I took the long journey by propeller airplane.

The couple never spoke to me during the entire trip. I remember sitting waiting in the Idlewild Airport—later to be renamed Kennedy Airport—for the connecting flight to the Netherlands. I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I just sat with my legs hanging off the chair, not touching the ground.

It seemed appropriate somehow, like the ground of my whole world had fallen out beneath me. Who were these people I was going to live with? Why couldn’t I go back to be with my mom? Would I ever see my friends again? I was about to board a plane to go live with a family not my own, in a cold country of which the sum of my experience was a few stories from my Dutch father. I was leaving Venezuela forever and was somehow expected to build a life in a place I couldn’t even speak the language. To this day, I can’t understand how my father could do it to me, especially since they had another son they decided to keep.

I remember waiting in the terminal desperately wanting to go home. That defined my life—one terminal after another but never home.

Chapter 1

A CHILD OF TRAVEL

The Second World War was just around the corner, which started in 1939 with the invasion of Poland and went on with the invasion of Holland, Belgium, France, and many more countries in Europe. Adolf Hitler was already heavily involved in the Nazi party in the early 1930s, and on January 30, 1933, he was appointed chancellor by the aging President von Hindenburg. After the president died, Hitler was in total power and continued to build his huge war empire.

My parents were probably aware of what was going on but did not realize how devastating it was going to be. My parents departed on the same ship from England to South America, which made many stops in between at former British Colonies such as Bermuda, Antigua, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Barbados, Trinidad, and eventually Caracas, Venezuela. They met each other on this ship around 1937. These ships would bring passengers who lived and worked on the islands and brought the mail and cargo such as cars, trucks, clothes, pharmaceutical products—you name it. The islanders were always excited when a ship arrived because that meant mail and new products. Soon thereafter, to travel by ship became too dangerous because German U-boats were everywhere, and they torpedoed any ship in sight.

My mother got off in Barbados where she started a new job as a matron in a boarding school, and my father went on to Venezuela where he worked for Shell Oil Company.

My father would frequently make the short trip to Barbados to visit my mother, and after a year or so, they got married and went to live in Maracaibo, Venezuela; and a few years later, they moved to Caracas.

While living in Maracaibo, my mother became pregnant but did not realize she was going to have problems giving birth. She was extremely small, and her first child died because of complications.

I was the second child, and my mother was advised several months before she was due to have me delivered to go to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Right after I was born, which was July 16, 1942, my parents went back to Venezuela, first by train to Miami and then by a Pan-American Airways flying boat to Venezuela. I was logging flight time before I was a month old.

My brother was born three years later in Caracas, and by that time, the hospitals in Caracas had improved, and my mother didn’t have to go to the states.

My father was born in Delft, Holland, in 1902, and his name was Anthonie Willem van Kleeff. His father was in the jewelry business. He worked most of his life in Venezuela for Shell Oil Company as a statistician. He went to Venezuela when he was about nineteen years old and was probably hired as a clerk because he only had a high school education and then worked his way up. In the old days, working for an oil company was one of the greatest places to work because of benefits and compensations. My father was not affectionate to my mother, brother, or myself. He was a strange man, and I did not get along with him. I avoided him and did not want to get into confrontation with him. I was afraid of my father, so there was little or no communication between us, much less any love. I never really had a family or a sense of what a normal family life would be like. He had some talents like painting—mostly watercolors and pencil drawings, and with a partner, he organized to build a British elementary school in Venezuela. One of his hobbies was architecture, and he designed the school, and his partner organized the financing for this project. They both did not care for kids. The school was built in an area called Altamira in Caracas fifty-five years ago and is still there and operating.

My mother was born in Barnet, England, in 1907, and her name was Molly Eileen Wyatt. She was a sweet lady, very petite and quite timid. When she sat on a chair, her feet could not even touch the floor. My mother was very intelligent, even though she did not have much of a formal education. She did a lot of reading and was quite adventurous and traveled quite a bit especially for those days. In the early 1930s, she went to Cairo, Egypt, to work for a rich family as a private tutor for the kids. After Egypt, she went to Barbados to work for a boarding school as a matron, which meant taking care of all the boarding school kids’ clothes. She was very precise and very neat. Both my brother and I had neatly sewn and embroidered name labels in all our clothes. It really was not necessary since we did not go to boarding school, but that was typical of my mother. She was very neat with everything, such as the house and the way everything was put away and stored. Her handwriting was impeccable and very British. She was meticulous with everything she did. I think I may have inherited that from her. I am very much the same way with everything I do. My poor mother really lived a pretty miserable life with my father. She smoked far too much, and I believe it was partly because she was miserable.

My grandmother on my mother’s side lived in Leiston, England, whom I would go to visit, and we had a nice relationship. She lived very simple because my grandfather died at an early age as a fighter pilot, and she was living on a pension from the Royal Air Force. Leiston is on England’s east coast. Every day I would go to the beach, and on the way back, I would pick flowers and wild raspberries for my grandmother. She would make jam with the raspberries. That was just about the only true family relationship I had, even though I only saw my grandmother three times.

My aunt lived with my grandmother. I found her to be incredibly ugly and pretty boring as well. She was in the military during World War II, a perfect place for her.

Mother’s father was a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force during the First World War. He was a fighter pilot, and he made a few inventions as well. He received an award from the Queen of England for inventing the dual control in airplanes. He felt sorry for the gunner because often, the pilot would get shot, and the gunner had no control over the aircraft, so he would die as well. The design was quite simple, but someone had to come up with the idea. All it was, was an extension of the flight control to the gunner, so he had control of the airplane should anything happen to the pilot.

Michael Wyatt, my uncle, was also in the RAF during World War II as a bomber pilot. He was involved in the development of the dam busters, which was a bomb shape like a ball and would be released from the Lancaster, a four-engine bomber, at a very low height and speed so that it would bounce a set number of times and then sink behind the dam and blow up. After several bomb runs in Germany, my uncle’s plane was hit and damaged so badly that he ended up flying the Lancaster to Spain on half the engine power and crash landed. Fortunately for Uncle Michael, the underground took him into hiding until the war ended about a year later. His wife thought he was dead, but he had survived and came home after the war ended. My uncle eventually retired as a group commander in the RAF. Incredibly, he broke a couple of Atlantic crossing speed records. My uncle was a very kind man; he was quiet, reserved, and cool. He must have been a hell of a group commander in the Royal Air Force and respected by his subordinates. Back then, to me, to be a really good pilot, you had to be a cool guy anyway.

My mother sometimes would tell me about my grandfather and uncle, and I was fascinated; they were war heroes. Decades later when my mother died in Exeter, England, I flew over from Germany in one of my airplanes to England for the funeral. After the funeral, I took my uncle for a flight around the Exeter area on the southwest coast of England. We both enjoyed it very much, and we had something in common—so this flying thing sort of runs in the family.

In the 1930s and 1940s, working overseas in a place like Venezuela was considered hardship duty, so the employees were given six months vacation every four years and could travel anywhere—first class at company expense. The employees’ lifestyle was similar to that in British colonial days with servants, nice homes, lots of parties, and everyone belonged to the country club. They also retired at the age of fifty-two. In those days when workers went overseas, they would not see their families for years. There were no telephones, and mail to and from Europe would take at least two weeks. People journeyed by ship, and the trip took three weeks.

The first two years of my life I grew up in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and then my parents moved to Caracas where Shell Oil had its headquarters. The first six years, I was raised speaking English and Spanish. I was quite an active young fellow, getting into lots of trouble, especially with my father. At school, I would get into fights with other kids, even though I usually was not the instigator. I hated fights because it seemed senseless to me to get hurt and mess up my clothes, but sometimes, I had to just defend myself.

Between our neighbor’s house and my parent’s house in Venezuela, there was a huge pine tree, which I would often climb in, and sometimes I fell out of the tree and hurt myself badly. In the driveway at our house, I would sit in my dad’s car and play with all the knobs and gadgets and probably left the lights on which resulted in a dead battery. When driving around with my parents in their car, my brother and I would play around and have minor quarrels among each other and make a lot of noise, and I am sure I did a lot more things to irritate my father.

My parents traveled a lot, which I enjoyed because it was always different and something new to see or experience. We went to Holland by ocean liner for a visit and made many trips to the Caribbean Islands such as Curacao, Trinidad, Grenada, and Barbados.

image05.jpg

Barbados 1945

Traveling in those days was quite a luxury especially by air, which seemed quite natural for me since I had done this since I was born, but still it was very exciting to see new things and get on an airplane or a big ship. In those days, travelers would get all dressed up. My brother and I would wear suits. The service on the airliners was impeccable, regardless whether one traveled first class or economy. Some airlines required the flight attendants to be single and to be registered nurses. The food was fantastic, and everything was served very neatly on trays. In first class, they would bring a cart and serve you the meal from the cart on to your plate and carve the meat in front of you. All the seats had new white sheets, sort of like a napkin on the head rests. In comparison, today, the passenger is lucky if the attendants throw a bag of peanuts at them.

In Barbados, my parents were friends with the minister of agriculture and his wife. They had a sugar plantation with a beautiful residence. It is now a museum. Most of the islands in the Caribbean were British, Dutch, and French colonies, and most of the islands have now become independent but still have some connection with the former ruling countries. In Barbados, the head of state is Queen Elizabeth II; and in Curacao, it is a separate country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Martinique and Guadeloupe are still part of France and the European Union. The Europeans who lived on those islands when I was a boy lived like royalty with servants, maids, and chauffeurs but that lifestyle is disappearing as these islands become independent.

On weekends, we would go to watch a cricket match or go to the horse races or maybe go to the yacht club. The women would wear their big fancy hats, drink tea, and eat cucumber sandwiches. The men would go somewhere else drinking gin or scotch, getting pissed out of their minds. There was no air-conditioning, so we had rooms with high ceilings and fans, and we had mosquito nets around the beds. Malaria was quite common and was also a good excuse for the British to drink. They thought by drinking gin and tonic that the likelihood of being infected with malaria decreased.

Years later, when I started flying for American Airlines, one of our layover hotels was right next door to the yacht club. I still have some pictures of myself playing on the beach in front of the yacht club.

Chapter 2

SENT AWAY

My father was a difficult man and an impatient person and could not tolerate me or any kid for that matter. He contacted his sister Ien

Reviews for Turbulence

[susandennis-139327 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I swear, this guy just loves to torture me! This is yet another absolutely wonderful book by John Nance. This time, the major airline - Meridian - is slipping in customer service. They've slipped so badly that even employees are losing heart and loyalty. Air rage is the logical successor and this novel depicts the true airline trip from hell. The hardest part about a Nance book is making it last. They are all true page turners and this one is no exception.

[wdlaurie_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I gave up on this book a few chapters in. The author so clearly has an axe to grind with the airline industry that the story was lost in the telling.

[sengels_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The thing about Nance is that his characters are credible. They are smart and they do things smart people do--even under tremendous stress. In Turbulence, tired, cranky, and abused airline passengers try to seize control of the plane, certain that to do otherwise would be suicidal. Interesting premise that keeps moving.