Exploration Pilot: The Flying Adventure

By Kendall B. Krogstad

The adventure begins with a rocky start; Krogstads flight instructor dies in an airplane crash. That realization seems to cast a residual shadow on Krogstads entire flying career. Through twenty years, more than ten thousand hours of flight, and more than a million miles of flying in extraordinary airplanessingle engines to jetson extraordinary missions, Krogstad experienced more close calls, near misses, and potential disastersas well as some calamitiesthan most pilots ever hear about.

Krogstad has landed and taken off in every state in the continental US, and his Alaskan adventures are among the most diverse and exciting as any pilot could experience. Every flight project was uniquely challenging and often carried with it the risks borne of unproven techniques and equipment. The technicalities of the work, the equipment, and the flying environment were complex, and Krogstad clearly defines them as they contribute to the bizarre events that defined his flying experiences and career.

The gradual loss of hearing clearly loomed as the eventual loss of Krogstads license to fly, but the actual end of his flying career was the devastating result of a personal disaster that haunted his being long after retiring from flying.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524542801

Kendall B. Krogstad

Guenther Lehmann Grothe and his family were victims of the cruel Russian invasion of Germany at the end of World War II. Despite living under an oppressive regime, he dedicated himself to restoring his family’s dignity. After defecting, he waited three years before getting a visa to come to the United States of America, where he became the independent owner of a successful dental laboratory. Kendall B. Krogstad is also the author of Exploration Pilot - The Flying Adventure, which is a compelling account of his extraordinary, often risky missions, including gripping episodes of calamities and near disasters, finally ending in an enigmatic, criminal incident.

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Copyright © 2016 by Kendall B. Krogstad.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016915337

ISBN:      Hardcover         978-1-5245-4282-5

                Softcover           978-1-5245-4281-8

                eBook               978-1-5245-4280-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 01/23/2016

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 Beginning An Adventure

Chapter 2 Production Flying

Chapter 3 It Goes With The Business

Chapter 4 Expansive Projects

Chapter 5 Learning Alaska

Chapter 6 The Crash

Chapter 7 Regrouping

Chapter 8 The Continuing Alaskan Adventure

Chapter 9 Knowing Alaska

Chapter 10 Finding A New Niche

Chapter 11 Making It Work

Chapter 12 Flying High

Chapter 13 Greener Pastures

Chapter 14 Stepping Up

Chapter 15 Blackout

Chapter 16 Side Shots

Chapter 17 Speedy Descent

Chapter 18 Florida Incident

Postlogue

Appendix

Glossary

For Arlene

FOREWORD

It has been thirty years since I have turned a key in an airplane’s cabin, cockpit, or flight deck. A lot can happen in thirty years, especially with one’s memory. Nevertheless, the events related in this memoir are etched indelibly in my memory, primarily because they were singularly noteworthy at the times of their occurrences. I have related these events typically in great detail, because, as is said, the devil is in the details, and the details often were a crucial factor in the occurrence of an event.

My postflying career spanned sixteen years before my retirement, during which time I was a professional writer of technical material. In those sixteen years, I never once considered writing about my flying experiences. Even after retirement, my interests and activities did not include anything related to aviation. Then I found that as my life numbers continue to add up, I spend more and more time thinking of the past, and aviation was a very important part of my past. So many memories began flooding back, and they could not be pushed out of my consciousness as they had been for so many years. Almost suddenly, I felt compelled to put them on paper, significantly to put them to rest in my own mind.

Given my technical background, my writing style tends to focus on facts without a great deal of editorializing. I suppose I ought to apologize to the reader who wades through these pages for my not making them more entertaining. My hope is that the events themselves are interesting enough to warrant a reader’s attention and perseverance.

Because this is a first-person memoir, I have necessarily overused personal references to myself: I or me or my. Other than occasionally reverting to passive voice writing, I wasn’t able to come up with a less narcissistic option.

Some things have escaped my memory. Most important are the names of many of the individuals who shared my experiences, as we typically have not been in touch for more than thirty years. The faces I remember well. I flew or otherwise worked with many people, many good people, who put their trust in my piloting abilities. I hold profound if not fond recollections of their involvement in my flying career. I have used actual names for those I remember, usually first names only, and have conjured pseudonyms for those whose real names I cannot recall. For persons of whom my portrayal is less than complimentary, I purposely used pseudonyms. Similarly, I remember almost none of the call numbers—federally registered identification numbers—of the many airplanes I flew.

I have found that the general aviation flying environment is much different now than it was in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. I knew it well then, but fifty to thirty years later, I find that I cannot accurately recall some of the protocols that were in effect then. If I have erred, it’s because I have no real need to research old methods. Of those protocols I have recalled pertaining to radio communication, I have simplified them to spare the reader the formality of the repetition of actual IDs and acknowledgments. Experienced pilots will understand the protocols that are pertinent to specific events, but those unfamiliar with them should probably read the appendix to better understand the context of those events.

Like many industries, aviation has an industry-specific vocabulary, often augmented with jargon such as spooling up a jet engine during the starting routine. New terms to which the reader may not be accustomed are usually explained in context or referenced on first use to the glossary by a superscript g, as in DMEg.

All of the flying episodes penned in this memoir are real, and I have depicted them as clearly and accurately as my technical writing skills demand, while still trying to add interest. I lived them at the time, and I have lived them again—often several times over in my head—as lessons I had learned, and some I have often relived in personal anguish. Those I remember in greatest detail.

To be sure, there were many events—near adventures—that I remember but which do not warrant space in this endeavor. In twenty years of flying, accumulating more than ten thousand flight hours and over a million flight miles, there were thousands of hours of ordinary flight when nothing unusual occurred—no engine failures, no emergencies, no close calls, no gotcha moments. Those hours were full of effort and dedication, fulfilling my ambition to succeed in flying. The hours added up to days that were error free and enabled to me to make a living but also make uninteresting stories.

Still, a five-minute event in a four-hour flight can be a heart-stopping, adrenaline-pumping, eternity-threatening occasion forever engraved within the vault of one’s memory. I am writing about many of these because each became a part of my life experience and being. Only errors and unusual events make it into print, and so this book often characterizes me as a flying klutz.

In aviation there are two kinds of mistakes: fatal and nonfatal. It is a statistical fact that, to the unwary, a nonfatal one can transmute quite readily into a fatal one. But even close calls can be hair-raising events, and often interesting reading.

As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. In reconsidering many episodes, it becomes abundantly clear that many things could have been done differently—things I could have, should have, would have done differently but for the necessity of focusing on the critical factors and having to make decisions without all of the input one would hope for in an impending crisis.

Flying is freedom in a new dimension. On leaving the ground, you are transformed from the mundane to the extraordinary. You are liberated, feeling free of gravitational reality; any direction is possible. You are a regent with an unlimited realm. And looking down, you realize just how vulnerable all of the things, objects, entities down there really are. What you can see, you could investigate, inventory, decorate, or violate. The possibilities are limitless, so you are in awe of what you see.

Most people think of flying as going from one place to another or simply sightseeing. And when people think of commercial aviation, they think of airlines. But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of ways to use flight that have nothing to do with linear travel, such as fighting fires, rescuing the stranded, delivering relief supplies, and, yes, attacking an enemy.

One important use never reaches the news media: aerial surveyingg. It is an industry, a mathematical science, an exacting discipline. It is unromantic, just as so many industries are, but it becomes an exciting, compelling, and fulfilling career to those who become involved and dedicate themselves to it.

Few of us understand or are interested about how the earth is measured. But measurement on a large scale is important to everyone, for the creation of maps that relate the true nature of the earth and what’s on it and for the engineering of infrastructure—such as highways, bridges, railroads, pipelines, dams, and the creation of lakes behind them—and the inventory of natural resources.

We are accustomed to thinking in terms of what we can see. But even more interesting is the measurement of qualities of the earth that cannot be seen. What’s beneath the observable surface has become increasingly important in this age of high-tech industry, an age that demands materials refined from the resources of the earth itself. Finding the resources, indeed—exploration, long limited to walking the surface—has become an airborne science. Extensive inductive reasoning finds indirect ways of interpreting data sets to locate specific resources. The data are often acquired by using sensors that detect—see—emanations in wavelengths other than visible light, often in the infrared or other spectra. Some sensors detect particulate emanations, such as gamma radiation, and still others detect magnetic fields.

It has been my great privilege to be involved in the acquisition of data about the earth using photography and many of the other sensory techniques.

At the time, photogrammetryg, the mathematical measurement of the earth, was a mature science but imperfectly implemented by the practical limitations of the equipment used to produce maps from photographs. Recent improvements in equipment and developments in automation have continued to render better results more economically.

By contrast, the use of airborne techniques for exploration was a much newer science. The basic problem of identifying the unique characteristics of the resource being sought and the development of airborne sensors that differentiate those characteristics from background emanations—noise—was itself just being explored.

In these applications, the airplane merely served as an adaptable platform for carrying the sensory and recording equipment. And the crew of the airplane—the pilot and photographer or sensory equipment operator—was charged with managing the acquisition of useable data.

It was the flying of these missions that became my career as a pilot. It was a career few people, even few airplane pilots, are ever aware of. It is the uniqueness of the missions that requires unusual aircraft modifications and flight in unusual circumstances that ultimately creates unusual experiences.

The flight environment itself, though not inherently unsafe in modern times, is an unnatural domain for Homo sapiens. We are ground beings, and elevating ourselves above it imposes logistical and physical risks and is unforgiving of imperfections in planning or execution or the equipment in use. We have tested the risks, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but emerging wiser for having done it.

In the mid-1960s, there were no personal computers, and business computers could be afforded only by the largest corporations. By the late ’70s personal computers were becoming available, but the user was charged with programming them to address the user’s specific needs. Information was recorded on punched cards, film, or a chart or tape recorder; it was state-of-the-art technology at the time, but primitive by today’s standards.

There was no such thing as GPS or weather satellites, and radio navigation for aviation was limited to what ground installations could provide.

Ours were commercial operations, and our customers knew what they wanted. Although we had both standard and unique equipment and methods of the times, some of what we were doing was innovative—finding ways to do things that needed to be done but for which there was no road map or ready vehicle. Those were the times that demanded ingenuity, and our innovations set us apart from other operators.

We had setbacks, but all in all, we were successful, and the companies for which we worked were profitable. And through it all, it was a remarkable adventure.

Kendall B. Krogstad

CHAPTER 1

Beginning an Adventure

Learning to fly an airplane is an adventure. Certainly not as adrenaline pumping as driving a race car or skydiving, but more on a par with less risky pursuits, such as yachting or being an engineer, and just as intoxicating. It gets in your blood and commands your attention. It invades your head even when you ought to be directing your thoughts and efforts to other pursuits.

There’s more to it than most people realize. Controlling a flying machine is only part of it. The rest is brainwork: learning about weather, navigation, regulations, safety—all the things that make aviation what it is—and exercising that knowledge. While the fundamentals remain intact, flying is now a much different environment than in the early 1960s when I was learning to fly at age twenty-six.

I was living in Placerville, a small town in California, with my wife, Arlene, and our two children. I was holding down an eight-to-five occupation as a surveyor’s assistant to support my family while I was learning to fly. I had the best of all worlds: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for, as the Chinese proverb defines happiness.

This particular morning, my clock radio came to life at the prescribed hour, and my groggy head opened an ear. A radio news flash said that on the previous afternoon an airplane giving a fire retardant drop demonstration to a company of firefighters in Sacramento had clipped a building and crashed, killing the pilot. The pilot’s name was given: Joe, my flight instructor!

Joe had introduced me to the details of the preflight check, the care and feeding of an airplane, the nuances of flight control, and, above all, the need for safety and awareness of safety issues. As of that morning I had recorded eight hours of flight instruction in my logbook, had barely soloed, and had many additional hours on the ground getting indoctrinated into the mind-set of being an aviator.

I was devastated.

Joe had been scarcely out of high school and was teaching flying in Placerville to help hold the family’s flying business together after the death of his father in a flying accident a couple of years earlier. Joe’s death was a compounding family tragedy.

At Joe’s funeral, I learned that Joe was not a certified instructor, though he had been working on his certification at the time. I had wondered why he hadn’t endorsed my logbook, but I didn’t know the protocol and had never raised the question. The lack of those endorsements dogged me throughout my continued training into commercial flying. Joe thus also taught me the important lesson of asking to see an instructor’s pilot’s license or, for that matter, the license of any pilot who invites anyone into his airplane.

Since there was now no flight instructor at the Placerville Airport, I searched and found another instructor, and my training then extended from home ground to a small airport near Folsom, the nearest airport with an instructor. Since I had been certified (by a certified flight instructor) to fly solo, I would fly the airplane the thirty miles to the Folsom Airport, fly the hour’s lesson with the certified instructor (I had asked to see his instructor’s license), and then fly home again. Mine was a typical flight training agenda that included the usual introductions to navigation, cross-country flying, crosswind landings, night flying (including nighttime takeoffs and landings), familiarity with all the regulations, and an aviator’s required understanding of weather. I passed the written examination with flying colors. I had also obtained the required physicalg examination certificate. All pilots must pass a physical examination by a physician certified by the Federal Aviation Agencyg (FAA) in order to be eligible to fly.

I took the oral and flight examinations and earned my private pilot’s license on Halloween of 1963. I have tried not to let that Halloween coincidence invade any of my thoughts throughout my flying career, but I have sometimes wondered whether it had anything to do with my later flying life, which was punctuated by some interesting misadventures.

Flying home as a licensed pilot who could now legally take passengers, I just had to find someone to take a ride with me. After landing at home base, I made a few phone calls and finally found a willing passenger: my grandmother.

She drove up to the airport, and I was careful to display my preparedness for my first live passenger flight, going meticulously through the preflight procedures. As she got into the airplane, she didn’t ask to see my brand spanking new private pilot’s license, but I proudly showed it to her anyway.

I was the picture of confidence, as I had flown that airplane, a single-engine Cessna 172, for all of my training. In the evening hours, I taxied out to the end of the runway I had always taken off from and did the prescribed engine run-up. The hilltop runway was conveniently aligned with the prevailing westerly winds, and in all of my training I had always taken off and landed toward the west.

The flight was not long, just around the town at a reasonable altitude, showing GrannyMa her house and my house and other points of interest. I was inwardly ecstatic. Then I made my usual approach to the airport.

Airspeed was under control, everything going great, but as I came close to the runway, I realized that we were going much too fast. I checked the airspeed indicator again, and it was right where I wanted it. Hmm. Had my airspeed indicator gone bad?

Seeing that I would overrun the far end of the runway, I abandoned the landing, boosted the power, and climbed again to the approach altitude. GrannyMa said nothing. Then, on final approach again, I slowed the airplane to approach speed, and it was right on. But we sailed over the boundary again, clearly going too fast. I didn’t hesitate but goosed the engine and started climbing again. What’s going on? I wondered. GrannyMa raised her eyebrows. Then it dawned on me.

I turned so I could check the wind teeg—an indicator on the ground that shows the direction of the wind—and saw that the wind had shifted from west to east and had freshened considerably. That had never happened in my training history. So I changed my approach and going east, against the wind instead of west, with the wind, landed normally on the east-west runway. As we got out of the airplane, I smiled as though everything was under control. Granny Ma thanked me for the ride.

My first adventure as pilot in command.

While we were never in significant danger, I learned a lesson that I hadn’t been taught during flight training. Don’t make any assumptions; even when you have always done something one way, it may not work the next time.

In the following months, I needed to build flying time toward a commercial license and flew whenever anyone wanted a ride. On one of those occasions, I had three guys with me from the service club I was president of, and we flew to Sacramento to take in a show. It was late and dark when we got back to the airport and took off.

There was no radio beacon that would lead me to my home base airport, and I usually just followed the highway. After taking off and leaving the airport traffic area, I followed the road just below us. My passengers were enjoying the ride, conversing, laughing, and asking me to take them to Las Vegas. It’s nice to be trusted.

But the highway seemed too busy, too wide, too straight. I then realized I was following the wrong highway. I glanced at the compass—south! I had been disoriented with the turns, so I then made a casual left turn to the northeast, finally spotting the required road up ahead. I made gentle turns and landed at home base without further incident. I don’t know whether the guys ever suspected anything. We never discussed it, and I didn’t betray myself. But inwardly I was profoundly embarrassed. Another lesson from the school of hard knocks. I would never make that mistake again.

The flying adventure had me hooked, and I was looking for ways to increase my involvement, gain experience, and perhaps earn a living at it. I had my eyes on a commercial license, but it would be a long time before I could qualify. And getting a flight instructor certificate was out of the question until I had obtained a commercial license.

Somehow I learned that it was possible to get a ground instructor certificate without a flight test. Since I had just come out of training as a student and knew what ground instruction was all about, I was confident that I could become a certified ground instructor. All I had to do was study some and pass a written examination. In the days before computers, there were only libraries as search engines or browsers, and I could find no material whatever as to what the FAA would expect as to what and how a ground instructor was to teach, and likewise, I found nothing on what the written test might be like. I reasoned that the only way I could find out what the test would be like would be to take it cold turkey. Assuming I would fail, at least I would know how to study for it. So I took the test. I passed it. That was the end of my ground instructor education, but now I could teach it!

I rented space at the local high school and the hangar at the airport and taught a series of classes a couple of times a week to a varied student body. Some were aspiring to be pilots; others had spouses who were pilots and wanted more education about the issues that are important to pilots. I scheduled an occasional field trip to a flight service stationg, general aviation district officeg (GADO), control towerg, or radar approach controlg facility. I wanted my students to get that exposure, which I didn’t get when I was learning to fly.

Building time in my logbooks was still essential to the next phase of my flying career, obtaining a commercial license. I flew many people for a spin around the town or to an occasional air show in some other part of the state. I took many people for their first ever airplane ride.

The requirement for a commercial license included having flown as pilot in command for not less than two hundred hours in addition to the required additional training and passing the more rigorous written exam, a more meticulous physical examination, and finally the oral and flight examinations. I qualified for the flight test within the next year.

The flight examiner balked when he noted that my private license had been issued without the endorsement of the flight instructor at the time for the first eight crucial hours of training. He finally conceded that if I could pass the test, the endorsement really wouldn’t matter. I passed the test.

I still had my nine-to-five job with the surveyor, but I was totally hooked on aviation and wondered how on earth I could get a flying job.

The opportunity soon arose. Victor, a contractor in my home town, was doing very well and, learning that I was a commercial pilot, approached me with a job offer. When I readily accepted, Vic bought an airplane, a single-engine Piper Comanche, for the purpose of commuting to a hospital construction site near Clear Lake, California. He was not a pilot himself and hired me the same day he bought the airplane. I eagerly qualified for carrying passengers in the airplane, that is, performed five takeoffs and landings to a complete stop. Qualification (or requalification) is required before taking anyone else in an airplane that you have not flown within the previous ninety days.

Vic had been driving the 150 miles each way between his home and the construction site on an almost daily basis. The flight was just over an hour each way. Normally, he was my only passenger.

I had explained that my license limited me to fair-weather flying—visual flight rulesg (VFR)—and to get full utility of the airplane, I should have an instrument endorsement for inclement weather flying—instrument flight rulesg (IFR). He agreed and paid for my training, which included more written and oral tests and the final flight test, which I passed.

During the course of the hospital construction, I did additional flying. When a critical piece of machinery failed, I had to fly Vic’s foreman to San Francisco and return him with a machine part. Vic also did some high-level entertaining, and I would fly him and his business guests to Sacramento, where there was an upscale restaurant that had an airport.

I was in flying heaven.

The day came when construction of the hospital was complete, and there was to be a celebration. Vic was taking his wife, Martha, along.

Martha had never been in an airplane before and wasn’t particularly enamored with the idea of leaving solid ground. But I had taken many persons for their first ride and was careful to be casual and businesslike. She settled in the back seat of the airplane, next to her husband, and said not a word during the entire flight to the Clear Lake Airport. I believe she had her eyes closed for the duration of the flight. I was careful to make the flight as uneventful as possible.

After the celebration was over, Vic announced that he would be staying for some business reasons and I would be flying Martha back home alone. I would return the next day to pick up Vic.

Martha insisted on sitting in the very middle of the back seat of the airplane. I had to calmly convince her that she needed a seat belt in case there should be some turbulence, and it was therefore necessary to sit on one side of the seat or the other. She reluctantly complied.

It was late summer, so I climbed to a higher altitude than usual to make the flight more comfortable by avoiding any clear-air turbulence, which is common when the ground becomes hot in the afternoon. Some distance from our destination, I reduced the engine’s power and began a gradual descent so as not to have to descend rapidly as we approached the airport.

Martha had been silent but now tapped me on the shoulder. Ken, tell me honestly, are we going down?

Without giving it a second thought, I just said, Yes.

If she wet her pants, she never told me. But triggered by hearing the muffled wail behind me, I suddenly realized that I had oversimplified what had been perceived as an impending disaster. I quickly reassured her, It’s OK, we can’t land up here, and I smiled reassuringly at her. She appeared to begin breathing again.

In later weeks her confidence had been restored, and she sometimes took a lady friend, via the airplane, to the fly-in restaurant in Sacramento. As they exited the airplane, they were talking about the menu and not the flight, and I couldn’t help but be a little smug that they were that comfortable with flying in a small airplane that it was a forgettable experience.

Sometime later, working with another company, I happened to be on the ground near another light airplane when two women got out of it, marveling and exclaiming about what a wonderfully good pilot their pilot had been. Apparently they were extraordinarily impressed. I couldn’t help wondering what the pilot did to impress the ladies with such prowess that they would remark about it. It seems to me that if he had conducted the flight in a totally satisfactory way, there wouldn’t be any need for action that would prompt such a reaction. An ordinary, eventless flight seems to me to be the best kind.

Vic, besides being in construction, was also an entrepreneur. The county offices located in our home town were of vintage construction and rapidly being outgrown by the expanding services offices and personnel roster. The local business owners wanted to see the county offices remain in town, of course, but couldn’t find suitable expansion space within the confines of city limits or its limited expansion possibilities.

Vic made tentative arrangements for the purchase of a large tract of vacant hilltop land out of town and offered the county the land for free if the county would relocate to that site. The county accepted, and Vic bought the land and donated the property. He then became a prime contractor in the construction of several new buildings to house the county’s courts and offices. In doing so, Vic became alienated with the city council and the entire cadre of the local merchants.

Vic also wanted to pursue other construction opportunities, some out of state. He asked me to pack my bags to spend a few days in Denver.

Vic and his construction foreman, Carl, arrived at the airport just as I finished giving the airplane the preflight checks. I loaded the baggage into the baggage compartment, and we all got into the airplane. I hadn’t yet started the airplane. Something was buzzing.

We sat in silence a few seconds, looking at each other. Yes, we all heard it. But I hadn’t put the key in the ignition, all the switches were off, the door was secure, and I glanced at all the benign gauges. Everything was supposed to be silent, but there was still this buzz.

Vic was the first out of the airplane, and Carl and I were out in a trice. The others stood away as I listened around the airplane, homing in on the buzz emanating from the baggage compartment in the rear of the fuselage.

I opened it pensively, and yes, the buzz was from inside. I pulled out the three duffle bags and put them on the pavement. The buzz was coming from my duffle. Curious. I began unpacking my bag and discovered that the jostling of the bag had flipped the switch on my cordless electric shaver, and it was doing its thing. I turned it off. A nonevent that gives one pause.

Vic then told me that his first thought was that the noise might be from a bomb, possibly placed by some disgruntled city business person. So the three of us meticulously inspected any and all spaces in the airplane that could possibly conceal an unwanted package. Nothing was found, and we were soon on our way to Denver.

The weather was completely cloudless for the entire trip, so I chose not to file an IFR flight plang. Most of the flight was only a couple of thousand feet above the ground, just high enough to be above any clear-air turbulence. There was a refueling and relief stop somewhere in Utah. It was late and dark by the time it was necessary to cross over the Continental Divide along the crest of the highest ridges of the Rocky Mountains in the middle of Colorado, just west of Denver. The divide varies between twelve thousand and fourteen thousand feet in height, so it was necessary to fly at an altitude of at least fifteen thousand feet at night to make a safe crossing. But along our route there are other mountains of varying heights in California, Nevada, and Utah as well. We were already at or above ten thousand feet as we left Utah. My passengers were sound asleep in the back seat as I scanned my flight chartsg and began the ascent to fifteen thousand feet. I had night flying experience, but at that early stage of my flying career with barely three hundred flight hours, I had no significant flying experience above ten thousand feet, which is considered the highest safe altitude without auxiliary breathing oxygen. Not only had I no such experience, I had no real knowledge of the physical consequences of flying at fifteen thousand feet without auxiliary oxygen. This airplane had no auxiliary breathing oxygen on board.

The great danger of high flight without oxygen is a