The Voice on the Radio

Ruben Achterberg had paid extra for the seat beside the pilot because he wanted photographs of the reefs, not because he had the faintest interest in aviation. Forty minutes before sunset on a cloudless Wednesday in April, the single-engine plane was cruising at nine thousand feet above a sea so clear that the coral showed through it like ink spilled under glass. The pilot, a cheerful man called Desmond, had spent most of the flight chatting to air traffic control. He pressed the button on his control wheel to report their position, told Ruben that he suddenly felt dizzy, and slumped forward against the controls without another word.

The nose dropped at once. The engine rose to a whine, the horizon tipped sideways, and the sea filled the whole windshield. Ruben grabbed Desmond by the collar and dragged him back into his seat, and as the pilot's weight came off the wheel, the plane began, unsteadily, to level out. Then, with fingers that would not quite obey him, Ruben pulled the headset off the unconscious man, found the button Desmond had been pressing all afternoon, and said: "Mayday. My pilot's passed out, and I have no idea how to fly this plane."

The voice that answered belonged to Lionel Baptiste, an approach controller at the airport on the main island, who happened to have spent ten years as a flight instructor before moving to the tower. Lionel asked him calmly whether the wings were level and whether he could see the coastline ahead, and told him to touch nothing he had not been asked to touch. Lionel, however, had never sat in that particular model of plane, and he could hardly guide a stranger through an instrument panel he could not picture. While he kept Ruben talking, a colleague found a photograph of that exact cockpit online and put it up on the screen beside the radar. From then on, Lionel was able to guide him switch by switch.

Lionel warned him that if he pulled back too hard on the wheel, the plane would slow down and stall, and that if that happened close to the ground, there would be no room to recover. He explained which knob controlled the engine power, where the flap lever was, and why the needle on the airspeed indicator mattered more than anything Ruben could see through the window. Ruben, whose shirt was soaked through by now, repeated every instruction aloud before obeying it, and Lionel, who had begun to recognize the slight tremor in his voice, slowed down whenever it got worse.

By the time the runway came into view, the sun was touching the sea, and every light on the airfield had been switched on to full brightness. "You're doing exactly what I'd want a student to do," Lionel said. "Keep the nose a little up, bring the power back, and let her settle." The wheels hit the tarmac hard, bounced once, and came down again. Ruben stood on the brakes with both feet until the plane shuddered to a stop, not far from the end of the runway. Desmond, it was later reported, had suffered a sudden medical emergency and was recovering in hospital. Ruben would later tell reporters that if Lionel hadn't been on duty that afternoon, he wouldn't be alive to tell the story.

When his shift had been covered, Lionel came down from the tower and walked out across the apron, where Ruben was sitting on the step of an ambulance. The two men had spent half an hour inside each other's heads, yet neither had any idea what the other looked like. Ruben stood up. For a moment they simply looked at each other in the last of the light. Then Lionel held out his hand, and Ruben took it, and neither of them said a word.