Unbelievable (eBook)

Chapter Two - To America

After our adventure in Morocco, for the first time in my life, I became very depressed. I walked around with feelings of hate towards anything that had to do with Morocco. I decided that I would never return to this worthless country that had caused me so many problems and so much stress. I had also recently lost my girlfriend from Sweden and no longer felt like sitting long nights, stoned, at Marco’s place.

One day I decided to visit my father. My mother had left him and moved to Brazil, so he now lived alone. My father asked for this meeting and I decided to hear him out and listen to what he had to say. He asked me how I saw my future; I told him that I didn’t know what to do, so he suggested that I take courses to become an airline pilot. I looked at him with disbelief. But my father was very serious. He had saved some money and investigated flight training schools in Europe and America.

Consequently, he thought the best thing was for me to move to America for this training. He also said that if I didn’t succeed, he wouldn’t be able to do anything else for me. After listening to his proposal, I was suddenly hopeful again for the first time in a long time. I thanked him for the opportunity and quickly drove to Mark’s to tell him what my plan was. Mark heard me out and told me that he had also saved some money; he decided to join me on my adventure to the United States.

Before Mark and I left for America I received a visit from Tanja, who I had met in Morocco. She invited me to pay her a visit for a couple of weeks in Bredstedt, a little village on the coast in northwest Germany where she lived. After a few days we both found jobs working together at the Husumer Hafentage, a large village festival which drew lots of people from far away. Following the festival we worked for some time during the Alser Vergnugen in Hamburg, which allowed me to save even more money. But to all comes an end and I returned to Holland to travel to America with Mark and begin training for my airline certificates.

Arne, on a short break in Hamburg.

My father drove Mark and I to Dusseldorf Airport where we boarded a Lufthansa DC-10 bound for Chicago. From Chicago, we caught a Northwest jet for a flight to Memphis and arrived late in the evening. At the Memphis airport we were picked up promptly by a Piper Seneca that belonged to the flight school where we had registered. That same evening we flew to Malden, Missouri, a flight of approximately one hour.

The first night we stayed in a hotel in town. The next morning we were picked up by a woman named Sally. She was an ugly, fat woman with a heavy English accent and she seemed pretty stand-offish. She took us to the flight school where we handed over $28,000 in cash. After the paperwork and formalities were completed, we were dropped off at the Pizza Mill, where we encountered other flight students. Most of them were very negative in their opinions of the school. The first question they asked us was if we had already paid for our courses. We were upset by this attitude because we were tired from the journey and after all the problems in Morocco, we’d had quite enough bullshit.

Malden is a village of approximately 4,000 people, predominantly farmers. It is located near Missouri Route 25 and US Route 62. There must have been at least thirty-five churches in the small town. The village also had one of the biggest general aviation airports in the state of Missouri, with three runways, each over 5,000 feet long. From 1942 to 1960 it was an air force base. Now it was the base for the flight school. The name of the school was Hall Aviation and the owner was Nick Kraft. Nick was always very friendly, but we had minimal dealings with him. There were approximately forty students training with us at the flight school. The instructor assigned to me was Alan Riegle, from England. He was an honest man who wanted the best for us. His first words after we met were, “Hanging around here you will hear about some nightmares. Some are true, but most of them are false.” How close he was to the truth at that time we could not have imagined.

In the following three weeks I flew nearly every day and soloed pretty soon. The ground school was taught by a fat guy, whose name was simply Bill. He reminded everybody of the singer Wayne Newton. He spent his days walking around slurping coffee. Periodically he would come into the class room to put in a new instructional videotape about flying, such as the Jeppesen or King tapes, which are video versions of the textbooks that are often used in flight training. Viewing on TV presumably gives the students a better idea of the theory of flight. Sometimes after the tape had finished we would look for Bill and sometimes found him in a dark room laying on a wooden table asleep with a giant coffee mug still in his hand or we’d see him walking to an office in a different building to get more coffee in the hope that somebody over there would stop him for a chit–chat.

The first six weeks went by without any big problems but then one day I was not on the flight schedule anymore. I didn’t understand this because there were enough aircraft available and my instructor also had sufficient time to give me instruction. It seemed that the school had run out of money to fill up the fuel tank and was waiting for new students to arrive and infuse their bank account with cash. From a few of the flight instructors, we learned that it was better not to say anything bad about the school because that could jeopardize the education of the existing students. I was determined not to become dejected and started looking around for ways to spend my time while I waited to fly again. I discovered a farmer in the neighboring village who had converted one of his old barns into a gym—something that was right up my alley.

As time progressed, Mark didn’t feel as content about his training, either, and after a while he began joining me at the end of the day at the gym to body-build. The machines we were using had seen better days. They were old and made of steel and there was no air-conditioning in this “gym.” It all looked a little bit like the old movie Iron Man, starring Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger. In the evening we came home tired but satisfied, watched a little TV and went to bed early.

Because we didn’t fly very often during this time, we had lots of extra time on our hands which, of course, was used to cause some trouble. One of our students, Yan, came from Switzerland. He was accompanied by his wife, a beautiful woman but unfaithful to Yan. She would sometimes share a bed with one of the English boys. All of us found out about this somewhat sad situation. Yan was an enormous goofball but it didn’t take long before he found himself a girlfriend, a German girl with a voluptuous rear. Yan would always brag about how he would “take her from behind.” One day several of the students got together in the room next to Yan’s, where everything was going on. Everybody listened as he made love to his new girlfriend. There was a lot of moaning and groaning until suddenly it became dead quiet. We heard the German girl run outside and cry for help. We rushed into the room and found Yan laying on the bed, motionless. Quickly we called for an ambulance and Yan was taken to the hospital. It seemed that he had suffered a serious stroke, serious to the point where, a few weeks later, they had to open his skull to remove a blood clot. Luckily the operation was successful and a few days later Yan was sitting up in bed joking. He said that the doctor told him not to hold off an orgasm because that could cause exchanging temporary life for permanent death (a well-known Dutch saying).

During the course of our flight training, one of the American students had a birthday. His parents bought him a fully aerobatic airplane. Aerobatic maneuvers are unusual aerial positions such as loops, rolls and such. To exercise these maneuvers one needs sufficient flight experience because correct execution requires technical skill and knowledge.

The birthday present was parked on the ramp between some of our training airplanes. His parents, the flight students, and several instructors were all standing on the ramp watching the aspiring stunt pilot as he prepared his aircraft. He got in, went down the checklist, started the engine, and taxied to the end of the runway. The start went without any problems and the airplane stayed just above the runway to build up airspeed. At the end of the runway the pilot pulled the nose up and the airplane went straight up. His parents were proudly watching their son. Suddenly, the aircraft stopped climbing and fell over one wing. It was clear to us that one of the wings had stalled, causing the airplane to go into a spin. Everybody realized that this was not part of the stunt. A few seconds later the plane crashed into the ground. That day we lost one of our buddies. It was terrible to have one of your pilot friends who you’ve hung out with die in front of your eyes in a crash. That same evening I wrote to my father about the horrible thing that had happened. His answer came soon...