I Think of the Ground Proximity Warning System
This is a more personal one than most of them, being repurposed from an unpublished essay about my fascination with aviation in spite of not flying since 2015 due to climate concerns. I may lock it afterwards, please bear with me :)
More often than would be considered normal in polite society, I think about the ground proximity warning system fitted on all modern commercial aircraft. This is a device put on planes to stop them crashing into mountains. The technical term for crashing into mountains is “controlled flight into terrain”, which sounds like a suicide bid, but means that a pilot did it, in a perfectly functional plane. Why did they? Usually because they are lost. Being lost, in aviation terminology, is known as “lack of situational awareness”.
The GPWS tone is uniquely admonitory, close to chiding. It is always male – men controlling planes might be arrogant enough not to heed a female voice – and like Terry Pratchett’s Death, it always speaks in capitals. “TOO LOW - TERRAIN!”
Nothing in that voice may be transcribed in italic or lowercase. It is neither a footnote nor a whisper. The ground proximity warning system has no interest in nuance, in comparing someone to a summer’s day, or asserting that its mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun. It doesn’t do small talk.
“DON’T SINK” it nags if you are supposed to be climbing after takeoff and making too tardy an effort. Wherease if the plane is landing too fast, it warns “SINK RATE”. There there’s “BANK ANGLE”, “TOO LOW – FLAPS” and various other messages warning about the configuration or position of the plane.
All GPWS warnings must be obeyed, but one above all others: it is an imperative of aviation that when the ground proximity warning system chants TERRAIN, TERRAIN – PULL UP! a sequence of events must be performed from the pilot’s muscle memory. This is called the Terrain Escape Manoeuvre.
Disconnect the autopilot
Disconnect the authothrottle
Apply max power
Pitch up
Roll the wings level
We must never ignore this instruction. Our brains think we are in one place, the pilot explains, but we are actually in another.
The call to PULL UP! is usually the last thing heard on the black box recovered from crashes before the sound of impact.
*
In December 2023, I had a dream where I willingly witnessed a forest fire destroy everything around me and did nothing to stop it. I was aware of the fire, I knew I was in danger, but for some reason did not commit any action to save myself or the ecosystem around me. I woke the following morning a bit shaken but told myself was just a nightmare. Then I got into the shower and out of nowhere found a large lump in my left breast.
What the hell, I thought, and through the next day or two intermittently jiggled my boob to see if the offending lump had disappeared or shrunk. But no, like the mountain, it was still there. I was officially flying low.
The month before it showed up, I had been harassed by two Irish writers. Messages had been sent into my inbox under anonymous handles such as “Truth teller” and “Beryl Bumface”:
Your narcissistic rants and horrendous nastiness constantly, across all platforms (looking for attention: me me me me me) achieves the very opposite of what you wish for: and this is ensuring the silence as who on earth would want to give *that* further oxygen?
Allowing a book review to ruin your life is a massive waste and if people pull the blinds down on your incessant screaming, it’s because it’s genuinely unbearable to listen to and witness, like watching someone lick the warm diarrhoea from their legs. Grow the fuck up.
DON’T SINK, the warning rebounds in my head, DON’T SINK.
But like the ship that defines my town, I had already hit the iceberg.
The one comment from this hateful diatribe that would have me smiling grimly in the coming months was the bit that said: You are expecting miraculous army back-up from other writers who are facing their own vulnerabilities, and trying to get on with their own challenges, some of them even have real problems.
TOO LOW – TERRAIN.
Over the years of struggling to gain a fair wind from the Irish arts world, something bitter had literally formed in my bosom. That it was on the left-hand side was not, in my view, a coincidence. Poisonous actions and the pain they caused had to be held somewhere. Close to my heart, where they grew like Blake’s poison tree. On a soul level, I was not wandering, not even that, but thrashing in the same place without moving. My situational awareness had well and truly hit the skids.
TOO LOW – TERRAIN.
DON’T SINK!
I managed to get a GP appointment before Christmas. Though it was clear something was up, I had to wait it out through Christmas until January when I trotted off to the Orchid Clinic in Cork University Hospital to get mammograms, ultrasounds and biopsies and leave hours in later in a daze, having been told by a consultant that I almost certainly had cancer.
“We’re going to get this sorted for you,” she said, her voice soft and firm.
And though I’d never heard it in anger, though I’d never been trained for any avoidance manoeuvre, somewhere in the depths of my rag-and-bone shop heart I felt the imperative of aviation, recognised it, knew that there was no choice left but to violently correct course. I felt that muscle memory kick in, though I had never had an experience like that before:
TERRAIN, TERRAIN – PULL UP! PULL UP!
“There’ll be surgery within weeks.”
Disconnect the autopilot.
“Chemotherapy, radiation, all options are on the table.”
Apply max power.
“We’re here for you.”
Pitch up.
“You’re young and healthy. We’re going to cure you.”
Roll the wings level.
Shortly afterwards I wandered into town in a haze of shock, lit a candle in the Unitarian church on Princes Street, and got a librarian in Cork City Library to take a picture of me smiling and holding the anthology in which my short story “The Defamation Suit” was published. In it, I am smiling, without a hint of shock in my eyes.
Maybe I will pull up in time.
Maybe I have control. (“You have control.”)
Maybe I can keep this bird flying.