DITCHING THE SKY

Retired airline pilot Porch tells the story of the harrowing day she had to land her plane in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

On August 12, 1984, the oil pressure in the tiny four-seater that the author was ferrying to New Zealand started to fall slowly and inexplicably; when it hit zero, the engine failed. Luckily, when she was 17, Porch had learned to fly in engineless gliders. Now, more than a decade later, this saved her life, as she was able to maneuver her plane well enough to survive its crash into the sea. Much of Porch’s story in this memoir involves catastrophic moments with unexpected saving graces; for example, when a rescue plane dropped supplies down to Porch in her small inflatable raft, they missed her by some quarter of a mile. Many people in this situation try to swim toward the supplies and drown on the way, but the author stayed put, because she’d experienced a frightening incident in a pool as a child and had feared swimming ever since; her resulting choice to stay in her raft saved her life. Porch organizes her memoir smartly, interweaving memories of her childhood and early flying career with the immediate emergency of 1984, the day she “ditched” (a pilot’s term for making an emergency landing and exiting a sinking aircraft). This back-and-forth can mean that some sections unnecessarily repeat details, but they do so for a reason: to bring readers back into the desperate situation in the cockpit. The book includes appendices about preparing an aircraft to be ferried, ferrying a crop-duster plane, and dealing with challenging airports in the Pacific; there’s also a radio transcript of Porch’s friend’s last hours before his own plane tragically went down. Overall, the book’s organization is quite successful at building and breaking tension, and in many ways, the narrative flow has a sense of balance that suits the material well.

A magnificent story of a woman who dealt with catastrophe with courage and humility.