Airport, Chapter 14: Keith Remembers - Upper Intermediate

Chapter 14: Keith Remembers

The key was to Room 224 of a hotel near the airport.

Standing in the small rest room near the air traffic radar room, Keith Bakersfeld realized that he had been looking at the key for several minutes. Or was it only a few seconds? Recently he seemed to have lost all sense of time. Natalie had found him more than once just standing still and looking at nothing. He supposed that his brain was like a worn-out motor that was no longer working properly.

The human brain could do wonderful things. It could produce great works of art and science. It could also keep alive the pain of memories that a man would prefer to forget. Keith had memories that he could never forget. Only his death, which he had decided would take place tonight, would end his suffering.

He must go back to the radar room now and finish his duty. That seemed to be the right thing to do. Then he would go to the hotel and swallow a large amount of Nembutal. Enough to make him go to sleep and never wake up again.

He looked at the key. Room 224. The number reminded him of what had happened on June 24th a year and a half ago. It was the beginning of his pain, and the reason he would die tonight.

June 24th had been a beautiful summer’s day, with a clear blue sky and hardly a cloud in sight. Keith had felt happy and light- hearted as he drove to work. He was not working at Lincoln International then, but at the Washington Air Traffic Control Centre in Leesburg.

Even inside the radar room, which had no windows, he felt the beauty of the summer’s day.

The Leesburg Centre was not near an airport, but it was one of the busiest air traffic control centres in the country. Helped by a man called Perry Yount, Keith controlled traffic in the Pittsburgh-Baltimore area. There was also another young controller, George Wallace, who was being trained by Keith.

He went into the control room and looked at the screen. It was quite busy. Perry Yount had some additional work to do today, and left Keith to work alone with George Wallace. George would finish his training and become a full controller in only one week from now. Keith allowed him to give directions to two planes which were coming too close to one another, and saw that he was making the correct decisions. Keith was a successful teacher, and he was proud of Wallace’s progress.

From time to time Perry Yount came to see if Keith and Wallace needed any help. Everything was going well. Then, just before 11 o’clock, Keith had to go to the washroom. Perry Yount agreed to stay near Wallace until he returned.

Keith stayed a long time in the washroom. It had a window, and he could look out and see green fields and flowers. It was a hot day, and he felt that he would rather go out into the fresh air than back into the control room. He often felt like this.

After Keith had left, Perry Yount had an emergency to deal with. A passenger on a plane had had a heart attack. He had to clear a way for the plane to land at Washington.

At the washroom, Keith wondered how much longer he could keep doing this job. He was very tired. He was thirty-eight, and had been a controller for 15 years. He felt that he was getting old.

Doctors knew that controllers became ill more often than people in less responsible jobs. Few other jobs put so much pressure on a man, and for many it was too much. They often found it difficult to sleep, and suffered from nervous diseases. Some controllers were like old men at the age of forty-five.

He looked out of the window again. If only he could go out! But he had to go back to the control room. He would go back - in a minute.

Perry Yount was bringing the plane down safely over Washington, changing the courses of 15 other planes in order to clear a path for it. He handled the emergency well, as he always did. Whenever he had a free moment, he checked that George Wallace was all right. He seemed to be. Keith would soon be back to help them.

Keith was still at the window. He was thinking now of Natalie. They had started to quarrel recently, for the first time. She wanted him to save his health by changing his job. But how could he? This was the only job that he knew how to do.

High above West Virginia, Irving Redfern was flying his small private Beech Bonanza to Baltimore. With him were his wife, Merry, and their two children, Jeremy and Valerie. Wallace saw the Redfern’s plane as a small green dot among the larger dots of airline planes. Redfern was following a safe course.

But there was something that neither Yount, Wallace nor Redfern knew. An Air National Guard T-33 trainer was flying in the area. The pilot, Captain Neel, was experienced but careless.

Without realizing it, he had wandered a long way off course. His plane appeared as a dot on the edge of George Wallace’s screen Wallace did not notice it.

A man can’t just leave his job, Keith was thinking. Not if he has a wife and children to look after. Unlike pilots, controllers did not earn a lot of money. But he couldn’t leave the safety of a job he knew he was good at. He would have to talk to Natalie again. Looking at his watch, he realized that he had been in the washroom for 15 minutes. He must have been dreaming! He hurried back to the control room.

As he came in he noticed that everyone was busier than before. He looked at the screen.

‘What’s the other traffic near the Beech Bonanza?’

‘What other traffic?’

Then Wallace saw the fast-moving dot on the edge of the screen. ‘Oh my God!’ he cried out.

With a single rapid movement Keith pushed him to one side and seized control. He shouted to Irving Redfern: ‘Make an immediate right turn now!’

Captain Neel’s plane was rushing towards the Beech Bonanza.

If Irving Redfern had acted immediately, he might have saved himself and his family. He was a good pilot, but not a professional, and he was a polite man who always thought before he acted. Now he wasted the few seconds he had by replying to Keith’s message.

In the control room they watched in silence, praying hard, as the bright green dots flew towards one another.

‘Washington Centre, this is Beech-’ they heard, and then the voice suddenly stopped.

The dots on the screen met, and up in the clear blue sky the Beech Bonanza was falling, spinning wildly, to the earth.

Then the terrible thing happened, the thing that Keith would ever forget. The radio of the Beech Bonanza was still working. The cries of the Redfern family were heard clearly in the control room, and the voice of nine-year-old Valerie was especially clear. All over the control room faces turned white, and George Wallace broke down and cried as he heard her cries of terror. ‘Daddy! Do something! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’ The small plane crashed and burned with the Redferns inside it. Captain Neel landed safely by parachute, 5 miles away.

Perry Yount was blamed for the crash, and he lost his job. George Wallace could not be held responsible, but he could never now work as a controller. They were both ruined men. Yount had to go into hospital, and then, began to drink heavily.

Keith was not blamed in any way for the crash, but he knew in his heart that he was responsible. If he had not stayed in the washroom for so long on that lovely summer’s day, the Redfern family would still be alive.

He got little sleep, and when he did sleep he had terrible dreams. They always ended with the hopeless cries of little Valerie Redfern. Sometimes he tried to stay awake, so that he would not dream of her again. During the day, too, he thought about her. He could not look at his own two healthy children without feeling guilty.

His work suffered. He lost the ability to make quick decisions. Natalie begged him to change his job. Once, almost crying, she told him that unless he did something she would take the children away from him, because she could not bear to see them growing up in such an unhappy home.

It was then that Keith first thought of killing himself. He put his hand in his pocket and touched the key again. He would need it soon.

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