Chapter Forty-One [with a few explanatory notes]

Superman

MANY OF CHRISTOPHER REEVE’S FANS knew he could fly for real. It was no secret the late “Superman” actor was a licensed pilot. But how many would have bet their lives—as I reluctantly did—that he could command a complex aircraft under stress with the same aplomb he demonstrated hanging from wires on a green screen stage?

Robert [my best friend “Robbie” Robertson] met Chris Reeve through gliding when the little-known actor was in the U.K. shooting the first Superman films. Back in the U.S., where Chris owned a glider, Robert would sometimes lead him around on cross-country flights.

[My ex-girlfriend] Kathy and I had seen Chris once on Broadway, in Lanford Williams’ Fifth of July (not my favorite play). But he had remained a mythical figure until he showed up early for the memorial service at Robert’s house. We all pretended it was no big deal for one of the world’s most famous actors to help carry benches into the backyard. It was Chris’s idea to have a more participative service based on one he had orchestrated for his grandmother.

Perhaps 75 of us gathered that evening, perched on chairs and benches in a circle on the grass behind the house. Many were from soaring. News of Robert’s death had raced through our community within hours in those pre-Internet days. The open question: “When will the service be?” We finally picked Monday, just over a week after the crash. But there were two people we hadn’t been able to reach. I knew [former world soaring champion] George and Suzanne Moffat took their sailboat on a long cruise every summer. So they could have been anywhere up and down the East Coast. Sitting in Robert’s kitchen that afternoon a few hours before the service, I idly dialed their home for what seemed like the 100th time. And then, after so many unanswered calls, I was speaking to George. They had just walked in the door.

I hadn’t rehearsed what to say. So for the second time in my life, I searched for the right words to deliver the most terrible news. I imagine pastors, military unit leaders, and others more familiar with horrific outcomes are better at it. In any case, George was unflappable. There was a pause, and his voice dipped with, “Oh,” but it didn’t waver. We discussed what we knew and the arrangements for the service that night, and he promised they would attend. Suzanne told me later it was a huge shock, but he hid it well.

As the warm September sun inched closer to the tree line, we spoke one at a time relating a special memory. Many involved humor—Robert had delighted in breaking the unwritten rules of staid society—and we laughed together in therapeutic relief after a week of grieving. The common thread we shared was expressing the joy Robert had brought into our lives and our deep sadness at his unexpected passing. Chris added his perspective. Besides gliding with Robert, the two had occasionally shared skiing and summer weekends.

A year earlier, [my wife] Tanya and I had chuckled when Robert, with his European university education but little knowledge of popular culture, related how he and [his German girlfriend] Ilsa had spent a weekend with Chris and his family on Martha’s Vineyard. He had never heard of, much less recognized, Grammy- and Academy Award-winning singer Carly Simon at dinner. Ilsa had laughed along with us as we shook our heads at Robert’s rustic ignorance of popular music.

Robert and Chris were both talented, ambitious, and self-confident, yet untaken by their accomplishments. In person, Chris seemed quiet and self-assured. Watching him chatting casually with Robert’s friends, it was easy to forget we had once snickered at his suspect piloting skills.

Afterward, a few of us sat down to discuss Robert’s ashes. The individuals in this group were not timid or reserved. We all had ideas—and opinions. With little delay, someone proposed spreading them over the “Big Ridge” in the Appalachian Mountains where Robert, Karl Striedieck, and two others had earlier that year established a new world record for distance around a triangular course of almost 850 miles. We nodded and mouthed our agreement as we looked around at each other. This would be an epic, symbolic tribute to our larger-than-life friend. Karl spoke up to offer his Cessna 180 for the ashes drop.

Our enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of the eight-hour round trip via car. Chris had been listening. At this point, he volunteered to fly down the next morning from his summer home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, meet us at Westchester County (New York) Airport, ferry us to the ridge, then drop us off on his way back.

We hesitated. This was a very generous offer given the cost to operate Chris’s twin-engine, pressurized Beechcraft Baron 58P. I surveyed the pilots to see how everyone else was reacting. I looked to be the only one with reservations. The idea took on life straight away. Like the engineers and NASA officials in the below-freezing hours before the Challenger space shuttle explosion six months earlier, we all fell into line:

“Great idea.”

“Sounds good.”

“Yeah, that’ll work.”

“Good mission.”

Most of them had to work the next day. I did not. I was unemployed, the tiny company I had joined a year earlier having run into difficulty, causing us to part ways. Moreover, there was a sense of obligation to be on that plane. At the request of his father’s friends from Scotland, I had begun to inventory the assets in Robert’s estate, which were scattered around the U.S., Europe, and the Cayman Islands—with no will. I had accompanied them to meet one of several lawyers in Robert’s Rolodex (not the right lawyer, I learned later).

I suspect each of us viewed this trip as a grand gesture larger than ourselves. Robert wasn’t just another pilot come to a bad end. He was a fallen hero. And we were caught up in planning a fitting tribute. Funerals are for the living, and this idea gave all of us a much-needed boost. It was, indeed, a mission. And I, more than most because of the turmoil in my own life, needed to be part of it.

⸎

Journal Entry: September 2, 1986 (White Plains, New York)

I’m belted into the co-pilot’s seat, but I might as well be on United Airlines because I’m strictly a passenger. The pilot in the seat to my left, sitting tall and upright with an aviation headset, his hands firmly on the controls of the twin-engine Beech Baron cruising at 200 knots (230 mph), is Chris Reeve. As with other decisions made a few drinks into the night, I’m reconsidering this one in the light of day.

It’s a little late for that. I stare at the complex array of gauges, instruments, and electronics stretching from Chris’s side of the cockpit across the instrument panel to mine. As with street signs in a foreign language, I understand conceptually what these are without knowing precisely what they all mean.

Like many of his cinematic alter egos, Chris Reeve’s face is calm and unruffled, reflecting none of the worries of those of us who have entrusted him with our lives. The thrum of the turbocharged engines is a muted roar, vibrating the aircraft beneath us like a heavy but responsive ocean-going vessel, reacting to every subtle change in the airflow and the controls.

I peer through the side window at the sprawling landscape of clouds passing thousands of feet below like rippled white sand at low tide on a Caribbean beach. The sky is vibrantly blue. Despite the chill outside, the morning sun is warm on the painted aluminum fuselage and wings, the edges of which glint like fine steel blades when the light reflects off them just so.

Our moods are more reflective of what’s concealed below the cloud deck, i.e., dreary, drizzling rain. We had lifted off from Westchester County Airport less than an hour earlier and ascended into the overcast, which had obscured the earth ever since. By now, I suspect we’ve passed over the Delaware Water Gap and are crossing one mountain ridge after another in a series of parallel formations in Eastern Pennsylvania, like a seagull gliding over rows of breakers in the surf on the way into the beach. I know the terrain hidden beneath the deceptively benign surface of the clouds is rough and mountainous, cloaked in forests, and pockmarked by occasional strip mines and quarries.

Chris interrupts my reverie and hands me a cryptic aeronautical chart. Speaking loudly over the engine noise, he describes his intended landing: an ILS (instrument landing system) approach for runway 24 at University Park Airport just outside State College, Pennsylvania.

“What do you think?” he finishes politely, sliding the headphone off his right ear for my response and looking directly at me, as I turn toward him.

For a few seconds, I’m stumped. What do I think? Superman is driving a turbocharged Baron in IMC conditions (instrument meteorological conditions) and asking me what I think? Then I force a rueful grin.

“Chris, I’m a glider pilot. You’re on your own,” raising my voice over the engines and handing the chart back to him. I assume he’s being polite. I hope he’s not relying on us for help.

He blinks and pauses, digesting what I said. Then he turns back to the flying. At Westchester County Airport, he had seemed reassuringly capable dealing with the tower and the New York Air Traffic Control Center when we took off and climbed up into the low cloud deck before breaking out into the sun.

We glider pilots normally navigate with Sectional Charts, similar to road maps, but with data on airports, airspace, obstacles (e.g., high towers), and ground features that are identifiable from the air. In contrast, the IFR (instrument flight rules) approach plate Chris handed me comprises symbols and radio navigation data. It might as well be computer code to a non-IFR-rated pilot like me.

Instrument flying involves navigating without seeing the ground and keeping the aircraft upright and at the correct speed and course without reference to the horizon. Few non-pilots are aware of how little time it takes for an untrained and/or ill-equipped pilot caught inside a cloud to become unable to tell whether they are in a turn or flying straight or even which side is up as they lose control and plunge hopelessly, with the aircraft breaking up in flight or crashing into the ground. This demanding skill requires specialized training, equipment, certification—and frequent practice.

To reach our destination near State College, Chris must rely on the instruments in the cockpit until the last minutes of the flight. If he does everything by the book, the airplane will remain upright as we descend through the clouds and emerge into the clear above the minimum descent altitude. Only then will he have visual references—i.e., the ground and the horizon—for the final touchdown.

I don’t know how many hours Chris has, or how they compare to the several thousand I’ve accumulated over 20 years. But it’s irrelevant; none of mine are in power planes or IMC conditions.

My unease springs from a story many of us heard about a reality television show a few years ago called Celebrity Daredevils. The producers wanted Chris to conclude his segment by flying his sailplane in a fast, high-speed, ground-level pass right in front of the cameras followed by a steep climbing turn back up to altitude.

As we heard the story, with the cameras rolling, Chris pushed the nose over and dove steeply, leveling out a few feet above the runway at over 100 knots. The high-pitched whistle of the glider whipping by so closely, dipping the right wing in the seconds before it slashed overhead like a blade, frightened the host, Bert Convy, of game show fame. Our storyteller had implied Chris had let things get away from him. Maybe he was having fun. At the last second, a wide-eyed Convy threw himself flat on the runway as the wing of Chris’s glider sliced over the unflinching cameraman.[1]

We threw back our heads and howled in raucous laughter: Hollywood hotshot gets in over his head trying something we pilots pull off without breaking a sweat.

Chris’s middling flying skills seemed to be confirmed a few years later when I learned Robert led him out on cross-country flights from time to time. I asked what kind of pilot the real-life Superman was.

“He does okay,” Robert had offered carefully.

“Okay?” I had snorted. “What the hell kind of answer is that?”

I had expected “he’s a good pilot,” or maybe “he’s safe but doesn’t know much about soaring.” But “okay” was the sort of non-answer I used to get when inquiring about a proposed blind date in college. The only thing Robert needed to say to finish it off was, “He has a good personality.”

Now, Robert’s “okay” is all I can think about. I’ve put my life in the hands of an okay pilot.

Another reminder, as if I needed one, is the contest number on Chris’s sailplane. “WK” was a legacy of its well-regarded former owner, Woodson K. Woods (father of Chris Woods, against whom I had flown at Springfield). It would normally translate to “Whiskey Kilo” in aviation parlance. But Superman has taken to referring to himself as “White Knuckles” in self-deprecating fashion. Other pilots gleefully emulate this behind his back in a not-so-subtle commentary on his skills.

None of this is a ringing endorsement for someone upon whom I am totally reliant for my safety. But that’s no surprise.

The combination of “celebrity” and “pilot” can be problematic, especially flying complex planes like the Baron. Some wealthy individuals, with large egos and limited time, skip the traditional process of gradually advancing in aviation through more challenging and expensive aircraft.

Not surprisingly, this has led to tragic accidents involving privileged personalities who treated aviation the way some of them treated lesser mortals—with arrogance and casual disregard for the rules that apply to everyone else—and who drove their big-ticket airplanes into the ground with fatal consequences. One famous example was the crash of New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, said to be a competent pilot but who had been flying for just a year, who died in his $1.2 million Cessna Citation jet after misjudging a landing approach in 1979.

Both my father and I had experience as flight instructors, trying to teach soaring to those more accustomed to giving orders than taking advice. Today, however, unlike their trusting but unwitting passengers, I knew exactly what I was getting into. Our dreary aerial funeral procession over rural Pennsylvania with a Hollywood movie star is unparalleled. Yet there is unease, not anticipation or drama, despite his presence.

For much of the past 20 years, I’ve reassured my non-flying friends and family that, for the properly trained pilot flying within his or her abilities, “the most dangerous part of soaring is driving to and from the airport.” So why am I on a mission to bury another of the finest pilots I have known?

I twist around in my seat and catch Ilsa’s eye. She’s huddled in the row behind me, cradling the urn with Robert’s cremated remains in her arms like a frightened child clutching a favorite toy. She raises her head and smiles back wanly.

The engine noise drops as Chris eases back the throttles to begin our descent. My stress level escalates in inverse proportion to altitude. It is a spectacularly useless time to question whether our pilot knows what he is doing.

I don’t bother checking to see how the other passengers behind me are faring. Most know less than I do. Ilsa isn’t a pilot. Robert had cared for her a great deal and wanted a relationship with someone with whom he could share flying. He had envied the ones I have with Tanya and George Moffat has with Suzanne. But Ilsa is a free spirit, unfettered by conventions of deadlines and schedules. Robert had worried that would complicate her performance as his crew at stressful contests and diminish his concentration.

Robert’s favorite crew, Rod Read, sitting right behind me, knows the most about Chris’s flying. He works at the FBO (fixed-base operator) at Westchester County Airport, where Chris has his maintenance work done. But when I’d asked him about Chris’s piloting creds the previous night, he had looked evasive and offered a similar non-answer:

“I only see him when he flies the Baron into Westchester. But he seems to do okay.” Another ringing endorsement. At least Rod is along for the ride.

The other two friends on board know even less. None of us has the information about our pilot we should have had before embarking on an IFR flight into mountainous terrain. But it doesn’t matter now. Either Chris knows what he is doing—or we will soon be reunited with our dead friend.

Sunlight illuminates the cockpit. The snowy crenellations and masses of cottony cloud appear to speed up, then flit by dangerously fast as we descend. The soft, vaporous layer changes colors from pure white as subtle grays, then darker shadows gradually appear in an oddly menacing fashion. Losing altitude, we plow into one swirling peak after another before merging with our shadow. Then we slip into the gray like a submarine easing below the surface of an oily, disquieting sea. Daylight dims, the horizon vanishes, and in seconds we are wholly without a visual reference. We could be creeping slowly on a highway in heavy, impenetrable fog on a nightmare drive, not knowing what might appear a second or two ahead. Except we are rocketing along at 170 knots, close to 200 mph.

Chris’s plan calls for descending on a southwest heading toward University Park Airport. Our path will bring us down the valley between two parallel ridges that overlook State College, home of Penn State University. The steep crests on either side of us are forested and rocky. If all goes well, we will let down neatly between them into the valley where the airport lies. If we veer off course, we risk colliding with one of the unyielding slopes with little chance of survival.

Onward we fly in the gray fog, the engines droning loudly as I watch the altimeter unwind. I’m not sure of the altitude of the nearby peaks, but I imagine we are approaching their level. I’m glad there isn’t much turbulence. Then we hit light rain. Lovely.

My eyes are unblinking as I stare ahead through the water droplets scattering and streaking up the windshield. I’m half waiting for something frightening to appear ahead, too close to pull up or turn away. Even at part throttle, engine noise suppresses most communications in the cockpit. No one says anything. We just share occasional furtive glances. Surely, we’ll break through this cloud layer soon.

I recall a scene in the recent movie Sweet Dreams. An airplane is carrying Patsy Cline and her fearful group through a violent storm. For long moments, their anxiety rises. Then, they burst out of the clouds into the clear with relief! An instant later, in a horrible shock, the plane flies straight into the vertical face of a cliff and explodes in a fireball. That was Hollywood’s version. The actual crash occurred in a forest and there was no explosion. But the scene was shockingly effective when Tanya and I viewed the movie in the theater.

“Is that how it will be for us?” I muse melodramatically. We wouldn’t even have time to reflect on our fate before lapsing into unconsciousness and death in a desultory conflagration of torn metal, smoking engines, shattered bones, and smoldering flesh. For some reason, this eases my anxiety. Nothing I can do will make any difference.

Motors whine and mechanisms thump in the plane as Chris lowers the flaps and undercarriage. He’s configuring the Baron for landing. The sounds of the air and vibrations change. He is focused on flying the airplane, communicating with air traffic control, and adjusting the engine and flight controls. I imagine his forehead creased with anxiety. Is he sweating in the cockpit, his hands wet as his nervousness rises? I’m afraid to look. What could I do if he were in trouble? Say something? Pray?

But his face betrays neither stress nor doubt, only a calm intensity that I hope reflects his justifiable confidence. The minutes tick off. The altimeter continues to unwind with no sign of the ground increasingly near.

Excerpt from Goodbye, Papa Golf, Copyright © 2023 Joseph N. Bearden III. All rights reserved. Those wishing to use material from this book beyond “fair use” must receive permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Author’s Note: Obviously we survived! More than a test of Chris Reeve’s flying skills, however, the day challenged in him another way, and revealed an aspect of his personality that caused me to hold him in even higher regard. For the full story, read the “Superman” chapter in my book, Goodbye, Papa Golf. 

[1] When last I checked, the Celebrity Daredevils clip was viewable at https://youtu.be/xUz9ed1IGo8 (accessed 16 Sep 2021; Chris Reeve’s is the last segment beginning at 1:32:00)