“The Fog” by Rob MacGregor and Bruce Gernon

Chapter 5 – ‘Fog That Clings”

Page 72 – Dead Air Space

     Those who have survived encounters with electronic fog are the ones who can testify to its existence and who can speak for the many others who entered the fog and lost their lives.  Another such survivor is a pilot named Cary Trantham, who flew into the fog in 1995 on a flight in the Florida Keys.  Trantham is the manager of a flying club at the Boca Chica Key Naval Air Station, and, having flown the club’s Piper Warrior many times, was familiar with the route.

     On that particular day, Trantham had flown to Ormond Beach in central Florida to visit her daughter.  They met at the airport, went out for lunch and shopping.  On her way back to the keys, Trantham dodged scattered clouds on her flight south.  The sun was low as she flew over Tampa-St. Petersburg and, as she neared Naples, she saw the lights of Miami to the east.  Overhead, high clouds blocked the moon and stars.  Then as she passed over the Everglades, a haze formed below her.

     “Suddenly, it was as if someone threw a blanket over the airplane,” she wrote in an article published in the April 2003 issue of AOPA Pilot, an aeronautical journal for general aviation.  The horizon was gone.  She panicked.  She didn’t know if she was right-side up or upside down.

     When she looked at the instruments, her confusion intensified.  The compass was spinning.  The illumination in the cockpit began to fluctuate from dim to bright and back again.  “The altitude indicator began to roll, and there was a high-pitched buzzing in my headset.”

     She recalled a conversation with a jet pilot in the Navy flying club.  He’d told her that there was a dead-air space in an area over the Gulf between the mainland and the keys.  She thought about a documentary she had seen about the Bermuda Triangle, with its missing planes and boats, instrument malfunctions, and magnetic anomalies.  She couldn’t help wondering if she was going to be the next victim.

     She tried making radio contact with Miami, but there was no response.  Terrified, she fought off panic.  She shifted frequencies and was relieved to hear the voice of an air traffic controller.  About twenty minutes later, she knew that she’d escaped the fog when she saw lights on the horizon and was told it was Marathon.  She followed the string of keys and eventually landed safely back at the naval air station.

     “I realized how lucky I was, and how close I came to the ‘dead-man’s spiral’ and being another lost airplane in the Bermuda Triangle.  I don’t question why I survived.  For whatever reason, it was a miracle, as all odds were against me.”