THE BIG U-TURN

I first visited Brazil in 1979 as part of an Around-the-World Southern Hemisphere Trip. I’d have to say that getting there was not half the fun. We had arranged to fly from Cape Town, South Africa to Rio de Janeiro on Varig Brazilian Airlines. The flight left in the late afternoon and was uneventful for the first 2 hours.

At about that point in the flight, I began to notice that the plane was making an unusual motion. It wasn’t like the standard turbulence that I had come to know and hate. It was more of a rocking motion. I was seated next to the window over the wing, and I noticed that at one moment, I was staring directly up at the tip of the wing and at the next moment, directly down at the South Atlantic Ocean. I started to notice that some of my fellow passengers were getting “fidgetty”. But I started to get nervous myself when the co-pilot came back into the main cabin, crawled onto a seat, and craned his neck to look out at the tail of the plane. It turned out that the tail rudder had become stuck and that the plane was virtually helpless.

Quite a bit of maneuvering then followed but nothing really helped. In fact, the rocking motion was getting worse. After about 30 minutes of this, the plane started a giant, slow, U-turn and it was apparent that the were on our way back to Cape Town. No announcement was made – I suppose that the pilot assumed that everyone already had a pretty good idea of what was happening. My wife and I made our preliminary goodbyes, and we rocked and rolled eastward for about three more hours. As we approached the Cape Town Airport, I noticed that the runway was covered with foam, and that fire trucks and ambulances were everywhere. In spite of the rocking, the pilot was somehow able to put the plane down safely.

Varig Airlines put all the passengers up at the Holiday Inn for the night. The morning paper carried the following headline: “CRIPPLED BRAZILIAN AIRLINER MAKES EMERGENCY LANDING IN CAPE TOWN”. I tried to buy a copy of the paper, but the other passengers had already snapped up every available edition. In the afternoon, we were transported back to the airport where we had the unnerving experience of being forced to watch a pair of Brazilian airline mechanics who had been flown in from Rio work for three hours repairing the rudder.

Fortunately, between the exhaustion,  the alcohol and the Valium, we were able to make it to Rio in one piece. I even made a few South African friends at the airport. We spent about a week in Rio and then flew to Lima We spent a couple weeks in Peru and then headed home to San Francisco. A few days later, I started my Ophthalmology Practice.

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