It was barely light when I took off and settled in for an all-day ride to the west. I cleared Rockford's radar service area and then switched off my radio and put on some country music I had prepared for the trip. I sat pounding the instrument panel in time to the beat, the stick between my knees. The sun rose behind me. It was going to be a beautiful flight. I was never aware of the propeller pulling me through the air. It was as if I were permitted to glide along beneath the cloud deck through the whim of an invisible force which, like gravity, was certain and eternal and impossible to doubt. No more could I fear falling out of the sky than I'd fear falling up off the ground and bumping against the clouds when I was standing in my back yard.

The vast empire of mist used to frighten me. I had once been a nervous pilot. Now I relished my sense of dominion over so much empty space. After a few years, we become accustomed to our world of miniatures, where the town water tower stands on tiny legs like a child's railroad model. It all looks so orderly and peaceful, unlike reality.

Flying low: They call this the nap of the earth, where the uninterrupted treetops seem like a carpet. On long flights, the controllers become friends when they're nice, as many were on that trip. When they'd go away for their break, I'd miss them and have to adjust to the new controller, a stranger, not an insider.

I flew into a flock of birds. Suddenly they were all around the cockpit like mysterious black streaks, but somehow I hit none of them. They didn't want to hit me anymore than I wanted to hit them. A bird through the windshield could knock me unconscious. That would be bad. A mile-long train passed south beneath me toward the smoking stacks of a town.

A highway sliced through a low hill of brown earth and tan grass. It looked like a delicious patè, and it occurred to me that I might be getting hungry. I looked for a place to stop for lunch and found one on the chart: McPherson, Kansas.

For some time the Citabria had been draining fuel out of one tank faster than the other. Whenever I filled the tanks, the left one took twice as much gas as the right. I had been flying all day, and the left tank was always light. The tanks are buried in the wings, and the aircraft is a high-wing model, so to reach the gas cap, I had to climb a ladder. When I was flying, the tanks were overhead—one on either shoulder—36 gallons of fuel in all. So with the left tank draining fuel faster, the airplane would turn more and more to the right the farther I'd fly into each leg of the journey.

Why not fix it? I had asked my mechanics, Russell and Liss, many times. But it was one of those knotty problems. It could be anything. I could find a mechanic who would happily take apart the wing and look around, and while the plane was grounded and the cost of investigating the problem went up and up, it would begin to seem so easy just to turn left all the time while the airplane wanted to turn right. Compared with having a roomful of surgeons open up my abdomen and look inside for a day or two, it would begin to seem like fun to have a belly ache. Furthermore, with an airplane, it sometimes seemed positively unmanly to demand that the stupid thing fly straight and level. “Work out with weights,” they'd say. “Make yourself strong.” So I kept flying, and every now and then my partner John and I would stop in at the shop and talk to Liss or Russell, but they'd be swamped with much more important work, and so we'd just casually say, “Hey, how about that old fuel thing, huh?” And Russell would say, “Yeah, pretty weird.” Or Liss would say, “Maybe it's the vent. We ought to check to see if it's misaligned.” But we all knew that we weren't going to check any vent. We weren't going to do anything at all. Not until something dramatic happened.

McPherson was my third refueling stop since leaving Ten Charlie that morning. I was feeling confident and pleased about the trip, which I had anticipated with some trepidation, since it would have been the longest trip I'd ever made in a small airplane. I had brought sandwiches and cookies and apples, and by the time I reached Kansas, I was pretty hungry. I needed a place to stop and eat all that food. I sat in the office reviewing my flight plan while someone (a line boy, I assumed) fueled the airplane. It was a departure from routine for me. I always fueled the plane myself. But I had begun to think that I might make it all the way to Santa Fe in one go, and I wanted to eat and be on my way. I thought I'd save time. If a red flag didn't raise itself the moment I thought of saving time, it was probably because I had allowed myself to get too hungry, and I wasn't thinking clearly.

All disasters are made of the same elements, the way all bread, as different as the varieties can be, is made of flour and water. The first element, especially in aircraft accidents, often involves deviating from routine procedures. But no one ingredient makes the loaf. It takes a lot of work before it's bread.

So I sat in the office eating my sandwich while someone fueled my airplane; and I studied my plan, deciding to press on until I had to stop. (Sundown would be my signal to find a place to stay for the night.) I finished my lunch and packed up and went out to the airplane, snapping chunks off of a big red apple with my teeth.

Now, since my fueling routine was different, my routine for inspecting the aircraft before flight had necessarily to be different. (It was like chaos theory: Little events produce bigger results the farther down the line they progress.) Since I normally took off and replaced the fuel caps, I was not sure where to start; the caps had already been removed and replaced. I should have hauled out the ladder and removed them and replaced them again myself, but I didn't. I simply stepped up on each strut and checked to see if they seemed tight. They did. I then sampled some fuel from each tank using the quick-drain valve beneath the wing to see if it was, indeed, fuel. It was. No water or contamination. I checked the oil. I walked around the plane to see that all the parts were still bolted together, tail wheel springs attached, tires inflated. I could find no reason to delay any further, and so I climbed in and started the engine.

I smelled fuel. I noticed that I smelled fuel, and I thought about the fact that I smelled fuel. But I didn't do anything about it. That is generally the second element in a fermenting disaster: Ignoring good information, disregarding a warning signal. I continued to taxi out to the active runway, expecting the smell to go away.

I ran the engine up to 1800 rpm for the magneto check. Now I really smelled fuel. It was like being back in the shop when someone was covering an airplane with fabric, using vile chemicals. Here I go: I committed yet another sin, one that is characteristic of all disasters from Bhopal to Three Mile Island. This mistake has two parts: First, I refused to believe the evidence of my senses. Second, I made up a story to explain away the evidence. I thought: Well, perhaps the line boy spilled some fuel while tanking me up. I thought: It's nothing. Or more probably, I stopped myself from thinking by an enigmatic process that we can never quite know, for knowing it would be the opposite of doing it. Orwell described it in his famous novel, 1984. He called it “selective stupidity.” I had never smelled that much fuel in a cockpit before, especially not while running up, when one would expect the prop blast to blow all fumes away. I have read transcripts of interviews with technicians, which were conducted after disasters such as Bhopal, Three Mile Island, the space shuttle Challenger, and the catastrophe that nearly stranded the crew of Apollo 13 in space. They all did the same thing I did: They pretended that everything was normal.

I made my radio call, “36250 departing runway 18... ” as I taxied onto the active runway. I roared off heedlessly into the sky. Now all the safeties were off and the bomb was ready to be armed.

The problem grew worse as I watched the left tank remain overly full and the right tank empty itself at a brisk rate. I could not think of any way to explain it. Here is another common element of disasters: I didn't really understand the system I was using. I thought I did. I had a blurry schematic of the system in my mind. But I had no deep knowledge of it. If I had been in possession of a clear mental picture of the Citabria's fuel system, I could have visualized what was happening—but I could not.

I flew on, until, somewhere just passed Hutchinson, fifteen or twenty minutes from McPherson, I was suddenly struck by the gravity of my situation. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes, and I awoke in a pool of sweat. I dialed up the Hutchinson tower to inform them that I had a fuel leak and was coming in. They asked me if I wanted to land at the field directly below me, and I circled a few times, but could not find it and asked permission to land Hutchinson. They cleared me to their runways, holding other traffic up to let me in.

It wasn't far, but the fuel smell grew significantly stronger and the right tank significantly emptier as I plied the air slowly, so slowly, it seemed. I could see the field, but it felt as if it were a hundred miles away. I kept myself high in case I needed the altitude to glide in. I wasn't sure what the next step ought to be, and there was nothing in the manuals, nothing in all the training I'd had—private license, instrument rating, commercial license, jet training, military training—nowhere had anyone ever mentioned this possibility to me or suggested what might be done about it.

I was almost in the traffic Hutchinson pattern now, and when I banked right to make my base leg, gasoline suddenly poured out of the throttle quadrant at my left hand, and I was splashed with raw aviation fuel. Instinctively, I jerked my hand away, surprised at the cold and the smell, which was now overpowering, but I continued my turn. I looked up at the fuel gauge, a float gauge in a sight glass just above my left shoulder, and as I watched in horror, the little window filled with fuel, and a torrent of gasoline sprayed out of the wing root area at me: Now I was being doused with gasoline. It was all over my shirt and hair and neck and it was running down my back. I felt my skin go cold and my hair stood up on end. I wasn't wearing a parachute, or I might have jumped, and I thought of my father with his parachute under his seat.

I keyed the microphone and told the tower, “Hutchinson Tower, two-five-zero has fuel in the cockpit.”

“Two five zero, Roger,” the controller said. “Take the first turnoff and taxi to the ramp after landing. Stay with me.”

“Two five zero, negative, sir, I'm shutting down everything now, and I'll be, uh... I'll just be stopping as soon as I can, I have lots of fuel in the cockpit now.” “Two five zero, Roger, cleared to land any runway.”

I said nothing, as I reached for the panel. My hand was shaking so hard that I had trouble shutting off the switches. I left the magnetos on to keep the engine running. Now I was on a short, steep final approach, and I was waiting for the gasoline all around me (and up my sleeves and creeping down my neck) to explode. I don't know why I thought so much of my father then, instead of Amos, who might have held the secret I needed most. He burned to death on final approach when his fuel tank sprung a leak, quite literally in his lap. Perhaps we spend so much time trying to escape the legacy of our fathers that our very act of cowardice condemns us to their fate.

I pointed the nose at the numbers on the runway. I felt as if I had snakes crawling all over me. I thought I was going to vomit from the smell.

It's funny the things we notice. I saw that the next airplane in line for take off, delayed by my little emergency, was the Starship, exotic and white and futuristic looking, an experimental 2-engine airplane built by the Lear company, and I wondered what the important people inside thought was going on out there that they had to wait. They probably never had to wait. And I thought of W.H. Auden, writing, “In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster...”

I made a normal touch-down and ran the airplane off the runway into the grass and had the door open before I stopped. I leapt out of the airplane and ran away from it. When I had sprinted 30 or 40 yards, I turned and looked back. I was soaked with fuel. I reeked. I was shaking hard. I put my hands on my knees to steady myself and catch my breath, and all at once my knees let go, and I sat on the grass as if I'd meant to.

It was only then that I noticed the yellow fire trucks that had come to greet me, and the firemen in their rubber suits, who were climbing down with fire extinguishers and walking toward the plane with suspicion smoldering in their eyes. They were waiting for it to explode, too. We exchanged words, but I'm not sure what they were. All I remember is that I said something to one of them, and he looked at me as if a dead man had offered him a piece of gum. Fuel was pouring out the bottom of the Citabria onto the concrete and the grass. I looked back at that little blue airplane, so cute, with stars on its tail, and for the first time I saw its potential for becoming my enemy. I felt betrayed, but of course, I had betrayed myself. My little disaster could not have been more elegant if I had sat down to plan it out on paper. The only thing I'd forgotten was my Zippo.

People think of catastrophes as incidents in which the elements of chaos and disorder enter into an otherwise orderly system, but that's wrong. Calamities require a powerful ordering influence to succeed. We have to harness a lot of energy and give it direction in order to hurt ourselves. To climb on a stool and fall is not much effort and not a terribly serious mistake. But to climb a building requires organization and energy. It is the energy we put in that comes back out to destroy us. Without the organizing principle, the energy to harm us would be unavailable, because it would remain diffused and could not be directed back at us. All disasters are orderly, and as I looked back at my inconsequential and trivial blue airplane, I saw all the effort I'd put into attempting to blow myself up. Even the act of refining oil into gasoline, the invention of the airplane itself, contributed a great ordering principle to the harnessing of enough energy to do me in. Rather a narrow view of history, I admit, but the only one I could take seriously at such a moment.

I stood up and dusted myself off, and only then did I think, finally, of Amos, his knees ricked up to his chin to get his feet out of the fire. I realized that he could have been standing there just like me. Our ways divided over the matter of one happy little blue spark.