Uncontrolled Fight by Frances Peck

Uncontrolled Flight  by Frances Peck

    I found Uncontrolled Flight to be a compelling, fast-paced, and currently relevant novel.  It had to do with Bird Dog planes and water bombers that are used to fight forest fires.  During my years working for the BC Forest Service, a few times I had the opportunity to watch the Bird Dog planes and Bombers in action.  The Bird Dogs are the small planes that fly over the fire to assess them, then decide on a path over the fire, that the bombers will then follow to drop their load of water or repellant.

    The storyline of the novel concerns Will, a Bird Dog pilot, and his very close relationship to Rafe, the extraordinarily skilled water bomber pilot, who he worked with for ten years.  Rafe had a wonderful personality, who was not only a straightforward, trustworthy, and kind person, but he was a very skilled and legendary tanker pilot. 

        One day, Will was directing him over a forest fire near Quesnel, and as he watched Rafe follow him over the fire, with horror, he saw Rafe’s plane fly lower and lower, until it crashed into the fire.  Will, and all those who knew Rafe, were left dumbstruck  in disbelief at his death, and his crash was the mystery, that the novel slowly untangled.

    Beside Will, also caught up in the grief and mystery of Rafe’s death was Sharon, Rafe’s wife, Natasha, a crash investigator (who had recently had an affair with Rafe), some other flight crash investigators, the company that employed Rafe, and Rafe’s brother.  The big mystery had to do with what had caused the crash, was it mechanical problems in the old tanker, or was pilot error.

    Getting a glimpse of the job that crash investigators do was very insightful.  Like detectives, they have to carefully comb through and inspect all of the fragments of the wrecked and burned plane and follow the paper trail of the plane’s mechanical records, in an attempt to see if any of the plane’s thousands of parts, led to the crash.  

    I liked the way the author set up the storyline so my opinion of the characters changed, as ever so slowly, more information was revealed.  The mentions of Quesnel and Prince George in the novel, which are places not far away from where I live, also made the story more real for me.  It was a fast-paced read that I really enjoyed spending time with. 

       I felt some personal relationship to the story since in the late 1980’s, while I was with the Forest Service, a Bird Dog pilot crashed and was killed on the mountain slope beside the Blackwater (McKale River).  He was leading a water tanker over a fire on the McBride Community Forest.

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