Reade Saunders

A crash implied violence, panic, an ending. This was an arrival, an unscheduled landing, an argument with physics that had concluded in a draw. The aircraft had stopped in a field with its dignity compromised, yes, but the pilot had walked away with his.

He could live with that.

From the outside, it looked worse. The propeller bent like a broken wrist, blades twisted into a shape that made no aeronautical sense. The nose sat in the churned earth at a stubborn angle, as if the machine had attempted to burrow. The canopy was crazed with spider cracks that caught the low sun and made the cabin look full of shattered amber.

He stood a few steps away, headset still around his neck, watching the scene as though it belonged to someone else. His hands were clean. That pleased him. He noticed the detail with the same part of his mind that noticed misaligned rivet lines, loose tie-down knots, or a student’s hesitation before transmitting.

There were people running now. A farmer with a flat cap, two men from a nearby yard, someone in a hi-vis who smelled of oil and urgency. They shouted questions at him in German and received calmness in return, which they seemed to interpret as either competence or shock.

“Bist du verletzt?”

“Nein.”

“was ist passiert?!”

“Engine..motor fehlschlagen“

He said it as if he’d already completed the incident report. Words selected for their utility, not their truth. It wasn’t a lie exactly, loss of power was the shape of it, but not the whole. The whole was too large, too messy. The whole contained decisions.

He checked his phone and saw a missed call from home. Another. A message thread with the word Where appearing twice, each time with more punctuation. He slid the phone back into his pocket without reading the rest.

He could manage that later.

He was thinking, absurdly, about the children’s shoes. About how they left them in the hallway in disarray, some upside down, some with the laces knotted into impossible loops. He had told them countless times that shoes had a place. The place was a rack. The rack was a system. If you couldn’t keep your shoes in order, what did that say about your ability to keep anything else in order.

His mind liked these small rules. They were reliable. They returned the world to him in digestible proportions.

The farmer approached and stood beside him, looking at the aircraft as if it were an animal that had wandered into the wrong enclosure.

“Scheiße” the farmer said.

The pilot nodded. “It could’ve been worse.”

The farmer glanced at him. “Yes! for sure it could.”

The pilot waited for admiration, or at least recognition. He had done something difficult, hadn’t he. He had placed a wounded machine onto the ground and remained intact. That mattered. In his world, that mattered more than apologies.

Instead the farmer looked back at the bent propeller with something close to disappointment, as if the scene did not satisfy whatever story he’d expected to witness.

That irritated the pilot in a clean, contained way.

He found himself remembering the faces of his former comrades. Men who wore risk like an entitlement. Men who had survived things they should not have survived and became worse for it. He had always told himself he wasn’t like them. He had a family now. He had responsibility. He flew civilian machines. He ran a business. He did school drop-offs. He knew the dates of birthdays.

And yet, under the surface, there was the same old hunger. The same belief that skill exempted you from consequences.

He called it experience.

A man from the yard asked him if he wanted water. He accepted, sipped once, then held the bottle without drinking. He liked holding objects. Objects didn’t argue. They didn’t accuse. They didn’t have versions of you.

On the edge of the field, the aircraft’s shadow stretched long and theatrical. The sun was low enough to make everything look like a painting, rich with gold and bruise-colour. It made the wreckage beautiful, which felt obscene.

He heard himself say, to no one in particular, “that’ll buff out”

It sounded almost like he was seeking a witness.

The hi-vis man looked at him, then at the aircraft, then back. “Lucky,” he said.

The pilot smiled, thinly.

He didn’t correct the man, but he did not accept the framing either. Luck was what you said when you didn’t want to acknowledge competence. Luck was what others said when a man had done something difficult and they didn’t like the idea that he could.

He had always resented that.

In the seconds before the engine had softened into silence, he had leaned forward instinctively, as if proximity could persuade the machine back into obedience.

He had gone through the checklist, quickly, efficiently, the way he prided himself on doing everything. Condition lever..cut-off..fire handle..Gen..bleeds… His fingers moved with the confidence of repetition. He knew where everything was without looking, which was true mastery of his craft.

Gravity cared little for checklists.

In those seconds he had felt something he hadn’t felt before, not fear exactly, but the sensation of authority leaving his grasp. The world was doing something without asking him. That was the true insult.

A clean story. He told himself there was no time to evaluate the slope, the size, the surrounds… He told himself his instincts were better than hesitation. He told himself that the ground was just another advisory limitation.

The aircraft had disagreed.

When the wheels noticed the transition, it was not the gentle kiss he later described. The propeller met earth and became something else. The cabin filled with a sudden density, a sound like a huge book being closed. In that instant, his mind did what it had always done under pressure. It became cold and operational.

He did not pray. He did not cry out. He did not think of his children in a warm montage. He thought, briefly and with irritation, about the paperwork.

Then the aircraft stopped.

Now, in the aftermath, people wanted a narrative. They wanted contrition, or gratitude, or shock. They wanted him to perform the correct emotional response so they could place him into the right category.

He didn’t give it to them.

He stood with his shoulders square, not as a pose but as a habit. He spoke in short sentences. He kept his voice level. Inside, he was already rebuilding. He was already editing.

He called home eventually. He waited until he was alone for it, stepping away from the cluster of bodies and buzzing phones, walking toward the hedgerow where the field dipped slightly and the wind carried the smell of damp soil.

When she answered, her voice was tight. “Where are you?”

“I’m fine,” he said, before she could say anything else.

A pause. Then, “What do you mean you’re fine.”

“There’s been an incident. I’m okay.”

“What incident.”

“Engine issue. I put it down.”

Another pause, longer. “Put it down? where.”

“In a field.”

Silence again. He could hear her breathing, trying to decide how to respond. He did not offer her space. Space invited emotion, and emotion invited chaos.

“I’m coming,” she said.

“No,” he replied, too quickly.

The word landed heavy between them.

“No?” Her voice sharpened. “No, what.”

“There’s no need. I’ll be home later.”

“Wh…”

“It’s under control.”

He heard himself say it and felt, faintly, the absurdity. Under control. The aircraft sat behind him like a corpse. His hands were clean, yes, but that proved nothing.

“It’s dealt with,” he said.

He listened to the silence that followed, and for the first time he felt something like unease. Not about the aircraft. About her. About the fact that she was not grateful. Not praising him. Not relieved in the way he needed her to be.

“I’m alive,” he said, as if this should cheer her up.

“Thank God,” she whispered, and there it was, the shape of her fear finally given language. It should have moved him. It should have softened him. Instead, he felt a brief flare of annoyance, not at her fear, but at the implication that God had something to do with it.

He had done this. He had kept himself alive.

“Look,” he said, “I’ll explain later. I love you.”

And he ended the call before she could invite more.

When he turned back toward the field, he saw that someone had started taking photos. A phone held up, the wreckage framed neatly against the dusk. He felt an old familiar itch, the desire to control the image. To step into the shot at the right angle. To ensure the story looked competent.

He didn’t, but he thought about it.

The BFU investigator was thorough. The pilot answered cleanly. He spoke in the language of procedure, because procedure was safe. The man nodded, wrote, nodded again.

“Any contributing factors,” the man asked.

The pilot hesitated. It was a question that could swallow him whole.

“Mechanical,” he said.

The word satisfied everyone. Mechanical meant impersonal. Mechanical meant no one had to talk about judgment.

The man wrote it down and exchanged bureaucratic pleasantries.

As the light thinned, the people dispersed, the urgency dissolving into the regular evening. The aircraft remained, black against gold. The pilot stood alone for a moment, listening to the field settle. Somewhere, a bird made a single sharp call.

He felt, unexpectedly, empty.

Not grateful, not humbled. Just empty.

He had survived the moment, but nothing else had arrived. No lesson had been installed. No wisdom assembled. The experience sat in him like an unopened package.

He knew, with a clarity that did not feel dramatic, that others would want this to change him. They would want the crash to function as a moral corrective, as if physics were a priest. They would ask if he’d learned something. They would lean in with that faint hunger people have for another man’s humiliation.

He could already hear the phrases. Wake-up call. Second chance. Near miss. Puts things in perspective.

He disliked all of them.

He walked back toward the wreckage and ran his hand along the fuselage. The metal was cool now. The aircraft felt, strangely, offended.

“I did what I could,” he thought quietly, as if to the machine, or to himself.

It was true.

To a point.

He rehearsed the story aloud in his head. Refining it, removing the pauses where doubt lived. By the time he reached the driveway, the narrative was smooth enough to repeat.

Inside, the house was loud, children moving, dinner smells, shoes in the wrong place. 

His wife met him in the hallway and held his face between her hands, as if checking that he was real. Her eyes shone with the aftermath of fear.

“You’re here,” she said.

He nodded once, steady.

“You’re safe.”

“I told you,” he said.

He meant it as reassurance. It landed like dismissal.

She stared at him for a moment, longer than was comfortable, and then she stepped back. The children surged forward, climbing him, asking a hundred questions he could not answer without breaking his own framing.

“Did you crash,” one of them asked.

He smiled. “No. The aircraft did.”

They laughed, uncertain, taking their cue from his tone.

Later, after they were in bed, she asked again, more quietly, “What really happened.”

He told her the edited version. Mechanical failure. Good field. Clean landing. No drama. He did not mention the moment his authority slipped. He did not mention the impulse to refuse her coming. He did not mention the empty feeling.

When he finished, she nodded slowly. “And you’re okay.”

“Yes.”

She waited. He did not add anything.

In the silence, he felt the uneasy sense that she was looking at him as if he were something she could not quite place. Not a hero, not a victim. Something else.

He found himself irritated again, almost without choosing it.

“What’s up,” he asked.

She blinked. “I want.. you to feel something.”

He gave a small laugh, soft but sharp. “I feel plenty.”

He meant it. He did. He felt control. He felt contempt for chaos. He felt the comfort of procedures. He felt the familiar urge to keep moving so nothing could catch him.

What he did not feel was what she meant.

He stared at the ceiling and listened to the house breathe. He told himself that tomorrow he would sort the insurance, arrange the recovery, write the report. He would do what needed doing. He would make it functional again, or at least make the loss legible.

In the dark, the image of the bent propeller returned, ugly and precise. A machine forced into surrender.

He thought, briefly, about surrender as a concept.

Then he dismissed it.

He had survived. The aircraft had not.

That was the balance.

But it would not satisfy them.