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El Cóndor and the Sulawesi Volcano

It did not explode. It cleared its throat.

El Cóndor, YV-528, is a bush plane bought at an auction in Caracas and named after the Andean condor, the largest flying bird in the world. The condor rides the air instead of fighting it, and Lobster Bob spent three years learning to do the same. On the morning of this story, at the airfield at Manado on the northern tip of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, he does his walk-around, touches the small nick on the propeller blade the way he always does, and takes off south along the coast, past a mountain everyone thought was asleep.

Then a column of grey ash rises off the summit, taller than the mountain itself. Ash is rock ground as fine as flour, and an engine that breathes it in stops being an engine. Lobster Bob turns away and drops towards the sea, and El Cóndor does what her namesake does: she finds the air going her way and rides it home, engine steady, nose level, never hurrying. They land with fine grey dust on her wings. A mechanic offers to smooth out the nick. Lobster Bob says no.

You will learn that Indonesia has more active volcanoes than any other country on Earth, why volcanic ash is so dangerous to aircraft, and how a condor can cross a sky almost without flapping. Nobody explains the nick. Nobody ever will.

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Lobster Bob has been everywhere. Now he is taking you.

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