RE Log - Spring 2024

Ocean Met By Matt Margini Humanities Department Faculty Aviators use the term “equal time point” to describe the moment on a flight when you don’t have enough fuel to turn back. The point of no return. On November 6, 2020, pilot Nathaniel Johansson ’14 and his co-pilot, Kelly Michaels, had just reached the “equal time point” on a 2,200-mile flight from Santa Monica to Honolulu, and they were feeling good. They were delivering a brand-new, $9 million Pilatus turboprop to its new owner in Australia. At 28,000 feet, the plane was humming along, 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Michaels crawled into the back, squeezing past two extra 150-gallon fuel tanks to fetch some “celebratory” packs of hummus that they had saved for the halfway point. That’s when the instrument panel started dinging with warnings no aviator wants to see. Fuel low pressure. Engine failure. The propeller came to a stop. Not long after, the plane was in the ocean. Johansson and Michaels were in a life raft, hoping to be saved. In a riveting upper school assembly last April, Johansson, a seasoned aviator who now trains pilots for Atlas Air, told this story to Ransom Everglades students. Despite the 28,000-foot drop, the life-or-death stakes, the make-it-or-break-it decision points, he emphasized how much it was just another day on the job, structured by routines and procedures that he’d practiced a thousand times before. But his eventful and varied career in aviation wasn’t the only thing that prepared him for that moment. As he steeled himself for a water landing 1,000 miles from any landmass, he found himself tapping into muscle memory from his time on the Ransom No matter where in the world he lands, Nathaniel Johansson ’14 stays close to RE SPRING 2024 Ransom Everglades LOG 25 Nathaniel Johansson '14 takes a selfie shortly before his rescue