Drone Threat

26

The Airbus A380 taxied to a stop on runway 36R, facing due north (000 true), waiting for permission from the tower to take off. The red-and-white kangaroo logo on its eighty-foot-high tail glimmered in the late, high morning sun. Qantas purchased the world’s largest commercial airliner in order to create what had been, until recently, the world’s longest nonstop commercial flight of 8,578 nautical miles from Dallas/Fort Worth to Sydney, Australia. With a cruising speed of 560 miles per hour, the flight time was just under seventeen hours. Today’s particularly efficient ground crew put them on the flight line two minutes ahead of schedule.

Qantas Flight 8 was oversold again and every seat occupied. Five hundred twenty-five passengers were located in three different classes on two flight decks arranged like a London double-decker bus.

To make the long trans-Pacific flight, the A380’s four turbofan engines required more than eighty-five thousand gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel stored in tanks located in the wings. The nine-foot-long turbofan blades spun at supersonic speeds, feeding air into the three-thousand-degree inferno of the engine’s combustion chamber.

If the spinning blades ever broke off, they’d turn to white-hot titanium shrapnel. The plane, in effect, was a flying gasoline bomb, and the supersonic blades were giant spinning matches. An exploding engine could also damage or disable wing surfaces, landing flaps, and a dozen other critical airframe components, along with the plane’s hydraulic, electrical, and braking systems.

Sitting on the tarmac, fuel tanks full and cabin crowded to the gills with anxious passengers, the A380 finally received the tower’s signal for departure.

The captain pushed the throttles forward and released the brakes. The turbines whined as the engines accelerated. In order to achieve takeoff, the A380 had to reach a speed of at least 170 miles per hour. When the engines were fully engaged, the plane would reach that speed after covering nearly ten thousand feet of 36R’s thirteen-thousand-foot runway. Through the miracle of brilliant human engineering, the fully loaded A380 could cover that distance in just seventy-eight seconds.

Forty seconds down the runway, the copilot pointed at a familiar shape speeding just a few feet off the tarmac directly toward them. He shouted in his headset.

“DRONE!”

No way to avoid it.

The five-pound drone slammed directly into the number-three engine. The captain didn’t panic. The spinning forward fan blades were like a giant Cuisinart married to the world’s biggest vacuum cleaner. They were safety-engineered to suck in and push out all kinds of objects while in flight, including torrents of ice and water and even frozen birds. With any luck the drone would be shredded, burned, and spat out the other end like a hapless duck.

Unfortunately, the drone was carrying a small payload of brick-orange Semtex, a plastic explosive.

The Semtex erupted.

The blades on the forward fan disc in number-three engine ripped away like loose teeth. In less than a second, the titanium fragments exploded through the compressor and combustor assemblies like a shotgun blast, shredding gearboxes, casings, vanes, discs, and bearings.

The plane shuddered.

People screamed.