16 Souls

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Seven Months before — January 21^st

Regal 12

“Standby, Ops,” Marty barked into the satellite handset. “Just… please standby a second.”

Somehow he was going to have to slow the pace down. Everything was cascading, and he didn’t need raw instinct to know that was how pilots made fatal decisions — including the one that had probably started this whole nightmare.

Once more he felt his stomach contracting to the size of a singularity at the thought that they’d climbed to wrong altitude and were the ones at fault, but he had to shove that aside.

Marty turned to the copilot, who was deep in concentration holding onto the controls in the right seat.

“Ryan, can you hang on a bit longer?”

“I’ve got her, Skipper. But the controller wants your cell phone number.”

For some reason, the request hit him like a stomach punch, the same effect as a control tower asking a pilot to call them after a potential violation.

Marty nodded and toggled the transmit button, passing his phone number to the controller, then punching up the PA.

Folks, this is the captain again. Your two pilots are working hard, but if there are any other airline pilots aboard, or anyone with big jet experience, we could use some extra eyes up here. Just ring your call button.

There was no time to explain it to the flight attendants, but they were savvy enough to figure it out anyway. Marty punched off the PA, surprised that he didn’t hear a single call chime from the cabin. Most airline flights were awash in off duty pilots, but then again, who’d be voluntarily non-revving on a night like this?

Okay, think! We have to work out the sequence for flap extension, and I need to know if the speed brakes are useable.

The satellite phone was still in his lap and Marty pulled it back to his face.

“Sorry! There a lot of moving parts up here. Where were we?”

“You tell us, Captain,” someone in the ops center replied. “We’ve got about ten of us on the line here to help you as well as our maintenance and performance people and a Boeing engineer.”

Marty was rubbing his eyes and nodding, before recalling that they couldn’t see the gesture.

“All right, my main problem is keeping that Beech fuselage on the wing. If we dislodge them, if they fall away, they die. There’s no question about that. Worse, I have no way of knowing how secure they are on our right wing. I mean it looks like the strut of the right main landing gear is literally embedded in our right wing. Maybe it’s so well stuck that I couldn’t blow them off if I tried, but I’m very worried that any increase in our angle of attack, even if accompanied by a significant decrease in airspeed, could lift them off. And it could happen too fast to stop, which means I really can’t experiment beyond a certain point. Everyone there understanding all this?”

“We’re hearing you, Captain,” someone answered.

“Okay… I’m astounded that we haven’t lost a hydraulic system, but so far so good. My biggest worry is whether we can milk down the flaps, extend them very, very cautiously, while slowing, and keep the same angle into the wind. The more flaps I can get down, the lower my pitch angle has to be for any given speed. That’s why I need to know what the performance figures say about maintaining the same angle of attack at slower airspeeds with the flaps out at different settings. My pitch angle right now is almost zero.”

There was a very loud silence on the other end for what seemed like minutes before one of the engineers responded.”

“Captain, there are really no easily accessible figures for that in our manuals. Boeing? Do you guys have anything to help?”

“Yeah, well… aside from telling you this sort of situation can’t happen and that you can’t do what you’re doing and stay airborne with wreckage on your wing, all I can tell you is that we’re in no man’s land. We can dig up test figures and parameters and all that but… zero pitch, did you say, Captain?”

“Yes.”

“See, I couldn’t even predict that with the graphs and charts I have.”

A quick discussion ensued on the other end culminating in the completely useless information that no one really knew what to do.

Obviously, Marty thought, they were struggling to help, but appreciation was overshadowed by a long-ago disaster over Iowa when a United Airlines DC-10 had lost all hydraulics to an engine explosion. The crew of United 232 desperately needed help from their operations experts, but there was simply no data for a total hydraulic failure and now he knew exactly how Captain Al Haynes had felt.

“Really, gentlemen?” Marty said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the frustration out of his voice. “Come on. I need analysis. I mean, if we got the flaps down to five degrees, and I keep the same airspeed, the flaps would give me additional lift and I could lower the nose a bit to compensate. But if, as we bring the flaps out, I slow the airplane to keep the same angle of attack, producing equal lift with a slower airspeed and more flaps, how far can I slow?”

“Captain, we’ll work on it. We just don’t know.”

“So I have to play test pilot up here?”

A new voice broke in.

“Captain Mitchell, Paul Butterfield here in Central Operations. I’m the head guy tonight. We’re doing and will do everything humanly possible to answer your questions, but we’ve got no basis for that particular answer. As you can imagine, that’s not something we normally need to calculate.”

“Okay, I get that,” Marty said, “but please do your best as fast as you can. In less than an hour I’m going have to just experiment.”

“No… we don’t want you playing test pilot up there, any more than you have to.”

“Then, gentlemen, get me the figures so I know what I’m doing. Of course, this might all be a moot discussion. I may not be able to physically extend the flaps at all.”

Marty could hear a brief exchange from the right seat between the copilot and ATC regarding another heading change. His right hand trembled as it held the satellite phone handset, and a sort of roaring started in his mind, as if everything he was facing was accelerating toward some critical mass.

He forced himself to take a breath and answer a bunch of well-meaning suits who obviously had no clue what he was saying.

“Mr. Butterfield… all of you… I know you’re trying to help, but if we can’t answer my question about slowly bringing the flaps out, then answer this, please. Let me ask you some stuff based on a no flap emergency landing, cause I know we’ve got test data on that.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Captain,” another voice interjected, “we’ve run the numbers for a no flap landing given the one remaining runway they’re telling us is still open at Denver, Runway Seven. Your approach speed — what I guess you pilots call your bug speed — will be one hundred eighty-two knots. With full braking and full reverse and touchdown on or before the numbers, you can just barely stop before the overrun. And, as I’m sure you know, the overrun on that runway ends in a hundred foot downslope.”

Marty bit his lip as he watched Ryan struggling with the airplane and ran the statement from Operations through his head.

“Okay, but at that airspeed, one hundred eighty-two knots… what will my angle of attack be?”

“You have to slow her down for landing, Captain. I don’t think there’s a choice about that. You can’t stop in the available runway otherwise.”

“What pitch — what angle of attack or what nose-up pitch angle — would I be using with the gear down and flaps fully retracted in level flight, at one hundred eighty-two knots, versus the angle of attack I’m using right now at two hundred forty?”

More silence from Operations before a new voice answered.

“Captain, you’re… you say you’re maintaining two hundred and forty knots right now?”

“That’s right. I’ve slowed her down from two fifty. And I don’t dare slow any more without risking all the lives in that wrecked Beech on my wing. I have no damned way of knowing what speed would cant my wing up high enough to cause the slipstream to lift them off the wing and kill them.”

“Captain, Bill Baxter here at Boeing again. I’ve got a team working on it right now.”

“Thank you, Mr. Baxter. You understand what I’m asking?”

“Yes… but we’re going to have to grab for original engineering test flight data. We don’t measure things by angle of attack, or nose-up deck angle, as you know.”

“Okay. Please keep this line open and let me know the moment you’ve got something I can use.”

“Captain, Paul Butterfield here. We’ll keep the line open of course, but about your speed. I need to emphasize that you’re going to have to slow her down.”

“Mr. Butterfield, do you want me to describe the faces of the passengers in that ruined airplane on my wing?”

“Captain, your passengers’ lives depend on…”

“Hey! I’m well aware of my responsibilities, okay? I just picked up some new passengers I hadn’t planned on.”

“I’m just reminding you, sir, that you can’t safely land at that airspeed.”

“Don’t you think I fucking know that?”

There was dead silence in response for several seconds before Marty forced himself to speak. “I’m sorry. I apologize for the profanity but… I’m the one who has to make the final decisions up here.”

He pulled the handset away before Butterfield could respond and turned to motion Nancy, the lead flight attendant, back in the cockpit, to monitor the sat phone as a distant warbling reached their ears.

For several seconds it was confusing: another cockpit warning apparently corking off and he should know what it meant. But he couldn’t recall — until the realization dawned that the noise was the ringtone for his cell phone.

The last goddamned thing I have time for! Marty thought, planning to ignore it even as the insistent sound continued. But there was something in the back of his mind screaming at him that this was somehow important, and even in the jaws of the tidal wave of worries trying to engulf him, Marty ripped the phone from its belt holster and punched it on.

“Yes?”

The voice was distant, and female, and very hesitant, like someone coming out of a deep sleep realizing they’d dialed a wrong number.

“Ah… is this… the captain of… I don’t know what your flight number is, but…”

“Who the hell is this?” he demanded.

“Ah… I’m… the pilot of the airplane on your right wing.”

The roaring in Marty Mitchell’s mind reached a crescendo as her words finally registered.

“I’m sorry… I wasn’t expecting…”

“I’m… Michelle Whittier.”

“You’re the captain?”

“Yes, if there’s anything left to be captain of.”

“I’m Marty Mitchell. Captain as well.”

“You guys hit us. I think one of my people may be dead. Everyone else is okay… although we’re freezing over here.”

“I’m so sorry! I have no idea what happened. I’ll get us down as quick as I can, Michelle.”

“You think that’ll work?”

“Has to.”

“I mean, we’re really moving around out here… my left wing is gone and my right wing may be structurally broken, and we’re being buffeted big time by the wind. I’m not even sure this is all real.”

“I get that. Look, I think your right main gear strut is what’s keeping you on our wing.”

“We’ve got to be creating huge drag for you.”

“Some, yes.”

“And when you slow and configure for landing…”

“I’m not going to slow. I can’t risk a higher deck angle.”

“Ah… Marty, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Marty, how… I mean, how can you land if you don’t slow? How fast are you going… are we going… right now?”

“Two forty. I’m going to try to milk the flaps down to decrease the deck angle as I slow, and hopefully the diminished force of the slipstream will also help keep you there.”

“I’m sorry to point out the obvious, Marty,” she added, “but we can’t fly if we fall off. You know that of course.”

There was a rising tide of emotion suddenly choking off his ability to speak, but he forced himself past the paralysis.

“Yeah. I wish we could bring you across the wing and inside.”

“So do I, but we don’t have any ropes, and unless…”

“We’ll get you down, Michelle.”

“I… of course I hope so. Hope so.”

“I’ll need your help.”

“Right. Anything. Sure,” Michelle replied, each word an attempt to reinforce the previous.

“We’re on vectors right now waiting for our company to get back to me with some of the figures for landing, and we’re down to Runway Seven at Denver, and I need to start experimenting to see if we can milk the flaps out. That’s when I’ll need feedback from you on any movement which might indicate we could lose you.”

“What do you mean?” she asked

“Any sudden grinding, or lifting, or shaking, or any indication she might be coming loose.”

A long pause and an audible exhale filled his ear until her weary voice returned.

“Marty, I’m not sure we would get any warning. We… the fuselage… could just fall off without any, ah… precursors, y’know? It’s constantly shaking right now.”

“Got it. We’ll proceed extremely slowly.”

“I’ll let you get busy but… I guess, call back when you need to.”

“Okay. My phone captured your number.”

“Marty?”

“Yes.”

“Ah… look, please do your best. I’ll admit I’m terrified. I mean, I know you will but, we’re in your hands, y’know?”

“Yes, I know.”

Who am I kidding, Marty thought.

There was no one to help. It was as if she was hanging onto his hand and dangling off the edge of a cliff, and yet he was holding on for dear life himself, screaming for help that would never come, grip loosening, voice hoarse — her Gwen Stacy to his Peter Parker.

He had to clear his throat to answer, and the words felt more like a fraud than a promise.

“We’ll get you down safely, Michelle. I’m not letting you go.”