16 Souls

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Seven Months before — January 21^st

Regal 12

“Approach, Regal Twelve. I assume runway zero seven is still the only one open?”

“Affirmative, Twelve, and the airport is advising that landing sooner than later would be a good idea. They’re trying to keep ahead of the snowfall with the plows, but this storm is unprecedented.”

“Understood, Approach. Right now, we need vectors for a north-south track with twenty-mile legs for the next ten or fifteen minutes. We’re going to try configuring and slowing.”

The controller relayed a heading, and with the cell phone connection to the captain of the wrecked 1900 on speakerphone, Marty took control from the copilot.

“Ryan, check the leading edge on your side for ice. I checked the left a minute ago and we’re clear, but I am assuming the anti-ice is inop on the right leading edge.”

The copilot swiveled his head around, face against the side window as he strained to see the right wing.

“This stuff is too dry to stick, Captain, and I have no idea whether the anti-ice ducting is blown or what.”

“At least the engine anti-ice is on.”

There was silence for a few seconds before Marty turned to the right seat, suppressing his roiled and conflicted feelings which were mixing a dark anger for the copilot’s contribution to this disaster, with contrition for his own failure, leavened by appreciation for the younger man’s aeronautical competence under pressure. If they survived, they would sort it all out on the ground. Hell, the NTSB and the airline and everyone up to God would sort it out with dire consequences to be liberally distributed to the offending flight crew, but for right now, the first officer was the best ally in sight. And the younger man was clearly feeling as frightened and hunted and alone as Marty.

“Ryan?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Kill the ‘captain’ and ‘skipper’ and ‘sir’ crap, okay? My name is Marty. Use it. We’re working this together.”

Ryan met his gaze with the look of a startled owl.

“Okay?” Marty nudged.

“Yes,” Ryan answered, nodding. “Thank you… Marty.”

“Welcome. And for the record, I’m scared shitless as well. Now, you’re one hundred and fifty percent sure you got the right circuit breakers for the leading edge devices?”

“Absolutely certain.”

“Anything else we should be considering or thinking about? Anything we haven’t addressed?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, here we go. I’m going to bring the throttles back incrementally and I want you to start milking the trailing edge flaps out and watch that gauge like a hawk for any asymmetry. Michelle? Can you hear us? Are you ready?”

“We are,” was the response.

The sound of the two huge turbofan engines changing pitch ever so slightly met their ears as the copilot lifted the flap lever out of the detent and brought it backwards a few millimeters at a time. He could hear the hydraulic motors begin to turn the torque tubes driving jackscrews that allowed the flaps to descend into a highspeed slipstream. Both of them were well aware that at two hundred forty knots they were going to overspeed the flaps, even though the entire flap system was sufficiently overbuilt to take such a beating.

“We’re at flaps one, moving to flaps two,” Ryan reported.

“Slowing through two hundred thirty-five knots…” Marty said, “…holding the same pitch angle. Keep the flaps coming… same slow rate.”

“Roger”

“It feels pretty much the same out here,” Michelle reported.

“Okay, slowing through two hundred thirty knots… down to two twenty-five. Flaps, Ryan?”

“About four degrees… I’m having to interpolate on this readout.”

Marty felt a tiny tinge of relief that the leading edge devices in fact had not popped out. Any one of them deploying could have been catastrophic. Obviously Ryan had pulled the right breakers.

“We’re at two hundred twenty-five knots and I’m holding the same pitch angle but we’re starting to drift down in altitude. Keep the flaps coming, Ryan. I’m holding the airspeed and the power right here, and hoping the flaps will give us more lift at a slower airspeed.”

“Coming through flaps five,” the copilot reported. “You feel that buffeting?”

“Yes,” Marty replied, the disturbed air roiling over the Beech fuselage had changed angle slightly and was shaking the tail of the 757. “It’s controllable. Michelle? You agree?”

“We feel the shaking, and we’re starting to put some forward pressure on our yoke. Are you changing your pitch angle?”

“Trying not to, but I’m going to have to pull up a bit more.”

“We’re feeling it shimmy and… and we hear a little metallic screeching, but nothing too alarming.”

“Okay, I’m holding two twenty-five knots and the same pitch angle, flaps are at what, Ryan?”

“About seven percent.”

“Okay, and we’re sinking about three hundred feet per minute. Michelle, I’m going to increase pitch angle by two degrees.”

Gingerly he put back pressure on the 757’s yoke, feeling the nose come up slightly, watching the attitude deviation indicator on the screen in front of him to limit the change.

“Ah, we’re hearing a lot of metal sounds over here and she’s bucking a bit. We’re putting pitch down pressure on our yoke. I think we can take some more.”

“Okay… keep the flaps coming, Ryan. That pitch angle has zeroed our descent… we’re holding altitude. I’m going to try slowing to two-twenty.”

“Flaps coming through ten percent now, ah, Marty,” Ryan reported.

“Pitch attitude is two degrees and…” Marty began, his voice trailing off as the 757 began rolling to the right.

“STOP THE FLAPS!” Marty ordered.

“Yeah…” Ryan replied, “we’ve got an asymmetry. Right side has stopped.”

“Yes. I’m bringing the flap handle back up… please tell me when we’re neutral… when, I mean, the roll moment has stopped.”

“Right there! Stop!”

“Okay.”

“How much flap do we have out?”

“Ah… ah… eleven percent. But I’m just past the flaps ten detent. If I let the handle go, it could move.”

Marty turned to the lead flight attendant holding the iPhone by his ear. “Nancy? Is there any tape of any sort in the galley?”

“I think so.”

“Wait, guys,” Ryan said. I carry duct tape in my flight bag. Here… I’ll tape the lever in place and…”

Suddenly a loud metallic screech and rumble shook the cockpit and the 757 yawed to the right as the voice of the other captain cut through their consciousness from the speaker of the iPhone.

“SHIT!”

A rhythmic bouncing was shaking them as well as another lurch accompanied by a scream from the cockpit of the Beech 1900.

In the Cabin of Regal 12

Lucy felt as if she were descending through the outer circles of hell. She had been watching the Beech fuselage as if her laser-like vigilance could somehow keep Greg safe. It was she who first noticed a dark panel of metal near the front of the ruined fuselage suddenly rise up, shaking violently. The vibrations were followed by a rhythmic bouncing and her heart all but stopped as she saw the structure begin to move, like an injured creature trying to rise where it had fallen. She saw the front end begin to bounce upward, and even being halfway back in the 757 at row 22 she could hear voices yelling in the cockpit as the tail of the parasitic aircraft suddenly rose and the 757 pulsed nose down.

She was losing him. The aircraft would fly up and back and disappear and she didn’t need a pilot’s license to know they would die if that happened with only one wing. He would die! The guy she’d waited a lifetime for who she’d finally found in her early forties was retreating to another dimension in time, like the wrenching scene in her favorite film Somewhere in Time. She hadn’t even realized her right hand was on the window, fingers spread, in a gesture beyond mere words.

The Cockpit of Regal 12

“LOWER YOUR NOSE… MARTY… PLEASE! It’s trying to pull loose…”

Marty had pulsed the yoke forward slightly, relaxing the back pressure to let the 757’s nose drop quickly by several degrees, changing the angle of the airflow over the wings and lessening the pressure on the underside of the Beech fuselage.

“What’s happening over there?” he asked.

“Oh God… pushing! No, Luke, push more! Help me! “

Her voice was vibrating from the shaking violently bouncing the ruined Beech fuselage before the sound of the phone being dropped and banging around the floor of the cockpit.

“Michelle?” Marty tried.

Suddenly the shaking in the 757 stopped, and Ryan looked at the captain with a feral look of disbelief.

“MICHELLE?” Marty yelled, meeting Ryan’s gaze. “Look out there… are they…”

The copilot had already plastered his face to the window.

“Yes! They’re still there! I can’t see much but they’re still with us.”

The sound of the phone being retrieved in the Beech cockpit was followed by Michelle Whittier’s voice, clearly shaken.

“Oh God! Luke, hold it there. We almost blew off!” Michelle shouted, her voice shaking. “We… I could feel the right gear strut lifting out of your wing and our nose was pulling us up… we pushed hard on the yoke and she settled back in but… it won’t take much more… angle of attack I mean. It was so sudden…”

“Our flaps are out as far as we can get them, Michelle, and I’m at two twenty and now speeding up by ten knots to get back to the same deck angle.”

“Okay… I…”

“Are you all right?”

“NO! God, no, we’re not all right! How the fuck did all this happen, anyway? What did I do to deserve this hell?”

A breaking wave of shame, guilt, and remorse broke over Marty and for a second deprived him of the ability to speak, but Michelle’s voice provided the grace of a reprieve, for the moment.

“Nevermind… that’s not… I’m just deeply rattled over here. We were just lucky a minute ago. That came out of nowhere… no warning. We jammed the yoke forward and thank God it worked… for now.”

“Agreed,” Marty said, his throat even more bone dry now than seconds before. “We’re at two hundred thirty knots. Keep forward pressure on your yoke.”

“Please don’t slow anymore!”

“We won’t.”

“It’s still bouncing out here, far more than before… like the nose is trying to lift again… and making those screeching noises, so it’s not as well seated… the gear strut… as before.”

“Michelle, is your right aileron controllable? If your right wing is producing lift out there, maybe rolling your yoke to the right could settle it back on our wing more. Your call.”

“Already doing it. How long to landing?”

“Ah, ten, maybe twenty minutes,” Marty replied.

Her voice came back markedly different, low and metered and somber.

“Okay, we have to face the facts. This may not work, Marty. Even if we can stay on your wing to landing, you’ll never get a 757 stopped on a slick runway inside of ten thousand feet.”

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take, and the length is twelve thousand, just… the far end is unplowed.”

“They were closing runways behind us. What’s left down there? Which runway?”

“We’ll come in on Runway Seven.”

There was a long pause and what sounded like a sigh before she replied.

“Ah… you do realize there’s a dropoff at the east end of seven, right? At least a hundred feet. And to each side… well, there are the taxiways to the north.”

“I know.”

“Any other runway would be better.”

“All the other are covered in snow, Michelle.

“I think that’s my point.”

“I’m not following you.”

He heard the phone scrape on something again and a cry of pain.

“Michelle?”

“Sorry, sorry! My shoulder is… hurt. I forgot not to move it.”

“How are you and your crew and passengers holding out?”

“We won’t die of hypothermia before you run out of fuel, but I may move to the Sahara after this. No, we’ll… we’re holding on… literally and figuratively.”

“Just a little longer.”

“Look… Marty… I want to live… I want my passengers to live… but I want everyone in your plane to live, too…”

“Michelle! That’s enough. I’ll get us down. I’m not sacrificing you guys to make a smooth landing.”

“What can I do over here.”

“Just what you’re doing. Now it’s up to us.”

There was a garbled reply

“What?” Marty asked.

“I just said… ‘I hope God is with us,’” she replied quietly. “Not my characteristic benediction but, you know what they say: There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Mountaineer 2612

“Luke, I have to ask you something,” Michelle Whittier said, wincing in pain again as she glanced at her copilot.

“Sure. What?”

“Since we know we’ve got over twelve hundred pounds of baggage in the back of this fuselage, and we’re trying to keep from tipping backwards, and the weight being so far back is a significant force trying to pull us off this wing…”

“I know where you’re going.”

“Do you? Because we’d have to use the crash axe to chop through the wall to the cargo bay, and then open the door from inside, which means it will blow off instantly, and if it doesn’t, if it just opens into the airstream, it could pull us off by itself.

“But if we could get rid of that weight…”

“Michelle, I know of one 1900 cargo door that came completely open in flight and didn’t blow off.”

“Yeah, but we’d be guessing as to whether it could affect us.”

“Wait, I have an idea,” Luke said. “I know I can get into the cargo bay… that wall is flimsy. Instead of changing the cargo door, why don’t we relay bags to the emergency exit row, pull the exit open, and dump stuff out there. Even if some of the bags won’t fit, we can dump the contents.”

“Really good idea,” she answered, “…and maybe we can find more warm stuff for our freezing passengers to wear. We also need to move people forward to the extent we can.”

“Only three empty seats forward,” Luke replied, “…but I’ll take care of it. Can you keep forward pressure on the yoke, though?”

“Yes. One way or another.”

“Okay.”

“How are you holding out, Luke?”

He had been in the process of removing his seat belt and he looked her in the eye now and paused.

“Ah… I’m very cold, like you, and I thought we were done back there, so… every minute’s a gift, y’know?”

She nodded. “I do.”

“Having something to do, to fight with, is good.”

“It is. Go. Quick. Move the people forward first.”