Lockout

PROLOGUE

October 2012

On approach to Anchorage International Airport, Alaska

Dan Horneman tried to relax his death grip on the control yoke, but the turbulence buffeting the Boeing 737 was alarming, and with every lurch his right hand squeezed harder.

There was no time to enjoy, or even look at, the snow-covered Chugash Mountains, a framed wonderland off to the right. He was barely hanging on.

Friggin’ testosterone test! Dan growled to himself. This flight wasn’t a formal checkride, but obviously Captain Tollefson had decided to see what the new guy was made of and whether he could hold his own against the always flawless airmanship of the Arctic Eagles—the name the airline’s experienced, Anchorage-based pilots called themselves. Dan had been warned about their superior attitude, a special self-appointed elite among Pangia World Airways pilots, and so far Tollefson was living the image precisely

And I had to pick one of the worst weather days of the year!

It wasn’t as if the whole hazing experience was a surprise—Jerry Tollefson had asked enough ridiculously overbearing technical questions before departure from Salt Lake to tip his hand. Slightly younger than Dan’s thirty-eight years and slightly shorter at five nine, Tollefson seemed like a decent sort, if a bit too sure of himself. But Dan fully expected to be grilled further during their layover. Clearly Tollefson had heard the rumors about Dan Horneman.

For that matter, who hadn’t?

From his left seat position, the captain was glancing over at Dan now with a smile, clearly enjoying the grim, determined look on his first officer’s face, and the arrogance riled Dan even further.

“It’s a mite breezy today, to say the least,” Jerry Tollefson said.

“No problem,” Dan managed, trying to force a smile, his throat feeling like cotton. It was his turn to land, and there was no question that any competent Pangia Airways copilot should be able to take any weather conditions in stride.

Yet…

Tollefson was leaning forward importantly, reading something on his forward computer screen as Dan reached to the glareshield and adjusted the airspeed selector, dialing in 160 knots, an electronic order to the autothrottles to maintain that speed. The landing gear was already down and locked and the flaps extended to thirty degrees—the final setting for landing. He was fighting to keep the Boeing 737 under control, the jet’s flight path moving them steadily toward the runway even though the nose of the jet was pointing almost twenty degrees to the left, crabbing into the wind. Their destination, Anchorage runway 7R—one of two parallel runways aligned with compass heading 070—lay three miles ahead, the threshold of the runway beginning on a small cliff some 300 feet above sea level. All afternoon it had been swept by a vicious wind from the north propelling snowdrifts across its 12,000-foot length. To make matters worse, the tower had reported poor braking on 7R, the only runway open and plowed. He might need every inch of the ice-covered surface to fight the airplane safely to the ground and slow her down.

“Winds are three-five-zero at twenty-two, gusts to thirty…” Captain Tollefson said, repeating the latest information from the tower. “That’s about a twenty-five knot crosswind component, and… our limits.”

“Got it,” Dan managed in a low croak.

The tower controller cut through his concentration with the final landing clearance, and Jerry responded in a routine tone of voice. “Pangia 113 cleared to land Seven-Right.”

The jet seemed to be settling, but its motion felt a bit strange, and Dan glanced at the airspeed indicator without registering the value. They were bouncing so severely it was hard to read any of the instruments.

He was behind the airplane, barely hanging onto her, like a terrified rider trying to stay on a runaway horse.

An interphone call chime from the flight attendants had reverberated through the cockpit moments before, and Dan’s brain was only now registering the fact that the captain had already pulled the interphone handset to his ear, his attention suddenly diverted.

“Smoke in the cabin? Where’s it coming from?” Tollefson asked.

From what Dan could hear of the exchange, smoke was curling from one of the restrooms in the back, and it was getting worse, which could mean a real emergency. Whatever the cause, it was now completely distracting the captain.

Dan doubled his concentration on the flight instruments, looking in momentary panic for the ILS, the Instrument Landing System indications, before remembering that the captain had turned it off.

“Dan, you don’t need the ILS or the flight director,” Jerry had said moments before, breezily playing the instructor. “Your runway is in sight and we’re cleared for a visual approach. Real simple, partner. There it is. Go land on it.”

For some reason, being cleared for a so-called “visual approach” hadn’t struck fear in his heart. At least not like it had before. He’d had almost no flight time in a real 737 since passing his rather pro forma checkride, and even that had been administered in a flight simulator safely bolted to a concrete floor. Not that he couldn’t fly manually, but what was upsetting him was the unnecessary loss of the Instrument Landing System’s guidance. He wasn’t used to flying a big jet visually, without the step-by-step procedures of what pilots called an instrument approach.

Dan glanced quickly at the captain. Mr. Macho over there seemed to love seat-of-your-pants flying. He half expected Jerry to turn around and snap off the autothrottles as well, which would force Dan to ride the throttles manually with his left hand to maintain airspeed. He was barely hanging onto the beast as it was!

The fleeting thought that he should make absolutely sure the autothrottles were, indeed, engaged crossed his mind. But the thought instantly fell victim to the avalanche of other stimuli cascading through his consciousness. Trying to figure out why the big Boeing seemed so sluggish and slow was taking center stage.

To Dan’s left, Jerry was still hunched over the center console with the interphone handset, trying to guide the flight attendants through the specific steps needed to isolate a cabin fire. Whatever was happening back there wasn’t getting any better, and Jerry was violating the sterile cockpit rule talking about other matters during a difficult approach—not that Dan wanted to challenge him on protocol. They might have to declare an emergency any second and ask for the fire trucks, but the immediate plan would still be the same: Land as expeditiously as possible on the runway just ahead.

There it was again, that same feeling they were sinking too much. It shuddered through Dan, prompting him to pull more back pressure on the yoke as he ran the pitch trim nose up to compensate. He had to be missing something. Nothing felt right!

Still more back pressure and more nose up trim. Definitely not right!

“Get out the fire extinguishers and check the trash bins in the restrooms and turn off the circuit breakers in the galley,” Jerry barked the order into the phone.

“Should we declare an emergency?” Dan asked, glancing at Jerry in time to see him shake his head.

Dan glanced back up at the glareshield, confirming the 160-knot speed he’d dialed into the speed selection window. But his confusion was growing over what the wallowing of the 737 was trying to tell him. He stole another glance at the real airspeed indicator with such a firm expectation of seeing the same 160-knot reading that his brain refused to contradict him with the fact that it read only 130 knots.

The jet was descending through an altitude of 600 feet above the snow-covered surface of Turnigan Arm, the body of shallow seawater that alternately became a vast mudflat at low tide, the scope of it extending from the western end of the runway several miles across the channel.

“You’re kidding! A cigarette in the trashcan?” The captain was shaking his head, still on the interphone.

Once more Dan ran the pitch trim nose up and increased his pull on the control yoke to get them back up on the glide path, but as the nose seemed to respond, a sudden, massive, audible vibration coursed through the control column, refusing to stop, the vibrations buzzing through Dan’s consciousness, confusing him, paralyzing him, the shaking making no more sense than the sudden blur of motion in his peripheral vision as the captain loosed a guttural cry and lunged forward, flinging the handset away.

“JESUS!”

Tollefson jammed the throttles to the stops and shoved the control yoke forward. The engines wound up to full power, accelerating and buzzing at full takeoff setting, as Dan moved his left hand to back up the captain’s on the throttles, but the captain angrily waved him away.

“I’VE GOT IT! MY AIRPLANE!”

The seismic shaking of the control column stopped, but Tollefson’s eyes were aflame as he glanced toward his copilot.

With the airspeed rapidly increasing and the nose down, they sank below the 300-foot threshold of the runway as the four blood-red VASI lights ahead disappeared.

Dan was already folding up with embarrassment. He’d failed to recognize the so-called stick shaker, the most basic emergency warning in the cockpit—the 737’s way of telling its pilots that the plane was a mere three knots away from not having enough airspeed to stay in the air. He’d all but stalled them, and now Jerry was fighting to keep them in the air.

Tollefson pulled gingerly, carefully, the big 737 too low to get over the embankment less than a quarter mile ahead without more altitude, the airspeed accelerating slowly now above 130 knots. He arrested their overall descent less than 150 feet above the muddy bay, the engines screaming, the Boeing gaining airspeed, the captain careful not to re-enter the event horizon of a stall as they began climbing again, struggling to nurse the jet back above the altitude of the runway threshold.

And just as quickly they were high enough and the runway surface reappeared, the aircraft now climbing, the airspeed coming up through 165 knots, flashing over the threshold embankment at the end without shearing off the landing gear, but with little more than thirty feet to spare.

Jerry swept the throttles back to idle, fighting too much airspeed as well as the vicious, gusting crosswind. He wrestled the 737 toward the concrete, the yoke continuously in motion, using the rudder to kick out the twenty-degree crab into a sideslip as he set the jet down on the left main gear about halfway down the runway. He let her roll to the right enough to settle the right main gear and nose gear and in a blur of movement yanked the spoilers out and the thrust reversers into operation, struggling to keep her on centerline, listening to the chattering of the anti-skid system as they slowly decelerated on the slick surface through a hundred knots, then eighty, then sixty, the end of the runway coming up too fast, his stomach in a knot.

With agonizing slowness the speed decreased until at last it dropped below twenty, and Jerry Tollefson gingerly steered the 737 to the left and off the end of the runway, where he came to a complete stop on the runup apron.

The captain took a deep breath and looked over at Dan Horneman, as if an alien had suddenly plopped down in the copilot’s seat.

“What in holy hell was THAT, Dan?”

“I…”

“You almost killed us!”

“I… I don’t know, Jerry, I…”

“Where the hell was your airspeed control?”

“I had the autothrottles on…”

“You WHAT?”

“The autothrottles, I had them on and…”

“No you didn’t… they weren’t even armed! I turned them off when I killed the ILS and told you to fly the damned approach manually. You were supposed to be flying this mother, not programming her!”

“I don’t know what to say, Jerry, other than I humbly apologize, and I recognize that you saved us.”

Tollefson was shaking his head in utter amazement, his left hand still on the yoke and shaking slightly as he tried to get a handle on what to say and how to answer the tower controller who was waiting for them to change to Ground Control.

“Where in the hell did you learn to fly, Horneman? Microsoft?”