John Nance - 16 Souls

She had tried to keep her composure, Marty recalled, but clearly the flint-hard lawyer had been shaken by his words. He could tell by the way she had shifted uncomfortably in her plush boardroom chair, her hand tugging absently at a tendril of hair as she asked with feigned detachment, “So, what were your options?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. I was in denial, y’know? The jet was still flying… and both engines were running… but I had this… this thing on my right wing and there was no precedent, no training for what to do about that. My jet, the 757, was sluggish and yawing to the right… I could essentially feel the presence of that fuselage in my controls.”

“Did the airline help? You called them for help, right?”

“They were trying, but they’re only set up for routine emergencies, and this was anything but routine. And to make matters worse, the captain of the aircraft we rammed pulls out a cell phone to talk to the controllers, and then… then, goddammit, she calls me !”

“What’s wrong with that?” Judith Winston had asked.

He’d paused, grasping for the words.

“How can I make you understand? One moment it’s a thing out there, a problem I can deal with almost in the abstract, even if my mistake created that problem. I can deal with numbers and abstracts and emergencies. But then her damned voice was in my ear.”

“Pardon?”

“The other pilot. The controller asked for my cell phone. He should have asked me if it was okay to pass it on, but he didn’t, and suddenly it rings with a frightened woman on the other end, a fellow pilot stranded on my right wing with fifteen others. Suddenly her life is a personal albatross around my neck. She’s totally dependent on what I do, what I decide, and worse, I got her into this by ramming her! I didn’t need that level of pressure! It was hard to even think, the magnitude and gravity of all of it was so profound already. But the moment that happened… the moment a live person invaded my command space… it made it personal and unbearable.”

“But… why? I’m struggling to grasp why it made a difference?”

“Because, dammit, that could have been me out there, terrified and barely hanging on and totally out of control! I couldn’t keep from being an empath! I felt her terror, and I caused it.”

“So, you’re saying that affected your ability to make the right decision?”

Marty had met the lawyer’s eyes, uncaring that his were probably glistening with tears as he shook with anger.

“There was no right decision. That’s the goddamned point! But even if there had been, who am I to decide, y’know? Who am I to decide who lives and dies? Those people on my wing, they have names and families and… and suddenly it wasn’t just a number. It wasn’t just souls on board anymore. And I couldn’t un-ring that bell.”

He had let himself submerge back into the narrative of that horror.

“Okay, where was I?”

“You were talking to your company and trying to figure out how to land,” she offered.

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.