M. Banner - Stone Age

Now, fuel was their chief problem. Even with the extended tanks John had installed, they were on fumes.

While John and Steve discussed their very limited options, someplace over a rural area west of Ottawa Illinois, their engine stopped, along with their radio, and all other instruments. All the lights in the cockpit flashed once and then went out. It was as if someone just unplugged an invisible power cord.

The cockpit of even a pressurized Cessna is loud, so much so that the pilot and co-pilot wear headphones to both hear the radio and to speak to each other via intercom. The sudden absence of engine noise was deafening. Both John and Steve, almost in unison, tugged at one side of their headsets, exposing an ear to confirm what their now frozen propeller and all their other impulses screamed. They were in trouble. A whistling sound from the rushing air displaced by the plane’s fuselage and a forward sensation being communicated by their inner ears, were the only stimuli telling their senses they were still moving. Otherwise, because the dark of early morning, only slightly illuminated by the green spectral display above, it appeared that they had stopped dead in the air.

“We are dead stick,” John announced.

Steve heard his dad’s muffled voice, unable to see much of his face beside him. The blackness inside the cockpit was thick and unnerving. He ripped off his headphones.

“- confirm. Son, please confirm that you have no readings on your side?” John yelled louder.

“Dad, I have nothing. You too?”

“Affirmative. I have no electronics, but I have full controls.”

“How can we not have even lights? Could our batteries die at the same time as the engine?”

“We have bigger issues. We should be close to a small regional around here…” Their eyes struggled to see through the blanket of darkness that covered them, looking for lights, any lights. But they were in a rural and somewhat rugged part of Illinois. It seemed the lights were off below as well.

They glided past a light and a whoosh-whoosh sound, just barely missing some structure… a windmill ? Then, in the distance was a clearing and a cluster of lights.

“There.” John pointed to a patch of lights assembled together on the ground, a small town of probably a few hundred, and the faintly lit long line of a rural highway leading to it. Steve craned forward to see it

“That’s a highway, not an airport,” hoping he was looking at the wrong lights.

“Flying beggars can’t be choosy. That will have to do.” John pushed his invisible hands forward and turned the plane’s wheel counterclockwise, while his feet pushed the pedals to counter. The ailerons, flaps and rudder worked in harmony to bank the plane left and on a downward slope.

They could both feel their air speed dropping a couple of knots every few seconds. Steve pushed the wheel forward more to keep their speed up at the expense of a quicker rate of decent.

The new quiet and somber darkness around them lulled their senses into a false calmness that belied the real danger that waited below. The Earth was going to come at them fast. They passed a single light of a large house in the hills, but otherwise, it was dark below them. The town’s fast approaching lights beckoned them from just below the cowling, growing in strength with each passing second, as their distance closed.

Then the town’s lights went out. It was as if the blanket of darkness that followed them in the air was thrown over the town as well covering all the lights below.

Now panicked, John and Steve spun their heads wildly, searching for anything, glad they could not see the fear in each other’s faces.

“How will we see the street now?” Steve asked feeling stupid for asking a question, he already knew the answer to.

“At this point, I’ll be happy to see anything,” John answered.

Breathing slowly, Steve tried to think like a pilot, considering what he would want to know, based on the forty or so hours he’d flown. “What do you think our altitude is right now?” He finally asked.

“Around 1000?” John guessed, “Maybe less.” He popped open his window and the scary peace was broken by the cool 120 knot air rushing into their cockpit.

Steve understood without asking. John was flying by his senses now, and he needed to hear as well as see anything he could to keep from going in nose first, or crashing into a structure or trees on the ground.

Their eyes appeared to be adjusting to the darkness. It was the auroras. They came to the same realization at once. The ground was bathed in a bright green light, enough now that they could see the trees and the fast approaching ground

“I see a road,” John announced triumphantly. He banked the plane slightly, but then reality sunk in, with only two hundred feet of altitude, they were too far away to make it.

“Steve, prepare for a crash landing. At that last moment, you need to tuck forward. You got that?”

John leveled the plane and searched for the cleanest line and a solid tree or structure to take some of their inertial energy away. He was thankful that he attended the workshop on crash landing at Oshkosh last year. At least, with little fuel in their tanks, they wouldn’t burn.

“I hear you, Dad. I’m not scared.”

There. He found his flight line between two tall oaks. Every second a loud whoosh sound, announced a passing tree. Any second now .

“I love you, son.”

“Me too,” Steve’s voice rose in pitch, unconsciously bracing for the impact the moment it happened.

The intercom and then the pilot’s voice broke through the loud hum of the plane’s engines which were working hard, still pushing to keep them upward, “This is your captain speaking. I’m sure you have already noticed the rare occurrence outside your windows. For the same reasons we left O’Hare so late, if you look out now, you will probably never see an aurora display this far south in your lifetimes.” Most of the passengers craned and contorted themselves to see the green ribbons of light spread out all over the horizon, so close they felt they could reach up and touch these heavenly objects.

“Soooo beautiful,” Stacy exclaimed, momentarily forgetting her fear, which had been constant throughout their flight.

The captain continued, “Because of recent solar activity, we have the pleasure of—”

The lights flickered and the intercom crackled, cutting off the captain mid-sentence. Every head that had been craning to see the beautiful light show, turned to regard the cockpit door, hoping their gaze would somehow pierce the door and yield some sort of confirmation that the plane’s captain was not as concerned as they were. The engines started to stumble as did the plane’s lights, as if some unknown force was sucking up the plane’s energy. It was the opposite.

All at once, the engines stopped and the lights were extinguished. The passengers were bathed in silence and an eerie green darkness. They held their collective breaths, as if the plane would now float, using the combined air in their lungs.

Stacy’s eyes, slightly illuminated by the green glow of the aurora outside, were filled with terror. Her right hand reflexively reached, grabbed, and squeezed a vice-grip hold on a hand in the seat next to hers. The silence, and the shock of the last few seconds was broken by a sheer wave of panic that washed over everyone from the front to the back of the plane like a tsunami. “Oh, my God!” and “The engines!” screamed out of the cabin’s green haze.

“It will be alright,” Stacy’s friend said, calmly squeezing her hand and the hand of the boy sitting next to her.

Someone yelled something unintelligible, followed by another, and then another, now screeching the same declaration, “FIRE.”