Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

27C was a retired lieutenant who had joined the Dallas police force at the beginning of that November; thirty-six years and change since the morning he’d shaken the hand of an officer named Tippit, a no-nonsense crewcut type who for almost forty years now had been nothing more than history’s trivia question.

25D debated whether to use the lavatory now or wait until he was off the plane and headed to the gold-status area of his preferred rental car company; he wondered which ubiquitous sedan waited under the yellow-green marquee that flashed out his last name, misspelled.

28D was knitting a six-foot scarf in blue-and-white wool.

30D, seated closest to the aft lavatory, wondered who he might complain to about the stench—stale wine, the ammonia of household cleaners and stray urine, even, he thought, the acrid smell of burning plastic.

The purser counted four-dollar miniature liquor bottles. The head flight attendant counted days until her retirement. The second flight attendant sipped bottled water and read a copy of Shape magazine.

Given a following wind and the anticipated movement of the jet stream to a southeasterly flow, the in-flight computer told Captain Grady Williston, fifty-five, of Westlake, Texas, that he could shave twenty-one minutes off the flight time. From the flight deck, he had already reported the prospects for an early arrival, but now, waiting for a vector for final approach, he began to regret it; Dallas was packed with end-of-season travelers, people heading home from Christmas with the family, which usually meant a crowded approach, having to take a sky lap or two before landing. Landing slots thirty-six seconds apart meant rush-hour traffic in the skies. Yet his own plane was only two-thirds full. The copilot had certified the count: seventy-seven passengers and six crew.

The navigator—Chuck Belk, forty-eight, of Chula Vista, California—confirmed a fuel reserve of nearly three hours, ten minutes, enough to circle Dallas four dozen times, enough, should events warrant, to allow for a diversion to Phoenix Sky Harbor, New Orleans, Sioux City. In the event of an actual emergency.

The rhythm of working with this familiar crew meant Captain Williston did not worry about the minor issues that bothered the flight attendants: passenger complaints about the seats, the assignations that led to entry in the mile-high club, an end-of-the-day shortage in the count of miniature liquor bottles. He feared the unpredictable: sudden turbulence, clouds exploding in microbursts, wind shear, bird and lightning strikes, runway incursions, and, as had happened last month on a long haul from Kennedy to Buenos Aires, a drunk and unruly passenger shitting on top of the beverage trolley; he worried about handheld missiles and passengers carting aboard Semtex-loaded backpacks, and, even though it had not happened in more than twenty years, he worried about an idealist brandishing a comically tiny handgun and demanding an audience with Brother Fidel, afternoon tea with Qaddafi. Captain Williston did not worry about the equipment itself.

Neither did the airline. After two more months of routine short hops, point to point between Salt Lake and the hub in Dallas, the plane was headed to a maintenance facility in Phoenix, where the logos and identifying marks and registry numbers would be sandblasted away, the skin of the airframe taken down to bare metal before repainting. The airline’s business plan included pawning off the problems of this particular jet, known and unknown, to the Guinean national airline. Twice a week, the plane would fly its most glamorous route, triangulating between Conakry, Beirut, and Dubai. The retrofits and hush kits that quieted the voracious wail of the tri-engine jet had been stopgap measures at best.

The crew heard the broadcast on their headsets, air traffic control reporting to Flight 503, “Traffic in the area,” an observation confirmed by First Officer Bill Zimmer with a lackluster “Check.”

Navigator Belk chimed in from the third seat with his response, heard only on the flight deck and duly recorded on the cockpit voice recorder, “Duh.” Belk, a former Marine, Annapolis graduate, took pains to get his work space squared away, stowing charts, filling out checklists. Only a small accident, dropping his pen, made him bend to the cockpit floor and, as he rose upward, notice the indicator light. An amber dome of plastic; replacement cost seventeen cents. A problem with the hydraulics. He pointed at it, and the captain gave it a quick series of taps with his index finger before the light flickered out.

How then to describe the sound of steel cable snapping, its pieces ricocheting against the aluminum skin of the airframe, tearing holes in the tail assembly, severing the hoses that fed the actuators of the hydraulic controls, those hollow pings and reports that meant total system failure? Perhaps it is best to describe noise by the absence that preceded it, the only sounds in the cabin the sharp, simultaneous inhalations of seventy-seven passengers and six crew, the short, automated trill of the Fasten seatbelt tone, the latches of galley compartments and lavatory doors boinging open, followed by the vacuum rush of rapid cabin decompression, the theatrical opening of the overhead panels that hid the plastic oxygen masks.

The flow of oxygen did not start, which meant that the level of pressure required to spring the masks from their housing was never achieved, but not a single passenger on Flight 503 reached to remove the mask manually. Whatever it was, it would be over soon.

Captain Williston tried to coax the wheel, but the sound of engine response, he knew, was wrong. He had always thought of his planes as living beings, objects of desire, things he could cajole into their best behavior. The noise of the plane in flight, level and steady, should have been as natural as the quiet murmur of blood flowing past the eardrums.

They all wished they had paid closer attention to the flight attendant’s instructions, closer attention to where the nearest exit was located, closer attention to the emergency instruction card located in the seat-back pocket in front of them: the six friends across row 19, the husband and wife in 20A and C, the young couple and their unticketed infant in seats 24D through F, and especially the young man in 26F, making an emergency pilgrimage to see his hospitalized mother. Warren Ashburton— My friends call me Ash —braced against the molded plastic wall nearest the window, now thinking not of his mother but of another time he almost died. He must have been seventeen. A winter’s rain had blanketed the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex with a persistent coating of ice, the kind that brought the milk, bread, and toilet-paper panic to grocery stores all over the city. He’d spent the afternoon at a girlfriend’s house, lost in the faux romanticism of black-and-white films on VHS cassette. He was expected home for dinner—family rules—but the roads were nearly impassable, and he’d pressed on as if nothing were different, no accommodation to the weather were required. His fingers now dug into the armrests of both 26E and F, but he was smiling at the memory, the cocksure arrogance of his teenaged immortality. Of course, he’d hit a spot of something he couldn’t see; the car felt as if it had hopped sideways on the black ice, and then he was airborne. He remembered a doctor next, discussions of surgery for a fractured humerus and scapula, a compound break of the collarbone. His mother then, the hands he knew as comfort, holding his uninjured hand and making jokes—he’d do anything to get out of family dinner, wouldn’t he?—the staleness of the hospital and the doubt he heard in her laughter scarier than anything else that had happened to him that day. The car had been a total loss. Doctors patted his legs after their cursory examinations and uttered the word lucky again and again. Indeed, he’d always been lucky. Admitted to law school on the wait list (he remembered the surprise of the admissions counselor, the way she’d told him that people as far down on the wait list as he was never made it in). He’d met Sherri in line at the campus bookstore the following month, their love the kind of bolt from the blue mythologized in fairy tales. He knew now there would be no happy ending.