***
VII
‘Bloody hell, this is the worst turbulence I’ve ever seen at this altitude.’
Captain Reed kept his hands loosely on the control stick at his side but allowed the autopilot to correct the airplane as a tremendous downdraft heaved against the Airbus and tried to drive her left wing down. The aircraft lurched to one side as the autopilot threw in a heavy dose of right aileron and corrected the aircraft’s flight path, the engines briefly changing note as they fought to compensate for the manoeuvre.
The cockpit had darkened considerably since they had entered the cloud layers, and everything outside the windshield was a uniform grey that was deepening with every passing moment and concealing everything about the outside world from them. Jason watched the instruments intently, relying on his training to avoid looking out of the windows. It was one of the most difficult skills that a pilot had to learn during the two years of intensive flight school instruction required to obtain a Commercial Pilot’s License, to entirely abandon their natural instincts and rely entirely on their instruments for a picture of the airplane’s path through the skies. There had been countless losses of life and airplanes when pilots had ventured into instrument flight without having first completed the required training. Being unprepared for flight was still the biggest killer in aviation, but despite having all the required licenses he remained acutely aware that they had last seen the horizon just before descending into cloud, and likely would not see it again until they emerged from the cloud base moments before touching down at Keflavik.
The multiple screens glowed in the gloomy cockpit as Jason watched the distance and altitude readings decreasing steadily. The aircraft was slowing naturally through the descent, and Captain Reed was also periodically adjusting the autopilot controls, the aircraft setting the throttles appropriately to maintain the desired airspeed as they closed in on Keflavik.
Jason peered out of the windshield and suddenly the view darkened even more and it seemed as though night had suddenly fallen. The sudden gloom enshrouded the Airbus like a vast black fist closing upon it.
‘We’re in the shadow of a cumulonimbus,’ Captain Reed said as he reached out and altered the aircraft’s heading slightly. ‘I’ll see if we can avoid the worst of it.’
The Airbus turned gently to the right, but neither Jason nor anybody else would have known about it but for the instruments telling them so. The artificial horizons tilted over by fifteen degrees as the A318 turned to avoid the huge thundercloud. Jason knew that such formations could be five miles wide and twice as high, containing as much energy as multiple atomic weapons. As the darkness intensified so a blast of rain swept into the windshield and battered the fuselage as though bullets were pounding the Airbus. The windshield wipers swung into action but they might as well not have bothered, such was the deluge now hammering the aircraft.
‘Fifteen thousand feet,’ Jason reported. ‘We’re at twenty nautical miles on the DME, three hundred knots indicated, heading three one zero magnetic.’
Captain Reed acknowledged the report but kept his eyes fixed on the instruments as the airplane plunged through the turbulent atmosphere. Jason felt his heart pounding in his chest, something he could not recall feeling since many years previously when he had experienced flight for the first time as a teenager in Hampshire. He had arrived at Blackbushe Airport with a birthday gift voucher clutched in one hand and a set of aviation headphones in the other, and his parents had watched in delight as for the first time ever he had climbed in alongside an instructor in a little single–engined Piper Warrior. Strapping into the captain’s seat had been one of the most exhilarating times of his life, and Jason still recalled his delight during that first take off and cruise, being in control as the instructor guided him through the basics of flight, coming back in to land and seeing the joy on his parents’ faces. Neither were wealthy so buying that first flying lesson had been difficult for them, but from that moment on Jason had never looked back.
The excitement and wonder he had felt then was very much different to the anxiety he felt now, hundreds of flying hours and tens of thousands of pounds in training costs later, concern coursing through his veins as he pulled out the pre–landing checklists and checked his harness.
‘Phoenix three seven five, any word from Keflavik yet?’ Captain Reed asked as he contacted Narsarsuaq control.
A scratchy reply came back from Narsarsuaq, broken by the heavy weather.
‘No contact, maintain course and descent, no other call signs reporting from your area.’
‘Wilco.’
For the first time Jason felt a stirring of fear deep in his guts, a foreboding as dark as the violent clouds surrounding them. The weather was closing in and they would have been on their guard even with tower control to guide them in. Without it, Jason felt suddenly vulnerable, as though he were breaking every single aviation rule in the book and risking the safety of everybody on board.
‘At least four flights were ahead of us into Keflavik and they all should have landed by now,’ he said, ‘we got the call for separation from them from Shanwick didn’t we? And we should have seen and heard others heading back to Gatwick by now. How come we’re not hearing anything at all from anyone on the ground?’
Reed shook his head but never took his eyes from the instruments.
‘I don’t know, it could be the weather screwing up the comms.’
Jason looked at the weather radar and saw nothing but torrential downpours ahead, evidence of virga and violent hailstorms scattered across the skies over Iceland. What bothered him was that such conditions were not particularly known for disrupting communications frequencies in totality, only interfering with the quality of them and with some of the older analogue navigation instruments.
The weather radar gave them the general impression of where the worst storm cells were and he guided Reed between them as best as he could. The radar was designed to detect rain droplets; the larger the downpour, the deeper the red image of the storm on the radar screen. All of the storm cells were fast moving and Jason knew that they could not avoid them all without straying too far from the approach vectors.
‘WX ahead,’ was all that he could say as they descended through ten thousand feet and the grey world outside the cockpit darkened even further. ‘Ten thousand, landing lights, two hundred and fifty knots.
Jason illuminated the landing lights and checked the airspeed, the two hundred and fifty knot limit below ten thousand feet designed to reduce the damage caused by birdstrikes, although he doubted anything else would be crazy enough to be flying about in this kind of weather. The landing lights were for easy recognition by other airplanes, visible for tens of miles in normal weather conditions, but they too were next to useless in this kind of cloud cover.
A sudden blast of what sounded like thousands of cricket balls hammering a tin sheet made Jason flinch as the aircraft thundered into a hailstorm deep inside the thunderhead. The Airbus lurched as powerful updrafts tried to propel the airplane upwards again into the sky. Jason instinctively turned his head slightly away from the windshield as the fist–sized hailstones pummelled the windshield.
‘Bloody hell.’
Captain Reed increased the descent rate, hoping to drop the aircraft below the icy air as Jason hit the wing de–icing switch to prevent accumulated ice from fouling the control surfaces and wing profile. Even a thin coating of hail ice, or of the equally lethal rime ice, could render an otherwise serviceable wing utterly useless and send the airplane plummeting to the ground.
The cockpit was almost completely dark now, the only illumination coming from the glow of the instruments as the autopilot fought for control of the aircraft, the wings rocking violently. Jason heard the first cries of alarm from the passenger cabin behind them as the Airbus shuddered beneath the blows. He forced himself to focus on the instruments and his checklists as he called out commands, and Captain Reed confirmed the correct settings or adjusted them as required.
‘Five thousand feet,’ Jason called as the altimeter wound down. ‘We’re through the transition altitiude. Switching to QNH niner niner one.’
He altered the altimeter to reflect the local air pressure as reported by ATIS, then checked the approach plates one more time to ensure that they were maintaining at least one thousand feet above the highest of the terrain features in their way, and then he called for a slower airspeed.
‘Two hundred twenty knots, turn left heading two eight five for ILS approach.’
Captain Reed complied instantly and the Airbus turned as it flew clear of the hailstone storm and into rain. The windshield wipers flashed frantically back and forth as Jason risked a glance out of his side window, but he still saw nothing but grey cloud all around them.
‘Two hundred knots.’
Captain Reed reset the autopilot, and the throttles between himself and Jason eased back to slow the Airbus as it hurtled through the darkness, and then suddenly Jason saw more light beginning to filter through the clouds and the veils of hammering rain suddenly ceased. The Airbus’s wings levelled as he felt a rush of relief and glanced at the weather radar.
‘We’re between two cells,’ he said, unable to keep the elation out of his voice. ‘We might have a landing window right here.’
‘Narsarsuaq, Phoenix three seven five on ILS approach for runway two niner at Keflavik.’
‘Phoenix three seven five you’re cleared approach runway two niner, no traffic reporting in your area, call on finals.’
‘Cleared approach two niner, wilco, Phoenix three seven five.’
Jason’s shoulders dropped as the tension drained from his body, and out of his window he glimpsed terrain for the first time, a tiny patch of icy ground beneath a deep layer of cloud.
‘Landing gear down,’ he said, ‘we’re gonna make it.’
***
VIII
NATS Prestwick Centre
Ayreshire, Scotland
Controller Beth Calder picked up the advisory call on her Shanwick frequency from a FlyBe scheduled service out of Keflavik, the transmission coming through in a rare moment of silence as she monitored traffic entering her airspace near the Reykjavik flight information region.
‘FlyBe two four two, one hundred and twenty nautical miles south of Keflavik, estimate BALIX at fourteen fifty, reporting all contact lost with Iceland Radio and all services at Keflavik and Reykjavik. Repeat, Iceland south west is off line.’
Beth had worked in the Prestwick Centre for several years since it had relocated to the vast premises in which she now sat. Her current role was as one of several controllers handling Shanwick Oceanic Control, the name “Shanwick” being an amalgamation of the areas of Shannon and Prestwick. The control area was immense, reaching as far north as Reykjavik Oceanic Control to the north, Gander Oceanic to the west and Santa Maria Oceanic to the south.
Hundreds of operators within the center controlled the movements of aircraft through airspace above Scotland and the north of England, across the North Sea to the east and halfway across the Atlantic towards North America in the west. Responsible for the biggest area of controlled airspace in the EU, oceanic clearances of aircraft traversing the North Atlantic were the operation’s most common tasks, and as such Beth was somewhat uncertain of how to react to the new callsign reporting on her frequency.
‘Say again FlyBe two four two, contact lost with all south west Icelandic control?’
‘Affirm,’ the captain of the flight responded. ‘One call–sign was in–bound to Keflavik, Phoenix three seven five, reporting fuel critical. They’re with Narsarsuaq. All oceanic traffic for Iceland is being diverted to Glasgow.’
‘Copy that,’ Beth confirmed, and passed on the FlyBe call sign’s oceanic clearances as normal before she glanced over her shoulder and searched for the regional coordinator among the throng.
The Prestwick center was immense and built within the walls of a huge Faraday cage designed to stop external radio broadcasts and other electric fields from interfering with the electronics and operator transmissions. The clocks on the walls were set to Universal Coordinated Time, with overlooking gantries and offices occupied by aviation specialists and other administrative staff. Prestwick handled around a million aircraft per year and required a considerable number of staff to support the operation.
‘Tom?’
Beth spotted her coordinator, a former controller who hurried across to her. An easy going and organised kind of guy who was popular on his watch, Beth handed him a hand–written note.
‘Keflavik and Reykjavik are both off line, and so is Iceland Radio.’
‘All three?’ Tom uttered in amazement. ‘How long?’
‘Not long,’ Beth replied. ‘Aircraft have been handed over fine in the last half an hour. Something must have taken them down, maybe technical issues. We’ve got one jet in the vicinity, low on fuel. They’re going to find it hard to divert from there, the weather’s lousy to the west and the south.’
‘Akureyri,’ Tom said, ‘or maybe even Narsarsuaq?’
‘Narsarsuaq’s going to be a stretch for a diversion and the weather is against them,’ Beth reported. ‘They’re talking to Narsarsuaq now, but Akureyri’s still their best bet.’
Tom nodded and turned as he hurried across to his own station and picked up the phone. Equipped with satellite communications, Prestwick had the capacity to contact any aerodrome, airfield or airport within their entire range of responsibility, so it would take only moments to find out what was happening on the ground at Keflavik.
The line rang in his ear within seconds, but nobody answered. Tom waited for over twenty rings, unable to break his lifelong habit of counting each successive tone. Unconcerned, he hung up and dialled Reykjavik instead. Twenty–six tones and no answer. Tom set the phone down, stared into empty space for a thoughtful moment, and then dialled Iceland Radio instead.
Twenty–four tones and no answer.
Tom set the phone down quietly. He was considering what to do next when a voice called out to him from an administrative desk across the room.
‘Tom, I’ve got an urgent call for you here.’
Tom turned and walked swiftly across to the desk, Beth’s hand–written note still in his hand to prevent him from becoming distracted by the centre’s fast–moving environment and forgetting about the situation in Iceland. An administrative officer held out the receiver to him. ‘Who is it?’
‘The United States Geological Survey.’
Tom began to feel a pinch of concern as he answered the phone, calls from the USGS usually only coming in when some bloody irritating natural event was going to disrupt air travel somewhere in their region. ‘Tom Garret.’
‘Hi Tom, this is Professor Lincoln Horner, USGS,’ the caller said in a drawling American accent that might have been Alabama, or maybe Georgia. ‘We’re calling regarding a seismic event in the Denmark Straits, north west of Iceland.’
Tom’s gut felt as though someone had dumped a ton of ice into it. Images of Keflavik and Reykjavik flashed through his mind.
‘Go ahead.’
‘Our sensors detected a magnitude–eight–event in the shelf off the coast one hour ago and there’s considerable activity as a result in the fault area on the south west of Iceland. We’re advising that all flights through the region are diverted south to avoid any possible chance of volcanic debris being ingested in aircraft engines.’
Tom stared into space for a long moment, an image flaring now in his mind of the tremendous disruption caused by that volcano in southern Iceland back in 2010, what was its name? The one that was too long to recite. Ear ache hole or something? The last time something like this had happened it had caused utter chaos across the entire Shanwick control are and…
‘Mister Garret?’
Tom blinked himself back to the present. ‘Yes, of course, thanks. I’ll pass on the information immediately.’
‘Do you have the contact details of any of the airports in th
e vicinity of the event?’ Horner asked. ‘We may need to liaise with them soon.’
‘We’ve lost contact with Iceland Radio and several air control towers in the south west of Iceland.’
There was an even longer pause on the line now as Professor Horner considered what he had been told. When he replied, Tom could hear the concern in his voice.
‘How long ago?’
‘Maybe a half hour.’
‘Have you been able to use any means of contacting the island?’
‘The phones are ringing, but nobody’s answering.’
Before Horner could reply, another voice caught Tom’s attention.
‘Tom, we’ve got something else here.’
‘Wait one,’ Tom said to Horner and turned to a young man who had been at Prestwick for only a few weeks, the youth hurrying to his side and his face flushed with a volatile mixture of excitement and concern.
‘What is it, James?’
The teenager waved a piece of paper at him. ‘There’s been some kind of event in Iceland,’ he reported, ‘and the Icelandic emergency responses are doing nothing.’
‘Doing nothing about what?’ Tom asked, trying to remain patient with the newcomer.
‘The ships,’ James replied, flustered. ‘All of the ships are sinking. We’re picking up distress calls from multiple call signs that then just go silent. Icelandic rescue services are responding momentarily and then they’re falling silent too.’
Tom stared at the teenager in disbelief as he felt a cold chill rippling up his spine, as though snakes were working their way under his shirt, and then he heard Professor Horner’s voice down the phone line in his ear.
‘Mister Garret, did I hear that correctly? Ships are sinking off the coast of Iceland?’
‘Yes,’ Tom replied vacantly, confused by the multiple reports of silent control towers and sinking ships and unable to figure out how they might be connected to each other. ‘What’s going on? Is that relevant to us?’
Altitude (Power Reads Book 1) Page 4