by Craig Thomas
"Roger, 494. Do you require assistance?" The unemotional, machine-like voice of Albuquerque Centre failed to calm. Instead, it seemed to distance the offer of assistance, make it impotent.
"Negative at present," he forced himself to say.
"We'll be looking for descent clearance in maybe nine minutes from now."
He glanced down at knee level at the repeater dials. Aileron, elevator and rudder indicated normal, where he expected the settings to be. He turned his attention to the manual wheels, low down on the centre console where their readouts were difficult to see.
"Jesus…" he breathed.
There was no correlation between the two sets of instruments. The airplane was badly out of trim possibly with stalled trim motors, an unknown fuel amount, and a monitoring system that was lying to them.
They had no way of knowing even where the fuel was. The fuel management system moved the fuel around the tanks to keep the fuselage balanced about a constant centre of gravity… Otherwise, it would become uncontrollable and fall out of the sky. Cold perspiration ran down beneath his arms, dampened the shirt across his back.
"Vance we have problems. Call the company, get Ron Blakey on the horn.
Tell him what's happening and ask him what we can do."
In another moment, Vance was talking animatedly to his chief research engineer.
Near stall to over speed… Brace, brace, brace. There was almost nothing else, now, that he could recall of the cockpit voice recorder's transcript. It was all he needed to remember, he told himself.
He felt or thought he felt a tremor in the control column, as if what was being registered was the struggle of the autopilot systems against a violent, increasing instability in the airframe. Flagstaff looked like a tiny, gleaming clearing in the stain of the Coconino National Forest far below the airplane. The mountains that reared up ahead along their flight path, and which surrounded Phoenix, seemed to press against the flight deck's windows.
"Ron Blakey says all we can do is come out of autopilot, sort the trim on manuals, and he said good luck…"
Gant's hand paused over the autopilot switch. Again, he sensed the unbalanced weight of the aircraft, the loss of fuel, the alien secretiveness of the 494. He was walking in a dead man's shoes down a road that a dead man had taken. His only advantage was that he knew the plane was losing fuel… Some advantage.
He cancelled the autopilot. Immediately, the 494 banked violently to the left and the nose reared like a wild horse's head. Vance slid into the co-pilot's seat and slowly Gant felt his supporting effort on the control column. Gant was able to reach for the elevator trim and adjust the nose of the aircraft… In moments, before he and Vance had regained control of the 494, it had turned almost three hundred and sixty degrees and climbed two thousand feet. Sweat ran from his forehead down his cheeks.
Slowly, as if coaxing a fierce and unpredictable animal into a cage, he brought the aircraft round on to its previous course. Phoenix glinted like fragments of a broken window ahead of them. The grey and brown flanks of mountains were unsoftened by heat haze or distance.
He called Albuquerque.
"Centre 494. We're just coming round on to one-eight-six radial. This is part of the distraction notified earlier."
"Roger, 494. We will clear a block of airspace, flight levels two-five-zero to three-two-zero in case you have further problems."
"It has to be more than a spurious cross feed right? More than just fuel transferring from one of the fuller tanks to the port wing tanks.
We're losing maybe most of all our fuel from the starboard wing tanks—"
"It feels like that?"
"I can't tell, dammit! The port wing's getting heavy, that's all feel tells me. Your fucking airplane has gotten a mind of its own from somewhere, Vance. You built it, you tell me what's wrong!"
"You want to die telling me I'm an asshole?" Vance snapped.
"Is that the extent of your ambition, Gant?"
"OK, OK!" Gant snarled. Tell me how we can cut the engines off from the fuel management computer."
"It's in the computer?"
"It's the computer that's lying to us, Vance the computer, your baby, that's dumping our fuel! Now, tell me how I can override it, cut it out before the tanks are drained!"
Vance's features adopted a strain of concentration, his eyes expressionlessly focused inward. Then he said:
The only way is to close down the electrical systems." Vance hesitated for a moment, then added: "You have to shut down all the non-essential electrics and fly her—"
"Manually? On hydraulics and air pressure?
Then glide home — right?"
There's no other way. I can't isolate the fuel management system from the rest of the electrics. It has to be this way…"
"And when we get to where we've glided, I'll have to make a dead-stick landing," Gant responded. Vance merely nodded.
"You sure know how to show a girl a good time, Vance you really, really do!"
Non-essential electrics… It sounded simple, almost innocuous.
Nothing dangerous in being without all the electronic displays and readouts and relying only on the air-driven primary instruments All the radio and navcom ms except the VHP box, would also be out… the radar, the VORs, the ADFs… He'd be dropping in altitude with every second, navigating by means of features on the ground, sliding across the landscape, looking for the Vance Aircraft runway, a sliver of grey concrete in the dazzling miles of desert. Non-essential electrics…
The 494 would go from a state-of-the-art airliner to a primitive glider in seconds once he took the decision. He had no need to climb any higher in altitude to allow him to reach Phoenix, he already had enough height to trade off against distance in the glide.
He must make the decision now. Airliner to glider. Gant shivered… there wasn't a choice, just as there was no time-out for a debate with himself.
There was only the one play he could make.
He contacted Albuquerque Centre. When he had finished informing them of the problem and his proposed course of action, the machine-like voice, still remotely calm, said:
"Roger, 494 we understand your problem. Do you want to declare a Mayday?
We'll patch through to Phoenix Approach meanwhile, clear conflicting traffic. We have you positively identified over the Verde River, range forty nautical miles due north of Phoenix."
"Roger, AlbuK. We don't wish to declare a Mayday at this time. Out."
The 494 was holding its altitude at thirty thousand feet. Airspeed, one hundred and ninety knots. His glide range when the engines stopped at that height was fifty nautical miles. He had ten to spare before the airplane ploughed into the Arizona desert.
He glanced at Vance, who seemed to be studying him.
"You ready?" he asked.
"You?" Gant replied.
The mountains ringed the city like huge, impenetrable ramparts. Phoenix gleamed like a spilt droplet of water in the brown desert. The Verde River twisted beneath them like a blue cord someone had dropped and forgotten. The control column strained against his fierce grip and Vance's supporting strength. Behind him, he sensed the empty plane like an assailant.
The airframe lurched in the air, weary and unpredictable as a drunk unable to support his own weight.
"Go for it!" Vance snapped."
Tim Burton and David Winterborne surprised each other in the grand foyer of the Club and were immediately affable, shaking hands firmly and without apparent reserve. Burton, taller than Winterborne, stooped habitually to the stature of other men, and did so now, even though
Winterborne's Eurasian features always seemed at odds with his height.
There was little else except the narrow eyes and sallow complexion of his Chinese mother in him. His slimness was maintained without recourse to athletic exercise of any kind. Burton played squash and indulged in desultory bouts with shining bars and suspended weights. He brushed a hand through his long hair, summoning a cautious, uncertain g
rin.
"I — um, heard about your problems, but didn't gloat," Winterborne offered. He and Aero UK had tried to press Sky-liner on Burton and Artemis Airways, with great force.
Thanks for that, anyway." Burton's grin seemed again to have difficulty in precisely displaying itself, then at once it was entirely genuine.
"I don't mind telling you "You wish you'd offered for some other aircraft?" The jibe was sharp.
They were standing before the grey marble fireplace, their images reflected in the Italian mirror above it. A Joseph Knibb bracket clock of ebonised wood and much gilding occupied the mantelpiece. Above them, the ceiling of the vestibule and foyer was wreathed with plaster vines and hanging bunches of pale fruit against an eggshell blue.
Burton shook his head ruefully.
"I still can't afford your monster, David I told you and Coulthard that a year ago, when you were holding me down in my chair and practically forcing me to sign.
No way, Jose—"
"And yet you can't afford to wait for the new Boeing, either,"
She'd been able to carry it off like a model on a catwalk. He, however, quailed at the atmosphere of the Club at that moment. It was as if he still only aspired to the world of power, influence and success that it symbolised, rather than truly belonged. David's father and Pyott had been members for perhaps forty years apiece. He felt like a parvenu.
A youngish barrister with political ambitions and the ability to trim like a racing yacht passed him with a confident nod in the company of an advertising executive.
They mounted the steps like schoolboys… David in school, he remembered again.
Carrying his hurt, his ruthlessness, his ambition inside a carapace of ingratiation and acquiescence. He'd paltered and shifted, tried to be inconspicuous and, like a chrysalis, had turned into the iron butterfly he now was.
A judge and a Cabinet minister, a group of City people, a novelist past his sell-by date in company with a publisher. He felt them all as an admonishing, even mocking parade as they passed into the Club.
Where were the bloody Japs? He felt nervous now, as if he would forget all his carefully rehearsed arguments, the brochure-like confidence he must bring to the meeting. Come on, I'm drowning, not waving… And behind everything, there was Vance. Come on, Alan, save my neck Ahead and to port of the airplane, the Theodore Roosevelt Lake gleamed, as if flashing him a signal, one that was unable to distract him from the barrier of the Superstition Mountains directly ahead. Twenty miles to run, barely six minutes before he attempted to put the airplane down on the runway at Vance Aircraft.
Airspeed one-ninety knots, altitude sixteen thousand feet and falling but only slowly, deceptively, as if the airframe would stay in the air for hours yet.
Instability tremored through the plane like the first symptoms of a return of malarial fever. Gant's hands and wrists, his forearms and shoulders, ached with the effort of keeping the unpowered airliner on course, in the glide.
The engine noise was missing. Air-driven pumps were maintaining hydraulic pressure in the flying control circuits. Once more, he nudged the nose up to maintain his airspeed for as long as possible. When he and Vance had made it, it had been a simple calculation. Altitude equals distance in a glide. They had enough altitude to make the runway at Vance Aircraft, more than enough
… But he could not restart the engines in order to make the slightest adjustment in speed, height, direction. He and Vance had switched off all the non-essential electrics, to the point where they were wearing their headsets with one ear uncovered, so that they could hear one another. The fuel had been stop cocked Cutting off all fuel flow had stabilised the airframe in its slow glide. The slightest alteration of course might unbalance the plane. He did not even know how much fuel if any was sloshing around in the tanks.
'494 this is Vance Centre." It was Ron Blakey on the horn, his tension palpable.
"QDM one-eight-six. You need to turn left five degrees to position for a straight-in.
Inform us when you have the runway in visual range."
The channel remained open for a second or two, as if they expected him to reply.
Barbara was there somewhere. He sensed her presence concerned more for her father and the future of the company than for him. The pettiness of the thought made him wince. It revealed the strained, worn state of his nerves. It wasn't the slim, tiny form of a jet fighter behind his seat, it was the huge bulk of a long-haul airliner. He almost felt its great weight, its sluggish, resistant inertia through his hands and feet.
The runway at Vance was more than long enough, he reminded himself, unable even to glance across at Alan in the copilot's seat. It had to be, in case they lost the brakes. There would be no deceleration available from reverse thrust from the dead, unusable engines. It would be all brake work His body tensed, as if the struggle with the aircraft's bulk had already begun. His forehead was sheened with sweat. The electrics for the air-conditioning had been switched off.
Phoenix's sprawling conurbation lay like a sand-coloured lizard, curled on the desert, surrounded by its silver reservoirs. The airflow seemed louder, poised to buffet at the plane in its helpless glide. He was flying on the trims alone, nudging the aircraft constantly to maintain its course, and saving the hydraulic power to the control column until he had to use the column to maintain the 494 on the narrow strip of the runway, which would blur beneath the rush of the airliner which wouldn't slow enough in tim eStop… Ten miles out, altitude nine thousand feet. His hands shivered at the impression of them dropping like a stone towards the mountains. He still couldn't see the runway at Vance Aircraft, even though the city was bigger, its glass towers winking in the morning sun. Phoenix seemed to be rushing towards them, its ring of mountains suddenly like a huge, opening mouth that of a shark.
Ron Blakey again. Gant was grateful that Vance maintained his grim silence beside him.
'494 — Vance Centre. Turn on to runway heading now." A pause, then, almost apologetically: "Emergency services are on full alert and standing by. Wind light and variable, QFE two-niner-niner-four. Call when visual with the field."
The technical instructions were added in a rush of words, as if Blakey had become conscious that he had revealed his own fearful doubt and now wished to mask it.
"Vance Centre 494. The field is not yet—" A dusty strip, thin as a pencil line in the desert, the tiny boxes of buildings nearby. His relief was huge.
"Correction, we have the field in visual. Two-niner niner-four it is."
Six miles out. A line narrower than the highways he could make out linking the suburbs of Phoenix. He looked at the altimeter. They were too high. He'd trimmed too safely, too well.
"Dump the gear!" he shouted at Vance, who was startled by his tone and urgency.
"Gear down?"
"Gear down?
Two muffled thumps as the undercarriage entered the streaming airflow.
The aircraft wobbled, tilted as if about to plummet, and he fought it back to level flight.
A third, softer noise, less disturbance to the airframe. The lights confirmed all three sets of wheels were down and locked. The sudden extra drag pushed the plane's nose down and he struggled to trim again as the speed dropped. He had nudged the 494 on to the runway heading.
Mountains seemed to brush like claws at the plane's belly, just hundreds of feet below them. The buildings of Vance Aircraft were thrown-away toys in the desert, shining in the sun amid hard, grey mountains. The runway was no more than a sliver of plastic placed on the desert floor, narrow and short as a slide rule.
Dragged back by the undercarriage, the plane wobbled in the airflow.
He eased up the nose, further cutting the speed. Hollis' voice, which had followed him through the flight like someone saying the Kaddish, had vanished in the back of his mind.
Two miles out, he judged. Vance's hands reached for the copilot's column, in anticipation. Gant shook his head angrily.
"On my order!"
He d
ropped the leading edge slats and the main flaps. The 494 seemed to rear back from the approaching runway like a terrified horse. The hydraulic pressure reading dropped. Would the air-driven pumps replenish it before he needed to use the brakes?
The threshold lights flashed beneath the belly of the aircraft. The mountains reared up around them, the great mouth they had seemed to form reaching to enclose them. The six-thousand-yard markers were beneath them in another second, the impression of the plane's speed numbing Gant, overriding every other sensation.
He saw the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles as they raced along either edge of the runway, throwing up dust in clouds. The runway rushed at them.
Gant hauled back on the column, wrists bulging with the effort, as if he were dragging it out of concrete.
"Now-!" he shouted, but Vance was already heaving on the copilot's column, his face squeezed and reddened with the strain.
No reverse thrust, no reverse- Brace, brace, brace- Get out of my head, Hollis He continued to heave at the control column and it began to creep back towards him. Vance's eyes were bulging with fear and effort, his teeth set in a grimace. The runway was a blur beneath the nose, so close beneath only the brakes-Wheels touched concrete. The airliner bounced back into the air. Then the main undercarriage touched a second time and the nose butted down like the head of a charging ram and the nose-wheels thudded on to the runway.
"Feet clear of the brakes!" Gant ordered Vance as the airliner raced to overtake the nearest of the emergency vehicles, its flashing lights and red flank lost in a moment.
He couldn't burst any of the tyres and he needed maximum braking. No reverse thrust. The tyres howled on the concrete, the rushing air seemed to deafen. He hit the toe brakes. The nose of the aircraft shuddered as the nose wheels shimmied on the concrete. The landscape shivered like something reflected in a mirror the moment it was shattered.
Groundspeed one-forty-five knots. No reverse thrust Three thousand feet to run!" Vance called above the din.
He could see the end of the runway. The airplane seemed to be accelerating… It was worse than making an emergency stop in a car…