“Maybe.” Elizabeth searched the passing cityscape and pointed to a high-rise on a bluff overlooking the waterfront.
“There … I think.”
Kelly nodded. “Cool!”
Elizabeth put her mouth close to Kelly’s ear. “Honey, keep your voice way down. They’re about to do a live interview, and remember the seriousness of what’s happening.”
Kelly looked at her mother’s sober face and nodded.
Elizabeth sat back and watched as the photographer focused his portable TV camera on the pilot, who began doing a live interview as he flew the chopper northwestward.
Her thoughts snapped back to something Chad Jennings had said while they waited for the helicopter to touch down at Seatac airport. Pan Am was being targeted by the FAA for a host of violations. He personally suspected that a dirty-tricks campaign might be behind each one of the FAA inspections that had turned up the problems they didn’t know they had. Jennings had seemed very upset on the subject, and had assumed that as an incoming officer, she had already been told. She hadn’t. The thought that something more than financial problems faced her new company was chilling.
Brian had said something about trouble with the FAA. What was it? When was it? She couldn’t remember. But one thing hung in the back of her thoughts as a dark warning of trouble: Jennings’s reaction. It was as if this emergency threatening Clipper Ten was merely the latest in a long string of operational problems, none of which Ron Lamb had mentioned.
9:40 P.M.
In flight, Clipper Ten
Somewhere north of Tatoosh Island—the ancestral home of the Makah Indians—a lone fishing boat suddenly heeled and turned in confusion as its captain whipped the helm toward the east and throttled his engine to standby. In the biting cold of saltwater spray driven by a stiff breeze from the west, he had heard nothing but the wind and his engine until seconds ago. Now, with adrenaline pumping through his bloodstream in massive quantities, causing his hands to shake, he tried to sort out what had thundered by over his head. The sounds had accelerated to a crescendo thirty seconds before, and he had glanced over his shoulder as the specter of a huge aircraft bore down on him from the west at what seemed to be the level of his radio mast, its landing lights surreal against the dark sky, and the screaming of its engines assaulting the sanctity of his hearing as his ears clicked under a sudden wave of air pressure. He had expected, then, to see it crash into the water, but it had sailed away, still airborne, its twin white taillights now visible in the distance like the forlorn lantern on the caboose of a receding train.
What on earth was such a craft doing so low? Was it a military plane? Was it civilian? How could such a thing be possible? The man fumbled for his marine radio, desperate to tell someone what had just happened.
The tension in the cockpit of Clipper Ten was mounting moment by moment, second by second.
“Don’t let me get below seventy feet, or bank over fifteen degrees, Judy.” Jim Aaron’s eyes were riveted on the instrument panel, his vision taking in the radar altimeter, which now showed a mere eighty feet above the waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Clipper Ten’s wingspan was over two hundred feet, the fuselage nearly three hundred feet in length. Yet at their present weight, they couldn’t fly any higher than seventy feet off the surface. Not yet, at least. Not until the left dump nozzle had spewed enough fuel into the night to lessen their weight and put the performance curves back into the range of normal flight.
Jim had pushed number-two engine up a bit, bringing its exhaust-gas temperature right to the red line. He was numb inside, and fully focused now on the job at hand. Life or death seemed a somewhat esoteric consideration. He had a job to do, and pushing number-two engine to the point of meltdown if necessary was part of it.
Number-two engine was stable, but barely. Everything was in a state of precarious balance: the rudder trim full left to compensate for the worst-possible-case thrust situation, a five-degree left bank cranked in to maintain a straight course as Seattle Center vectored them down the channel, and the fuel-jettison pumps throwing jet fuel out of the left dump nozzle as fast as possible.
They had already passed abeam of one oceangoing freighter, a ship with a superstructure tall enough to snag them out of the sky if they’d attempted to fly over it. The ship was fully lighted and had been visible for miles, but it had helped to know in advance it was there, thanks to Seattle Center’s new liaison with the Coast Guard.
A Coast Guard Rescue C-130 had found them and joined up overhead now, matching their anemic 190-knot flying speed and acting as a radio relay station when they hit blank spots in Seattle Center’s coverage. The passengers had been briefed and prepared, and the flight attendants had reviewed their procedures with the rafts. Everyone below crouched in a brace position. If he had to put it in the water, they were as ready as they would ever be.
Survival now depended on the skills and courage of the pilots of Clipper Ten to keep their ship flying in ground effect without dipping a wingtip in the water and cartwheeling everyone to their deaths. And, as the three of them knew well, an airborne 747 could cover the seventy feet to the surface in the blink of an eye, or the flick of a wrist.
“Position, Judy?” Jim dared not take his eyes off the radar altimeter. Even with the landing lights on and showing the waves and water ahead, they were far too close to the surface to fly visually.
“The INS shows us twenty-four miles from Port Angeles airport.”
Patrick’s voice followed immediately. “We’re down to six hundred and eighteen thousand pounds now. If I’m figuring the charts right, in about twenty minutes we should be light enough to gain some altitude.”
Jim Aaron quickly converted the twenty minutes to sixty-four nautical miles. It wasn’t enough. They would have to fly in circles off Port Angeles until they were light enough to climb to the four hundred feet needed to use the Port Angeles airport. Banking the aircraft much in such perilous conditions was unthinkable. One circle could take in a diameter of twenty miles.
Judy saw Jim Aaron start to shake his head. Patrick noticed the gesture as well. The captain’s eyes were on the instruments, but his head was moving in jerks left and right, ever more rapidly, as his mind compared the possibilities and faced the inevitable.
“We can’t make Port Angeles.” The words fairly exploded from the captain’s mouth. He immediately glanced at his copilot with an apology on his face, noticing that she, too, had figured it out as well.
“We’ve …” he began, “… we’ve got Whidbey dead ahead about eighty miles, we’re aligned with the runway, and even if I can’t gain ten feet, we can get her on the ground.”
“Roger, I’ll tell them.” Judy’s finger was already pressing the transmit button.
6
Wednesday, March 8, 9:55 P.M.
In flight, Chopper 7
The full magnitude of what was happening finally began to sink in. For the past twenty minutes, Elizabeth Sterling’s ears had been filled with technical facts of Clipper Ten Heavy’s emergency somewhere out to the west, but it had all seemed rather impersonal.
Until now.
As they raced north from Seattle with the rotor blades slapping the air in a full-speed dash toward Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, the facts and images coalesced in her mind. She was now a corporate officer of Pan Am. That, in effect, was her crippled airplane out there, loaded with passengers who had trusted her airline. Suddenly it all became personal and frightening.
And then the presence of the TV camera became intimidating. This was no private airborne cocoon, it was a flying studio to the world. The drama was being played out before a worldwide television audience. Some of the pictures being broadcast by satellite out of Atlanta and around the world on CNN were originating from the small TV camera now bumping her left arm, as their pilot continued giving a running over-the-shoulder commentary.
The fact that whatever happened, Pan Am would now be seen as an airline with safety problems, sent more chills dow
n her spine.
In flight, Clipper Ten
“PULL IT UP!” Judy’s voice rang sharply through the cockpit as Jim Aaron pulled the yoke back quickly. The radar altimeter had dropped below fifty feet for a second, startling them. He felt the ship respond and gain a little altitude, then reach the crest of the pressure wave they were flying and begin to protest. From here on, it seemed to say, it’s altitude or airspeed, but you can’t have both.
Yet it seemed they were getting light enough to nudge higher, out of ground effect. Slowly he let the rate-of-climb needle start up as the radar altimeter cracked through a hundred feet for the first time in many long minutes: 120 feet; 140 feet; then mushing into 160 feet as the airspeed dropped to 180 knots and stabilized, a tiny rate of climb still showing on the instruments.
“Hallelujah! I think we’re going to get out of here!” Jim’s voice was cracked and hoarse.
“Thank God!” Judy said. “We’ve got to have at least a few hundred feet in the air approaching the runway threshold. Jim, when we lower the landing gear, we’re gonna slow down big time and start sinking.”
Judy watched Jim Aaron from the corner of her eye, waiting for a response.
There was none.
“Jim?” Judy’s voice pierced his concentration.
“Yeah?”
“Could we discuss how we’re going to handle this?”
A small breaker of shame rolled over him now. He had been flying solo again, making unilateral decisions and not even announcing them, let alone discussing them. This was a crew, right?
“I’m sorry. We need to be making these decisions together,” he said, glancing around at Patrick. “All three of us.”
He paused to check the altitude again. They were climbing again ever so slightly, edging foot by foot through two hundred feet off the water.
“Okay, let me tell you what I think we’re facing. Then you two give me your opinions. I think we should take it straight in to Whidbey and land it with whatever we’ve got. When we put the gear down, we’re going to slow down, so we can’t lower it until the last possible moment. We’ve got to time it just right. Too soon and we sink into the shoreline or the water before getting to the runway, as you pointed out, Judy. Too late, and we touch down with the gear not fully extended. Same with flaps, if we even have time to use them. And, Judy, you’ll have to bring them out with the alternate extension system.”
Patrick leaned forward. “Boss, why don’t we circle out here for a little while and keep dumping? Then we could get enough altitude to give us an edge.”
Judy was shaking her head. “Patrick, number four’s still burning out there, as far as I can tell. Not much, but some. I think we’d better get on the ground as quick as we can.”
Patrick’s voice came back strong and worried. “You’re both being stampeded. I want to get this over with too, but, dammit, Jim, you said it yourself—we’ve got to time this just right. If we buy some extra time, maybe it won’t be that critical.”
“We’ve been overboosting number-one engine for nearly an hour,” Judy said,” and number two’s barely above idle. Either could fail at any time.” She turned now to look him in the face.
“Okay … okay, look at this,” Patrick said. “We come in at, say, three hundred feet. You put the gear down at two miles. Because of the reduced hydraulic capacity it doesn’t come down fast enough, but it’s already a speed brake, so we sink right onto the runway with all the main struts at odd angles and nothing locked—and we’re still full of fuel!”
“We just have to time it right,” Judy said.
“How? We can’t practice it! I can only guess at it!”
Jim Aaron had listened quietly. Now he spoke up. “Good point, Patrick. If I could approach at five hundred feet, I’d feel a lot safer, but I’m equally worried about trusting number-one engine.” He glanced at Judy. “Okay. Let’s plan to make a wide circle as close to Whidbey as we can make it, out over the water. If number one goes, I’ll firewall number two and let the sucker burn off the strut if necessary to get us to the runway. It may be damaged, but at least it could give us a controlled ditching.”
“What would you think,” Patrick said, “about my using the right-wing dump mast? It’s far enough from number-four engine. I don’t think the fuel stream will catch fire.”
“But,” Judy replied, “if you’re wrong, won’t the fuel catch on fire explosively, and we blow the wing off?”
“Not necessarily.” Patrick’s reply lacked conviction, but there it sat.
They both looked at the captain, and waited for his response.
“I say we try it,” Jim said at last. “We need to get lighter fast. You violently object, Judy?”
She looked at the forward panel for a moment, then turned toward the captain and smiled thinly.
“Not violently.”
Patrick nodded and immediately flipped the appropriate switch, doubling the fuel-dump rate to five thousand pounds per minute.
The sudden, unexpected sound of an engine fire warning bell rang through the cockpit almost immediately. Judy craned her head to the right, expecting new flames, but saw nothing, as Patrick fairly yelled, “It’s number two! That’s nothing to do with my fuel dump.”
Jim Aaron hesitated, holding his hand up in a “stop” gesture, as much to slow himself down as to warn Judy and Patrick that he wasn’t ready to shut down the engine yet.
“Is it really burning?” he asked. Patrick picked up the interphone handset and punched in the number of the aft flight attendant station as Judy scanned the engine instruments.
“Jim, it’s not putting out much power.”
Jim Aaron reached for the thrust lever and pushed it forward. The engine thrust remained the same. Only the fuel-flow and exhaust-gas temperatures were rising as Patrick heard a frightened report from the aft galley and relayed it.
“It’s really on fire! They—one of the crew in the rear galley—says there’s a plume of flame coming out!”
Jim shook his head. “If it was giving us any thrust …” He reached up and pulled the fire handle, and then punched the fire-extinguisher button as Judy and Patrick ran through the engine-fire checklist, watching then with relief when the fire light went out and another report from the aft galley confirmed there were no more flames.
There was also no more thrust from the inboard left engine. Almost instantly, Clipper Ten’s airspeed began dropping, forcing Jim Aaron to push the nose over ever so slightly. With a sinking heart, he realized that number two had been giving the critical edge of thrust they needed to get out of ground effect. Now it was gone.
Reluctantly, he relaxed his back-pressure on the control yoke to let the big ship settle back down to an altitude of seventy feet—and back into ground effect.
One engine left, and no options.
Whidbey Island Naval Air Station
With little more than twenty minutes’ notice, the duty officer had accomplished wonders. Rows of fire trucks and rescue equipment lined the taxiways in their appointed positions, pulsing a silent staccato symphony of flashing red beacons into the night. Base ambulances stood by, and more were coming, scrambled from nearby communities such as Oak Harbor, Anacortes, and Mount Vernon.
Three TV news helicopters were circling the naval base and staying in contact with approach control and each other to stay out of the way. More choppers—Army, Coast Guard, Air Force, and several private medical evacuation helicopters—were en route from various points.
Cars were screeching to a halt before base operations every few seconds as more and more members of the command element of Whidbey NAS arrived, all roused from their homes by last-minute phone calls. A line to Naval Operations at the Pentagon stood open as well, and a telephone alert chain had roused several high-ranking naval officers to the fact that their normally tranquil Puget Sound base was about to be the focal point of a world-watched drama.
In the control tower cab, the chief petty officer on duty lowered his field glasses and tur
ned to his newly arrived commander, stabbing a finger at the western night sky.
“There, sir. Use the glasses here. You can see the beacons just coming in view, right on the surface.”
Clipper Ten
The fire on number four eliminated the idea of circling. It was growing worse, and threatening to eat into the underside of the wing. The crew of Clipper Ten elected to head straight for the runway at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, praying they could stay airborne that long.
Inch by inch, Jim Aaron had once again nudged Clipper Ten up to two hundred feet above the water on the power from a firewalled number-one engine alone as fuel continued to spew into the night from the two dump masts, lightening the aircraft’s gross weight pound by pound as they clawed for more altitude, speed, power, and time.
“Clipper Ten, Whidbey Tower. Winds are one-six-zero at eight knots.”
The runway lights were in view now, dead ahead. Jim wondered if they were forgetting anything.
Nine miles remained. The three pilots could see the red-over-red visual approach slope indicators as well, indicating they were dangerously below glide slope for a normal approach.
“Two hundred feet off the water, speed one-eighty-five.” Judy’s voice from the right. Her eyes were riveted on the instruments as Jim clawed for more altitude.
“Two hundred ten, speed one-eighty-five and holding. We’re coming up!”
“Okay, Patrick, watch our timing.” Jim said. “You tell me when.”
Patrick had used the satellite phone in an unprecedented conference call, frantically trying to organize the collective thinking of Seattle maintenance and the Boeing company on exactly how long it would take to extend the gear and the flaps in their present condition.
“Remember,” Patrick replied, “the gear figure’s only good if there’s no damage.”
The captain nodded. “We’ll land with whatever we have.”
There was no possibility of a go-around. Clipper Ten was coming down one way or another as soon as the gear lever was moved to the down position.
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