“Two hundred twenty feet, speed dropping slightly to one-eighty knots.”
Jim held the back-pressure. He needed three to four hundred. They would lower the landing gear first, then the flaps, but only to the five-degree position.
“Two hundred fifty feet, airspeed’s dropping to one-seventy-five!”
He could take it only to 170. Jim nudged the yoke forward slightly, watching the rate of climb begin to drop.
Five miles.
“Clipper Ten, Whidbey Tower. You’re cleared to land, sir. Emergency equipment is standing by.” He could see the rows of flashing emergency equipment beacons ahead.
“Two hundred seventy feet, speed one-seventy. Don’t get it any lower, Jim!”
“Roger, Whidbey. Thanks,” Judy transmitted.
He would lower the gear at three miles, the flaps as soon as the gear was down. They had worked it out.
Four miles. Almost there. The ship had stopped climbing. He couldn’t get more than 275 feet, but the speed was back up to 175 now and climbing slightly.
“There’s three miles, Jim.”
“I don’t think we’re high enough! I may cancel the flaps!” Jim said.
This is gonna work. We’re gonna make it work! Jim’s thoughts were whirling by.
“Stand by on the gear!” Patrick’s voice was taut with tension as he calculated the remaining distance and time, and marked the proper moment.
“Gear down!” Patrick fairly yelled it, and Judy’s hand reacted instantly. The sound of the nose gear and the shuddering of the wing and body gear assemblies coming off their uplocks after the gear doors opened radiated through his senses. Something, at least, was happening down there.
And predictably, the airspeed began dropping. Jim lowered the nose slightly, feeling the big ship shudder and begin to descend, trading precious altitude for airspeed as the landing gear acted like speed brakes.
“Nose gear down, body gear both sides down, but the right wing gear is not locked. Left one is down,” Judy answered.
So, there was a gear problem after all.
“We’ll live with it.”
“Coming up on flap extension,” Patrick announced.
“I’m not sure I want them,” Jim said.
“Now or never!”
Jim traced through the possibilities, and decided yes.
“Flaps five!” he barked.
Judy’s right hand moved the alternate flap switches at the same moment her left hand positioned the main flap handle to five degrees.
Less than two miles now, and sinking through two hundred feet, airspeed dropping to 160 as the flaps changed their minimum airspeed to a lesser value.
But the threshold of the runway began to climb slightly in the windscreen. They were sinking too much!
“No more flaps! We stay at five!” Jim said.
His hand pushed the number-one throttle, but it was already at maximum. With five degrees of flaps, he could slow only to 150 knots before the stall warning would start.
“One hundred fifty-five on speed, Jim!”
He was pulling more than he should on the yoke. They were through 150 feet now. He needed to cross the threshold of the runway at fifty feet, but they weren’t going to be that high.
One mile to go, and they were settling through one hundred feet and slowing.
Oh God! We did it too soon! The cry echoed through his head as he bit his lip and tried to reinvent the laws of aerodynamics. Speed, altitude, airspeed.
Airspeed! He could cheat with more flaps!
“All the flaps you can give me. NOW!”
She complied instantly. It would be a race between conflicting curves. Increasing drag against decreasing airspeed against increasing lift as the flaps slowly lumbered out on electrical motors against remaining distance to the runway buoyed by …
Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!
His hand was coaxing the big ship to stay put at fifty feet, and she was complying. He had bought some time, but he could feel the airspeed decaying with the monstrous braking effect of the giant, triple-slotted flaps.
As the threshold lights slipped beneath the nose, the stall warning began, a small, eccentric motor that shook the yoke like a berserk vibrator. They were too slow!
Jim pulled ever so slightly, increasing the pitch, holding the altitude, praying his wheels were still above the surface of a runway which in truth was twenty-eight feet above sea level.
The airspeed was unreadable with the vibration coursing up to his eyeballs. He knew they were approaching a real stall, but there was nothing left but to hold and hope.
No one aboard Clipper Ten felt the first contact between the rear pair of wheels on the left wing gear and the absolute edge of the runway overrun, but Jim Aaron heard the speed-brake handle deploying automatically with wheel spin-up, and knew they’d touched something.
The remaining tires of the extended main gear struts settled onto the hard surface one by one in rapid succession, all of them fully supporting the weight of the 747 before it left the overrun surface and rumbled onto the main runway.
Those in the emergency vehicles near the end of the runway had watched in stunned silence as Clipper Ten sank lower and lower, arresting the descent at what looked like mere inches above the surface. Now it had thundered over the shoreline like a nightmarish apparition of an accident about to happen, the wheels at more or less the exact elevation of the overrun surface.
But instead of flame and tumbling metal, there were aircraft wheels rolling across hard surfaces as they were designed to do.
“Jesus Christ, tower, he rolled it on! He didn’t have an inch to spare!” was merely the first of the radioed comments.
When it was obvious his machine was on the ground, Jim lowered the nose as he made sure the speed-brake lever was fully back. He hit the brakes immediately as he pulled number one into reverse more or less simultaneously, but Ship 612 barely slowed as they continued to barrel down the runway toward the red lights which marked the far end.
All three of them watched, mesmerized, as the 747 ate the remaining concrete, the brakes seemingly ineffective though the pressure was good and Jim was pressing the pedals as far as his feet could push. They were willing it to slow now, mentally begging her to stop. The upward angle of the landscape on the other side of the runway was invisible in the dark, but they knew it was there.
Jim Aaron plunged his feet as far forward on the brakes as he could. At last he began to feel the big Boeing move decisively beneath him as the brakes began to grab.
The red lights marking the end, however, had all but disappeared under the nose.
Jim had pulled number-one engine into reverse idle. Now he pulled it into full reverse, feeling the effect as he fought to maintain directional control.
Agonizingly, Clipper Ten rolled off the runway and onto the overrun, its momentum dying, its nose gear finally coming to a halt less than a hundred yards from the absolute end.
The fire trucks raced for the still-burning number-four engine immediately, spurting a greeting of fire-suppressant foam.
Within ten minutes the passengers and crew of Clipper Ten had evacuated the airplane, using the emergency slides on the left side. The huge Boeing now sat bracketed by several portable searchlights as a convention of emergency vehicles ringed the scene. The TV cameras broadcast live feeds from the various reporters on hand. Several times loud applause and cheers broke out from the rescuers and the rescued alike as various members of the crew came down the slides after checking to make sure their passengers were all off. Captain Aaron slid to the ground last, watched live by well over eighty million viewers around the world. With the passengers gathered on the grass on the eastern side of the runway, the happy confusion of the scene was marked by what seemed a hundred firefly-like rotating beacons.
Jim Aaron and his crew then walked around their ship, noting the gaping absence of the right inboard engine, the scarred and peppered hulk of the right outboard engine, and the torn and jagged metal
skin beneath the fuselage where shrapnel from the disintegrating engine number three had pierced the baggage compartment and damaged landing gear and hydraulic lines before flying to the left side of the 747 to be ingested by engine number two.
The right-wing landing gear was partially extended but had been held up by damaged tubing of some sort. It hung at a 45-degree angle now, its tires several feet above the pavement, with the aircraft supported nicely by the remaining three main landing-gear assemblies.
Jim Aaron returned to the side of number-one engine with Judy and Patrick at his side. The lead flight attendant appeared as well. Jim hugged her as Patrick reached up to pat the right outboard powerplant that had brought them back. The gesture was broadcast live, and the passengers broke out in applause and cheers once more.
On the western side of the runway, standing quietly by the empty Jet Ranger that had brought them there and holding her daughter’s hand, Elizabeth Sterling watched the scene in shocked silence, awestruck by the size of the aircraft and the people who had been just numbers thirty minutes ago.
She was shaking slightly, but she wasn’t cold. The suspense as they had hovered and watched the 747 limp the last few miles toward the runway had been almost unbearable. Looking up now at what the airliner pilots called “The Whale”—remembering what it had just gone through—she suddenly felt very small. Very small and very out of place.
My God! This is what I’ve helped create!
There had been fleeting moments of terror during the years in New York, when she suddenly felt like a little girl awakening in an adult body in the midst of a hostile world. Those were momentary, fleeting episodes, but they would leave her shaken and introspective for days. Do I really belong here? Do I really know what I’m doing? HAVE THEY FOUND OUT I DON’T HAVE A CLUE? The little girl would torture the successful woman, and then scurry away to the lace-curtain recesses of her childhood memories, leaving Elizabeth to revalidate her adult self-confidence all by herself.
The same feeling now squeezed her middle, as never before, with the icy grip of pure anxiety. This was no paper company she was playing with. This … this airline … was people.
Elizabeth felt Kelly snuggle against her, and a different, more practical wave of guilt rose up in her throat.
I was so quick to bring us here. What if …
The looming shape of the 747 filled the night before her, but it could just as easily have been in pieces on the ground now, with broken bodies everywhere—and Kelly by her side to witness it. What kind of mother would chance that? Why hadn’t she thought about the potential consequences?
“Mom? Are you cold? You’re shivering.” Kelly was looking up at her, obviously worried.
“A little.”
“Let’s get back in the helicopter.”
“I shouldn’t have brought us here—” she began.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“They did a good job, didn’t they? The pilots, I mean.”
Elizabeth turned her eyes back to the airplane. She could see the bright portable lights of several TV photographers illuminating the vice-president of operations. “Mr. Jennings used the word ‘magnificent’ after they stopped, Kelly. He should know. It looked pretty impressive to me.”
Kelly took in the same scene without a word, a smile spreading across her face. “If you hadn’t done the money work, they wouldn’t have an airline, right?”
Elizabeth nodded slowly as Kelly smiled again and turned to open the door of the Ranger, reaching out to pull her mother inside, catching her eye as she closed the door.
“I’m real proud of you, Mom.”
Moses Lake, Washington
Robert Chenowith watched the happy images from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in pure shock. He had been tuned to a late-night sitcom when the first news flash broke. Within minutes it was apparent that the Boeing 747 that Pam Am’s flight crew was trying to coax back to safety was none other than Flight 10. The new Pan Am was too small for the director of the Moses Lake facility not to know which ship was on which flight. That was Ship 612. The same one that had been sitting in his hangar the night before. The same one that had been exposed to an intruder.
And the same one he had declared free of sabotage.
With a long, ragged sigh, Chenowith came forward in his recliner and put his hand on the telephone. He had been so proud to land this position, it would be shattering to lose it, but he had no doubt that his decision the night before not to report the intruder to the vice-president of maintenance would be fatal to his career.
Apparently it had almost been fatal to Flight 10.
As he dialed the number in Seattle, he knew deep down that engine number three had not come apart by itself.
7
Thursday, March 9
Pan Am Corporate Headquarters, Seattle
Elizabeth had hidden her anger well, but it was becoming increasingly difficult. Making a good first impression with the staff and fellow executives of Pan Am was the prime directive for the moment, but she was aching for the opportunity to get Ron Lamb alone. He had some serious explaining to do.
She hated facing an important day with less than four hours’ sleep, but by the time she and Kelly had picked up their bags, reached the new condo, and settled down the previous evening, it was 2:00 A.M. By 5:30 A.M., the continuous dreams revolving around the momentous events of the night before had made sleep impossible, and the memory of Clipper Ten staggering across the runway threshold was haunting her. She had given up trying to sleep and rummaged instead through the minimal stack of groceries they’d ordered in advance, finding coffee to brew and bread to toast. She took a shower then, and left a long list of chores for Kelly before clearing the door as soon as the new housekeeper arrived.
By seven-fifteen, Elizabeth was twenty blocks across the city on the fifty-sixth floor of the Columbia Center Building.
Her office was beautiful. She had picked the decor on the previous trip, and it had turned out even better than she had imagined. She stuck her head inside long enough to verify that everything was in place, left her briefcase on the edge of the mahogany desk, and set off in search of Chad Jennings. In the middle of the night she had seized on what Jennings had told her about the FAA. She had accepted it as if Pan Am were completely guiltless. But were they?
The executive offices had become a beehive of activity by 8:30 A.M., with two TV camera crews and various reporters calling or waiting in the reception area, emergency briefings, and a frantic crisis atmosphere as the headlines praised Pan Am’s flight crew at the same time they flailed Pan Am for allowing the incident to happen in the first place.
By 9:00 A.M. she had briefed her assistant, her new secretary, the comptroller, and most of their people, in addition to touring the accounting offices and reassuring everyone that the only changes she would be making in the next few months were strategic ones at the corporate finance level.
“Everyone, breathe easy. I’m not here to fix something that isn’t broken, and from what I see, the internal financial structure is well oiled.”
The only glitch was her second-in-command, Staff Vice-President of Finance Fred Kinnen. It wasn’t necessarily instant dislike, more a feeling of distrust that sounded an internal warning when she tried to talk to the man. Thin-lipped and intense, his answers irritated her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. He was correct and polite and well informed, but he made her feel uneasy and unwelcome.
At 10:15 A.M. the executive committee of the board was to meet. They had invited her, as a new board member, to attend. The agenda was urgent and worrisome, especially the news that yet another FAA inspection had been launched an hour before at the Seatac operations offices. Ralph Basanji, senior vice-president of public affairs, ran through the media damage from Clipper Ten, and minced no words.
“The conclusion,” he said, “seems to be that we have the best pilots around who’re able to do superhuman feats with a broken airframe, but that the broken a
irframe is somehow a result of our being, and I quote, ‘struggling Pan Am,’ end quote. The allusions to the long financial problems of the first Pan Am are being hung around our necks like an albatross, and I’m fighting to put a different spin on it, based on the fact that we’re a new company. But I won’t kid you, the ship has taken on some water this morning.”
And finally, at long last, by half past eleven, Elizabeth was able to follow Ron Lamb into his office and close the door.
“Ron, I’m here now. What were the other things I needed to know?”
She had made up her mind in midmorning after getting a clearer picture from Chad Jennings. Pan Am’s public image was in trouble, and it was affecting the markets. If Ron Lamb didn’t level with her about the FAA pressures and other problems—if he tried to mislead or snow her on anything she now knew—the deal was off. She’d take Kelly, go back to New York, and file the damnedest lawsuit the airline world had ever seen.
Ron’s eyes met hers across the desk, and he immediately sat forward, clasped his hands, and cleared his throat.
“Okay. Now I can brief you.” He began by outlining the same scenario Chad Jennings had detailed, leaving nothing out, and added a new twist.
“Politically, we have a problem in Washington. Someone may be, shall we say, energizing the FAA to lean on us real hard. We’re successful so far, and we’re taking traffic from some of the big boys, so I suppose retaliation is understandable. We’re not much of a threat, mind you, but we’re a future threat, and they have a lot of muscle.”
“Who’s ‘they’? You talking about American?”
“And United, and Delta, and Northwest, and the international carriers.”
She must have looked shocked, though she was trying to keep her expression in check.
“They’re smarter than that,” Elizabeth said. “American in particular.”
“I know it. But someone seems to be pushing the feds, and any of the airlines we just named would be much happier if the new Pan Am weren’t around to bother their growing international route systems.”
“How much trouble can the FAA cause?”
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