Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

“Iqaluit, Clipper four-zero.”

  Brian looked at the microphone as if it had suddenly materialized in his hand.

  Now why did I do that?

  “Go ahead, four-zero,” the controller answered.

  So what do I say to you, Iqaluit? Things have gotten strange up here and I just wanted to hear a friendly voice?

  “Ah … just checking to see if you were still there, Iqaluit,” Brian said.

  A light Canadian accent colored the controller’s words as he gave a cheery reply.

  “Yep, we’re here all right, Clipper. You’re level, then, at flight level four-one-zero, eh?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Tyson was back through the cockpit door and strapping into the right-hand seat again in less than two minutes.

  “Nothing. No glow, no indication of any trouble on either engine.”

  The engine fire lights remained on, shining like giant red beacons, telling them the big lie that both engines were burning.

  But the main engine instrument panel had returned to normal for the moment.

  “Okay,” Brian began, “what do we have here?”

  At the same instant, both fire lights extinguished simultaneously—almost as if some unseen hand had flipped off two switches somewhere down in the electronics compartment, one deck below.

  Two minutes passed without a flicker, then the center screen suddenly went dead, and both pilots began to feel something new and disturbing.

  Brian looked at the throttles in alarm. They hadn’t moved. He looked for the engine indications instinctively, but there were none. His eyes moved then, in an instant of alarm, to the instrument panel, which confirmed what they were feeling: they were slowing down.

  In the background noise of the slipstream, he thought he had heard the sound of turbines winding down the scale. Tyson Matthews reached the same conclusion simultaneously.

  “We’ve lost an engine,” the copilot said.

  Brian’s right hand gathered the throttles and shoved them forward as far as they’d go.

  There was no response.

  “My God, we’ve lost both of them!” Brian said, his heart racing. “Emergency restart … airstart ’em!”

  Tyson grabbed for the overhead switches to fire the ignition plugs in both engines in the hope of restarting quickly.

  “I don’t have any engine information … I don’t know what we’ve got!” Tyson exclaimed, looking at the blank engine instrument display.

  Brian was watching the airspeed decay. “I’m … ah … gonna set up a glide here. Around two hundred twenty knots, I think.”

  Tyson nodded as Brian fought to stay focused, disconnecting the autopilot and lowering the nose to stabilize the airspeed, as the rate-of-climb indicator began a slow descent to the fifteen-hundred-foot-per-minute indication.

  Tyson was hanging on both restart switches. “Nothing, Brian. We’re getting nothing!”

  “Any popped breakers anywhere?”

  “I looked. I don’t think so.”

  “I’m gonna deploy the RAT.” Brian reached for the lever that dropped a small propeller into the airstream. The ram air turbine would give them electrical power and even hydraulic power if everything else failed.

  “I’m gonna start the APU too.” Brian’s hand shot to the upper panel and toggled the auxiliary power unit in the tail into the start mode, and within a minute there was a steady run indication from the diminutive jet engine. He flipped the appropriate switches to bring it on line in order to power the electrical system and the air-conditioning and pressurization systems.

  “Okay, we have electrical, hydraulic, flight controls, and cabin pressure. Now we need engines,” Brian said.

  “Brian, we’re coming through thirty-nine thousand. If anything’s happening out there, I don’t feel it.”

  “Are we in the start envelope … yeah, yeah, we are.” Brian said, checking the airspeed. They had to keep the airplane moving in a certain speed range for an airstart of the two huge turbofan engines, but the speed checked good.

  “Keep trying,” Brian added. “The problem may be our altitude. It may fire off when we get a little lower.”

  Tyson’s voice was strained and climbing slightly with alarm. “And if not? What then, Brian?”

  Good point. We need help.

  Brian yanked up the microphone. “Ah … I’d better let them know what’s happening. Keep working on the restart. I’ll fly the airplane and talk to Iqaluit.”

  Brian depressed the transmit button.

  “Iqaluit radio … ah … Clipper four-zero. We’ve lost both engines and are now descending, ah, through flight level three-eight-five. If there’s an emergency airfield somewhere within a hundred miles, please give us an immediate vector. We’re trying to restart now …” He let up on the button, then remembered the transponder. They should be squawking the emergency code of 7700, though they would be out of radar contact. He reached over and dialed it in.

  Brian glanced at Tyson, noting the flared eyebrows and the look of barely contained fright and utter frustration on his face as he met Brian’s gaze.

  “Nothing. Nothing, dammit!” the copilot snapped. “It’s not happening, Brian!”

  “Don’t give up!”

  The radio crackled in their ear with a startled operator on the other end, his voice suddenly intense and concerned, his vocal pace doubled from before.

  “Clipper four-zero, roger, copy your emergency. The nearest usable airfield is over three hundred miles from your position. I recommend a heading now of zero-nine-five degrees magnetic. You’re a two-engine 767, is that correct?”

  “That’s right, Iqaluit. And they’re both flamed out and are not restarting. We may need to think about an emergency landing.”

  Brian thought about the first conclusion anyone below might reach, and decided to squelch it. “And, Iqaluit, for the record, we have plenty of fuel and good fuel pumps.”

  “Brian? We need to let the cabin … the passengers … know,” Tyson said, inclining his head toward the rear bulkhead as he kept his eyes on the blank engine instrument screen.

  Brian nodded as he scooped up the interphone handset and punched in the appropriate code. The response was nearly instantaneous from the lead flight attendant, who had been in the process of calling the cockpit.

  “What’s up, boys? Why are we descending?” Her feminine voice registered in Brian’s ear, reminding him for a second of Elizabeth. He banished the thought and cleared his throat, which was tight with apprehension.

  “We … ah … we’ve got a double engine flameout. We’re working on a restart now, but—”

  “No engines? Are you telling me we’re going down?”

  He realized he was nodding into the phone, and found his voice.

  “We’ll probably get them restarted when we get lower, but for now, get the cabin ready for an emergency landing. Immediately! Worst case, we’ll have fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh God! Where are we? Is there an airfield?”

  “Jan … Jan, just get busy. We’ll do our best.”

  The line clicked dead. He picked up the PA microphone then, and looked at Tyson with a question in his eyes. If just one engine could be brought back on line, it wouldn’t be necessary to scare the passengers.

  Tyson shook his head angrily in the negative.

  “Folks, this is the captain. I’ll be very frank. We have a very serious problem, and it may be necessary to make an emergency landing. I’ve instructed the flight attendants to get you and the cabin ready. Please cooperate immediately. We’re very busy up here.”

  That was enough. Brian snapped the microphone off and adjusted his descent rate to increase the speed a bit. The urge to pull back on the yoke and stop the descent was powerful, but without engine power it would be a futile gesture.

  “We’re through thirty-six thousand and they’re not starting, Brian. We’re gonna have to think of something fast. There’s nothing down there.” Ty
son pointed down.

  “Okay. Give it a rest for two minutes.” He waved at the overhead airstart switches. “Let’s … let’s think options.”

  “We don’t get one of these suckers started, we have no options!” Tyson said.

  “Clipper four-zero, Iqaluit, say fuel and souls on board.” The operator was only following the rules, but the copilot was in no mood to be interrupted. Before Brian could answer, he had pulled his own microphone to his face.

  “Stand by, Iqaluit, stand by … we’ll get you in a minute!”

  Brian took a deep, if somewhat ragged, breath. It was all on the line now. “Okay, if we get restarted, we go to the nearest Canadian base and land. To that end, we need to think through what we’re trying. Are we missing something?”

  “And if we don’t get restarted?” Tyson asked, his eyes flaring wide.

  “Then let’s face it. We’ll have to land on whatever flat spot we can find below, with gear down, and pray we can do it.”

  “What’s below us, Brian?” the copilot asked. Brian started to grab the map, then remembered the radio.

  “Iqaluit Radio, Clipper four-zero. Still zero engines. We need your help. What’s ahead of us about eighty miles? Are there any flat areas? I don’t have time to read the map and fly, too.”

  The tense but reassuring voice of the Canadian operator came back almost immediately.

  “We’ve been looking at that for you, sir. The terrain’s pretty flat the way you’re headed, but if you have to put it down somewhere, you’ll want a lake, not open ocean ice.”

  “What’s the weather below us?”

  “Our remote station closest to the position is reporting winds out of the west at twenty knots, a solid overcast at one thousand meters, or around three thousand feet, and temperature in Fahrenheit is, uh, minus forty-eight.”

  “Can you vector us to a big lake? I assume they’re all frozen?”

  “Clipper four-zero, they’re all frozen solid, and we have no radar here. Ah, we’re looking at maps. Stand by.”

  Brian could hear a buzz of voices behind the operator as he let up on his transmit switch.

  There was no point in looking at Tyson. The frustration—the helpless feeling—was eating the copilot alive. He was willing the engines to start, but nothing was happening.

  They were below twenty-six thousand feet now, coming down at around fifteen hundred feet per minute. Brian calculated seventeen minutes and ninety miles left before they’d be out of options.

  “Ah, Clipper four-zero, Iqaluit radio.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Sir, ah, how many more miles can you stay airborne without power?”

  Brian told him the calculations.

  “Okay, we’re doing you no good with this heading. It’s taking you toward open ice pack, and you’d still be two hundred miles from the nearest runway, and that’s no good. I suggest we turn you back west, to a heading of two-seven-zero degrees. We think you can find an area of many good-sized lakes, and you can pick which one you want when you break out.

  Brian had already started turning back to the west as the operator spoke.

  “Roger. We’ve got inertial navigation systems, Iqaluit. We’ll give you our final position and heading just before … before we … land.” The word was hard to get out. He hoped it would be a landing. He had to believe it would be a landing, and not something less controlled.

  Another rush of epithets came from the right seat as Tyson gave up on the right engine and began working on restarting the left. He was holding on to the switches with one hand and banging on the darkened engine display screen with the other before reaching down to cycle the engine fuel control switches off and on one more time.

  Brian rolled out of the turn and stabilized on a heading of 270 degrees as he turned to the copilot.

  “We need to talk about how to handle this.”

  “I know it,” Tyson replied rapidly. “I heard that weather. We’ve got nighttime and no moonlight below the overcast, and less than three thousand feet to pick a landing spot.”

  “Okay … okay, so we’re going to need as much speed coming down through the cloud deck as we can get, and we’re going to need the landing lights,” Brian added.

  “We’ve got good hydraulics,” Tyson said. “We should hold off extending the landing gear and flaps until we’ve decided … you know … where to go in.”

  Brian nodded. “I know the gear’s going to take about fifteen seconds, and the flaps maybe a minute. We’ll be moving at three miles per minute, and our lights aren’t going to show up anything on the ground until we’re within a mile and probably three hundred feet.”

  “Goddammit, Brian, there’s a full moon up here tonight. Why the hell do we have to do this with an overcast? We need that light.”

  The question was serious and pained, but Brian found himself almost laughing.

  “Yeah, next time we do this we’ll have to plan it better,” he replied, but Tyson was totally focused on the restart attempts and the humor was lost.

  “Okay,” Brian continued, “if we’re lucky enough to get a semi-flat surface, the brakes might work, but if not, I should probably aerobrake and treat it like a soft-field landing … you know, keep the nose up as long as possible.”

  He could see Tyson nodding his head on the right.

  “We’re descending through twenty thousand feet, Brian. We’d better get our lights down … get our night vision up. We should be breathing pure oxygen, too, just before … you know.”

  Brian nodded and began lowering the already subdued cockpit lights.

  There was a knock on the door, and Brian punched the electrical unlock button on the overhead panel to admit Jan, the lead flight attendant. He looked over his shoulder at her, aware of the drained and fearful look on her face.

  “What … what’s our situation?” she asked.

  Brian shook his head from side to side. “We aren’t having any luck getting them started.”

  “Are we out of fuel? Did we run out?”

  “No. Something’s wrong with the electronics.”

  “So … we’re going to land … where?”

  Brian looked her in the eye. “I won’t mislead you, Jan. There’s no airport out here, only frozen terrain and frozen lakes. We’re going to try our best to find a lake. It could be rough. Very rough.”

  She nodded stoically and took a deep breath. “You’ll remember to give us a PA warning to brace?”

  “I promise,” Brian told her.

  She started to turn to go, then turned back. “Oh, the woman and the young lady in compartment one who’re friends of yours?”

  “Yes?” Brian felt his blood run cold at the reminder of whose lives were in his hands.

  “The young lady says, ‘Thumbs up,’ and she loves you.”

  “Tell …” He had to clear his throat. Emotion had welled up and choked off the reply. “Tell her … I love her too … and thumbs up.”

  Jan closed the door behind her and disappeared into the cabin as the phrase rattled around Brian’s head. How many times he’d used that to buck up Kelly when she thought she was facing some insurmountable hurdle. “Thumbs up, young lady! Only ‘can-do’ attitudes permitted around here.”

  Tyson’s tired hands dropped from the overhead switches into his lap as he shook his head. The anger had disappeared, and he looked genuinely anguished. “It’s not gonna happen, Brian. We’re out of options.” He glanced at the altimeter. They were coming through fifteen thousand feet. The moonlight glinted from the upper deck of the overcast below, and it was obvious they were only a few thousand feet from entering it.

  “Okay, make a last check with Iqaluit. Give our position,” Brian commanded. Tyson grabbed the microphone to comply.

  Brian watched the ghostly shape of the undercast rising to gobble them, and lofted a small prayer.

  Dear God, please help me do this! Please help us do this! Let Kelly get out of this okay.

  “Okay. He’s been told. Rescu
e forces are already launching, he said.” Tyson replaced the microphone and reached to the engine airstart switches for one final try.

  They were into the clouds now.

  “I hope the weather report was right,” Brian said.

  Tyson checked the extremely accurate radio altimeter. It showed them now at eleven thousand feet above the surface.

  “Tyson, I’m going to accelerate to three hundred knots by five thousand above the surface and hold it until at least two thousand, and probably all the way down, depending on when we can see anything. What do you think?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Sounds okay. You fly and I’ll look. We need to get these lights down. Time for oxygen.”

  Tyson pulled his mask from its compartment and put it on. Oxygen increased the effectiveness of night vision, and Brian turned to do the same.

  The sound of the slipstream increased now as Brian pushed the nose over and let gravity accelerate them to three hundred knots. Almost all the cockpit lights were down to absolute minimum, but there was still nothing to see except dark gray outside the windscreen.

  Brian picked up the PA microphone.

  “Okay, folks, everyone in the brace position.”

  They descended through five thousand at 310 knots, then four thousand, with no hint of a breakout.

  “They said three thousand, right?” Brian asked.

  “That’s what they said,” Tyson responded. Whether Brian had also heard Iqaluit’s concern about the Arctic storm system moving into the area, he wasn’t sure. They could talk about it later. He hoped.

  “Okay, any time now, Canada. Show yourself. Please!” Brian muttered.

  “Coming through three thousand,” Tyson called out. “You’re on speed.”

  Nothing.

  “Two thousand,” Tyson called.

  Still nothing.

  “Fifteen hundred, Brian. I don’t see anything.”

  “Turn on all the landing lights,” Brian directed. Tyson’s hand reached up and snapped them on immediately. Nothing but illuminated clouds showed ahead of them, the light almost blinding as it reflected back in.

  “Twelve hundred feet, Brian.”

  “We may have to do this on instruments all the way,” Brian said.

  Which would probably be suicidal! Brian thought.