Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  Taking flight lessons and working his way to a commercial and instrument rating before qualifying for airtanker copilot had been another protracted struggle, but he’d loved every minute of it.

  “Clark, close your eyes if you want,” Rusty was saying. “Rest up a few minutes for the approach. It really is allowed.”

  “Thanks.” He could see Rusty still looking at him as if waiting for an opening.

  “What?” Clark asked.

  “I’m wondering,” Rusty began, choosing his words carefully, “how preventable this was, you know?”

  “You mean, with all the special inspections this year, how the hell could a propeller blade fail like that? Or were those inspections just a placebo to make the FAA and Forest Service brass feel good?”

  Rusty nodded. “Something like that. Look, Clark, I’ve figured out it was you who wrote that bombshell exposé article last year on tanker safety, and it scares me to think how right you were. This whole system’s shot.”

  Clark gave him a worried glance and the copilot smiled and nodded more vigorously. “Hey, most of us really appreciated it. Not that anyone knew it was you.”

  “Why would you think that article was mine?”

  “Deduction, my dear captain Watson. Only a guy with a butt full of saddle sores from too many years in the DC-6B, and a guy who’s a true professional in this business, could have known the right stuff about what’s wrong. Obviously none of the guys still flying on the front lines every year are going to risk their jobs to speak up in public, and that means the only cappie with both the necessary qualifications and the ability to do so without cutting his throat would be someone newly retired, and that left a particular birdman named Maxwell.”

  “So, that’s your conclusion, huh?”

  “Yes…that, and your speech patterns gave you away. You write like you talk.”

  Clark chuckled as he rechecked the gauges. “If I write like I talk, then I’m really in deep trouble.”

  “Actually, you do both very well, skipper. I was impressed.”

  The compliment registered with a small sparkle of pride. Rusty was a good writer with several national articles to his credit.

  “Thanks,” Clark replied guardedly. “But…how many others know who wrote it?”

  “I’m the only one, as far as I know.”

  “Ah, you’re…you’re not planning on—”

  “Broadcasting the fact that the old friend I requested to fly with threw an anonymous harpoon into the side of the tanker industry last year and scared both the general public and the administration? Hell, no. You were dead-on right. I just wanted you to know that I agree with you, and that I appreciate it.”

  “Well…I just don’t see the owners ever having enough money to do it right, y’know? Maintenance, training, inspections, ancient planes…we’ll just keep on using Band-Aids and killing people,” Clark said. “And I still have a lot of suspicions about how the C-130s were being used in the off-season, things we’ve never really looked into. The only real remedy I can see is a government takeover of some sort. Heck, I know the Forest Service and BLM will continue to harden their oversight, but it’s still brittle. They can’t make exhausted old aerial wrecks safe by passing regulations requiring them not to crash.”

  “I admire your courage, Clark. I’ve seen this trait in you for years.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Like the time you tried to hustle that little redhead in Boise?”

  “What?”

  “Pure courage. You didn’t have a prayer.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “But the type of courage I’m talking about is the intestinal fortitude to tell it like it is regardless of the consequences. Did the queen bee ever figure it out and call you?”

  “Sherry Lacey, you mean?” Clark asked, recalling the last time he’d spoken to the Forest Service’s director in charge of wildland firefighting. Sherry was a lovely, intelligent woman and one of the Air Force’s first female pilots. But ultimately she was in a highly political position, and there was little chance she would have liked his conclusions.

  “No. As far as I know she never knew that came from me.”

  “Well, I salute your courage,” Rusty added.

  Courage indeed! Clark thought. He’d penned the article from within the safe haven of retirement and hadn’t been brave enough even to sign his name. Of course, maybe it would have been better if Jerry Stein had known it was him who’d stirred up so much fury. If so, he hadn’t a doubt that Jerry would never have begged him to come back. “The bastard who wrote that,” Jerry had fumed to him on the phone, “is a traitor and a liar.” Clark had murmured all the right sounds of passive assent and said nothing more.

  Rusty was nodding grimly. “Clark, you know, honestly? How long have I been flying these tubs as costar…maybe eight years? I sure would like to stick around and upgrade to captain, but I’d rather find a new job or even stop flying instead of rolling the dice every summer and running the risks we run. I love it, but these birds are aging faster than Trent can repair them.”

  “We need to talk. There’s more going on here than meets the eye, Rusty, and I could use a silent ally. Congress doesn’t understand yet, even after the Blue Ribbon report last year, which was scathing and excellent.”

  “I’m ready, man. Because the way I see it…”

  The shrill jangling of an alarm bell covered the last few words as both pilots jerked their heads to the right. There was a red glow on the forward panel, and Clark realized it was the number-four-engine fire light. Rusty pressed his nose to his side window.

  “What now?” Clark asked.

  “Jeez, number four’s on fire!” Rusty said.

  “Number four?”

  “Yes!”

  “Didn’t we shut off the fuel and finish the checklist?”

  “Yes, dammit…I know I did….” Rusty was fumbling to reach for the checklist with his free left hand, across his lap, his right staying on the yoke.

  “I’ve got her,” Clark said, taking up the pressure on the yoke with his left hand as he reached for the engine-fire switch on the overhead panel with his right.

  “Rusty…check engine-fire switch number four. Confirm number four.”

  The copilot looked up and nodded. “Ah, roger, number four confirmed.”

  Clark pushed the switch that isolated number four-engine from fuel and electrical power and discharged the fire extinguisher.

  “Anything? Any change?” he asked.

  “No! The fire bottle isn’t going to help…. The engine’s almost fallen off.”

  Clark ignored the unintended rebuke. “Can you see what’s burning? Where the flames are coming from?”

  “Want me to go back and look?” Rusty was already unfastening his seat belt.

  “Yeah. Go.”

  Rusty tumbled and pushed out of the right seat into the narrow aisleway, bruising his leg as he struggled free of the center console and raced out of the cockpit door into the mostly empty cabin to look out of the windows on the right side.

  He was back in less than a minute.

  “I don’t know, Clark, it’s…the flames are coming from the front of the engine nacelle and over the top of the wings as well as under it.”

  “You think it’s fuel?”

  “Could be…God, if it is…”

  The rest of the sentence went unspoken. The fuel tanks were half empty, but what remained was highly explosive aviation gasoline, and if the flames could somehow find a way in to ignite the fumes, it would be all over in a literal flash.

  “How about oil, Rusty?” Clark said evenly, feeling a cold knot forming in the pit of his stomach and the same creeping fear oozing around inside. “Could it be just burning oil?”

  Rusty nodded, brightening just a bit. “Maybe! The flames aren’t that much…it could be burning the remaining oil leaking out of the engine.”

  “I’ll call base and tell them we’re on fire and to get the fire trucks ready to follo
w us down the runway.”

  “Can we make it back?” Rusty asked as he refastened his seat belt, his voice more pleading than asking, the knowledge that there were no parachutes on board an unspoken truth.

  “What are the options? We’re much closer to home than to Jackson Hole. Even the lake is a long way back.”

  Clark shoved the remaining three throttles forward to METO power.

  “I’m going to goose the airspeed as high as I can.”

  “Try to blow out the flames?”

  He nodded, adjusting the rudder trim and rolling in more left aileron as the ship responded, the throaty roar of the remaining power plants masking the extreme danger they were trying to overcome.

  “Anything else I can do?” Rusty asked, the strain in his voice apparent.

  Clark nodded and tried unsuccessfully to grin.

  “Yeah. Get out the beads and start clicking.”

  “Beads? I’m not Catholic.”

  “Then…I don’t know…maybe make a promise to God that you’ll give up women if he gets us out of this.”

  Rusty looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Excuse me? I’ll give up women?”

  Clark snorted, finally forcing his mouth into a genuine smile. “Well, I’m sure as hell not going to, and I’m the captain.”

  WEST YELLOWSTONE AIRTANKER OPERATIONS

  Clark Maxwell’s familiar voice had somehow cut through the din of conversations and office noises and silenced everyone in West Yellowstone Operations and the nearby pilot standby shack. The short bursts of static on the frequency seemed to underscore the distance between the crippled DC-6B and the relative safety of the runway outside.

  There were other voices over the radio crackling through the room, the routine background chatter of the mechanics and ground crews and the Operations personnel, but those in the room were practiced at tuning out anything but the radio exchange they wanted to hear.

  Clark described his situation to the dispatcher, who was located at a small desk in a corner of the room.

  “Ah…the flames are probably about…they’re trailing behind the wing maybe ten feet…not a huge fireball, but we’re really kinda worried about it getting to the fuel vents. I’m…gonna need the trucks ready to hose it down the second we slow up. Tell them to just follow me down the runway.”

  The dispatcher’s reply was almost inaudible to the cadre of aerial firefighters collectively holding their breath.

  “Roger, Tanker Eighty-four. We’ll be ready. How far out are you?”

  The microphone button aboard the DC-6 was pushed and once again the intermittent static coursed through their ears before Clark’s voice returned.

  “My…ah…handheld GPS says we’re about ten miles out now, closing fast. Speed’s two hundred sixty.”

  “We’re clearing all other traffic. The field’s yours.”

  There was a tug on Rich Lassiter’s sleeve as he stood next to the dispatcher. He turned to find one of the younger Forest Service employees standing wide-eyed with a receiver to her ear.

  “What?”

  “One of the rangers at the south entrance to the park says one of our tankers just flew by on fire.”

  “We know.”

  She nodded. “Yes, but he says the whole right wing was on fire and he was going down.”

  Somewhere in the back of his mind Lassiter recalled an article about the extreme fallibility of eyewitnesses in aviation disasters, but it wasn’t silencing the shrill voice of panic in his mind that they were about to lose a second one.

  IN FLIGHT, TANKER 84

  “I’ve got the field at eleven o’clock,” Rusty said, pointing in that direction. He looked back out his window. “And it looks like it’s diminishing out there…just sputtering, y’know?”

  “Almost out?”

  “Close. Not much flame left.”

  Clark nodded as he nudged the struggling airliner five degrees more to the right, aiming for a point three miles north of the field. The wind was out of the south, and he’d make the tightest left turn possible to final approach to minimize the time.

  “Rusty, the only checklist I want to hear is the before-landing checklist. Take care of everything else silently.”

  “Okay. I’m still showing two hundred ten knots, Clark.”

  Clark nodded again without replying as he ran the visual calculations of just when and where he should yank the throttles back and slow before turning. There was an optimum point that would bring them down to the right approach and landing speed at just the right moment. Too soon and he’d lengthen the time they were exposed to the fire. Too late and he’d whistle in over the runway threshold too fast to land safely, and making a go-around with the fire still going could cost them their lives.

  “We’re five out,” Rusty called.

  “Roger that.”

  The throttles were suddenly in motion backward as Clark pulled engines one, two, and three to idle, and worked fast to take out the considerable amount of rudder trim he’d been carrying.

  “Gear down.”

  “Roger, gear down,” Rusty responded as his hand moved the gear lever. The sound of an immediate rush of wind filled the cockpit as the landing gear moved into the slipstream way above normal extension speeds. The DC-6B shuddered and began to slow.

  “Four miles.”

  They were still almost perpendicular to the final approach path to the runway and moving over the ground at a hundred and ninety knots.

  “Flaps ten.”

  “Roger. Flaps coming to ten.”

  Clark used every ounce of muscle he had in his left arm to crank the yoke over as he pressed hard on the left rudder, skidding and rolling the big aircraft into a left forty-five-degree bank. The nose came left as they slid through the final approach course, slowing and descending, the speed still above 170.

  “Flaps twenty.”

  “Flaps twenty.”

  “Flaps forty.”

  “Roger, forty.”

  They could feel the ship rise on the added lift of the large flaps as they came farther out, and Clark pushed forward to keep them descending, the fuselage of the big Douglas now twenty degrees misaligned with the runway.

  Rusty pressed the transmit button on his yoke. “West Yellowstone traffic, Tanker Eighty-four, emergency bird, two-mile final, full stop, Yellowstone,” he said, releasing the transmit button and glancing at Clark. “Speed one thirty and slowing.”

  Clark banked back to the right slightly, aiming at the very end of the runway and coming over the threshold just as they aligned with it. He flared and let the mains settle onto the concrete almost simultaneously with the nose gear before pressing on the top of the rudder pedals to activate the brakes, metering the pressure but slowing rapidly as the waiting fire trucks flashed past. The firemen began racing to catch up as the DC-6 slowed below thirty. There was a taxiway just ahead on the right, and Clark steered the ship into a tight right turn to pull safely off the runway before letting it roll to a stop.

  “They’re already on it!” the copilot announced, just as an impressive stream of water and foam hit the right wing from behind.

  An anxious team of mechanics led by Trent Jones himself materialized with an engine stand and tool kits. When the firemen were through cooling the engine and cleaning up, they pulled the stand up to the hanging remains of the eighteen-cylinder engine. The two pilots had run the shutdown checklist with calm, steady voices, but when Rusty climbed to the ramp minutes later and tried to walk, his legs had turned to jelly.

  Clark seemed steadier, but he, too, was fighting the effects of the last half hour.

  Trent Jones motioned for his lead mechanic to take care of questioning the pilots while he stood on the grimy surface of the asphalt chewing an unlit cigar and moving around number-four engine with an older mechanic in trail.

  The scorched and damaged Pratt and Whitney R-2800 power plant was barely hanging on the twisted remains of the engine mount, which had broken at all but two weld points. The engine itse
lf was almost touching the concrete and still swaying gently.

  Trent moved several feet away and looked closely at the right wing. The two ruined propeller blades had chopped several huge gashes in the leading edge of the wing, but the main event—the wing spar—appeared untouched.

  “If that had reached a fuel tank, they’d be gone,” he growled to himself.

  Andy Simmons, the other mechanic, scratched at his mountain man beard and stuffed a greasy rag in a rear pocket of his coveralls as he watched. Trent Jones was technically his boss, but he was also a much less experienced mechanic. Andy hated management duties. He had worked for Jerry Stein for a decade before Jones came aboard, and he was perfectly content to let a volatile man like Jones spar and battle with Jerry while Andy came in quietly every day and happily did what he loved to do: convince complicated machines to run well. The amazing R-2800 was his specialty, a brilliantly designed engine first produced in 1939, full of complex reciprocating parts and eighteen cylinders that, when running smoothly, pulled itself through the air with the power of two thousand horses.

  “Jets,” Andy was fond of sneering, “are kid stuff. Real men maintain R-2800s.”

  He’d already seen enough of this particular version to know what it was going to take to repair it.

  “So whatd’ya think, Mr. Maintenance Director?” Simmons asked, well aware that while Trent was a reasonably competent mechanic, he was a novice with the R-2800s, and completely underwater as a maintenance director.

  Trent Jones made a rude noise and pulled the unlit cigar out of his mouth.

  “What’s to think? The prop’s toast, the wing alone is a good two days’ work to patch, and we’ll have to either scavenge an R-2800 engine mount, or build one when the fuzz isn’t looking. And we’ve got a wingful of soot and black to get off.”

  “You do know, don’tcha, that Jerry’s on descent right now in that little Lear of his?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. He’ll be on the ramp in another twenty minutes, Trent, and heading for the hangar to help you out.”