“Captain, I’m telling you…”
“No, Mr. Butterfield. You’re not telling me anything of use. What you’re trying to do is intimidate me to slow down. Perhaps you, and I guess the CEO, and everyone else, think that if I follow your orders, I can wash my hands of the moral responsibility for the results. But we all know that’s bullshit! You’re trying to make this horrible choice for me, and I cannot let you do it, because I know what will happen. Okay?”
“I can’t legally order you…”
“No, you can’t. But you can relay all you’ve said as a de facto order, and that’s what you’ve made crystal clear: do what we tell you! It’s pretty much the way Regal treats all its pilots. So okay, I understand your position. But it’s my call.”
“I’m not going to refute or endorse your characterization, Captain. Look, I’m not the bad guy here. None of us are. But you need to understand that your actions will have consequences.”
Marty forced a sarcastic laugh into the receiver, making sure it was loud enough to register on the other end.
“How about that! My actions have already had consequences! So will this conversation if things go poorly. Keep your fingers crossed, Mr. Butterfield, because in truth what I’m going to do up here is go with a calculated risk, versus an execution. Goodbye, sir. I assume you’re wishing me luck, but I’m disconnecting now in order to land.”
He jabbed the disconnect button and felt a surprisingly unexpected calm, the decisional agony resolved. So now, even before the deed was done, it was done — and his career undoubtedly would go with it.
Marty turned to the copilot, wondering why Ryan was balancing his smartphone with a calculator displayed on the screen.
“How’re you doing, Ryan?” he asked suspiciously.
“We’ve got a problem,” Ryan answered, far too focused to be aware of the irony.
“Just one?” Marty replied with a snort.
“We must be burning fuel faster than I calculated.”
“What are you seeing?”
With his left hand firmly on the control yoke, Ryan looked at the captain…
“We should have eight thousand pounds total remaining in the center tank, but we only have five!”
“How is that possible?” Marty asked. “I know we’re burning a hell of a lot more fuel down low and with the appendage on the right wing, but you had that figured, right?”
Ryan looked at him with deep concern bordering on true panic. “The center tank may be leaking, too.”
“Okay, we have five, but how much in the left main?”
“We can’t use that fuel! It’s counterbalancing the Beech fuselage.”
Marty was leaning forward and examining the tank readings himself.
“We have nine thousand in the left main. So, we’re not going to flame out.”
“No, but we have no idea how much we can burn out of the left main tank before we get in major control issues keeping the wings level. I mean, nine thousand pounds on the right along with all the drag and yaw, I don’t want to eat too far into the nine thousand on the left.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“Captain! We really need to get her on the ground inside fifteen minutes. And that’s assuming whatever additional leak there is — if there is one — doesn’t suddenly get worse.”
“I got it, Ryan. But if we have to feed from the left tank, we will.”
“Captain…” he began, sighing loudly and tilting his head down as he bit his lip deciding what to do. He snapped his head in Marty’s direction with the suddenness of a rifle shot. “I’m not comfortable being in that position! We don’t know where the point might be of loss of lateral control, and the limitation is twenty-five hundred pounds max imbalance. Two thousand five hundred pounds! We’ll suck up that much halfway through a missed approach.”
Marty sat in thought for a few beats, wondering why he felt such a flash of anger at being countered. That was precisely what a copilot was supposed to do. But what he wasn’t supposed to do, Marty thought, was screw up the altitude and cause a midair! Maybe that was the source of the anger… the copilot’s role in this disaster.
No, Marty realized. It’s my resentment over Butterfield’s call. Ryan is right. The window for getting the 757 on the ground is shrinking fast.
He turned to the copilot. “You’re correct and I apologize. And I think we’re about as ready for the approach as we’re going to be.” Marty let the words roll of his tongue as casually as he could, but he felt like a fraud. He was anything but the big, calm, thoroughly in command captain with ice water in his veins. He was thinking erratically, acting on impulse, and frightened beyond the nightmares of the meek.
Marty closed his eyes for a second, reaching for as much inner strength as he could find. He had to concentrate on what had to be done, not the mistakes already made.
Okay. It’s time.
His finger found the transmit button on the control yoke.
“Denver Approach, Regal twelve. We’re ready for vectors a long, twenty mile turn in to the ILS for Runway Seven.”
“Roger, Regal Twelve,” the controller responded. “Turn right now to a heading of three five zero, maintain seven thousand.”
“Right to three five zero and seven thousand.”
In the Cabin of Mountaineer 2612
It had been a hard decision to send Luke Marshall to the back of the cabin with a crash axe to get to the cargo compartment, but with her shoulder at the very least dislocated, Michelle couldn’t do it herself. It was painful enough to keep forward pressure on the control yoke to keep raising the tail and holding the nose down on the 757’s wing.
It could be nothing more than her imagination, she thought, but the bouncing of the Beech fuselage seemed to have dissipated as it’s center of gravity slowly shifted forward with every bag thrown out or emptied.
There had been no protests from the passengers over the impending loss of their checked baggage and all the contents, and three of them had jumped up to help Luke either shove the bags through the opened emergency exit hatch, or open each one and throw the contents out into the brutal slipstream roaring past the open portal. The main problem had been the reaction of passengers across the wing in the 757 who had completely misinterpreted what was happening when the exit hatch was pulled on the Beech fuselage. Regal 12’s passengers had watched in panic, wondering if the Mountaineer passengers were going to try to cross the no man’s land of the wing anyway, braving 230 knots of wind with no handholds.
Regal 12 Cabin
How much time had passed was a mystery Lucy Alvarez had no interest in solving. Every second was a living hell of praying, hoping, begging and pleading with any deity who might listen to take pity and save her lover. He was so close, and yet so very far away, and no matter how many times she waved her lighted cell phone screen in the window, Greg hadn’t understood or responded. His phone remained off and unresponsive to her continuous stream of messages and texts. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask the pilots to relay a message to him, but suddenly there was a flurry of moving flashlights in the cabin of the stricken Beech and to her utter shock, some sort of emergency exit hatch she hadn’t noticed was suddenly opened, the hatch itself pulled back into the aircraft.
Logic played no role in Lucy snapping off the seatbelt and launching her body half way over the seatback of the empty window and middle seats ahead of her, her hands grasping for the same door latch the now restrained Roger had used. She fumbled with it frantically, her leverage all wrong for operating a latch meant to be pulled down by someone kneeling in front of the door, not leaning horizontally, but her hands finally solved the mystery and she felt the latching mechanism retract. But, she still couldn’t pull the hatch out of its seal against the residual cabin pressure left in the 757.