“What, Ryan?”
“We’re burning fuel now from the left main, Marty. Our balance is going to be affected quickly.”
“We need five minutes. Do we have five minutes?”
“God, I hope so. You really think this will work?”
“Same answer. God, I hope so! But, yes, it’s what we both were missing. Who gives a rat’s ass what runway is formally open? We have emergency authority to land anywhere.”
“Can the gear take it? This is big landing gear! Maybe we should land gear up?”
“No. If the gear can’t handle it, we’ll still be decelerating on a very long runway with no dropoff at the end. Dammit, why didn’t I think of this before?”
“Regal Twelve, turn right now to a heading of three one zero, maintain seven thousand feet to intercept the localizer, and you’re of course cleared for the Cat 3 approach to Runway 36 R as requested. Be advised our ILS monitors are not indicating a stable signal yet.”
“We have it up here, and we’ve got GPS backup. We’re good.”
“The emergency equipment will be relocating from Runway Seven.”
“Roger.”
Marty carefully banked the 757 fifteen degrees to the right, holding the turn until on a 45 degree intercept for the final approach course. He could see the localizer coming alive and beginning to move across the screen, the artificially created horizontal situation indicator showing them rapidly approaching the centerline of the runway as projected out many miles by the instrument landing system transmitter. He began another bank to the right, and rolled out on centerline.
“Intercepting localizer.”
“How do you want to do this, Marty? As a monitored approach?”
“No time. I’ll hand fly. Read the radio altimeter all the way down and help me find the runway. We’ll lower the gear in three miles. Give me landing lights at two hundred feet.”
“Speed is two thirty, on the nose,” Ryan announced. “Flaps are still where we left them.”
“Got it. Bringing the combiner back down,” he said as he pulled the heads up display back into position in front of his eyes.
With both pilots used to approach speeds being somewhere between eighty to a hundred knots slower, the rapid approach of the normal descent point was startling, as if they were flying a high speed jet fighter instead of a lumbering transport.
“Give me the gear, now!” Marty called, realizing he was about to overrun the descent point. “Gear down, before landing checklist.”
Ryan responded immediately, the gear handle snapping down and the sound of the huge main landing gear and nose gear rumbling into place, followed by three green lights on the panel.
“Down and three green,”
“Before landing checklist,” Marty ordered, and Ryan began rapidly going through the sequence.
“Checklist complete, one thousand feet above, speed two thirty.”
“Roger.”
“You’re a bit above the glide slope!”
‘I know it. I’m going to stay in a right crab against this right crosswind until just over the runway, then I’ll kick it out and align us.” Marty’s hand pulled the two throttles back a bit more, his eyes darting between the attitude indicator, HSI, and airspeed as he gently lowered the nose to increase the rate of descent.
“Still one dot high on the glide slope,” Ryan called out.
“I know it.”
“Seven hundred above, two miles to go.”
“Gear and flaps rechecked down?” Marty asked.
“Gear down and locked, flaps just beyond ten degrees.”
Marty was working diligently to keep the speed on target at 230 while checking to make sure the deck angle of the 757 was at least two degrees nose up. The main gear had to touch first, but any flaring of the aircraft, and raising of the nose just over the runway, with such excessive speed would simply fly them back into the air. Yet the descent rate was just over twelve hundred feet per minute which would mean a very hard landing that the gear could probably take, but it would be a crunching arrival at best, and if too hard, the Beech fuselage would undoubtedly be broken loose.
“Five hundred feet, just over a mile. I’ve got some fuzzy lights ahead and the snowfall is decreasing.”
“Roger.”
“Three hundred feet. Half a dot high on the glide slope. Two hundred feet above, landing lights coming on.”
Ryan left hand had been resting on the landing lights and he snapped them on now, revealing a torrent of snow streaming past the windscreen.
“Approach lights in sight,” Ryan added, “…slightly to the left! One hundred feet”
Marty’s focus had been on the projected green numbers and lines in the combiner, but with the landing lights came the streaking snow and the faint glow of a sequenced line of strobes called the rabbit, as well as the white runway lights which were broadening and moving toward them like outstretched arms, the dark of the runway between them, suddenly illuminated by something that made no sense at first.
Two lights, just ahead, right in the middle of his intended touchdown and nowhere near the runway lights or any other rational explanation except that maybe there was still a snow plow on the runway and they were aiming right for it at over two hundred thirty knots!
Marty was still crabbing to the right and had just begun to push the left rudder while holding the right wing down, but suddenly the entire picture changed.
“Fifty feet, over the threshold,” Ryan said.
Time dilated in Marty’s mind, his left hand translating the only rational action which was to roll the aircraft back to the left enough to let the right main gear pass over what he could see now was slightly to the right of the runway centerline. He pulsed the yoke back slightly as he rolled left, with no time to explain to anyone, and when the lights of whatever was below had flashed beneath them with no feeling of impact, he began to move the yoke back, unprepared for the heavy gust of wind that was suddenly raising the right wing and rolling him much further left than he’d panned. A quick pulse to the right with the yoke wasn’t enough, and with growing horror he felt the left wingtip drag onto the runway surface, the drag pivoting the 757’s fuselage left as the left main gear crunched onto the runway partly sideways, followed by the right main gear, and now it was a frantic attempt to kick the aircraft back to the right and keep the right wing from contacting the runway, but every attempt to regain control was too little too late as the aircraft went fully sideways, rolling to the right, the right wing now skidding along the surface, the sound of tearing metal and impossibly confusing gyrations lasting for an eternity and exceeding anything he could influence as his world skidded along the snow covered surface shedding parts.
Marty’s consciousness returned to the courtroom. There were no sounds around him, all eyes looking in his direction, and his words still effectively echoing around the heads of everyone present.
He could see his attorney standing quietly by the defense table, watching him with a slightly stunned expression, and he was greatly relieved when she shook herself into motion and stepped forward.
“Thank you, Captain. I have a few more questions.”
He swallowed hard and nodded at her.
“When all the motion had ceased, what do you recall?”
He exhaled and shook his head. “It was pitch black and very cold and I heard sirens everywhere. We were on our right side… the cockpit section… and I didn’t know the fuselage had broken in two. Ryan was knocked out, but I could see he was breathing. I had no idea who was still with us, where anyone was, and I guess I blacked out before they pulled us out of the wreckage.”
“Captain, if no headlights had appeared in front of you, would the crash have happened?”
Richardson had shaken himself into action as well and was on his feet to object.