Dan Wade snapped the yoke to the left, causing the 700,000 pound aircraft to roll sharply left with its wing hanging less than fifty feet off the ground. The huge airplane began to drift left toward the side of the runway.
Geoffrey Sampson’s voice rang out from the left seat. “We’re aimed too far left of the runway to land, Dan!”
“TOO MUCH LEFT! ROLL RIGHT, DAN, AND PULL!” Dallas bellowed.
The left wingtip struck the ground a glancing blow. The sudden left yaw was countered by the thundering impact of the sixteen tires of the main landing gear in the grass to the left of the runway. The nose began to come up in response to the blind copilot’s frantic pull on the yoke.
“Going… around!” Dan Wade managed to say as his left hand jammed the throttles all the way forward. Instinct caused him to counter the left-hand lurch with right rudder and right roll, which guided the big jet somehow back into the air, nose high, robbed of airspeed, and hanging ten feet over the surface on the pressurized cushion of air created by its passage. “TALK TO ME!”
Another bright series of lightning strikes, accompanied instantly by a sudden crack of thunder momentarily boggled both Dallas and Geoffrey. Dallas found her voice first, but decided there was no point mentioning something the copilot couldn’t see or do anything about anyway. “We’re… we’re holding… don’t let it down any more! We’re barely above the ground, but your wings are almost level. Runway’s to the right! Pull her up some.”
“AIRSPEED?”
“Jeez, Dan! One hundred… twenty!”
“Dan,” Geoffrey Sampson’s almost detached voice again, then, “DAN! THERE’S A TOWER AHEAD!”
Dan pulled sharply back on the yoke.
“OH LORD!” Dallas yelped, as the sight of a red-and-white checkered metal tower disappeared beneath the nose, followed by the sickening sound of a muffled metallic scraping noise. Another gigantic shudder rattled through the aircraft. The engines came to full power and the nose pitched up.
“GOD, Dan, We HIT it!”
“DALLAS! Can you tell me my pitch angle? How nose-up am I?”
“I’m looking! I think maybe ten degrees!”
“Help me hold it there! Am I wings-level?”
The sound of a muffled explosion on the left side was followed by a warning bell and a red light on the panel directly before them as the 747 yawed left.
“What the hell is that?” Dallas yelped.
“There’s a red light in the handle up there!” Robert MacCabe chimed in. “It has the number ‘two’ on it.”
“That’s a fire in number-two engine,” Dan said, automatically pressing the right rudder pedal to oppose the unbalanced thrust from the right wing. “We lost number two. You gotta help me keep the wings level, everyone! Talk to me! TALK TO ME! Geoffrey, keep telling me the degrees of wing-left or wing-right!”
“Wings are level now, Dan,” Sampson replied, his eyes huge.
“You’re level and we’re climbing quickly!” Dallas said, her breathing coming in short staccato gasps as she tried to keep up.
“How high?” Dan asked.
“Ah… three hundred feet. Still climbing.”
Dan found the flap handle and snapped it to the fifteen-degree position. Gear! he thought. Should he dare? It might be damaged, but he needed less drag. It could wait a second, he decided.
His left hand released the throttles to find the engine fire levers.
“Altitude?”
“Five hundred and climbing. Airspeed one hundred forty now,” Dallas said.
“Dallas, this is vital. The fire handle I’m touching, is that the one with the red light in it?”
“Yes!”
“Okay, and it says two?”
“YES! You need to roll a little to the right. JUST A LITTLE!”
“Left wing down three degrees,” Geoffrey Sampson intoned. “Now down left two degrees.”
Dan yanked the number-two engine fire handle and twisted it to set off the fire extinguisher. “ALTITUDE?”
“Eight hundred… still climbing!” Dallas said.
“I’m going to pull the gear up,” Dan said, and his hand snapped the gear handle to the Up position. The sound of moving landing gear shuddered once more through the aircraft.
“Airspeed?”
“One hundred eighty… no, one-ninety,” Dallas replied. “We’re climbing through a thousand feet. Wings are still level, but we’ve lost lights in here, all but a few.”
“Are we above the hills on the other side?”
“Yes,” Dallas told him.
Dan moved the flap lever all the way up as he took a deep breath. “You’re going to have to talk to me constantly! We need to go to the west and climb to five thousand. Don’t let me get too nose-high or roll too far in either direction!”
“I can still see the instruments, but this side only,” Geoffrey said.
“TALK TO ME, DAMMIT!”
“Okay, Dan!” Dallas responded. “Right wing’s down a few degrees, your nose is about ten degrees up.”
“I’m going to touch a switch called APU, Dallas. The Auxiliary Power Unit. Would you verify it says APU?”
“Yes. APU.”
He snapped it on and pressed the Transmit button on the control yoke.
“Hong Kong Approach, Meridian Five. We may have taken out your ILS tower. I’ll need vectors to a safe altitude while we try to figure out what to do.”
There was no answer.
“Hong Kong Approach, Meridian Five, how do you hear?”
Dan Wade’s left hand had found the glareshield panel again and was punching the Autopilot Connect buttons, but there was no response.
“Dallas? Geoffrey? Is the Autopilot Connect indicator here lit up?”
“No. It’s dark,” Geoffrey replied. “What does that mean?”
“Oh Lord. It means I don’t have an autopilot. I’ll have to fly manually. You’ve got a friggin’ blind pilot flying manually!”
“Oh, no,” Geoffrey moaned.
“Hong Kong Approach, Meridian Five. Please respond!”
The radio remained silent, as did Dan for an extended period, before Robert MacCabe broke the silence.
“Why aren’t they responding, Dan?”
The copilot reached forward and put his finger on a small round compass dial containing two needles.
“Ah, are… there two red flags in here?”
Dallas Nielson leaned forward. “Yes. Two of them.”
Dan pointed back to the center pedestal to one of the navigation radio dials. “Make sure it’s on one-oh-nine-point-five, and then tell me if the flags are still there.”
The sound of clicking filled his ears as Dallas made the adjustment. There was silence for a few seconds.
“The flags are still there, Dan.”
She could see him slump. “Dan? You okay?” Dallas asked. “Roll right a bit, nose down a bit.”
Dan began shaking his head. “We’ve lost it,” he said quietly.
“Can’t we try again, Dan?” Robert MacCabe asked, his voice strained.
Dan was shaking his head. “If I can’t reconnect the autopilot, we can’t do an automatic approach. And if we can’t get the localizer…”
“I don’t understand,” Robert said.
“When we took out the ILS tower and our own ILS receiver back there,” Dan said, “I think we destroyed the only equipment we had that could get us home.”
CHAPTER 12
“Where is he going?” The facility chief was leaning over the duty controller, watching the faint return from Meridian Flight 5 crawl away from Hong Kong.
“He’s heading approximately zero-eight-zero,” the controller said. “But his transponder is not working. All we have is the raw radar return.”