“You’re instrument-rated?” Mikulsky asked, drawing a puzzled frown.
“You’re asking if I’m instrument-rated?” Arlie replied incredulously.
“Yes, I believe that’s what I asked you,” Mikulsky said, a slightly officious tone bleeding into his words.
Arlie chuckled. “Son, I’m a Boeing 747 captain for a major airline, with thirty thousand hours and an airline transport pilot rating: Last time I checked, you couldn’t get an ATP without having an instrument ticket.”
“Oh. Yeah,” George Mikulsky said, his face reddening.
“How long have you been with the NTSB, George?” Arlie asked.
April could feel the rising tension in the room as the inspector shifted in his chair and Mikulsky drew back. “I’ve been with NTSB for four months now.”
“Are you a licensed pilot?”
“Captain Rosen, why don’t you let me ask the questions here?” Mikulsky said, his voice taut.
Arlie smiled the characteristic smile Gracie always described as irresistible. He readjusted himself on the bed as if girding for a small battle before replying. “George, the reason I asked you that question is because there are certain things I need to explain in more detail if you’re not a pilot than I would need to explain if you were. I’m sorry you take offense at the question.”
“No, I’m not a pilot yet, but that doesn’t matter,” Mikulsky snapped, making an exaggerated note before continuing. “I’ll tell you if I’m unfamiliar with something. Let’s please get back to your narrative.”
April and Arlie exchanged a cautionary glance.
“Okay,” Arlie said, resuming the narrative. “I’m at a thousand feet, I’m not getting a response from Anchorage Center, the clouds are getting lower ahead, and it’s almost dark. I’ve only got a few coastal lights way off to my left, and I have only one choice left other than turning around, and that is to pull out my satellite phone and try to call Anchorage Flight Service by phone. But the visibility is deteriorating too fast, so I told Rachel we’d better turn around and divert back to the northwest into Valdez, and she agreed. I—”
“You had your sectional maps out and available?” Walter Harrison asked, interrupting.
“Yes,” Arlie replied carefully, fixing Harrison with a none-too-friendly look. “I characteristically use maps when I go flying, in addition to my dash-mounted moving map GPS system, and my backup handheld GPS. Do you want me to list the charts?”
Harrison quickly shook his head no.
“Very well. I punched Valdez into both GPS units, which gave me a course of something like three three zero, which won’t work because of the mountains, so I headed northwest to fly up the channel and decided I was safe for about ten miles north before I’d have to either climb in clear conditions, or turn back to the west toward Anchorage to stay visual. Just to make sure I had the required clearance below the clouds, and since I was over open water, I descended to a hundred feet on the radio altimeter. The sea state was fairly choppy. I’d estimate the waves at five to seven feet, and I didn’t want to land in rough conditions like that in open water.”
“You could still see?” Mikulsky asked.
“Yes. It was still dusk, and I was in the clear beneath the cloud layer. That’s why I could see the waves below. This is open ocean, you understand, in international waters.”
“Okay.”
“So, we’re motoring along on a course of about two hundred ninety degrees and it looked a bit clearer to the right, so I came right to about three-twenty, and we’re getting close to the decision point, with a cloud deck still overhead, when all hell broke loose for no apparent reason.”
“How much fuel did you have?”
“Nine hours’, George. Fuel’s not an issue here.”
“Okay.”
“I’m holding the controls steady at a hundred feet and a hundred forty miles per hour when I unexpectedly run into a fog bank that seemed to come out of nowhere. Everything goes gray outside and I, of course, transition to the instruments and am just starting to climb and turn around to get out of it when there’s this loud metallic snap, or clang, or something, and I lose a prop blade on the right side. At least, that’s what it felt like, because the ship instantly starts shaking, which it would with a missing prop blade. Not only that, it must have just missed the cockpit as it broke away, because there’s this incredible whooshing noise along with this instant, horrible shaking.”
April watched her father as he spoke, his eyes far away, his mind reliving that terrible moment as he talked.
“The controls suddenly feel like they’re going to beat me to death, they’re shaking and rattling so bad. Only a split second has passed, but it’s clear I’m going to be fighting for our lives. The old girl heaves to the right, and I yank the yoke back to the left and hit the left rudder, working to maintain my instrument scan at the same moment the right engine comes off its mounts. Somehow there’s a huge ball of flame on the right, probably from a breached fuel tank. I figure we’ll explode before I lose control, but there’s just this raging orange glow. I yank the feather knob for number-two engine and try to get the fuel cut off as Rachel yelps and turns to look. ‘We’re on fire!’ she reports to me like she’s trained to do, and I’m thinking it’s damned lucky she’s a pilot, too. I don’t need panic at a moment like this, I need all my efforts to keep the airplane in the air and level, which is getting to be a real challenge. I goose the left engine up to max power and I’ve got almost full left rudder, when we hit something… I don’t know… probably low-level mechanical turbulence off the mainland several miles to the northwest. Whatever it is, it’s the last thing I need because it just flips us to the right like a toy, despite full left aileron and full left rudder. I’m just hanging there in an impossible position with ninety degrees of bank and no lift, for just a heartbeat, but it’s enough to lose most of my hundred feet of altitude. I’ve almost got her back to wings level when the right wing or the right pontoon digs into the waves, and I can’t pull her out. Suddenly we’re cartwheeling and there’s water and cold and screaming metal and the most amazing noises. When the motion stops, I’m still conscious, and, incredibly, there are still lights glowing in the cockpit, although we’re filling with water. I look to the right to find Rachel, and thank God, she’s conscious, too, and wide-eyed and working to release my harness. It’s obvious the bird is sinking, not floating. I mean, I’ve got cold water to my knees. Somehow Rachel gets herself and me out of the seat belts and opens the hatch in the top of the cockpit, and we swim out just as the bird goes down.”
“You mean, sinks?” Mikulsky asked.
Arlie nodded. “I can tell you, the icy cold of that water is beyond description. We were both instantly wide awake. And there was another small miracle: One of the emergency life rafts had apparently worked as it was designed to do and popped out of the wing locker I’d engineered. The raft came up right next to us, and we pulled ourselves in and got the survival kit aboard — I bought the kind with the survival suits — and we somehow wiggled into them, soaking wet and freezing. I tried to find the emergency radio, but we were struggling and thrashing around so wildly to get the suits on, my guess is I knocked the damn radio overboard. The wind was cutting, the waves were mountainous… much higher than I expected… with the spray blowing everywhere. The wind… my God, the wind was howling like a monster, and I remember thinking that the satellites would at least pick up our ELT, emergency locator beacon, within ninety minutes. I could hang onto that, you know? I just assumed the ELT was working, but I didn’t know for sure. I did know that we were okay for a while in the survival suits, but then, we got them on while wet and cold, and I knew we couldn’t hold out indefinitely. I tied a line between Rachel and myself to make sure we didn’t get separated. I told her our ELT would bring help fast, but the night got deeper, the fog got thicker, and we tried to huddle together and maintain warmth, but we were both shaking so hard and getting numb, and then… then there were a bunch of weird dreams, and I guess now that some of them may have been the helicopter picking us up.”