I know that every minute we are putting five more miles between us and the safety of the airfield, but the beast is having a field day in my mind. We'd be a laughingstock if we went back and the mechanics found nothing. They will write "cannot duplicate" in the discrepancy forms when their search for a problem from a flight turns up nothing. I hate that. It suggests that I'm a jittery flier or that perhaps I'm someone who just wants to cause trouble for mechanics.
And then there's the fear of that old specter, fatigue. You know it'll catch up with you in the long hours ahead and you don't want to do anything to hasten it or intensify it. If we go back, they may throw us onto another mission, lengthening our crew duty day another three or four hours. But worse yet, they may dump us back into crew rest, which is something we dreaded at McGuire. Such are the mind games that insipid trouble plays on a flier, urging him to hold his inertia, to stick with the course.
But I know the crew is troubled, especially the conservative Brian back on the engineer's panel.
"Let's go back," I finally say to Bones.
As New York Center clears us to turn 180 degrees for a direct course back to McGuire, the loadmaster, Mike Hall, announces that he has found the source. Many loadmasters stand back and watch when something like this happens or until an obvious calamity breaks out but not Mike. Maybe his survival instinct is driving him, but whatever, I'm delighted by his initiative. I turn and look, seeing him on hands and knees, sniffing, like a dog, at a circuit breaker panel just behind my seat. Then I notice the blue haze forming just above the deck, and I issue the order that I should have made minutes earlier.
"Crew, get your oxygen masks on. Check regulators 100 percent."
The mask, with its attendant smoke goggles, hoses, and cables has an acute way of boosting your awareness when you wear it. It grabs your lapels and slaps your facepours a bucket of cold water on your thick, lethargic noggin. It gives you a vigorous shoulder shaking and makes you realize that your margin for error has narrowed and a high level of performance is now in demand. The hissing of your breathing and your muffled voice in the mask ram reality home and rivet your attention to the task at hand.
Now we are desperately busy. Bones transfers control of the jet to me and begins to copy new weather, while Brian calculates landing performance data and Wait continues to investigate the smoke. We barely have time to run the approach checklist. The weather has deteriorated since we took off, so rather than the quick visual approach that we hoped for, we have to set up for a lengthy ILS (instrument landing system) approach.
We follow the radar vectors from McGuire Approach Control and intercept the glide slope beam. As we lower the flaps and gear, the smoke thickens. The runway is wet and we're extremely heavy. It would be nice to get rid of some of this fuel, but there is no time. Even if there were, it would be questionable whether we should open the dump valves with a fire somewhere aboard. Brian says that we should be able to get stopped, but there won't be much room for error.
The tower reports stiff crosswinds. This we definitely don't need, because the crosswind requires extra speed that will gobble up precious runway. We break out of the clouds at about 400 feet into a heavy rain, and I begin to fight the gusting winds. I push the throttles up, then bring them back again and again to control the sink rates and airspeed transients. The yoke moves fore and aft, left and right under my hand in a struggle to maintain attitude. Bones switches on the rain removal system, and the tremendous howling of the pressurized air blowing across the windscreen claws at my concentration, but it clears the rain away.
With a clear view I can see that we are approaching in a big crab because of the crosswind. Our nose is pointed well to the left of the runway, though we are tracking the center line. We cannot land like this. Seconds before touchdown, I push the right rudder to the floor and roll the yoke hard left. The left wing goes down, and the nose swings to the righttoo much. Now we are angled a bit to the right of the runway centerline. I release a little right rudder pressure and apply a slight back pressure to the yoke. The landing is smooth, not because of my skill, but because of the extra airspeed we've had to carry.
Immediately I throw all four engines into maximum reverse thrust. The reversers are clamshell like doors that close behind the engine's exhaust pipe and direct the jet blast at a forward angle much as a spacecraft slows by firing a rocket in its direction of travel. But then the snowball gets bigger.
Bones notices the amber warning light and yells that the number four reverser has malfunctioned. This forces me to discontinue reversing on the number one engine, to avoid running off the left side of the runway because of asymmetric reverse thrust. Now the smoke is the least of our troubles. We have a heavy bird, a wet runway, excessive speed, and half our reverse thrust.
I begin to apply hard brake pressure at about 110 knots indicated airspeed, far above the maximum 60 knots for brake application. I hope the antiskid brake system will hold up. I remember how it failed me in a similar situation a couple of years ago, but we were lucky then. If the fires blow I might not be able to control it. I pull the inboard throttles back so hard I feel like they're about to bend. Predictably, we hear the popping explosions as the compressors begin to stall, and the engines spit enormous fireballs ahead of the plane. As the runway end approaches, we begin to slow enough to turn off safely, but the snowball hasn't stopped rolling yet.
Knowing that the brakes will be white hot and in danger of catching fire or even exploding, I stop as soon as we are clear of the runway and call for a quick evacuation. We shut down, jump out, and are passed by firemen as we trot away from the jet through a cold rain. We inhale deep lungs full of freshness and dampness; it never felt better. We laugh and slap one another's backs there in the rain, like sailors delivered through a gale. We've ridden the snowball. We've "cheated death once again," Mike chants.
The mechanics quickly find the charred wire bundle in the AHRS circuitry. There will be no more flying for us today. The flight surgeon has grounded us temporarily because of the smoke. And before the brakes have cooled, it seems, the rumors have started about us. One crew we meet at the motel has heard that we were recalled and grounded because we were drunk. Another brings us false news that we are to be decorated. Later we learn that we have been killed.
The doc releases us a couple of days later, and they throw us into the fray again. We had a minimum crew rest at Zaragoza and are now headed back downrange.
"MAC Bravo 5518, you are cleared direct Barcelona, Upper Golf 33. Maintain Flight Level 330."
We've reached our cruising altitude, and the Spanish controller has cleared us to proceed along route UG23 to the eastern boundary of his airspace. I look at the computer-generated flight plan for a review of our route clearance, which reads: ZZA UG25 QUV UG23 ALG UB35 CRO UA1 METRU W727 DBA B12 KATAB UA451 LXR W726 WEJ B58 KIA. It looks fairly simple. Barcelona is tuned into both our navigation radios, and we are flying directly to it. Beyond that, with the concurrence of the respective countries, we will continue along UG23 through France and Italy, switching over to Upper Amber 1 (UA1) at Crotone, which is on the toe of Italy's boot. I'm not sure why we sometimes substitute colors for standard aviation phonetics (like "amber" for "alpha") when referring to these international routes, but I do it because I hear other pilots doing it. I suppose it's a way to be a little rebellious in our rigidly structured world without causing too much consternation.