Command Pilot William McKinley Parker sat watching his three CRT television screens on the instrument panel. Jacob Enright at this right side blinked watery eyes at his own consoles. Copilot Enright was still inside his moist mask of drug-soaked gauze which stuck painfully to dime-size blisters raised hours earlier by the laser jolt from LACE. Colonel Parker’s face bathed in the cherry light of re-entry’s glow was puffy and sweating from the ordeal of decompression sickness which had nearly blown his body apart during his spacewalk. The lethal phase of his case of the bends had subsided, but the pain lingered and clouded his weary brain.
“Down the old kazoo, Skipper,” Enright mumbled as he scanned his instruments reading out Endeavor’s rate of descent, cross-range error along the ground-track which had to dog-leg well sideways to hit Okinawa, and angle of bank as the ship’s computers automatically rolled the shuttle wingtips up and down to bleed off energy for a precise landing at the emergency shuttle landing strip at Kadena Air Force Base.
“Yeh, Jack,” the Mission Commander croaked. “The PTI ought to kick in at about 350 K.”
“At three hundred fifty thousand, Will. Lookin’ for the son of a bitch in twenty seconds.” Enright squinted his bloodshot eyes at the large “eight ball” attitude indicator in front of his face and a bit below shoulder level. The Flight Director, a round black ball with yellow indicator needles, would show the ship’s gentle pitch-up when the Programmed Test Input was executed by the humming memory banks in the four primary computers. The fifth computer watched the other four to keep them honest during reentry’s blinding firestorm. A steering error of a gnat’s eyelash could reduce the already wounded ship to a ball of molten aluminum.
“She’s got the wobbles, Jack,” Will Parker stammered. His own eight ball showed a very slight instability in the ship’s glide caused by its ruptured tail section.
“Still within the deadband envelope, Will.”
“Seems so, Number One. But if I get a rate C and W, the PTI goes into the dumper.” Colonel Parker watched the bank of Caution and Warning lights for the first flicker of an indication that the ship’s parallel attitude-control loops could not handle the PTI maneuver. The forty-degree, nose-high attitude of the ship used the flat side of the massive, black wings to deflect the scalding slipstream away from the damaged tail area. Endeavor literally rode down her own shock wave like a surfer’s waxed board skimming over a curl at Malibu. Only the shuttle rode a wave of ionized gas more than 3,000°F hot.
“About now, Skipper,” Enright said loudly. Neither he nor Parker wore their helmets, since Enright’s face was bandaged and Parker would not be able to hear his copilot if Parker had donned his own helmet. They spoke over the roar of air slamming into the windshields at 22 times the speed of sound.
Just behind the exhausted flier, Soviet cosmonaut, Alexi Karpov, leaned forward from his backseat position on the upper flightdeck to look over Enright’s shoulder at the arrays of instrument panel displays.
“Bastard” was all Will Parker said when the ship’s nose simply dropped out from under him. He did not shout. The word came softly and heavy with disappointment instead of anger at their sudden peril.
When the bogus PTI-7 maneuver pushed Endeavor’s nose downward, the view outside the forward windows changed quickly. After five minutes of black sky illuminated by the red wall of ionized plasma, the windows filled with red gas and blue ocean. The sparkling Indian Ocean off the coast of Thailand shimmered as if viewed through a piece of cranberry stained glass.
“Runaway AP!” Jack Enright called. His pilot reflexes instantly propeled his hands toward his panel of circuit breakers and the buttons which would cut the electrical power to the ship’s autopilot now on a rampage of its own.
“Command override!” Parker called. “I got it!”
With a copilot’s inbred training, Enright let his left hand drop away from the control stick between his knees. When the pilot in the left seat says “I got it,” the copilot, even if his logbook boasts 10,000 hours of jet time, immediately becomes the student pilot. Enright’s right hand continued to grope for the switches to disable the brain-dead automatic pilot.
“DAP inhibit,” Enright stammered. He had pulled the plug on the twin digital autopilot systems. It had taken him no more than three seconds. He could do it in his sleep.
While Enright had put DAP’s lights out, Will Parker had wrapped both hands around the control column between his thighs. He did not blink for the ten seconds he wrestled with his doomed ship.
The instant Endeavor dropped her black nose, she poked her face into the molten shock wave. The nose-high angle had kept the firestorm well beneath her wings where thousands of heat-resistant black tiles of pure glass insulated her soft belly.
The cabin claxon droned loudly as the red master alarm light illuminated before each pilot’s face. In the center of the instrument panel, the red CABIN DEPRESS light flashed.
Enright, now on his own internal autopilot, instinctively checked the cabin-pressure gauges for confirmation that perhaps a window seal had melted a bare heartbeat before the forward windows blew out to let in hellish death by incineration.
“No sweat, Skipper,” Enright shouted, sweating. “Ride her out!”
When Endeavor’s nose went down, the sudden heat pulse over the forward cabin had heated the outside shell of the ship just enough to make it expand. When the cabin skin stretched in the heat, the inside cabin became imperceptibly larger. The cabin environmental-control sensors felt the inside air expand to fill the wider flightdeck and the low-pressure alarm was triggered by the air molecules seperating for an instant to fill the suddenly larger vessel. The ship’s mechanical lungs refilled the cabin immediately, and the red light blinked off. Enright then turned off his red master alarm light. He reached in front of his captain’s sweating face to press Parker’s master alarm light as well.
By the time the alarms silenced, Parker had gently pulled Endeavor’s charred nose back up toward the black sky still red in re-entry’s glow. His pilot’s steady hand had prevented his initial panic from allowing his hands to jerk Endeavor’s nose skyward in a back-breaking loop. Parker did not consciously caution himself against such a lethal recovery. As a professional pilot, he understood that half of real flying is trained reflex; the rest is simply magic.
With Endeavor now down to 35 miles above the Pacific, she again flew safely nose-high. The center of the three television screens on the forward panel filled with warning alerts. The attitude-control systems were baffled by the runaway autopilot. The electronic brains which picked their way at light speed through the re-entry computer program looked toward their two human helpers for relief.
“You got it, Number One,” Will Parker said through clenched teeth. His hands slipped forward of the control stick. The three negative “G’s” of slowing down made all three airmen lunge forward against their seat belts and shoulder harnesses.
“I have the con, Skip,” Jack Enright said breathlessly. Still in intense facial pain and too tired to die, Enright gripped his hands around the control stick. Endeavor would have to make the program’s first completely hand-flown re-entry and landing. Make it or die. Even though the digital autopilot had been strangled to death by Enright, the computerized flight director indicator system still generated flying instructions. The pilot had only to follow its needles: pull up to catch a needle rising; bank left to catch a needle drifting leftward. “Turn to the needle,” Enright’s numb brain mumbled into his buzzing and burned ears.