Chapter Three
A cold gust of air blew across his heart, turning his blood to ice.
Sickened, Goddard went limp in his seat.
Crashed?
Dead?
What were they talking about?
He refused to accept it. He didn’t necessarily know what he believed happened to you when you die, but one thing was certain, this was neither his Heaven nor his Hell.
It was as though someone were playing a joke on him. That had to be it. He’d reached a…a radio enthusiast, who had taken the opportunity to screw with the luckless bastard begging for help. It was monstrous. He switched to the standby channel and repeated his call for help.
No one answered.
After a few minutes, he switched back to the original frequency and tried again. This time, there was absolutely no response.
He was screwed.
He had to work out how to disengage the autopilot, lower it to 5,000 and then reset the autopilot.
There was no other choice.
He stared at the instruments around him. Most of them were identical on either side of the cockpit. Pilot’s half, co-pilot’s half. That meant he had half as many things to worry about. Radio panel, check.
Goddard glanced at the fuel gauges. They showed the aircraft nearly full. That must have been impossible. They had been flying for more than ten hours, yet they had barely used any fuel whatsoever.
No aircraft was that efficient.
It was all impossible — unless…
Had they landed and refueled somewhere while everyone was asleep?
He shook the thought from his head, filing it away for a future problem to solve — if they made it through the current disaster.
Goddard continued to scan the gauges and controls.
The compass pointed south. They were heading due south. Good. He glanced at the map. He was over water. Most likely the Adriatic Sea, but could they be somewhere else entirely? It didn’t matter. His job wasn’t to land the aircraft. No amount of automated assistance was going to make that possible for him. His job was to bring the aircraft down until the air stopped being so thin. Let someone else work out where they were and how to land the aircraft once they woke up.
He fixed his gaze dead ahead, imagining himself flying the aircraft. If he were a pilot, where would his attention be? The most important controls would be right in front of him and beside him, easily within reach, and capable of providing important information without hesitation or distraction.
One small screen directly in front of him fit that description.
It showed a circle, half brown, half blue. If he had to guess, and he did, he would say that was something like…a plane leveler? It looked like the Airbus was on an even keel, with no dipping or tilting. The small screen beside it looked…kind of like the radar screens that you saw in movies. Nothing went blip or ping on the screen. That was good, but it also reminded him that he was still all alone in the world.
Below the screen were the letters PFD. It was obviously some sort of display screen, giving vital information about the aircraft. Goddard felt if he had the time, he could work out what each of these things meant. He pulled up the iPad and typed in the name at the bottom of the screen — PRIMARY FLIGHT DISPLAY.
The iPad brought up the simplified instructions relating to that device.
He ran his eyes across the information sheet…
The center of the PFD contains an attitude indicator (AI), which gives the pilot information about the aircraft's pitch and roll characteristics, and the orientation of the aircraft with respect to the horizon.
He finished skimming the information quickly, devouring any information about how to keep the aircraft straight and level once he’d lowered it to 5,000 feet. It was good knowledge and useful information, but he found nothing that mentioned the autopilot — and none of it would be relevant if he couldn’t take the aircraft off autopilot.
Goddard looked around for the autopilot settings. Anything marked autopilot.
Nothing.
His hands were shaking now. He forced himself to relax. Nothing was flashing. He wasn’t yet out of fuel. Nothing was wrong with the plane, exactly. Trying to act before he had a clear idea of what was going on would just potentially cause the plane to crash.
He went over all the buttons and switches again. Nothing marked autopilot.
He swallowed.
AP, he would look for something marked AP. A lot of the switches and buttons had abbreviations on them.
A couple of different buttons were marked AP. AP1, AP2, and something on an overhead panel marked APU. The overhead buttons didn’t look like they were the vital functions of flying the aircraft, though. Things like “Entertainment,” “Ext Lt,” and “Anti-Ice” options. And “Eng Start,” but the engines were already running, so he wasn’t going to muck around with that one.
AP1 and AP2 it was, then. AP1 had a green light on the button. An autopilot program was engaged.
In order to land the plane, he’d have to turn that off. Not yet, though.
Within a few minutes he’d picked out the pedals on the floor, the joystick, and a kind of handle in the middle of the center console as looking important. Unlike movies that he’d seen, there wasn’t a misshapen steering wheel in front of the pilot and co-pilot’s seats, but a keyboard that folded up under the panels. He slid it carefully back into place.
The joystick must…change the plane’s direction? Up and down, right and left. That seemed to make sense. Despite his age, he’d played computer games which used a joystick once or twice. He just wished one of those games had been a flight simulator. No matter, he could only work with what he had. The pedals must be for the gas and the brakes? Except that he had some kind of vague memory that the pedals didn’t control the gas.
He was panting for breath. Shit…he’d put his oxygen tank down. He found it beside the seat and took a few breaths, but not too deeply. He didn’t want to hyperventilate again, either.
The handle in the center console. That was the…gas. The throttle…whatever the term was. He was pretty sure of it. It was labeled 1,2,3,4 Engine Master.
He steeled his resolve, gripped the joystick — which felt entirely inadequate for the controls of the world’s largest airplane — and flicked the AP switch to off.
Bracing for a sudden dive, he realized that nothing had happened. The aircraft continued to fly straight and level, while the engines hadn’t changed their pitch whatsoever.
The autopilot was still running.
That didn’t make sense. What the hell did I just turn off if not the autopilot? Goddard didn’t wait to find out. Instead, he flicked the AP switch back to on.
Scanning the instruments and controls, he couldn’t spot anything.
He was out of luck. His body slackened into the chair. Years ago, a friend had taken him sailing on a Beneteau 42 in the windy waters of San Francisco. Despite the concept of men against the wild, they had used an autopilot to steer the yacht. Halfway through the day, a large cargo ship crossed their course, and his friend was forced to take control of the helm. Goddard thought back to that day. How did his friend do it?
Goddard grinned at the simplicity.
He didn’t turn anything off. He simply took control of the wheel. The autopilot had a built-in safety feature that allowed human inputs to override the computer.
Could it really be that easy on board an A380?
There was only one way to find out.
Goddard gripped the joystick in his left hand and gently maneuvered it forward. The attitude indicator in front of him showed the position of the aircraft’s nose dipping below the artificial horizon. The airspeed indicator started to increase, while the altitude decreased. The vertical speed indicator, next to the altitude indicator, displayed his rate of descent in “thousands of feet per minute.” For example, a measurement of "+2" indicates an ascent of 2000 feet per minute, while a measurement of "-1.5" indicates a descent of 1500 feet per minute.