Chapter 3 - Stepping into the Storm
The cockpit of the modern twin-engine airliner was a digital sea of red and amber warning lights.
Captain Evans was a dead weight in the left seat. His body had slipped sideways, his heavy shoulder pressing against the primary flight controls, forcing the yoke slightly forward and exacerbating the catastrophic descent. The digital attitude indicator showed thirty-five degrees of left bank and twelve degrees of nose-down pitch.
The altimeter was unwinding like a broken clock: twenty-two thousand feet... twenty-one thousand...
“Help me move him!” Mark Jensen yelled over the din of the stall warnings. He was frozen in his seat, his hands hovering inches above the control yoke as if touching it might hasten their deaths. “I think he had a stroke! I can’t lift him!”
Pauline didn’t waste a single syllable on comfort. She leaned across the center pedestal, reached down with an efficiency that completely belied her age, and found the manual seat adjustment lever on the base of Evans’s chair.
“Release his harness,” Pauline ordered.
“What?”
“Release his shoulder straps! Now!”
Her voice cracked like a whip in the confined space. Jensen flinched, his trembling fingers fumbling with the rotary buckle at Evans’s chest. The straps snapped back. Pauline hauled on the seat adjustment lever, ratcheting the captain’s seat backward along its metal rails, pulling the unconscious man clear of the control column and the rudder pedals.
“Chloe!” Pauline shouted without turning around.
The young flight attendant was standing pale-faced in the doorway.
“Get two able-bodied passengers,” Pauline commanded. “Drag him out onto the galley floor. Lay him flat. Find an AED and begin compressions if you lose a pulse. Do not let anyone else enter this flight deck.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Chloe squeaked. Within seconds, two burly men from first class reached into the cockpit, hauling Captain Evans out by his armpits, their faces white with terror as they took in the spinning desert landscape through the front windscreens.
The heavy armored door clicked shut behind them.
Pauline didn't hesitate. She hitched up the cuffs of her red wool cardigan, slid her small frame into the captain’s sheepskin-covered seat, and pulled the chair forward until her feet rested firmly on the titanium rudder pedals.
To Mark Jensen, it was an image of pure absurdity: an elderly woman whose feet barely reached the floorboards, sitting in the command seat of a two-hundred-ton, seventy-million-dollar modern jetliner.
“You can’t fly this!” Jensen screamed, panic turning his voice shrill. “It’s fly-by-wire! The flight management computers are completely locked up from the asymmetric torque! You don't know the systems!”
Pauline ignored him. Her hands didn't shake.
The moment her fingers wrapped around the control yoke, a profound, glacial stillness washed over her. The cacophony of the alarms—the blaring horn, the flashing red master warning light, the robotic voice screaming *“TERRAIN! PULL UP!”*—faded into background static.
Her mind slipped into a groove it hadn't occupied since November of 1983.
*Airspeed: 210 knots and decaying.*
*Altitude: 18,500.*
*Vertical speed: 4,000 feet per minute down.*
*Engine one: Spooling down to zero N1. Total catastrophic failure.*
“He didn't feather the fuel supply,” Pauline muttered to herself.
Her right hand darted to the center console. She didn't have to read the labels. Modern avionics might have replaced analog dials with glass screens, but the physics of fluid dynamics and jet propulsion hadn't changed an iota in fifty years. She slammed the Number One fuel control cutoff switch down. She pulled the fire suppression handle for the left engine, twisting it hard to the left to discharge the primary Halon bottle into the shredded nacelle.
The screaming temperature gauge on the port engine instantly began to drop.
“Now,” she said, her voice dropping into an icy, rhythmic cadence. “Rudder trim. Full right.”
She spun the trim wheel beside her right knee. At the same time, she stomped her right foot down on the pedal with all the strength in her seventy-three-year-old leg.
The aircraft groaned. The metal skin around them shuddered violently as the massive vertical tailfin caught the slipstream, forcing the yawing nose back toward the centerline.
“Help me with the pitch,” Pauline said to Jensen.
Mark was staring at her, paralyzed. “What?”
“Grab the yoke, Jensen!” she barked, not looking at him. “Two hands! We need to break the stall, but if we pull too hard, the tail will snap from the asymmetric loading. We bleed the dive gently. On three. One... two... *pull*.”
Together, their hands locked onto their respective control columns. Pauline applied steady, surgical back-pressure.
The nose began to rise.
The G-forces pushed them down into their seats. The airspeed indicator flickered, bottomed out at 190 knots, and then, as the nose dropped below the horizon to trade altitude for energy, the airspeed began to climb.
200 knots.
220 knots.
240 knots.
The hideous synthetic horn of the stall warning suddenly cut out. The flight deck fell into an eerie, relative silence, punctuated only by the roaring rush of air over the cockpit canopy and the single, healthy whine of the starboard engine.
Pauline leveled the wings.
Through the thick glass of the windscreen, the jagged brown ridges of the Nevada desert stopped their violent rotation and settled into a flat, sun-drenched line below them.
The altimeter stabilized.
*11,400 feet.*
They had lost nearly twenty-four thousand feet in under four minutes.
Mark Jensen slumped back against his headrest, his chest heaving, his uniform shirt soaked through with sweat. His hands were trembling so violently he had to shove them between his thighs to keep them still.
He slowly turned his head to look at the woman beside him.
Pauline Sanders was already busy. Her eyes swept the overhead panel with mechanical precision. She reached up, clicked off the secondary hydraulic pump that had been overheating, and reset the generator bus for the right-hand electrical system.
Her breath wasn't even elevated.
“You...” Jensen stammered, his voice dry as sand. “Who... who the hell are you?”
Pauline didn't look at him. She reached over to the pedestal, plucked the aviation headset from Captain Evans’s hook, and slipped it over her silver hair. She adjusted the boom microphone until it rested half an inch from her lips.
May you like
“I’m the person who is going to keep you from dying in the desert, First Officer Jensen,” she said calmly. “Now shut up, find the emergency approach plates for Nellis, and get Los Angeles Center on the radio.”
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