it.
“Don’t be afraid.” He looked past her at Christine, then at Casey.
“You’ll be all right.”
He moved back to row seventeen, the seat immediately behind Holly.
She was loath to lose sight of him. He helped her confidence just by
being within view.
For twenty-six years, Captain Sleighton Delbaugh had earned his living
in the cockpits of commercial airliners, the last eighteen as a pilot.
He had encountered and successfully dealt with a daunting variety of
problems, a few of them serious enough to be called crises, and he had
benefited from United’s rigorous program of continuous instruction and
periodic recertification. He felt he was prepared for anything that
could happen in a modern aircraft, but he found it difficult to believe
what had happened to Flight 246.
After engine number two failed, the bird went into an unplanned descent,
and the controls stiffened. They managed to correct its attitude,
however, and dramatically slow its descent. But losing eleven thousand
feet of altitude was the least of their problems.
“We’re turning right,” Bob Anilov said. He was Delbaugh’s first officer
forty-three, and an excellent pilot. “Still turning right.
It’s locking up, Slay.”
“We’ve got partial hydraulic failure,” said Chris Lodden, their flight
engineer. He was the youngest of the three and a favorite of virtually
every female flight attendant who met him, partly because he was
good-looking in a fresh-faced farmboy way, but largely because he was a
little shy, which made him a novelty among the cocksure men on most
flight crews. Chris was seated behind Anilov and in charge of
monitoring the mechanical systems.
“It’s going harder right,” Anilov said.
Already Delbaugh was pulling the yoke full aft, left wheel. “Damn.”
Anilov said, “No response.”
“It’s worse than a partial loss,” Chris Lodden said, tapping and
adjusting his instruments as if he was having trouble believing what
they were telling him. “How can this be right?”
The DC-10 had three hydraulic systems, well-designed backup. They
couldn’t have lost everything. But they had.
Pete Yankowski-a balding, red-mustached flight instructor from the
company’s training facility in Denver was riding with the crew on his
way to visit his brother in Chicago. As an OMC–observing member of the
crew-he was in the fold-down jumpseat immediately behind Delbaugh,
virtually peering over the captain’s shoulder. He said, “I’ll go have a
look at the tail, assess the damage.”
As Yankowski left, Lodden said, “The only control we’ve got is engine
thrust.”
Captain Delbaugh had already begun to use it, cutting the power to the
engine on the right, increasing it to the other-the port—engine in
order to pull them to the left and out of their unwanted turn. When
they began to swing too far to the left, he would have to increase the
power to the starboard engine again and bring them around that way a
little.
With the flight engineer’s assistance, Delbaugh determined that the
outboard and inboard elevators on the tail were gone, dead, useless. The
inboard ailerons on the wings were dead. The outboard ailerons were
dead.
Same for the flaps and spoilers.
The DC-10 had a wingspan of over one hundred and fifty-five feet.
Its fuselage was a hundred and seventy feet long. It was more than just
an airplane. It was literally a ship that sailed the sky, the very
definition of a “jumbo jet,” and virtually the only way they now had to
steer it was with the two General Electric/Pratt & Whitney engines.
Which was only a little better than a driver trying to steer a runaway
automobile by leaning to one side and then to the other, desperately
struggling to influence its course with his shifting weight.
A few minutes had passed since the tail engine exploded, and they were
still aloft.
Holly believed in a god, not due to any life-altering spiritual
experience, but largely because the alternative to belief was simply too
grim. Although she had been raised a Methodist and for a while toyed
with the idea of conversion to Catholicism, she had never made up her
mind what sort of god she preferred, whether one of the gray-suited
Protestant varieties or the more passionate Catholic divinity or
something else altogether. In her daily life she did not turn to heaven