for help with her problems, and she only said grace before meals when
she was visiting her parents in Philadelphia. She would have felt like
a hypocrite if she had fallen into prayer now, but she nevertheless
hoped that God was in a merciful mood and watching over the DC-10,
whatever His or Her gender might be and regardless of His or Her
preference in worshipers.
Christine was reading one of the pop-up storybooks with Casey, adding
her own amusing commentary to the adventures of the animal characters,
trying to distract her daughter from the memory of the muffled explosion
and subsequent plunge. The intensity of her focus on the child was a
giveaway of her true inner feelings: she was scared, and she knew that
the worst had not yet passed.
Minute by minute, Holly slipped deeper into a state of denial, unwilling
to accept what Jim Ironheart had told her. It was not her own survival,
or his, or that of the Dubroveks that she doubted. He had proven
himself to be singularly successful when he entered combat with fate;
and she was reasonably confident that their lives were secure in the
forward section of the economy-class seats, as he had promised. What
she wanted to deny, had to deny, was that so many others on the flight
were going to die. It was intolerable to think that the old and young,
men and women, innocent and guilty, moral and immoral, the kind and the
mean-spirited were going to die in the same event, compacted together
against some rocky escarpment or on a field of wildflowers set afire by
burning jet fuel, with no favor given to those who had led their lives
with dignity and respect for others.
Over Iowa, Flight 246 passed out of Minneapolis Center, the air-traffic
control jurisdiction after Denver Center, and now responded only to
Chicago Center. Unable to regain hydraulics, Captain Delbaugh requested
and received permission from United’s dispatcher and from Chicago to
divert from O’Hare to the nearest major airport, which was Dubuque,
Iowa. He relinquished control of the plane to Anilov, so he and Chris
Lodden would be able to concentrate on finding a way through their
crisis As a first step, Delbaugh radioed System Aircraft Maintenance
(SAM) at San Francisco International Airport. SAM was United’s central
maintenance base, an enormous state-of the-art complex with a staff of
over ten thousand.
“We have a situation here,” Delbaugh told them calmly. “complete
hydraulic failure. We can stay up awhile, but we can’t maneuver.”
At SAM, in addition to United’s own employees, experts were also on duty
twenty-four hours a day from suppliers of every model of aircraft
currently in operation by the airline-including a man from General
Electric , where the CF-6 engines had been built, and another from
McDonald Douglas, which had designed and manufactured the DC-10. Many
books, and a massive amount of computer-accessible data about each plane
type was available to staff at SAM, in addition to an exhaustive
detailed maintenance history of every craft in the United fleet. They
could tell Delbaugh and Lodden about every mechanical problem their
particular plane had experienced during its lifetime, exactly what had
been done to it during its most recently scheduled maintenance, and even
when upholstery damage had been repaired-virtually everything except how
much loose change had fallen into its seats from passengers’ pockets and
been left behind during the past twelve months.
Delbaugh also hoped they could tell him how the hell he was supposed to
fly an aircraft as large as an apartment building without the aid of
elevators, rudders, ailerons, and other equipment that allowed him to
maneuver. Even the best flight training programs were structured under
the assumption that a pilot would retain some degree of control in a
catastrophic incident, thanks to redundant systems provided by the
designers.
Initially, the people at SAM had trouble accepting that he had lost all
hydraulics, assuming he meant he’d had a fractional loss. He finally
had to snap at them to make them understand, which he deeply regretted
not only because he wanted to uphold the tradition of quiet
professionalism that pilots before him had established in dire
circumstances, but also because he was seriously spooked by the sound of