Will Kent opened his eyes just in time to see the engine explode.
His arm shot up to protect the passenger seated at the window, but his daughter Shannon didn’t seem to notice. The eleven-year-old girl just watched the flames spewing out of the back of the engine’s tail cone and uttered an uneasy whoa.
Will sat up straight and looked over the tops of the seats. The emergency exit was two rows up. A flight attendant sat there in a rear-facing
jump seat staring at the passengers. He could just make out her name bar. Molly. Will caught her eye.
Molly didn’t say a thing. She didn’t have to.
The aircraft shook. Panic gripped the cabin as everyone craned for a look out the windows. Flames. Chunks of metal ripping off, flying by. Will leaned over Shannon for a better view. The engine was on fire.
Parts of the wing were shredded. Below the plane, crystal-clear turquoise water.
Shannon looked to her dad. “Why aren’t we turning back to Honolulu?”
Will had been wondering the same thing.
In the cockpit, every pilot’s worst nightmare was coming true.
“We lost thrust in engine one,” First Officer Kit Callahan radioed to ATC, her voice rising involuntarily as the plane dropped. “And all hydraulic fluid in all three systems.”
“Say again, fourteen twenty-one?”
The air traffic controller sounded skeptical. Even the captain glanced over to see for himself. Any other day, all this second-guessing would have pissed her off.
Not today.
Kit triple-checked the ECAM, barely believing the display herself.
System failures were listed in order of severity. Level 3 failures, the most crucial, were first, in red. Red filled the screen. Every time she cleared one, another would pop up. All were Level 3. The digital screen looked like it was bleeding out.
They’d been airborne for less than two minutes. Engine one was dead. So were the hydraulics. This extended beyond their training. Pilots don’t run situations like this in the simulator.
There’d be no point.
“Fourteen twenty-one, ah, did you say all three? All three hydraulic—”
“Goddamn it, dead stick!” Captain Miller said.
No hydraulic fluid. No hydraulic power.
The plane was dead in the air…
Leave a Reply