Chapter 5 - Blind Descent
"Flight controls are unresponsive," Malachi said.
His voice didn't crack. It didn't rise. It had passed through the threshold of fear into the strange, crystalline calm that sometimes touches human beings in the final seconds of their existence.
Gerald looked up from the floor, his face white with horror. "What did you say?"
"The hydraulics are gone," Malachi said, letting go of the dead yoke. His hands fell to his sides. "We don't have elevators. We don't have ailerons. The computer can't steer the wings."
"Then... we're crashing?" Gerald asked, his voice a dry croak.
"Not yet," Malachi said.
He remembered a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Atlanta. He was ten years old. His father had set the hydraulic pressure to zero on the desktop simulator in their study, smiling that warm, fearless smile that made Malachi feel like the sun would never set.
*Listen to me, Malachi,* Isaiah had said, tapping the throttle levers. *If the hydraulics die, the airplane becomes a boat. How do you steer a twin-screw boat when the rudder falls off?*
*With the engines,* young Malachi had answered.
*With the engines,* Isaiah had nodded. *Differential thrust. Push the left engine, the plane turns right. Push the right engine, the plane turns left. Push both engines together, the nose pitches up. Pull them both back, the nose pitches down. It’s slow, it’s clumsy, and it takes the touch of an artist. But it will bring you home.*
Malachi placed his blistered hands on the two throttle levers: the cold, idling left lever and the hot, roaring right lever.
"Elena!" Malachi shouted into the cabin mic. "Brace position! Everyone down! HEADS DOWN, STAY DOWN!"
Through the cabin, the flight attendants’ voices rose in a synchronized, rhythmic scream that echoed over the roaring wind:
"BRACE! BRACE! BRACE! HEADS DOWN, STAY DOWN! BRACE! BRACE!"
Malachi slammed the left thrust lever forward, matching it to the right engine.
For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened as the cold General Electric engine spool-up cycle lagged behind. Then, with a deafening, metallic roar that shook the entire fuselage, the left turbine caught fire, compressed the dense sea-level air, and surged with fifty thousand pounds of thrust.
The blast of air from the engines under the low-slung wings created an immediate aerodynamic pitch-up moment.
The nose of the 777 groaned, shuddered, and slowly—miraculously—began to rise out of its dive.
Three thousand feet.
Two thousand five hundred feet.
"Now... turn her," Malachi muttered, his teeth bared.
He pulled the right throttle back two inches while leaving the left throttle pinned forward. The imbalance in thrust shoved the massive tail to the right, swinging the aircraft’s nose onto a heading of two-four-zero.
Directly ahead, the thick, blinding veil of the storm clouds suddenly ripped apart like wet paper.
The Atlantic Ocean appeared below them—a terrifying expanse of black, churning waves capped with violent white foam, barely eight hundred feet beneath the belly of the jet. The sea spray was being whipped into the air by sixty-knot gale-force winds.
And there, dead ahead, through the sheets of freezing rain, a single line of brilliant, flashing white approach lights pierced the darkness.
Runway 24. Shannon Airport.
"I see the runway," Malachi whispered.
He pressed the radio toggle. "Shannon! This is Malachi Brooks! I have the runway in sight! I have no hydraulics! I am flying on throttles alone! Total control loss on primary flight surfaces!"
In the control tower, Sarah Jenkins dropped her headset to her collar, grabbed the airport binoculars, and ran to the panoramic glass.
Out over the mouth of the River Shannon, sliding beneath the rain clouds like an injured aluminum whale, was Flight 782. The aircraft was yawing wildly from side to side, its wings rocking as the twelve-year-old boy manipulated the engine throttles with micro-adjustments, fighting the savage Atlantic crosswind.
"All units, rolling!" the fire chief screamed over the crash network. "Widebody on short final, no hydraulics, uncontrolled landing speed! Move, move, move!"
Ten massive Rosenbauer Panther fire trucks accelerated onto the parallel taxiways, their sirens screaming into the storm, their high-capacity water cannons pre-charged with foam.
"The landing gear," Gerald gasped from the cockpit floor, looking at the panel. "The wheels aren't down!"
"The manual extension switch," Malachi shouted, pointing toward a small panel on the right side of the center console. "The alternate gear release! Pull that handle, Mr. Whitmore! Pull it as hard as you can!"
Gerald scrambled across the floor, his fingers catching on the yellow-and-black striped handle. He planted his knees and yanked it upward with an agonizing grunt.
Beneath the floor, a heavy mechanical release clunked open.
Without hydraulic pressure to lower them, the massive multi-wheel main landing gear trucks fell under their own dead weight into the five-hundred-mile-per-hour slipstream. Gravity and wind resistance slammed the heavy steel struts backward until they locked into the wing sockets with a concussive *THUD-THUD* that vibrated through the passenger cabin.
Three green lights illuminated on the center dashboard:
*NOSE GEAR: DOWN AND LOCKED.*
*LEFT MAIN: DOWN AND LOCKED.*
*RIGHT MAIN: DOWN AND LOCKED.*
"Gear is down!" Gerald yelled, tears of relief washing the blood from his cheeks.
"We’re too fast," Malachi said, his eyes locked on the digital speed tape. "Two hundred and twenty knots. Without flaps, our landing speed is sixty knots too high. We’re going to run out of runway."
"Can you stop her?" Gerald asked, his voice shaking.
Malachi looked down at his father’s bronze captain's wing, which he had wedged into the dashboard compass mount.
"My dad never lost a plane," Malachi said. "And neither will I."
Five hundred feet.
The ground was rushing up with terrifying, dizzying speed. The green Irish fields were a blurred smear beneath the rain. The turbulence tossed the massive airliner like a cork, the right wing dipping toward the runway approach lights.
Malachi shoved the right throttle forward, kicked the wing back to level, and then—fifty feet above the asphalt—did what every instinct in a pilot screams against.
He chopped both throttles to idle.
The sudden loss of engine thrust dropped the 777 out of the sky like a stone.
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"BRACE FOR IMPACT!" Malachi screamed over the PA.
***
