About ten yards away from Metz and Johnson, Fitzgerald stood at the edge of the runway, shouting. “Push down. Push down! That’s it. That’s it. Gently. Gently.”
Some of the firemen, policemen, and reporters began to cheer. The Trans-United people were screaming, “Down! Down! Down!”
All around the airport and, as the word spread, inside the terminal building, people were weeping and hugging each other.
Johnson stood frozen by the scene in front of him, not knowing if his behavior appeared appropriate, and not caring.
Wayne Metz unconsciously grabbed Edward Johnson’s arm. Talking about crashing an airliner was one thing; seeing it coming out of the sky in front of him was something else. He opened his mouth and drew a short breath. “Good God, I’ve never seen … anything … Oh, my God, look at it.” Metz felt like running, and in fact had slipped his hand in his pocket and found his car keys. He turned, dazed, toward Johnson. “We’re finished.”
Johnson shook his head. “Not yet.”
The Straton glided in closer to the approach lights, hardly more than a mile away now, barely 200 feet above the airport, dropping a few feet every second, its long landing wheels reaching out tentatively.
The crowd was becoming almost delirious with emotion as the drama of the moment swept away the last inhibitions. Men and women, reporters and emergency personnel shouted, jumped, wept, and embraced.
* * *
In the cockpit of the Straton airliner stood First Officer Daniel McVary and more than a dozen passengers—mostly men, some women, and a few children. They were babbling and wailing, their residual instincts telling them that they were in danger. Their faces and arms were covered with freshly coagulated blood from the battering they had taken during the descent into the storm.
Sharon Crandall stared at them. “John …”
Linda Farley fought to keep from screaming. Her body began shaking.
“John!”
Berry’s whole existence had been reduced to the controls in front of him and the runway looming up outside his windshield. “Ignore them! Stay in your seat! Linda, put your head between your legs and don’t move.” It was hardly more than one mile to the threshold of the runway. Thirty more seconds. The Straton’s speed was too high and its altitude too low. Berry could feel someone’s hand brush against the back of his neck. He tried to ignore what was behind him. He concentrated on the airport and his approach path.
Berry could see the crash trucks racing in from all directions, converging on the entire length of the runway. He glanced quickly at the airspeed indicator. Still too fast. They would overshoot the runway and land in the bay or veer off and crash into the buildings outside the airport boundary. He made another adjustment with the throttles and the flight controls.
As the airliner streaked toward the threshold of the runway, Berry became more aware of the press of bodies jammed into the cockpit of the Straton. He suddenly realized that someone was standing barely inches from him. Berry glanced to his right.
Daniel McVary stood at the rear edge of the center console. His body leaned forward, hovering threateningly over the flight controls. The other passengers stepped to the front of the cockpit, cautiously, tentatively, like unwelcome visitors.
Sharon Crandall drew away from McVary. Her voice came out in a barely audible whisper. “John …”
“Stay strapped in. Don’t move. Don’t provoke them.”
McVary reached out and put his hand on the copilot’s control wheel.
Berry felt the pressure on his wheel, then felt a cold, clammy hand on his face. He heard Linda trying to fight down a mounting hysteria. “Christ, Jesus!” The threshold of the runway was half a mile away. The excessive speed was dropping off and the nonexistent fuel was still flowing to the engines.Please, God . He eased farther back on the throttles and felt McVary’s hand on his. “For God’s sake, get the hell out of here!” He swiped at McVary’s hand.
With the other hand still wrapped around the copilot’s control wheel, Daniel McVary pulled hard. This washis control wheel, that much he remembered, although he had no idea what it was for.
Berry could feel the man’s pull. He pushed forward against the captain’s control wheel with as much force as he could, to counterbalance what McVary was doing with the copilot’s wheel. Berry’s arms ached. “Get away, you stupid son-of-a-bitch. For Christ’s sake …”
Crandall struck out at McVary with her fists. “Stop! Stop! Go away! John. Please!”
“Steady … steady …” They had only a quarter of a mile to go, but Berry knew that he was losing in this battle of brute strength. Whatever the copilot had lost in mental ability hadn’t affected his muscle power. “Sharon! Get him off! Now! Fast!”
Sharon tried to pry the man’s fingers from the control wheel, but McVary held to it with an incredible strength. She bent over and bit savagely into the back of his right hand, but McVary was almost totally beyond pain.
Daniel McVary pulled against the copilot’s control wheel even harder, and it caused the Straton to suddenly pitch up and its right wing to dip low as the tail began to yaw from side to side. The stall-warning synthetic voice began to fill the cockpit again with its frightening chant.AIRSPEED. AIRSPEED . Several of the passengers howled. Linda screamed.
Many of the people standing in the cockpit were thrown off balance by the sudden erratic motions of the Straton. They lurched back toward the bulkhead; some of them fell against the circuit-breaker panel.
McVary held firmly onto the wheel and kept his balance.
“You bastard! Let go, you son-of-a-bitch.” Berry knew he had only a few seconds left to get the Straton back under control. If he didn’t, they would die—right here, right now. The runway was only a short distance ahead. “Sharon! Help me! Help!”
Sharon Crandall felt the flesh in McVary’s hand break under her teeth, and blood run over her chin and down her neck. Still, the hand would not move. She picked her head up and shot her hand out, jabbing a finger in McVary’s eye.
The copilot screamed, and released the wheel.
Berry pushed his control wheel abruptly forward, rotated it to the left, and pressed hard against the rudder panels. The Straton seemed to hang in its awkward position for a long second. The stall-warning synthetic voice was still sounding, the repetition of its one-word vocabulary now continuous.AIRSPEED, AIRSPEED, AIRSPEED . Berry could see the ground streaking by outside his windshield at an incredible angle, then suddenly the horizon straightened and the runway centerline swung back to the middle of the windshield.
But the Straton had lost too much airspeed. Even without the continuous blaring of the stall-warning voice, Berry could feel the sickening sensation that told him the airliner was nearly done flying. In another moment the Straton would fall uncontrollably, like an elevator cut loose from its cable, its 400 tons crashing to the runway below.
“John!” Sharon screamed. The ground rushed up toward them. She covered her eyes.
Waiting as long as he dared, Berry made one last and desperate pull on the flight controls with all the strength he had left.
* * *
Captain Kevin Fitzgerald’s experienced eye told him instantly that the pilot had suddenly lost control. He found himself running toward the plummeting airliner, shouting as he ran. “He’s losing it! It’s pitching on him! Oh, goddamn it, he’s losing it. Christ Almighty!” The pilot had managed to get the giant airliner within a half mile of the runway, and now, inexplicably, he was letting the ship get away from him. He shouted like a coach trying to play the game from the sidelines. “Goddamn it! Goddamn you! Hold it, you bastard, hold it! Kick the rudder. The rudder! Kick the goddamn rudder, you son-of-a-bitch!” He suddenly stopped running.
Just before the Straton’s wheels hit the runway, Fitzgerald could see that the pilot had made one final, desperate control input. That, coupled with the aircraft’s low airspeed, was all that averted instant and total catastrophe. But the aircraft’s unspent downward energy was stil
l far too great for its designed limits of strength. As Fitzgerald watched, the Straton sank down onto its undercarriage, then the huge sets of landing gear snapped off as if they were made of glass. Broken wheels and struts catapulted in all directions. The airliner fell onto its belly and skidded down the runway at over a hundred knots, a shower of sparks rising beneath and behind it. The aircraft yawed left and right, dangerously close to a complete spin. Fitzgerald could see the speed brakes extend above the wings. The rudder was still working back and forth; Fitzgerald knew the pilot had not given up.
The crowd on the grass began running as the uncontrolled airliner, as tall as a three-story building and as long and wide as a football field, began skidding toward them. Some of the crowd jumped on retreating vehicles; others hit the ground.
Fitzgerald knew that no place was safer than any other if the Straton went off the runway, and he stood his ground and watched. Around him, four news cameramen stood in the grass, recording the progress of the giant airliner plowing across the runway less than 3000 feet away. The sound of scraping and tearing metal rose above the screaming of the engines as the tortured Straton 797 came closer.
* * *
Wayne Metz said to Ed Johnson, in an awed, faraway voice, “Did he make it?”
“Sort of.”
“Will it explode?”
“Maybe.”
They both watched as the huge aircraft continued its crabbing skid down the runway, leaving a trail of sparks, coupled with an unbelievable sound of scraping, tearing, tortured metal.
Metz asked, “What should we do if it doesn’t explode?”
“We should go out to the aircraft and be among the first to meet the pilot.”
Metz glanced at Johnson, then back at the Straton. He said softly, “Explode and die.”
* * *
Berry felt the Straton settle hard on its landing gear, and heard the incredible sound of the gear ripping off. The airliner’s 820,000 pounds dropped jarringly onto the runway and the aircraft began to slide. Berry’s only emotion as the landing gear collapsed was anger. Anger at himself for getting it so far and losing it at the last moment.
But it wasn’t all lost yet. He was alive, and he intended to stay that way. He glanced toward Sharon. As his hands reached for the fuel shut-off switches, she was looking at him, and apparently had been since the impact, watching his face, trying to see by his expression if they were going to live or die. He nodded to her, as if to say,It’s okay . But it wasn’t.
Berry raised the spoilers on top of the wings to act as speed brakes in a last desperate attempt to slow the careening airliner. His feet worked the rudder pedals, but he could see it was having little effect on keeping the aircraft pointed straight down the runway, now that the fuselage was in contact with the pavement.
For a split second, right before touchdown, he had seen himself taxiing the crippled airliner up to the parking ramp, but now he knew he would be lucky if he could avert an explosion. For the first time since he had begun flying, he wanted to run out of fuel. But even if the tanks were dry, there was probably enough volatile fumes in them to blow the airplane to pieces.
He saw the crowd scattering to his left, and noticed the crash trucks moving away as well. He motioned for Sharon to get into a crash position, but she shook her head. He looked quickly over his shoulder and saw that Linda had her head between her legs. The passengers were stumbling and falling; the deceleration had thrown many of them back into the lounge.
The sickening sound of tearing, scraping metal filled the cockpit with a noise so great that he literally could no longer think clearly. He turned back to the front and waited out the final seconds. There was nothing left for him to do concerning the Straton, and that, at least, was a welcome relief.
* * *
The Straton skidded toward Fitzgerald. As it came within a hundred feet of him, it suddenly spun out of control, its seven-story-high tail coming around in a slow clockwise direction. Fitzgerald dropped to the ground. The massive Straton filled his whole field of vision and he could actually smell its engines and feel its heat as its wing passed above him. He looked up and saw the left wing dip down and plow into the grass. The outboard engine fell from its mounts and rolled end over end in the grass, leaving a trail of blazing earth behind it.
People began to yell, “Fire!”
Fitzgerald looked up at the aircraft spinning and sliding away from him. He could see that the wing section around the lost engine was a maze of severed wires, tubes, and cables. Long plumes of orange flame and black smoke trailed off the damaged wing. Within seconds the entire left wing was ablaze, flames shooting up to the full height of the fuselage.
Fitzgerald stood quickly and began running after the moving airliner. Incredibly, on his right, he saw Edward Johnson and Metz running too. Johnson he could understand. There was nothing cowardly about the man, no matter what one thought of him. But Metz …What the hell was going on here?
The Straton had slowed considerably as soon as its wing and engine ripped into the ground, and the spinning action further slowed its forward momentum. The aircraft came to rest a hundred yards from Fitzgerald.
Rescue units began rushing toward the Straton, and fire vehicles converged on it with nozzles spewing foam over its length, trying to smother the fire before the fumes and fuel in the tanks exploded.
* * *
From the captain’s seat, Berry could see the wall of flame that engulfed the left wing.
Before the airliner came to a complete stop, Berry ripped off his seat belt, stood, and reached across to Sharon Crandall. He grabbed her arm and shook her. “Sharon! Sharon!” She was dazed, and he could tell from the gray pallor of her face that she was in shock. He opened her belt and pulled her out of the chair.
She clung to him for a second, then picked her head up. “I’m all right. We have to get out of here.”
Berry looked around. The cockpit was jammed with twisted, moving bodies. The first whiffs of acrid smoke had already floated up the circular stairs into the lounge, and drifted into the cockpit. Passengers from the lounge were beginning to respond to the smoke, and began heading toward the cockpit.
Berry shouted above the noises of the injured and the sounds of the emergency units outside. “Open the emergency door. I’ll get Linda.”
She nodded quickly and pushed her way through the stumbling forms around her.
Berry pulled away a lifeless body draped over the observer’s seat and unbuckled Linda’s belt. The girl was barely conscious, and he lifted her over his shoulder.
He pushed his way to the door, which was still closed. “Sharon! Open the door. Open the door.”
She knelt beside the small emergency door, tears running down her face. “It’s stuck! Stuck!”
He thrust the girl into Sharon’s arms and pulled at the emergency handle. It held fast, and he pulled again, but it wouldn’t open.Damn it. The airframe is probably bent . He looked around wildly. Through the cockpit door poured a stream of passengers, crawling, clawing, staggering, and with them came clouds of black stinging smoke, darkening the cockpit. The passengers pressed against him; they were thrashing, howling, terrified. Foam splattered against the windshields, and the cockpit became almost black. He looked up and saw that Sharon and Linda had disappeared. He reached for them, but other bodies were forcing him back against the sidewall. Berry dropped to one knee and rammed forward until he found the emergency door again. He grabbed blindly for the handle, and finally located it. The smoke was overcoming him, and he couldn’t find the strength to pull. “Sharon! Linda! Where are you?”
“John, here.” Her voice sounded weak. “We’re over here. In the front.”
“Hold on. Hold on.” Berry looked up, but he couldn’t see more than a few feet through the smoke and the frightened, milling passengers. He turned back to the emergency door. He grabbed the door handle and pulled on it with every bit of strength he could summon. He kept pulling until he thought he would black out.
&nb
sp; The door suddenly flew open, followed by a loud explosion as the nitrogen bottle fired into the inflatable emergency chute. Berry drew in a long breath. He grabbed at the figure standing in front of him, but his eyes were burning and he couldn’t see through the clouds of black smoke that billowed out the door.
The passengers began tumbling past him, their residual intelligence directing them toward the sunlight and air. Berry shouted as the stream of passengers fell over him. “Sharon! Linda!”
“John. Here. We’re here. Against the copilot’s chair. Please, we can’t move.”
Berry crawled toward the voice, trying to stay below the smoke. Through his watering eyes he saw a bare leg and grabbed at it. But the people around him were moving like a tidal wave now, like the escaping air that had started this nightmare so many hours before. They pressed against his kneeling figure, and before he realized what had happened he was on the bright yellow escape chute. He grabbed wildly at the sides of the chute, but he could not stop himself from sliding down, headfirst, toward the runway below. Before he hit, he heard himself screaming, “Sharon!”
20
* * *
John Berry’s head throbbed and waves of nausea passed over him. In the distance he could hear sirens, brakes screeching, the shouts of rescue workers, bullhorns, radios squawking, and the cries of injured people around him.
He got himself into a sitting position and tried to look around, but his right eye was blurry and he rubbed it; his hand came away with blood. “Damn …”
He glanced at the Straton towering over him. The huge jetliner sat on its belly, but the aircraft was tilted to the right and its nose was pointing back toward the direction from which he’d landed.Incredible , he thought, looking at the size of this thing that he’d brought in. The cockpit had been so small. … He suddenly felt a sense of overwhelming awe and pride. “My God …”
Mayday Page 35
