Altitude (Power Reads Book 1)

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Good, then strap yourselves in and sit tight because this will be a bumpy ride. We don’t have much fuel left and I’m only going to get one shot at this, so let me do my job. We all want to get home, and we’re all in the same boat here.’

  He saw the passengers begin to urgently fasten their seatbelts. Jason turned for the cockpit and then felt a tug on his shirt from the seat beside him. He looked down to see a young boy with big brown eyes, clutching a sick bag in one hand as he looked up at Jason.

  ‘Mister, we’re not on a boat,’ the boy whispered helpfully. ‘We’re on a plane.’

  Jason stared at him for a moment and then nodded seriously. ‘My mistake, well done.’

  The boy gave him a thumbs–up as Jason marched into the cockpit. He was about to lock the door behind him when an old man with a silvery moustache approached, hurrying between the aisles.

  ‘Son, you might need another pair of hands and eyes in there.’

  Jason realised that the old man must be the ex–airline pilot that Becca had mentioned. The old guy gestured to Captain Reed’s body with a tilt of his head and a regretful expression.

  ‘When did you last fly?’ Jason asked.

  ‘1991,’ came the brisk reply, ‘737s out of Gatwick, short haul before my retirement. I captained 747s before that and flew Lightnings for the Royal Air Force when I was youn…’

  Jason opened the door before the old man had even finished the sentence, grabbed his shoulder and ushered him into the cockpit, then locked it behind them. The old man frowned as he took in the damaged windshield.

  ‘My, you have been in the wars, haven’t you?’

  Jason directed Penrose toward the captain’s seat, but the old man hesitated.

  ‘This airplane is your command and I should be in the First Officer’s seat.’

  ‘It is my command,’ Jason countered, ‘but you’re used to sitting there and I’m used to sitting here. We’ll do our jobs more effectively if we stick to what we know.’

  The old man’s eyes sparkled with admiration and he extended his hand.

  ‘Samuel Penrose, at your service.’

  ‘Jason Harper, at your mercy.’

  Penrose climbed into the captain’s seat, and then his eyes widened as he surveyed the instruments before him. ‘Good Lord above, where did all the televisions suddenly come from?’

  Jason knew that Penrose would have been more used to seeing endless ranks of analogue gauges, dials and switches rather than the hi–tech array of screens before him now.

  ‘The world went digital a couple of decades ago,’ Jason replied as he sat down and strapped into his seat. ‘But the instruments themselves are the same.’

  Penrose secured his harness and absorbed the dazzling array as Jason hit the transmit switch on the control column.

  ‘Narsarsuaq, Phoenix three seven five, we’re out of time, ideas and options. We’re going to try again to land at Keflavik and refuel before leaving.’

  ‘Roger Phoenix three seven five,’ came the reply, ‘you’re cleared for descent, no other traffic in your area. Emergency teams are on their way, last report from geographical survey was that toxic gas remains in Keflavik and other low–lying areas.’

  ‘Copy that,’ Jason replied.

  ‘You think that they’ll have enough oxygen to refuel and get us out? It could take a while.’ Penrose asked.

  ‘We don’t have a choice,’ Jason replied.

  He reached up and set the descent rate on the autopilot and the Airbus lowered her nose once more. Outside he could see the massive eruption cloud now twice as wide as it had been, the very uppermost tip bathed in orange light as though it were a giant black torch that someone had lit aflame. The sun was now a thin sliver of molten metal vanishing behind the horizon, the blanket of clouds below all shadowy blues and pinks in the fading light.

  The nose of the airliner fell away gently into the descent and Jason eased the throttles back to conserve what meagre fuel they had remaining. The aircraft’s airspeed remained static as gravity took the place of thrust and they headed down toward the darkened clouds below.

  Jason hit the public address switch.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please ensure that you remain strapped in at all times. We’re descending to land at Keflavik and all reports suggest the weather still remains rough the whole way down.’

  The clouds rushed up once again and Jason peered up through a gap in the damaged glass of the windshield at the gargantuan ash cloud ahead. As he did so he saw that veils of ash were falling from the heights, glowing in the sunlight like veils of gold rain before they plunged into shadow once more.

  ‘What goes up,’ Penrose murmured as he saw the veils of falling ash. ‘We don’t have very long left.’

  Then dense banks of cloud rushed past the windshield and what little visibility they had vanished as the cockpit was plunged into darkness once again.

  ***

  XXX

  The Airbus’s wings rocked as the first updrafts and turbulence assaulted her, Jason almost impervious to the motion now as he watched the instruments carefully and kept one eye on the weather radar as it swept out into the violent firmament ahead of them.

  ‘Twenty–five thousand feet,’ Penrose announced, slipping naturally into the role of a helpful first officer.

  ‘Narsarsuaq,’ Jason called, ‘what’s the current QFE at Keflavik in millibars?’

  The response came back immediately.

  ‘QNH niner niner one millibars, QFE niner eight six millibars.’

  Penrose sucked in air through his teeth and Jason nodded in agreement. The air pressure had fallen further since their last landing attempt, which meant that the storms had likely worsened considerably in the time that had passed since they had last heard from Keflavik and Iceland Radio.

  Jason set the stand–by altimeter to the correct pressure on the ground at Keflavik’s runway, and made a mental note to set the main altimeter also as soon as they descended below the transition level. The last thing he wanted now was to make a great approach but then hit the ground a mile short of the runway because his altimeter was set incorrectly. Contrary to popular belief, an altimeter did not display an airplane’s height above the ground unless the air pressure settings associated with that area were selected by the pilot.

  Jason set the display screens to the correct settings, one showing their planned approach path into Keflavik as a GPS–style display, the other showing the heavy weather ahead as the radar scanned the clouds. The third screen before Jason displayed the all important artificial horizon, while another showed the Horizontal Situation Indicator, allowing him to navigate precisely via the radio navigation aids and ILS at Keflavik Airport. Penrose grunted his admiration for the technology available to modern pilots as he looked out of the windshield.

  ‘In my day, the weather radar was how many bumps you had on the top of your head after you’d landed.’

  Jason managed a grim smile as the Airbus shuddered and gyrated, the turbulence swiftly worsening as they plunged down through the cloud layers.

  ‘It hasn’t changed all that much, but we do have…’

  Jason was cut off as an alarm blared in the cockpit and warning lights started flashing before him. It took him a moment to realise that they were the fuel indicators. A digitised female voice warbled from speakers in the cockpit.

  ‘Warning, fuel critical.’

  Jason scanned the fuel gauges and he could see that there was almost nothing left, their supply limited to what was left swilling around in the bottom of the tanks. He immediately hit the auxillary pumps to ensure that the low levels of fuel could be drawn by the engines and then pulled the throttle further back.

  ‘This is going to be very close,’ he managed to say.

  ‘Close enough is all that we need,’ Penrose offered helpfully in a calm voice. ‘Twenty thousand feet.’

  The Airbus was suddenly thumped from below and shuddered, Jason’s head and neck compressed by the force of the
updraft as the engines whined in protest. Cries of shock echoed back and forth from the passenger cabin as the airplane bucked and rolled wildly with the savage winds hurtling past them.

  Jason leaned forward to check the wings for icing, and in the green glow of the navigation light saw the upturned tips flexing wildly, quivering like a leaf in a gale. He turned back to the instruments and tried to avoid the temptation to look out of the useless windshield as the autopilot guided them down through the storms.

  ‘Fifteen thousand.’

  The cockpit was now as black as night, and a sudden blast of rain hammered the windshield once again, drumming deafeningly loud on the weakened glass. Jason squinted as visions flashed through his mind of the windshield failing and blasting shattered glass into their faces at three hundred miles per hour.

  ‘Can they take more hail?’ Penrose asked, shouting slightly to be heard above the onslaught.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jason replied. ‘If we hit another storm like the last one they might fail, and then this is all over.’

  Jason knew that there was no way a man could fly an airplane like the Airbus without a windshield in place. Even at landing velocity the aircraft was moving as fast as a Formula One car at maximum speed, nearly two hundred miles per hour. The windblast would be impossible to counter unless the pilot was wearing a motorcycle helmet and even then, control would be almost impossible. The oxygen masks they possessed in the cockpit might be able to protect them against the windblast, but they would be useless against the rain and especially the hailstones.

  ‘I’m going to try to go around the worst of the weather,’ Jason said, ‘even if it costs us fuel. We can’t risk losing the windshield.’

  The Airbus turned as Jason input a fresh heading into the autopilot to avoid a major storm cell directly ahead of them, gyrating again as it tried to alter course through the violent weather. A vivid white flash of lightning flared like an exploding star outside the cockpit and a deafening crash of thunder threatened to split Jason’s eardrums. Fiery plasma ran like glowing white water across the wings and the airliner shook under the blows, the passengers behind screaming in alarm.

  More lightning bolts flashed and flared outside and the Airbus heeled over again, one wing soaring upward into the sky as the other plunged downward. Jason felt himself slide to the right in his seat as the airliner rocked over and then the autopilot hauled it upright once more. The plane then began turning to the left as it followed the original course that Captain Reed had plotted into the navigation system before he had died.

  ‘Ten thousand feet,’ Penrose said calmly, apparently unaffected by the severe conditions.

  The Airbus jerked to the right and then the left wing plummeted downward as the airplane sideslipped. Jason shoved the throttles open as the autopilot corrected the wings, seeming to strain to do so against the forces working against it.

  ‘Warning, fuel critical.’

  Jason ignored the voice as he watched the aircraft’s flight path on the screen before him, tracking the virtual navigation aids and a magenta line on the screen that headed towards Keflavik. She was a thousand feet below her assigned altitude and now the autopilot was raising the nose to try to compensate for the sudden loss of height.

  ‘We don’t have the fuel for that,’ Penrose said politely. ‘Better to level out and let the flight path come back to us.’

  Jason grabbed for the autopilot switches and shut off the NAV command, then set the descent rate to the airplane’s most efficient glide angle for endurance. The Airbus’s nose came up slightly and he eased back on the throttles again as the airplane continued its left turn, the wings rocking back and forth and the fuselage rumbling as it was hammered by the winds outside.

  ‘We’re coming around the back of the storm cell,’ Jason said, and realised that he was sweating, his skin tingling with prickly heat. ‘I’ll be able to pick up the ILS beam soon.’

  Penrose nodded. ‘Eight thousand feet.’

  Jason switched the altimeter to the correct pressure setting and prepared the ILS frequency. As soon as they switched over, he knew that they would be locked in to the one piece of technology that could bring them safely to a landing at Keflavik’s runway, and get them out of the horrendous storms now tearing across the sky around them.

  The Airbus laboured around its turn and lined up with Keflavik, twenty nautical miles ahead of them through the rain, the gloom and the dense clouds. Jason found himself acutely aware that somewhere just a few miles behind them the towering cloud of ash and burning rock would be looming over the island, twelve miles high, and the hairs on the back of his neck tingled and rose up as though the Grim Reaper were standing behind him in the cockpit.

  ‘Locking in the ILS,’ Jason said and switched the frequency, then switched the autopilot to the ILS function.

  The autopilot locked in, and then a moment later the engines began to die.

  ***

  XXXI

  ‘No, not now!’

  Jason panicked as he saw the fuel indicators flashing bright red, not sure of what to do as for a moment his training was overwhelmed by the realisation that they were too late.

  ‘Warning, fuel depleted. Repeat, fuel depleted.’

  The engine thrust indicators began to fade and Jason swore as he shut off the autopilot master switch and hurled the throttles open to maximum thrust as he pulled back on the control column and the airplane began to climb.

  He knew that there was no way they could follow the ILS glideslope in this kind of weather, or any kind for that matter, without power. The only way he could save the airframe now was to gain as much altitude as he could before the engines shut down completely, using up what little fuel and airspeed he had.

  The Airbus soared upward through the dense cloud, Jason watching the altimeter as it wound upward.

  ‘Six thousand feet,’ Penrose said as they climbed.

  ‘Come on,’ Jason urged the engines uselessly, praying that he could get enough height for them to glide the rest of the way in without power. ‘Just a little more.’

  Penrose spoke calmly alongside him, having mentally calculated just how much height they would need to save the airplane. ‘You’ll need eight thousand feet to make the runway.’

  Jason kept the Airbus’s nose at an attitude that gave him the best rate of climb as they soared upward in the turbulent darkness, and then the giant, roaring turbofan engines whined down and Jason’s heart sank as he saw seven thousand feet on the altimeter.

  ‘That’s not enough,’ Penrose said.

  Jason had no choice but to lower the nose to preserve their airspeed and prevent the Airbus from stalling and tumbling out of the sky. The figures he had memorised on his type–rating training for the aircraft leaped again into his head, and by unthinking reflex he lowered the nose until the airplane settled at its best glide angle for endurance. 17:1. That was the glide ratio for the airplane.

  ‘We’re lined up,’ Penrose said as he glanced at the DME on the instrument panel, displaying the distance to Keflavik. ‘Twenty–one nautical miles to run from seven thousand feet.’

  Jason could do the maths just as well as Penrose, and he reached the same conclusion. If they didn’t have such a strong headwind, they’d reach the airport with just a few feet to spare. But the thirty knot winds were slowing them down, the extra drag reducing their range without the engines to power them through it.

  ‘We’re gonna hit the ground a mile short of the runway,’ Jason uttered. ‘That’ll put us in the water.’

  Penrose said nothing for what felt like an eternity but was in actual fact only a few seconds. They sat in silence and stared out of the useless windshield as they descended to earth at over two hundred miles per hour with their engines out and no fuel left to restart them.

  Jason wracked his brains for some solution to the crisis, but he was out of ideas and felt suddenly exhausted. He glanced at the weather radar and saw heavy turbulence and rainfall ahead of them, just one more obst
acle between them and the salvation of an airfield with an atmosphere that might just kill them all anyway.

  He heard a rising commotion from the passenger cabin, and realised that the passengers were now also aware that the engines had ceased to operate. Jason reached for the public address system switch and hit it.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please assume crash positions for landing. Repeat, please assume crash postions for landing. Thank you.’

  The commotion metamorphosied into barely audible gasps and whispers, the hustle of people afraid of what was going to come next and utterly unable to escape their fate. A few loud sobs broke out, cut short by others not wanting their grieving friends or family members to spread further panic among the passengers. That, Jason understood, was the real nature of people’s fear of flying. It wasn’t just the fact that they were trapped miles above the earth in a giant aluminium tube travelling at hundreds of miles per hour through violent storms, although that in itself was stressful enough. The real fear was born of an absolute lack of control over what would happen if the aircraft met with a crisis in flight. Most people understood that aviation was immensely safe, but equally they also knew that a crash landing was exactly that and that it was tough to stop seventy tons of airliner when the brakes weren’t available or it was diving out of control toward the ground. The contradiction between the safest mode of transport on the planet and near certain death if something did go wrong was obvious. The hundred or so passengers behind him were right now hoping and praying that he would make a decision or come up with a solution that would save their lives, and Jason knew that he had nothing left and neither did the airplane. They could no more defy the laws of physics than a magician could produce a real live rabbit from an empty hat and in aviation, illusions were no solution to a crisis such as the one they now faced.

  ‘We’ll have to go in for a belly landing,’ Jason said, ‘on the water.’