Skid

by Rene Gutteridge

  He’d failed by leaving the cockpit. He was responsible for every person on this plane, and he’d failed them all. He could hear them crying. He could see Mrs. Kilpatrick holding her one-hundred-three-year-old mother, rocking her like a baby, having already lost her once, about to lose her again.

  It suffocated him. It buried him. Even though he sat on the floor of the airplane, his back felt tired from the burden. His name, once released to the media, would become synonymous with failure. They would listen to the black boxes and find out he made the fatal error of deciding to leave the cockpit. If there had been two or three pilots in there, Miles would’ve had far less opportunity to do what he did.

  Danny looked at Miles, who sat in a corner of the plane where a jump seat normally folded down. Blood trickled from his brow and nose. He looked scared.

  Was Danny so different from Miles? He would never kill anyone, but he wasn’t above personal gain. He wasn’t above feeling the need for revenge. Restitution. Smacking James upside the head.

  The man who’d been swinging the gun around and barking orders now looked like a frightened, weary child, huddled in the corner with his knees pulled to his chest.

  “My name is Perry,” Miles said.

  “What?” Danny asked.

  “Not Miles. I’m not Miles Smilt. He’s tied to a chair in his house. My name is Perry Watts. I worked for the FAA, but I got fired. Because I wasn’t good at planning things out.” The guy looked down. “I’m sorry for all this.” He didn’t look back up.

  Danny suddenly noticed that Chucky had stopped licking him. He turned his head to see Chucky nibbling on the plastic.

  “Anna Sue!”

  Anna Sue, who still stood in the middle of the aisle, turned her head. “Yes?”

  “He’s doing it! He’s eating the plastic!”

  “Good boy, Chucky. Good boy. You’re not going to get in trouble for this, I promise!”

  “Anna Sue, I want you to sit down and get your seat belt on, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “How fast can he chew through plastic?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes he chews it up in a matter of minutes, other times he takes his time about it.”

  “Any way to get him to hurry?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The plane seemed to slow. Everyone cried out, and panic stirred in the air.

  “GiGi!” Danny called.

  “What?”

  “They’ve put down the flaps! Get on the intercom and explain what’s happening, talk everyone through this. Tell them the plane is slowing down so it can land. This is a good thing.”

  Danny was surprised to see her wiping tears. “You okay?”

  “Tears of laughter. This is better than watching a pig fly.” She got on the intercom.

  The girl in polka dots appeared, squeezed past the pig, and sat in the seat to his left. “The captain needs to know something.”

  “What?”

  “She said the…the…” She glanced down at her notes. “The FMS computer or something is already set?”

  “The Flight Management System. It has the entire flight programmed in.”

  “Yes, that’s it. She said you guys were set to land on the shorter runway in Amsterdam.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” They all dreaded that runway. It made every pilot nervous. The airport had been promising for years to make it longer, but so far nothing had happened. It was within regulation, but barely.

  “She doesn’t think it’s a good idea to have them try to change it,” the girl said. “A lot could go wrong.”

  Danny nodded, trying to process it all.

  “She said she’s going to have them arm the autobrakes, but she’s going back and forth between Maximum and Medium.”

  Danny thought it through. The knob had four settings: Off, Min, Med, or Max. Normally it would be set at Min for landing. The Max setting made your eyes water. Danny had heard of guys blowing tires on Max on a dry runway. Usually, the Max setting was only for snow-covered or icy runways. The Med setting was normally used for wet runways. They were landing on a short runway with two guys not familiar with the procedures. Set it on Med and risk running off the end of the runway? Or set it on Max and risk blowing all the tires?

  Danny took a deep breath and tried to block out everything around him. It was second nature to him, all of this, but trying to tell someone else how to do it seemed nearly impossible.

  “Okay, write this. Tell her I think we should go Max, but we have to make sure they keep the engines at the same EPR and—”

  “EPR?”

  “Engine pressure ratio. If not, they’ll slide sideways, and that can be disast—problematic if our tires blow.”

  Lucy wrote quickly. “Okay, I’ll tell her.”

  She turned to go, but Danny said, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “No. Medium. Tell her Medium.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. That runway can handle it if winds are light. Yeah. Medium.”

  Lucy paused after scratching out her notes and rewriting them, and Danny urged her on her way. A few passengers’ stares caused him to second-guess himself again, but he closed his eyes and told himself he knew what he was doing. He repeated it over and over to the sound of Chucky chewing plastic and making wet breathing noises through his snout.

  He really loathed this pig. He wanted to yank at the plastic, kick against the metal bar that held him, anything to hurry this along, but that might distract Chucky, and the pig was, to Danny’s dismay, his best hope. To say he was growing irritated was an understatement. His life hung in the balance, his career was likely shot, and he was chained to a chair with a pig licking him.

  Then, like a shooting star across the sky, a thought flickered through his mind.

  No. No, no, no. No!

  Yet as he attempted to talk himself out of it, like a compulsion, his hand disobeyed.

  He reached out and started stroking the pig.

  “This is going to cause the throttles to retard and the airplane to slow down. It will not slow below the minimum airspeed for the flap setting, so as it slows below the maximum speed for a flap setting, you are going to step the flaps out incrementally. Flaps 5. Flaps fifteen. Flaps twenty-five. Flaps thirty. Do you understand?”

  Lucy looked back and forth between the men. Neither nodded. Neither acknowledged anything that the tower said. “Hank?” she asked.

  Eddie said, “Um…can you… Can you repeat that?”

  “Lucy!” The captain’s voice sounded urgent. Clutching her notepad, Lucy raced out of the cockpit and toward her. The captain had pulled herself into an awkward position to get a better view of the cockpit. “Tell them to tell the tower to instruct them to set the speed command to the ref speed. That’s the approach speed. Tell them it’s going to be easier to put out flaps as we reach each maximum flap speed. Go.”

  Lucy was still jotting down notes as she raced back to the cockpit. She repeated everything the captain said.

  The Dutch voice on the radio said, “Okay, listen. The flap handle is to the right of the throttles and is shaped like a small airfoil.”

  “What’s an airfoil?” Hank whispered.

  Eddie shrugged, but they both seemed to be looking at the same thing.

  “It has detents at each of the appropriate flap settings, and it must be lifted slightly to get out of each detent. The settings are marked on the console,” the controller explained.

  Lucy watched and listened as Hank followed the instructions. The invisible person on the ground spoke softly, calmly, as if the quieter he spoke, the more they would have to strain to listen. If there was a God and He had a voice, maybe He sounded like a Dutch air-traffic controller.

  The airplane slowed as Eddie turned the knob and Hank opened the flaps. Thirty miles out. Twenty miles out. Fifteen miles. Ten miles.

  Suddenly the craft turned. Eddie’s hands flew up, and he yelled.

  “Don’t panic,” said t
he voice. “The airplane is lining itself up with the runway.”

  Lucy held on until she felt the turn end. An unexpected turn, but they were still on course.

  “All right,” the voice said. “It’s time to put the landing gear down.”

  “Lucy!” the captain called.

  Lucy ran back to her. “Yes?”

  “What’s happening?”

  “We’re ten miles out. We’ve slowed the airplane. Um, they’re getting ready to put the landing gear down.”

  With tears in her eyes, the captain smiled. “That’s the easiest part, that landing gear. Three green lights—it’s all you want to see.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lucy,” the captain said, grabbing her arm.

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a seat up there. It’s called the jump seat. Sit in it. Buckle yourself in, okay? Don’t forget to buckle yourself in. Put it over your lap, not on your waist.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I want you to watch it all. Watch every moment of it. There’s this really cool moment where you come through the clouds and the tiny specks on the earth become buildings and houses. You know people on the ground can hear the engines roar. You can feel your belly tickle, because really, we’re not supposed to be up here, you know? That’s for the birds. But here we are, flying like we were made for it all along. I was made for this. I always knew it. Ever since I was a kid. This is my last flight. And I need you to be my eyes, okay? I need you to tell me everything you see, what it feels like, okay? Can you do that?”

  Lucy nodded, choked up at how vulnerable the captain looked, chained to the floor and unable to even look out a window.

  “Okay. You’ve done a great job, Lucy. We’re going to be okay.”

  “Yeah. We’re going to be okay.”

  Lucy walked back to the cockpit, sat down in the small, black seat and buckled her belt over her lap like she was supposed to. She pulled it tight for the first time, and listened to the voice.

  “We’re at two hundred and fifty knots,” Eddie said.

  “All right. This is going just fine. Now, I want you to punch the ILS button. It is located on the console. Do you see it?”

  Hank pointed. “Right here. Got it. What is it?”

  “It’s the Instrument Landing System. The instruments are going to read the data from the airport. Okay?”

  “We can’t see anything. There are clouds everywhere. All we can see are gray clouds!” Eddie’s voice climbed with every word.

  “It’s okay, the airplane will do all the work.”

  Hank put a steady hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “We’re going to have to trust even though we can’t see.”

  “Fly by faith, not by sight,” Lucy added.

  Hank looked back and smiled. “Exactly.”

  “Two hundred and forty knots,” Eddie said.

  “Perfect. Everything is going very smoothly,” said the voice. “Just trust me, do what I tell you to do, and you’re going to be fine.”

  “Two hundred and thirty knots. We still can’t see the ground,” Eddie said.

  “You’re fine. There are some low clouds, that’s all.”

  Lucy gripped the edge of her seat. It felt like they could crash into something at any moment, like flying blind. They just had to trust the voice.

  “It’s time to punch the Autoland button. Do you see it? It’s located in front of you, on what you would call the dashboard of your car.”

  “Got it.”

  “Now we’re going to arm the autobrakes. The spoilers are to the left side of the throttles on a large handle that sticks up about even with the throttles. You arm them by pulling the handle up.”

  Eddie pulled it up. Lights blinked. Computers beeped. Somehow, Lucy had a good feeling about it all. “Got it. Our pilot said to turn the knob to Medium. That the runway could handle it.”

  “We concur.”

  “Oh. Good.” Eddie took a deep breath in and popped his knuckles. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a pool.

  “All right. We’re looking for you coming in from the north. Stand by.”

  Hank smiled. “Waiting’s always the hardest part.”

  Danny considered the pig. It chewed like a cow on cud. He had never been around pigs much, except the elementary trip to the farm, so maybe he had the wrong idea about them. Maybe everything he knew about pigs was wrong. He’d always imagined pigs eating very quickly. Scarfing it down. Eating everything in sight.

  But Chucky seemed to be a nibbler, at least when it came to plastic.

  As Danny sat, feeling the airplane slow, turn, line up with the runway, and descend, all the while stroking Chucky’s back, he thought it was awfully ironic that he was chained to an airplane. He’d been afraid of losing his job, and here he was, chained to it. He couldn’t lose this airplane if he wanted to.

  And now, in the midst of facing his own mortality and his own morality, separated by a mere letter in the alphabet, none of it seemed to matter. He liked his job, but it didn’t define him. He made a mistake, but it wouldn’t ruin him. Like a camera with autofocus, his life suddenly became clear. He felt whole again. And it was an odd time to feel whole, surrounded by a pig, a passed-out pilot, a prisoner, and four millimeters of plastic.

  He looked at Anna Sue, sitting, clutching the seatback. He felt sorry for her. If ever she’d needed Chucky, it was now. A sense of admiration came over him. Here was a woman who only wanted to get from one place to another. Who knew what kind of teasing and discrimination she constantly felt for having a pig and being emotionally challenged. The world was not a kind or understanding place.

  But here she was, hanging in there like a trooper.

  “Anna Sue?” he called.

  She turned. “Yes?”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  “What?”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  “Why?” Tears worked their way out of her eyes. “Chucky and I have caused a big mess.”

  Danny paused, wondering if it was appropriate to discuss her disability. In their predicament, appropriateness could probably fly out the window. He wanted her to know something.

  “You know, Anna Sue, we’ve been on a wild ride, and I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you’re holding up.”

  “Don’t be too impressed. We still have to land.”

  “Yeah. But Anna Sue, your disability isn’t easy to live with. There’s a lot of stigma attached to a person with emotional challenges.”

  Anna Sue raised an eyebrow. “Did you say emotional challenges?”

  Danny nodded. Uh oh. Maybe he’d crossed the line.

  She laughed and shook her head. “I’m not emotionally challenged. I’m motionally challenged. I get carsick. And train sick.” She looked forward. “And airplane-wreck sick.”

  Danny laughed. Then he laughed harder. He laughed so hard people started to stare, but he didn’t care.

  Anna Sue chuckled and shook her head. “What’d you think was going to happen? I was going to go crazy or something?” Danny could hardly catch his breath.

  James moaned, then turned on his side and opened his eyes. He rubbed his head with a shaky hand. “What happened?”

  Danny prayed he wouldn’t glance to his left again.

  Snap.

  Danny gasped. His hand was free. “I’m loose!”

  “Go!” someone yelled.

  Danny scrambled to his feet. He ran down the aisle, holding on to the seats, focused on getting to the cockpit. The only thing he could think about was that he should have gone with Maximum. Medium would have been fine if they had the possibility of using the thrust reversers.

  Maybe he could get there in time.

  He passed the captain, her eyes lighting up as she saw him. “Go!”

  Danny stepped quickly, steadily right into the cockpit.

  “It’s the pilot!”

  Hank started to unbuckle.

  “Stay there! Stay buckled in. Sir,” he said to the other man, “go
ahead and sit back here, and buckle in.”

  They exchanged seats. The airplane, as always, felt like it was floating to the ground, no matter what the speed indicator showed.

  He took a quick glance at the instruments. The landing gear was down. Everything looked perfect. The only thing out of order was the fact that his copilot was a passenger.

  “Schipol, this is Atlantica 1945. First Officer Danny McSweeney here. I’m in control of the aircraft.”

  Cheers from the tower echoed through the cockpit.

  Danny watched the instruments, just like always, and tuned everything out. He smiled at the thought of the sterile cockpit rule.

  They were flying through “zero-zero” weather, or “the goo,” as pilots called it. It meant visibility was zero and the ceiling of the clouds was zero too. The goo had caused many accidents over the years. Lots of guys had flown into the ground obeying what their inner ears told them instead of the airplanes instruments.

  Behind him, the passenger in the jump seat sounded nervous. “We can’t see anything! We can’t see!”

  “It’s okay. Everything’s fine,” Danny said. “We have to trust what we can’t see.” And every mechanic who had ever touched this plane. He knew the plane could land itself. Now he just had to believe it.

  “But shouldn’t you…?”

  And then they broke through the lowest clouds right as the wheels touched down. The tires made that skid sound that let you know you were back on earth. Danny reached to the front of the throttle, which upon landing retarded to idle, and pulled up on the reversers until they were above the throttle and past the detent.

  The engines spooled up again and reversed the thrust. He turned the EPR up to 1.4, careful to keep the engines equal. The last thing they needed was asymmetric thrust problems.

  The airplane slowed to sixty knots, and Danny eased the reversers down to the detent and then carefully stowed them.

  “This is McSweeney. Flight 1945. We’ve come to a complete stop. Over.”

  The fire trucks and ambulances waiting in preparation for a disaster surrounded the plane as if it were on fire. Danny smiled. They were just doing it like they’d been trained.