Missing in Flight

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO ANNA

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

A NNA

Miguel checks his phone as Anna initiates their descent. After dropping his phone back into his shirt pocket, he grins at her. “My wife just texted me. She’s in labor and heading to the hospital.”

“Oh, wow.” Anna glances at their flight path. They’ll be landing in less than an hour. “I hope you can make it there in time.”

“I hope so too.”

“Do you know what you’re going to name her?”

The entire cockpit rattles as they encounter more turbulence. The nose drops, lifting her off her seat, and Anna’s stomach churns. The nose pitches upward. As she’s jerked against her seat back, she wishes she would’ve eaten something with her coffee. The last time she felt airsick was during pilot training in the air force.

“We’re getting bounced all over the place,” she says to Miguel. “Didn’t dispatch say there should only be light turbulence on our descent?”

“Yeah. This is much more than that. We must be on the edge of that—”

The ding-dong sound of the SELCAL interrupts Miguel’s sentence. COMPANY CALL appears on a screen on the instrument panel. Miguel switches to the number two radio.

He keys his microphone switch. “Flight 7038.”

“7038, dispatch, the weather for the New York/Newark area is deteriorating rapidly. Wilmington International, India Lima Mike, is your new alternate. Fuel required is eighteen decimal two. What is your fuel remaining at this time?”

Miguel looks at the lower ECAM display. “Fuel remaining right now is seventeen decimal five.”

He checks the flight plan and turns to Anna. “We don’t have enough fuel for that. I don’t think dispatch realizes our weather deviation used up our extra fuel.”

He keys the microphone switch again. “Dispatch, Flight 7038. Uh, we don’t have the fuel for that, due to an extensive weather deviation earlier. Unless we head there right now.”

“Roger, Flight 7038, I’ll see what I can come up with. I’ll let you know via ACARS.”

“Flight 7038, roger.” Miguel punches the radio button back to the number one radio. “Sounds like dispatch might have dropped the ball on keeping track of our fuel.”

The radio blares before Anna can reply.

“Pacific Air 123, things are getting backed up at New York Approach. I have holding instructions for you; advise ready to copy.”

“Shit,” Miguel mutters, pulling out his pen and grabbing the paper flight plan. “Pacific Air 123, ready to copy, go ahead.”

“Pacific Air 123, roger, hold northwest of CYPER on the three zero seven-degree radial, right-hand turns. Length of legs your discretion; expect further clearance at time zero four two seven. Descend and maintain flight level one niner zero.”

Miguel reads back the clearance as Anna dials in nineteen thousand in the altitude window.

“This isn’t good,” Miguel says as he prints out the latest weather observation for LaGuardia. “Unless we divert to Wilmington now, we’ll have only Newark or JFK as alternates, and their weather is going down the toilet fast.”

A wave of disappointment washes over Anna. She won’t see Joel now. She instantly regrets her selfish thought at the expense of everyone’s safety on board, knowing in her gut that she shouldn’t be seeing Joel anyway.

She thinks of that night in LA at the start of summer, seated across from Joel at her hotel restaurant after bumping into him at LAX. Their paths had only crossed a few times since their air force pilot training in Oklahoma over ten years ago, but that evening in June, they reconnected so easily.

Joel made her laugh harder than she had in years, bringing tears to her eyes at the restaurant. Several hours later he opened up about his divorce. Tired of feigning happiness about her own marriage, she told Joel about her own relationship struggles. She immediately regretted it, feeling a sense of betrayal to her husband. But it was also a relief to say it out loud.

Anna recalls the kiss they shared a month later, in Joel’s hotel lobby, after trading trips to be in Chicago on the same night. It had felt so right and so wrong at the same time. When Joel invited her up to his room for a drink, it had taken all her willpower to say no, knowing what would happen if she did.

That kiss was three weeks ago. When Joel said he was coming to New York for thirty-six hours, she couldn’t stop herself from fantasizing about all the ways they could fill the time. It strikes her that she and Joel got to this place the same way she and Carter morphed from happily married to passionless roommates. Gradually. In both cases, by the time she sensed what had happened, it was too late. Now, Joel is asleep in his downtown hotel room, where she’s promised to meet him as soon as she lands.

She glances at their fuel quantity display and knows what Miguel is going to say before he responds.

“New York Center, Pacific Air 7038. It looks like we don’t have any holding fuel, so if we don’t get a clearance to continue the arrival at CYPER, then we will be requesting to divert to Wilmington, India Lima Mike,” Miguel says with urgency in his voice.

“Pacific Air 7038, New York Center. Roger, I have your request.”

A bright lightning flash accompanied by a boom so loud it muffles the last few words from New York Center startles both pilots.

Anna steals a glance at Miguel’s grim expression as the airplane takes a hard bounce several times in the turbulent air. She instinctively puts her hand on the control stick to her right, just in case the autopilot can’t keep up with the rough ride.

The map display shows several large thunderstorms along their route, but so far the red and yellow danger zones it depicts are clear of their intended path.

“The storms are really closing in around us,” she says.

Above them, a strobe of lightning flashes, brightly illuminating the sky and the rain streaming down their windshield.

The turbulence intensifies. Anna notices Miguel’s hands around his control stick too. The autopilot struggles to maintain control but somehow remains engaged.

“Damn. I should’ve gotten more sleep for this,” Miguel says. “I thought I was going to finish my book tonight. You’d better lock your shoulder harnesses. I think it’s going to get pretty rough.”

Anna presses down on the lever beside her seat, locking her harnesses in place. Feeling the aircraft tossed about by the storm, she’s fueled with adrenaline.

“Should I disconnect the autopilot and hand-fly this?” She works to keep the nervousness out of her voice.

“No, it can probably do a better job than either of us can right now, and when we get handed off to New York Approach Control in a few minutes, we’re going to get really busy.”

Anna notes the concern on Miguel’s face but tries not to let it feed her own rising panic.

A rapid dinging sound fills the cockpit. Beneath her headphones, Anna feels a pressure change in her ears and hears a momentary loud rush of air. Her eyes dart to the lower ECAM screen. CAB PRESS is displayed in bold white letters. What the hell just happened? The cabin pressure numbers are now red, showing the cabin altitude at eighteen thousand feet.

Miguel pushes a button to silence the steady dinging sound and yells, “Cabin press, cabin altitude, masks on, emergency descent!”

Anna squeezes the red grips on the oxygen mask stowed in her side panel and whips it out. After slipping it over her head, she releases the red grips. With a loud whoosh, the mask seals against her face.

A high-pitched triple beep blares from the forward panel.

“The autopilot is disengaged!” Anna shouts.

The nose pitches forward. The weight of Anna’s torso presses against her shoulder harnesses. She grips her side stick to take control of the aircraft.

“Something’s not right with the pitch control!” she yells over the rush of oxygen blowing against her face. “It’s responding really slow . I can’t get it to settle down.”

The airplane continues to pitch up and down as she fights to maintain the descent with her control stick.

Miguel shoots a glance at Anna struggling with the control. “Just do the best you can; I need to go through this checklist,” he says into his mask’s microphone.

Miguel reads the checklist off the ECAM screen. Anna’s body tenses as it crosses her mind that they might not make it. She’s surprised to find herself thinking of Carter. Anna forces the thought aside as she continues to fight with the pitch control.

Miguel announces over the cabin PA system, “Emergency descent, emergency descent!”

Seeing that the cabin altitude is above fourteen thousand feet, he presses the “Mask Man On” button to ensure the oxygen masks have dropped out of the overhead compartments for the passengers.

Anna is sucked against her seat before lifting away from it, feeling weightless as the nose pitches up, then down. “There’s definitely something wrong with the controls!”