Final Approach (4 page)

“Dammit. Dick's going to try to land in this crap, big as life!”

“You know him?”

Pete looked at Jean, belatedly remembering the “sterile cockpit” rule, the FAA's punitive view of nonessential pilot comments, and held his finger to his lips, his eyes rolling momentarily toward the tiny microphone that fed their voices to the cockpit voice recorder. She nodded.

The bright landing lights which marked the position of North America 255 were now less than 5 miles out, and as Pete Kaminsky and Jean Simonson watched in amazement, they began to drop below the usual glide path which airplanes normally followed to the runway. At first the deviation was subtle, so much so that neither Jean nor Pete was sure anything was wrong, but within seconds it was apparent that Timson's airplane was settling to the ground at a dangerous descent rate, the nose and landing lights canting upward, indicating an attempt to climb, the airplane still too far out for the sound of the engines to reach the 737 cockpit.

“Is he below glide slope?” Jean's eyes were glued to the side window, watching incredulously as the Airbus's landing lights dropped below the level of distant groves of tall oak and sycamore trees which formed picturesque windbreaks on the farmland north of the airport.

“He sure is,” Pete replied. There was, they both knew, a major freeway out there in the dark: Interstate 29, covered with cars and trucks unaware of the aerospace behemoth screaming at them at far too low an altitude.

“They gotta get up. Climb!” Pete was leaning halfway across the cockpit, the sterile-cockpit rule forgotten, straining to see, watching as the lights of the oncoming Airbus seemed to stabilize behind the trees in the distance, hanging there for seconds which ticked by with the unhurried, torturous pace of passing hours. Pete's mind rebelled at the idea he could be watching a crash in progress. That simply couldn't happen, although he knew intellectually it could—and had in other places at other times when technologically sophisticated aircraft had tangled with windshear in thunderstorms. It looked for all the world, Pete thought, like Timson had flown into a microburst. But surely he could fly out of it. Those lights had to climb … had to rise!

Just when it seemed the surrealism of what they were watching had gone too far to believe, Flight 255 rose above the tree line, the Airbus's screaming engines pushing it back to a safe altitude, the aircraft finally crossing the approach lights of Runway 19 as it climbed steeply, the powerful twin beams from the landing lights cutting upward into the misty skies like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie.

“I was afraid he was going to get in trouble out there. Dick's a good pilot—he knows better than to fly into stuff like that.” Pete said the words quietly, his voice drowned out suddenly by the approaching engine noise, his eyes following the huge machine as it passed in front of them, the sound of both turbojets at full power literally shaking the smaller Boeing 737.

“Good Lord, Pete, he was below the tree line!” Jean's eyes were glued to the Airbus as it flew overhead. A stiff wind from the northwest replaced the vibration of the passing Airbus, shaking the 737 gently as thunderstorm-generated gusts moved their airspeed needles slightly, then died down.

“Two-fifty-five's going around. Severe microburst on final.” The strained voice from the cockpit of the North America Airbus echoed in the ears of the 737 pilots and the control tower simultaneously.

“North America 255, what are your intentions?” Tower controller Carl Sellers acknowledged the go-around call from the Airbus with a logical question. Now the airplane was over the middle of the airport, apparently leveling off at about 1,500 feet. Obviously they had experienced a close encounter with windshear, and they'd probably want to go out and enter a holding pattern somewhere, letting the storm blow through. That was what Carl expected, so what he heard next made no sense.

“Tower, North America 255 would like a closed pattern. We'll come right back around for another visual approach to Runway one-nine.”

A closed pattern meant they wanted to make a U-turn, fly back parallel to the runway, and immediately turn back to land on the same runway. That was unbelievable. They had flown through what they themselves called a severe microburst. Now they wanted to do it again?

“What's he up to, Pete?” Jean asked in the cockpit of North America 170.

“Be damned if I know, but I'd bet that microburst is still out there. Did you feel it a moment ago?”

“Yeah.”

The white taillights of the 320 could be seen banking to the right as Timson or his copilot turned the big jet. The two of them watched in silence as the Airbus made its way back toward the north.

“The wind's died down. Maybe he knows what he's doing.” Jean Simonson had pushed her face almost over the forward glare shield, cupping her left hand to block the instrument lights as she tried to figure out what the pilots of Flight 255 were thinking. She watched as the Airbus reached a point approximately a mile north of the runway and began a steep right turn back in their direction. Their 737 sat on the hammerhead just to the left of the approach end of Runway 19, the right side of the cabin visible to the approaching flight crew.

“Jeez, that's going to be tight.” Jean seemed stunned, and Pete imagined he was speaking for both of them as they watched the progress of the descending airliner, mentally calculating its trajectory as it turned rapidly back to the east and south in a continuous arc on its turn to final approach.

“North America 255, cleared to land, Runway one-nine.” The voice of the tower controller cut in suddenly, but there was no reply from 255.

Now the Airbus 320 was turning back toward them, the landing lights sweeping like a slow-motion scythe, moving clockwise horizontally through the air—pointing east, then coming through southeast and illuminating their airplane as the 737 sat pointing west, their right side now bathed in the lights from the Airbus. To Pete, the 320 seemed to hang there for a moment, no longer moving to the right in their field of vision, the lights almost painful in their eyes. The moment arrived when the lights should be swinging by them, and it was he who first realized no such movement had occurred.

“God! What's he doing!”

The landing lights were much closer than before, but they were dropping again, this time dangerously close to the runway, and aimed right at Pete's airplane. Suddenly the 320 seemed to nose down sharply, the landing lights pointing out the altered flight path, the turn stopped, the aircraft getting close enough to hear again.

“Pete …”

It was more of a choking sound than a word that emerged from the captain's seat, but it accompanied Pete Kaminsky's emergency decision to jam the two throttles of his 737 to the firewall. His right hand shot forward, gathering thrust levers on the way, reacting to the unbelievable specter which simply was not moving out of their window. The Airbus had dropped, the nose had come up again, the huge airliner stopping its descent mere feet off the ground and less than a quarter mile away. The landing lights of the onrushing craft had them bracketed as Pete and Jean saw the airplane roll to wings level, its nose coming up, but looming larger with every split second as it came straight at them.

What had been a puzzlement had now become a clear and present danger. They had to thrust themselves and their passengers out of the way!

Jean seemed transfixed, her mind calculating the changing trajectory of the machine behind the glaring lights now flooding her window with blue-white light, the sound of distant engines becoming less distant, their own engines just beginning the eight-to ten-second process of winding up to full power.

In the control tower, Carl Sellers was still puzzling over a power interruption that had scrambled his radar display and dimmed the lights for a split second. Now he heard a half-verbal sound of amazement from someone to his left. He dropped the field glasses again and looked toward the end of Runway 19, his mind rapidly assimilating the obvious fact that North America 255 was coming down in the wrong place. There wasn't time for comment. There was nothing he could say on the radio in time—the aircraft was too close to the 737! It was one of those incredible moments in which the reality of an impossible sight is essentially rejected by the brain because it couldn't be happening, even though it is.

In the cabin of Flight 170, Kimberly Weiss had noticed bright lights to her right, across the aisle. Now they were blinding, streaming through the window as other passengers turned their heads in curiosity. She could tell they were dropping in her perspective, the changing shadows cast by the beams of light stabbing across the passenger seats from thirty-two windows confirmed that. Several people had lit illicit cigarettes on the nonsmoking flight, and there was enough stagnant smoke to make the scene unreal, as if thirty-two small spotlights were being panned up across an avant-garde theater set, hesitating, and starting ever so slowly to pan down again, all the while getting brighter. And there was sound—the sound of engines getting louder. She realized the 737's engines were revving up as well, and she also knew enough about flying and airports to realize one other essential fact: whatever was approaching was airborne and at high speed.

As Kimberly watched with rising alarm, the 737 began to move forward, barely, slowly.

The ultimate nightmare of trying to run from an approaching horror but not being able to move was upon them, and Pete felt a helplessness like none he had ever experienced. The sudden rush of power from the accelerating engines had begun thrusting them forward. All he needed was a few seconds, but the sound of the screaming machine to their right had become deafening, the noise of a powerful engine passing just above the fuselage becoming almost enough to mask the sounds and the feeling of immense force which suddenly gripped the cockpit as the right main wheels of the Airbus bit into the fuselage of Flight 170 at about window level, collapsing the skin and ribs and stringers of the right side instantly as the tires exploded, their relatively thin rubber casings crushed and breached by the Boeing 737's disintegrating structure, the main struts also collapsing and folding backward as they raked through the cabin, obliterating rows 17 through 20, along with the occupants and the top and left side of the fuselage, the left main gear and lower fuselage of the Airbus collapsing the vertical tail and rear cabin area. The force of the energy exchange shoved the smaller aircraft to the left and robbed the Airbus of speed and acceleration, the lower aft fuselage contacting and shredding the aft cabin and fuselage of the Boeing, the right horizontal stabilizer and tail assembly tearing open the number three fuel tank and propelling its contents of kerosene into what was left of the Boeing cabin, splashing it left and right as the ample supply of sparks from grinding metal ignited the fluid into a fireball. The main fuselage of the Airbus—ripped open beneath, landing gear gone, tail destroyed along with any hope of aerodynamic control—pitched forward, still moving at over 100 knots as it trailed debris and seats and the ruined bodies of numerous occupants of Flight 170.

Airport police officer Brian Harlow had just left the taxiway in his squad car after picking up the soggy cardboard box when a flash and a horrendous noise told him instantly something had happened at the north end of his airport. As he looked in abject disbelief, the outline of a twin-engine jetliner trailing sparks and flames shot over the top of the 737 like a circus tiger leaping through a flaming hoop, its trajectory gently arcing down, the nose pointing at the surface of the taxiway, then impacting it nose wheel first as the nose section whipped up and out of view, the wings and aft fuselage telescoping, flames erupting everywhere.

Now the Airbus was a shapeless mass of fire and debris tumbling past his position beside the taxiway, the fuselage and wings of the Airbus 320 rumbling by with an ungodly sound, spewing fuel and flames and pieces. When the roiling mess had passed by, leaving him untouched, Officer Harlow looked to the right and realized the 737 was no longer there.

Sitting to one side of the runway, Senator Kell Martinson had been puzzled by the gyrations, and then the go-around which terminated Flight 255's first approach. He had heard the radio call about a microburst, but obviously the pilot had it under control. Kell had watched passively then as the Airbus reversed course, letting his eyes rest on the runway, waiting for Cindy's flight to touch down and roll past his position, decelerating normally with thrust reversers operating and mist flying. As soon as they turn off the runway, he thought, I'll head for the terminal.

With his mind on pleasant thoughts, Kell did not notice the lights of the 320 as they dropped below the image of the 737 to his far right. He did not hear the initial crunch of metal, or see the explosion of igniting kerosene until his field of vision was filled with flame and fragmenting wreckage filling the night with kinetic horror mere yards in front of him along the taxiway. And at that moment, his mind simply refused to accept the impossible image. Such things were not supposed to happen.

His world instantly in flames, Captain Pete Kaminsky was unaware that the cockpit had been neatly sheared from the disintegrating structure of the 737, nor did he realize that he and Jean had been pivoted almost exactly 180 degrees to face the raging fire that was roaring inches from their still-intact windscreen. Pete struggled to let instinct and training guide him. Emergency evacuation. He needed to evacuate his passengers. He found the engine fuel and start cutoff levers and moved them to the off position, grabbing then for the intercom receiver with his right hand at the same moment he felt cold air on the back of his neck and struggled to turn around. He was about to tell Jean to unstrap and get back to the cabin to make sure the doors were opened and emergency slides deployed when his eyes finally focused on the void behind them. There was no cabin. There was nothing there but runway lights. Jagged metal stringers and shards of aluminum plating bordered the bewildering picture, as the infrared heat from the fire in front of them burned into his neck through the glass. He unstrapped his seatbelt, not realizing until that moment that he was lying against the left windows. Jean was hanging in her seat above him. The airplane must have rolled over on its left side, he thought.