9
More of theAlaskan snow had melted off the crashed KC-46 Pegasus. Now it was mere patches spotted here and there across JBER’s runway.
Miranda stood with the rest of her team, looking down at the wing of the crashed aerial tanker. With her muchsmallerteam.
Jeremy should be making some detailed observation and then discussing it far past relevance. Taz’s laugh would stop him and lighten the moment.
Instead, the four of them stood in a grim line and stared at it in silence.
“Well…shit.” Holly didn’t even toss in any of her broad Australian Strine.
“That’s what I said,” Andi commented.
“You nailed it, little sister.”
“Thurman Munson,” Mike said quietly.
“August 2nd, 1979,” Miranda agreed.
“Who was Thurman Munson?” Andi asked.
Mike raised his tablet and the QAR like a pretend baseball bat to his shoulder and swung them. “Catcher and captain for the New York Yankees. One of the greats. Over thirty years later and he still ranks in nine different categories of statistics.”
Miranda wasn’t sure why Mike considered that information as pertinent to the situation.
“He,” Miranda directed the conversation once more toward the relevant, “had bought a new jet, a Citation 500 I/SP, a direct predecessor to my own M2, three models and forty years earlier. He was practicing touch-and-goes. On his fourth landing, he didn’t use the checklist and failed to extend the flaps. On approach he developed an excessive descent rate. His belated attempts to recover saved his two passengers except for bad burns, but he broke his neck. Unable to move himself, he burned to death before he could be rescued.”
Miranda returned her attention to the wing. The flaps of the KC-46 Pegasus weren’t extended. They were still tucked neatly into the trailing edges of the wing. Or rather in what was left of the wing after it had broken free, snapped in several places spilling thousands of gallons of fuel from the wing tanks, and then burned fiercely until the airport’s fire crews had arrived to extinguish the conflagration.
“Only this time there were no survivors.” Three duty crew, three trainees, and a senior flight instructor had all lost their lives. None of them had noted the pilot’s failure to extend the landing flaps.
She pulled out her own computer and retrieved an estimated final flight profile she’d worked up for Thurman Munson’s famous failure as a class exercise—it had thoroughly puzzled her eighth-grade science teacher despite several attempts to explain something so simple to her.
Holding it up next to Mike’s profile of the KC-46 Pegasus aerial tanker, the profiles were nearly identical. Munson had clipped a tree short of the runway and never fully recovered. The USAF pilots had plowed through a whole line of runway threshold lights—and never fully recovered.
“There was no attempt to accelerate and no radio report of any failure of the flaps. The control to extend them was never engaged. It was a complete miss,” Holly pointed to the relevant line of data.
They all stared at the wing some more. Holly’s assessment was correct.
“Time to call the clean up crews?” Mike asked. “They’re saying it’s a matter of national security to return this runway to operation.”
Miranda didn’t like declaring afait accompliwhen she still hadn’t inspected the rest of the crash. But the QAR had recorded no mechanical faults. They’d have to perform a careful review of all of the cockpit communications and procedures on both the QAR and the black box’s cockpit voice recorder. But they didn’t need the plane for that.
She turned to Andi. “Why do I feel such a need to complete a full inspection of the wreckage?”
Andi sputtered for a moment. “How am I supposed to know that? You’re the expert here, Miranda. Look, I know I’ve been screwing up personally, but none of us have the instincts for a crash that you do. I’d never second guess that.”
“I have instincts?”
Andi laughed in her face. “Duh! Really, really good ones. What do you think you’ve been honing since you were thirteen? Youknowwhether or not we should keep going. Unless it’s your autism speaking.” Then her face paled. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. Honestly, I never would… could… Oh God!” Andi covered her face with her hands.
Miranda had never thought of her autism as a disembodied part of herself, but neither was it an invalid proposition. She wasalwaysuncomfortable with incomplete actions.
But that meant she herself would be having debates between herself and her autism, which didn’t make any sense. Or perhaps the obverse of her autism arguing with her trained instincts?
No, her autism was an integral element of who she was. It was like considering an airplane as distinct from its wings—without them it wouldn’t be an airplane. She rather liked that metaphor and allowed herself a moment of self-congratulation on finding a relevant one.
“I’m sorry, Miranda. I was talking about the plane when I said you would know whether or not to keep going. I mean—” Andi turned away, leaving an incomplete sentence, despite knowing how those bothered Miranda.