Chapter 2

There were four legs, or stages, of the flight from Mather Airport outside Sacramento to Eppley Airfield in Omaha. General practice was for the two pilots to trade off primary flight duties for each leg. As the pilot-in-command, or PIC of the aircraft, Ken was the one to dictate who flew the first leg. His usual habit when working with a new first officer, or FO, was to fly the first leg himself. This allowed the new pilot to get comfortable with the way he did things and, on the Omaha line, allowed Ken to watch how his new partner handled the descent, final approach, and landing, which was what constituted the fourth leg of the trip.

He decided to do things a little differently on this night. Since there was a possibility — albeit a small one — of wind sheer at Eppley, he would have Jo take the first leg. That would put Ken at the controls for the fourth and final leg. Jo seemed a little surprised when he told her to go ahead and take them up, but she didn't seem to be offended.

"All right then," she said, nodding confidently. "Let's do it."

"Let's," Ken said. "Are you sure you don't want to take your jacket off first though? It feels like the cabin heater is running on the hot side tonight. I can feel it already."

She shook her head. "I'm kind of cold blooded at times," she said.

"Suit yourself," Ken said mildly, thinking that she must be extremely cold blooded. He was already starting to sweat and he was in shirtsleeves.

Jo got them under way. She maneuvered the aircraft around to the head of Runway 22L and put the throttles to the stop. The two Pratt & Whitney jet engines roared with thrust and they accelerated down the runway, quickly reaching the stall speed of 122 knots. Jo pulled smoothly back on the control stick and they lifted into the night sky. The gear came up and she banked them around to the right, to a compass heading of 050 degrees, which would put them on an intercept course with Airway J47, the main corridor that aircraft flying higher than eighteen thousand feet used when flying between San Francisco and Salt Lake City. They passed over the city of Rancho Cordova, skirted the edge of Folsom Lake, and then passed over the Sierra Nevada foothill town of El Dorado Hills, where they were handed off to the regional air traffic controller and assigned an altitude of FL350, or thirty-five thousand feet. By this time, of course, Jo had long since engaged the autopilot and the aircraft was basically flying itself. She punched in the altitude she wanted it to level out at and continued to monitor their ascent.

"Good flying," Ken told her, and it was. She had done everything by the book.

"Thank you," she replied.

They continued to climb, passing over the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevadas. Twenty-one minutes after take-off, they were at twenty-eight thousand feet and just northwest of Reno, Nevada. Far below they could see the lights of the biggest little city in the world shining up at them. It was here that they intersected Airway J47. The autopilot banked the aircraft to the right and the compass began to slowly spin toward their new heading of 088 degrees. This was the end of the first leg.

"My aircraft," Ken said.

"Your aircraft," Jo confirmed, completing the ritual of handoff.

Four minutes later they reached their assigned altitude. The autopilot put them into straight and level flight at a speed of .76 mach. In forty-eight minutes they would reach Salt Lake City and the start of the third leg. Barring something unexpected, neither Ken nor Jo would have to touch the controls or even the autopilot inputs until it was time to start descending one hundred and fifty miles from Omaha. Except for routine radio checks as they passed from one regional ATC center to the next, there were no official duties to perform. This was commercial aviation — 99.8% mind-numbing routine. It made for lots of time for pilots to get to know each other.

"So what's your story?" Ken asked Jo as the empty darkness of the Nevada desert passed far below them. "Are you the typical Early Bird pilot?"

"The typical Early Bird pilot?" she asked.

"You know? Did you get a job here as a means to build up hours for your real goal?"

She smiled. "Yeah, I guess you could say that," she said. "I only have three hundred hours of multi-engine time, not including what I've picked up since I've been here."

"That's about average for our new pilots," Ken said. "And once they get over that magic one thousand hour mark they start applying for the real carriers like FedEx and UPS."

"That's my plan," she confirmed.

He nodded. "That'll make the bosses happy. They like for Early Bird to be a stepping stone airline. That way they never have to pay anything other than step two salary."

"You sound a little cynical about that," she said.

He shrugged. "If you consider reality to be cynicism, than I guess I'm a cynic."

She nodded thoughtfully and then made a quick scan of the instruments. Nothing was amiss.

"So what happens after you move on from this place?" Ken asked. "Are you going to pick up another five thousand hours with the big boys and then start applying for the passenger airlines? You'll have to start regional, of course, but it won't take long to work your way up to United or Southwest."

Now it was she who shrugged. "I haven't thought that far ahead in any sort of detail, but I think I'll probably stay with cargo air."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," she said. "I'm a night person. If I stay with cargo I can always get a line that flies mainly overnight hours. If I went passenger I'd be almost guaranteed to have to fly a lot of daylight during whatever rotation they put me on."

"This is true," Ken agreed. "Passengers are mostly moved during the day and cargo is mostly moved at night. Would daylight flying really be that bad, though?"

"Like I said, I'm a creature of the night. All my life I've worked graveyard shifts, even once I started flying. My last gig was with Breckenridge Aviation out of McClellan. We did aerial spraying for mosquitoes during the summer, cloud seeding over the Sierras in the winter, and a dozen other things in the in-between times, but it was always at night."

"Sounds like I got a vampire on my hands, huh?" Ken said with a chuckle.

Jo smiled. "I've been accused of that once or twice," she said.

They flew on, keeping up a fairly steady pace of conversation. Jo told Ken her basic biography. She was thirty-one years old, born and raised in the Sacramento area, an only child of two accountants. Her upbringing had been upper-middle class but she'd never felt the urge to go into the family business. She loved her parents but she'd always thought they were members of the most boring profession on Earth. She had a Bachelor's degree in biology but her grades had not quite been good enough to get her into medical school. She had always held a fascination for flying but had never pursued it, even as a hobby, until six years ago when she'd decided to get a private pilot's license just for fun. During her early training she'd fallen so much in love with flying that she decided to take a shot at doing it for a living.

The rest was a fairly typical description of the climb up the aviation industry ladder for a non-military pilot. She had worked for peanuts as a flight instructor for the school she had trained at in order to build up enough basic flight hours to get the commercial certification. She had worked for peanuts for various sleazy single-engine carriers doing a variety of courier and surveillance duties in order to build up enough hours to move onto multi-engine aircraft. After getting multi-engine certified, she had worked for peanuts for a slightly higher class of sleazy carriers so she could build up enough hours to start applying for jobs with carriers that operated actual jet aircraft. Thus, Jo's arrival at this particular step — first jet carrier, where she would build up enough multi-engine jet hours for the really big boys, who invariably required a minimum of one thousand hours as pilot-in-command before they would even accept your application.

"This is all very exciting," she told Ken. "When I first started all this I never really believed I'd one day be flying a ninety ton jet and getting paid for it — especially not as much as they're paying me here. I mean, I'm making seventy-five dollars an hour!"

Of course, that seventy-five an hour was only per flight hour, of which Jo, as a newly hired FO, was only guaranteed eighty per month. This was nothing compared to what the big boys paid, but it was still probably at least twice what she'd been making flying twin turboprops full of mosquito poison or silver iodide.

"The pay is okay," Ken allowed. "Especially when you promote up to PIC and get your own aircraft."

"What about you?" she asked. "You've been at Early Bird for awhile, right?"

"Almost nine years now," he confirmed.

"Charlie said you used to fly in the military?"

"That I did," he said. "I have two thousand hours in the KC-10."

The next question was obvious. If you have two thousand hours in KC-10s and probably ten thousand in civilian multi-engine jets, what the hell are you still doing here? Every FO that was ever assigned to him wanted to know this. The only matter still at hand was how she would ask him. Would she go direct approach or hit him from the flank?

She went direct.

"You would think you would be a shoe-in for a job with UPS or FedEx," she said. "You gonna make the jump?"

His usual answer to this question was something along the line of how he didn't want to give up the seniority he had accumulated here at Early Bird. Seniority, after all, was everything in the airplane driving business. He would also throw in a bit about how remaining employed with Early Bird allowed him to stay in the Sacramento area, where he owned a home. If he were to jump ship to the big boys, they would expect him to relocate or at least commute to one of their hubs. There was a grain of truth in these reasons, but it wasn't the real truth.

There were not many people he had shared the real truth with. Meghan knew, of course. So did Jack Stinson, the flight manager for Early Bird. Matt, Ken's older brother, knew the real reason, which meant that Julie, Matt's wife, and Cindy, Matt's ex-wife, undoubtedly knew as well. He had never told his parents the real truth but he assumed that Matt, Julie, or Cindy probably had at some point. Aside from that, however, everyone just assumed that lack of ambition and unwillingness to change were the reasons that Ken was still employed at a stepping stone carrier after nine years.

Ken did not give his standard reply to Jo. Though there had been no repeat of whatever weirdness had come over him during the pre-flight, he still found himself oddly enamored with the plain-looking yet strangely beautiful young pilot sitting next to him.

There was a physical attraction to her. He could not even begin to deny that. He could definitely see what George, Tommy, and the others had been talking about now. There was an air about her that just screamed sexiness and sensuality. There was nothing you could put your finger on that was a factor in this quality of hers, but it was unmistakably there all the same. It was like one of those optical illusions you sometimes saw in books or on chain emails. At first glance you saw what you were expecting to see, but after looking for a minute, after absorbing what was there, you saw something else entirely. It was a gentle attraction yet a persistent one. Not strong enough that he would consider jeopardizing his marriage by making a play for her, but definitely strong enough that her image might come to his forebrain the next time his hand and his penis made each other's acquaintance.

There was, however, something more than physical attraction going on as well. There was something about Jo that just made her seem like she was a good listener, that she would hold whatever was told to her in confidence. There was really no rational basis for Ken to feel that way about her — he had met her for the first time only a few hours before, after all — but he did not doubt or mistrust the sensation in the least.

And so, he found himself opening his mouth and telling her: "I'm pretty much stuck at this place for the rest of my career."

"Oh?" she said, her tone non-judgmental, merely curious.

"I have an accident on my record," he said.

She nodded gravely. An 'accident' on one's aviation record was considerably more significant than an accident on one's driving record, although the actual definition was the same. "Were you at fault?"

"Wind sheer was ruled the primary cause," he said. "Pilot error, however, was listed as a contributory factor."

"I see," she said softly, again with no tone of judgment in her voice, no projection of the embarrassment that a person displays when another person of short acquaintance shares too intimate of a detail. "What happened? If you don't mind talking about it, that is?"

He sighed, staring out the cockpit windshield at the half moon floating in the sky before them. "It was in 1998, when I was flying KC-10s for the Air Force. I was with the 60^th Air Mobility Wing out of Travis Air Force Base here in California but my squadron was TDY to MacDill Air Force base down at the tip of Florida. We were supporting a big anti-drug operation over the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. You know what a KC-10 is, right?"

"It's an aerial refueling tanker, isn't it?" she said.

"That right," he confirmed. "It's basically a DC-10 outfitted with extra fuel storage and a refueling boom that sticks out the ass end. They would send us up with a quarter million pounds of fuel so we could circle over the gulf in case any of the AWACS planes or the fighters or the surveillance aircraft needed some gas. Most of the time, on quiet nights, we didn't have many customers. That meant that when it was time for us to land, we would still have most of the fuel in the tanks. It got to the point that it was fairly routine for us to be pretty close to maximum landing weight when we came back down."

"Wow," she said. Even though she was a new pilot, even though she had never been in the military, she still was quite familiar with the concept of the maximum landing weight. An aircraft could take off with as much weight as it was physically able to carry as long as it had enough runway to reach rotation speed. This was because taking off did not stress the airframe or the landing gear. The maximum weight of landing, on the other hand, was considerably less than the maximum weight of take-off — especially on a large multi-engine jet like the KC-10 — because aircraft were not designed to slam down onto a runway with two or three hundred thousand pounds of fuel in the tanks. It could be done in an extreme emergency, but it almost always caused damage to the airframe and the landing struts. The fuel was supposed to be burned off during flight so that when it came time to land, all of the weight it represented would no longer be there.

The term 'maximum landing weight' did not mean the optimum landing weight or even the top end of the advised landing weight range. It meant the absolute heaviest that the aircraft could be without suffering structural or strut damage as a result of landing. Landing an aircraft that was anywhere near the maximum landing weight was something that was supposed to be done very sparingly and only in unusual circumstances because it was dangerous, both in terms of airframe stress and reduced aircraft handling at the slow speeds of final approach and touchdown. This was something that every pilot was taught in the earliest stages of training.

"I complained to my superiors about the redline landings a few times," Ken told her.

"And what did they say?" she asked.

"It was made very clear to me that complaining about piddly-ass shit like landing weights that were 'in parameters' was a quick path to riding a desk. And when I asked if maybe it was possible to take up less fuel for the particular mission we were running I was told that the mission parameters — which had been written by someone who hadn't been in the cockpit of an aircraft in more than five years — called for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of fuel and that was what we were going to carry."

"Wow," Jo said again.

"Yeah, I know," Ken said. "I'm not saying that all of military aviation is like that, or even that most of military aviation is like that. That was just the way things were in my particular squadron on this particular mission assignment. Captain Baylor, our squadron commander, was a micro-manager who liked to do everything by the book. He was someone who had been promoted more for his ass-kissing skills and his connections than his leadership abilities. Colonel Rigger, who was in charge of the whole anti-drug operation, was an up-and-comer pushing for General. He believed in double-covering every possible base and triple-guarding every possible end zone. These factors, unfortunately, are common in the military — in civilian life too, I suppose.

"Anyway, Captain Baylor didn't want to listen to his pilots bitch about landing weights. He didn't want to go to Colonel Rigger and tell him that the fuel requirements he'd written into the mission for the KC-10s were more than three times as much as we reasonably needed to carry. That would be making waves, and in the military culture, you avoid making waves if you can."

She nodded, looking at his face for a moment. Her eyes showed interest in what he was saying, compassion for the situation he was describing.

"And I was just as much a victim of the 'no-waves' school of thought as Baylor," Ken went on. "I could have submitted an official report about the landing weight problem and Baylor would have been forced to at least push it up the chain of command. Any one of us pilots and any one of the crew chiefs could have done this, but none of us did. That would have been making waves and none of us wanted to put our career in jeopardy by doing it. And so nothing changed. We kept going up with a quarter million pounds of fuel in our tanks and kept coming back down only two or three thousand pounds below maximum landing weight. That was the first link in The Chain."

The Chain was a phrase familiar to Jo as well, as it was to any pilot. The Chain referred to the well-documented fact that most aircraft accidents were not the result of a single thing going wrong but rather a long chain of things going wrong, one after the other. In post-accident investigations it was usually found, or at least strongly suspected, that every single link in the chain of disaster was something that could have been overcome or not even noticed had it remained an isolated event. Such was the case with Ken's accident.

"On the night it happened, the weather was unsettled," Ken continued. "The meteorologists predicted scattered thunderstorms at least, with a possibility of heavy thunderstorm activity and tornados. There was some talk of canceling the mission for the night but in the upper ranks no one wanted to be the one to say no-go, so we went. That was another link in The Chain. It was later determined that we really shouldn't have left the ground at all that night.

"We arrived on station right on time and started circling over the gulf, waiting for someone to need some fuel. There was no action at all. Our task force was dumb enough to be up there in that kind of weather but the druggies weren't. After about two hours, the thunderstorm activity started to really pick up all across southern Florida. Now someone decided to make a decision. It was Colonel Rigger. He was told that if the thunderstorms got any worse—and the meteorologists told him this was likely — that MacDill would not be able to recover the aircraft that were up and we would all have to be diverted to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia."

"That doesn't seem so bad," Jo said. "Aircraft are diverted all the time. It's a pain in the ass, but it's routine."

"I know that and you know that," Ken said, "but Colonel Rigger thought it might reflect badly on him if the next day's mission had to be scrubbed because he sent his aircraft up in bad weather and they had to divert. So he decided to bring everyone in right away. For all the other aircraft out that night, this was no big deal. The F-15s, the E-3, the E-2s, and the T-47s had all been up long enough that they'd burned off some fuel. We, however, were still sixteen thousand pounds over the maximum when the order to return to base came down."

Jo's eyes widened. "Did they order you to land overweight?" she asked.

"No, not at all," Ken said. "Had they given me such an order, I would have told them to fuck off — probably even in those very words — and no one could have touched me for it. You can't order a pilot to do something outside of safety parameters, not even in the military."

"Thank goodness for that," she said.

"Yeah, I suppose," he said. "The problem was, we weren't overweight when it came time to put down. Remember, a DC-10 burns about ten thousand pounds an hour at cruise speed, which was what we were doing up there. By the time we flew back to the holding pattern at MacDill, we were down to only four grand above the maximum. Since we were still heavy, we circled in the landing pattern for almost another hour while all the other aircraft were recovered. That brought us down to about three grand below maximum."

"Which is still pretty damn heavy," she said.

"Yeah," he agreed. "It is. I told the tower that I was still close to the limit on weight and wanted to circle for another hour or so before I came down so I could burn off at least another fifteen thousand pounds. We were flying with the flaps down and the slats deployed, after all, so those engines were sucking it up. The tower, however, told me that the thunderstorms were getting worse and that it was unlikely the base would still be open in another hour. I needed to land now or I needed to divert elsewhere."

"So you decided to land," Jo said.

He nodded. "Yeah, I decided to land. I could see the thunderstorms all around us. Lightning was flashing, you could even hear some of the thunder in the cockpit. The air was unstable and we were bouncing around up there, hitting air pockets, getting buffeted by winds, you name it. I'd put down in weather like that before and I'd landed at that weight before. I'd just never done both at the same time. I was nervous, but I never thought that anything would really happen and I knew that Colonel Rigger and especially Captain Baylor would be royally pissed if I had to divert to Georgia. I was the only aircraft still up and I didn't want to be the one who forced the entire mission to be cancelled the next day because I was too pussy to land. I thought that if I did that, it might reflect badly on my career." He sighed. "So I made the decision to bring us in. I told myself it would be all over in five minutes and I'd be back in my bunk in an hour."

"What happened next?" she asked, seemingly fascinated by his story.

"Everything was routine until the last few seconds of the final approach. I circled around, dropped the gear, was right on the line with the ILS, and the turbulence even seemed to ease up as we got lower. We passed over the perimeter fence and were just above stall speed, less than fifty feet AGL. I was just starting to flare for touchdown when the wind sheer hit us. It was exactly the wrong time for something like that to happen."

"I've never been through wind sheer before," Jo said quietly. "I've heard it's pretty nasty though."

"That's just the thing," Ken said. "It wasn't that nasty. I had been through wind sheer before and, while it scares the crap out of you, it's usually nothing you can't deal with. The plane drops unexpectedly and you instinctively pull up a little and correct any bank that it causes. It's enough to give you an adrenaline jolt, but not much more. Kind of like when someone cuts you off in your car on the freeway. You recognize the danger, you hit your brakes, it scares you, but nothing happens."

"But this time was different?"

"We were too heavy," Ken said. "The plane was too sluggish and it didn't react as fast as I needed it too. The wind sheer pushed us down and made the left wing dip. I pulled up and corrected for the bank within a quarter of a second. My co-pilot put on the power to keep us from stalling out. The plane just didn't respond in time because it was too heavy."

"And you hit hard?" she asked.

He nodded, feeling, once again, the terror of that moment. "The left wing gear slammed down hard on the runway. It made a horrible sound when it hit. The right gear and the centerline gear came down a little softer, but the damage was done. Just as I managed to get the nose on the runway, the left landing strut collapsed. The left wing hit the ground and fifteen feet of it sheered off. We went skidding down the runway at a hundred and twenty knots, spraying jet fuel the whole way."

"My god," she said.

Ken nodded. "I still don't know how or why that fuel didn't ignite, but it didn't. I steered hard to the left for just a second and that was enough to pull that left wing off the ground and let us balance on the centerline gear. We rolled for four thousand feet, me making gentle little nudges with the nose wheel to keep us on the runway. I was terrified. If there had been any significant motion to the right, the centrifugal force would have been enough to put that left wing back down on the ground. We finally stopped and all of us got out of the plane and clear. Jet fuel continued to pour out of the left wing tank but it never went up. No one died, no one was even hurt. They were eventually able to repair the plane and put it back in service. There was a blurb about it in the Tampa newspaper two days later but that was about it. As far as aircraft accidents go, it was about a three on the one to ten scale for public interest."

"It sounds like you did the right thing," Jo said. "You kept the wing off the ground. You saved your aircraft and everyone in it."

"Yeah," he said, "but unfortunately, when they investigate an aircraft accident, they don't care too terribly much about what you did after it happened. They're more interested in what you did to help cause it to happen in the first place."

"Did they want to pin it on you?"

Ken shook his head. "No, not at all," he said. "I will say that the SIB and the AIB people who investigated the accident were about as apolitical as it is possible to be in the military. They weren't trying to whitewash anything or pin blame on anyone. They were genuinely trying to find out exactly what had caused the accident so it wouldn't happen again. They were thorough and they looked into everything, questioned everyone from Colonel Rigger's boss down to the grunts who put the fuel into the aircraft. They were told about the routine overloading with fuel and why it occurred and they followed that thread all the way back to its origination. In their report, they named Rigger and Baylor and the military's very culture of discouraging people from 'making waves' as major contributory causes to the accident."

"As well they should," Jo said.

"Yeah, as well they should," he agreed. "And they also named Lieutenant Kenneth Patterson, pilot-in-command, as a contributory cause as well. Lieutenant Patterson knew the plane was heavy and would be less-responsive on landing, Lieutenant Patterson knew the weather was bad enough that the airfield he was supposed to land at was about to be closed, yet Lieutenant Patterson chose to bring down his aircraft anyway."

"You couldn't have known that a wind sheer was going to hit you at exactly the critical moment," Jo said.

"I couldn't have known that," Ken said, "but I certainly should have realized it was at least a worst-case possibility in that particular situation. Yes, there was an institutional pressure for me to land there that night. Yes, there was even a possibility that my career could have been affected had I decided not to land. That underlying pressure was addressed in the accident investigation and dealt with after it. None of that, however, changes the fact that I decided to attempt a landing in a situation where it would have been safer to divert and land somewhere else. It was an honest mistake — it didn't stem from incompetence or inebriation or lack of sound judgment — but it was still a mistake. To tell you the truth, I can't say that I disagree with being named a contributory cause."

Jo nodded slowly. "Yeah," she said slowly. "I guess I can see where you're coming from with that."

He shrugged. "So once the accident report came out, both Colonel Riggs and Captain Baylor were relieved of command. I was not officially punished, but I was reassigned to an administrative position where I flew a desk most of the time. They only let me have enough flight hours to meet the minimum requirements, and that was always in the right hand seat. It was made clear to me that if I chose to remain in the military, I would remain a desk jockey and wouldn't be promoted any further. If you're passed over for promotions three times, you're out."