Super Born: Seduction of Being (7 page)

Where the work became difficult was following
what happened to these thirty-one women after that. With name
changes from marriage, divorce, remarriage, death, movement around
the country, unlisted phones, and phones in others’ names, it
became hard to follow, and I often lost the trail. With only pizza
and beer as my assistants, I continued diligently all day and into
the night (not really, but you get the idea).

Little did I know that while I toiled that
night over a hot laptop, events were already in motion elsewhere in
Scranton.

When I reached Jones’s place, I soon found out
why he hadn’t been concerned about my meeting with Lowe. He was a
wreck, obviously not having cleaned up or changed his clothes in
days.

As I joined him at his desk, Jones
quickly folded up some blueprints and circuitry drawings, slipped
them in his desk.
Chapter 4

Miracle of Flight 118 (My
Ass)

When I first saw the jet climbing up
to join me in the sky, it felt like a friend come to join my fun in
the frigid night air. I closed in, thinking that maybe we could
race into the clouds together. It was pretty to watch, with its
flashing lights, but too
slow
to keep up with me. I stopped and watched it pass.
As I watched its lights drift away in the night, I could sense the
one hundred hearts beating inside and it made me feel connected to
them.

That was when I saw the orange ball engulf the
left engine and the poor thing almost rolled over on its
side.

My heart stopped for a second when I thought of
all those people on board, imagining what they must be feeling as
they began to fall. Imagine was all I could do while watching it
actually happen from the outside. It wasn’t until later when I read
the flight transcripts and watched the news reports that I
developed a full picture of what really happened inside the
plane.

Inside the cockpit, the alarm bells sounded as
the pilots feverishly tried to figure out what had happened. With
no power and some of the flight surface controls not responding,
they had little control over the plane. They contacted the tower,
declaring an emergency, and fought to restart the right engine.
There were routines they had learned during their training for the
loss of one engine, two engines, or flight controls, but with none
working, they had few options. They needed to restart the right
engine; the left was obviously gone.

Flight attendants told of what they saw and
said as their training clicked on and they instructed the
passengers to assume a “safe” crash position, while one tried to
reach the captain for instructions.

Most telling for me were the stories of the
passengers themselves. Their stories moved me to tears. In the back
of the plane, a young mother sat between her seven-year-old
daughter and six year-old son. She pulled her children to her,
unable to answer their repeated pleas: “What’s going on,
Mommy?”

A young college student and his girlfriend sat
in the front right of the plane. The girl clutched the young man’s
arm and sobbed. When interviewed, the young man talked about his
sense of the “immortality of youth” beginning to fall away at that
moment; how his sense of life changed forever.

A stewardess told how she struggled to hang on
to the overhead and angle her body against the tilt in the plane
while she tried to help a young mother strap her newborn into the
car seat carrier beside her. “What’s going on?” the mother asked,
without answer.

Meanwhile, in the cabin, the captain fought the
controls, while the copilot went through the restart sequence on
the right engine. Ahead of them in the darkness, darker than the
sky around it, loomed the peak of North Mountain.

The events in the cockpit were amazing to read
about and the interviews with the pilots brought home the terror
happening inside the plane. The pilot said he knew that if he had
enough power, he could do just about anything with a jet. He spoke
of having flown at the speed of sound down desert canyons when he
was in the Air Force and never breaking a sweat. He was also
confident they could start the right engine, if they had the
time.

“
Nick! I need that engine, now!” he
shouted to the copilot. But looking at the switches he had set and
those that were yet to go before he could try the engine, the pilot
said he knew that they didn’t have the time. He looked at North
Mountain’s rapid approach and settled back in his seat.
“Nick!”

“
Just a minute, Skipper, I’m almost
ready,” answered the copilot, committed to his work.

The captain said that he glanced up to see
North Mountain’s approach and it triggered his thoughts. Although
his hands and feet never faltered or left the controls, he said his
mind began to race. He spoke of having lost both his parents in
rapid succession two years before—the only family he had left was
his wife and their two sons, who were already young men. His
thoughts turned to them in the best of times: his wife’s smiling,
laughing face, his sons as young boys, and their faces full of joy
upon the arrival of “Max,” the family dog.

Then he took another look at the face of North
Mountain—it filled his windshield, only seconds away—and then felt
himself reaching for his parents’ welcoming arms.

I remember approaching the plane, not knowing
if I could handle it. Not knowing if I would be helping the people
inside or merely end up being a useless, close-up witness to their
deaths. But when the plane responded to my will…it was
amazing.

It was at that moment that the pilot said he
felt the nose of the plane rise as North Mountain disappeared
beneath him. Then he felt the plane bank gently to the left,
circling back to the airport, its airspeed increasing. The two
pilots both said they looked at each other in disbelief. Both
engines showed zero thrust, zero rpms. The alarms still rang. Their
steering yokes turned by themselves. They both agreed that for
those used to being in control of tons of metal and hundreds of
lives, it was a baffling, disconcerting experience.

The copilot tried to turn the wheel, only to
find it violently push back. He continued to try to restart the
engine, even as the plane flew under my control. He explained that
their training was based on science, and he knew of no other way to
function.

The passengers cared not about the how or why.
All they knew was that the jet was level and seemingly back in
control. They all remembered cheering, crying, or hugging one
another.

The woman in the back with two children said
she pulled them close and sobbed uncontrollably. Her daughter
asked, “Why are you crying, Mommy?”

The young college student remembered his
girlfriend burying her head in his chest while he sat upright,
staring forward, with tears watering in his eyes.

In the cockpit, the captain said he was the
first to let go of the controls, becoming aware that something out
of the ordinary was at work. The radio crackled in his ear. The
voice of the controller remained calm and professional, but in the
background, the pilot could hear cheers. “Way to go 118, we copy
you level and on return course vector. We have you cleared for
landing on runway one-niner west. Over.”

“
Copy that, one-niner, over.” The
pilot answered without knowing how he could comply. He didn’t know
right then how to tell them the truth of what was
happening.

“
Whole lotta people down here are
waiting to buy you a beer, 118. Over.”

“
Take you up on that, control.
Over.”

By then, the copilot was unable to control
himself. “Jim, what the hell is going on? How do we land this
thing?”

The pilot said he just shook his head slowly.
“You tell me. All I know is that we’re not in pieces on that
mountain; we’re slowly losing altitude on a perfect approach to the
airport. I’m not flying. You’re not flying. We have no engines, yet
we’re still here. What controls do we have that are working? If I
try to turn the controls to bank right and level out the plane, it
fights you back to keep banking left and go where it
wants.”

“
It?” said the copilot
perplexed.

“
Look at our airspeed. In theory,
this plane can’t be still in the air at this slow speed, but we
are!”

It was then the radio crackled again. “One
eighteen, we track you now off approach vector for one-niner. Are
you able to make one-niner, over?” asked the tower.

“
One moment, control,” was all the
pilot could think to answer.

I continued carrying the plane through a slow,
controlled descent, but now was passing over the runway toward the
terminal. The pilots were clearly trying to make heads or tails of
their situation—I knocked on the pilot’s side window, then my head
appeared. It was the head of a woman wearing a black mask, with a
rat’s nest of blond hair blowing and tangling in the winds outside
the cabin. If the pilot had not been belted in, I’ll bet he would
have jumped into the copilot’s lap with surprise.

I tried to mouth a request to the pilot. The
pilot’s confused look told me that he could not understand what I
wanted, and feared me more than he was trying to understand me. The
copilot had a blank, first-year-of-calculus look on his face and
was still trying to cling to logic.

“
Is that a passenger?” he asked,
before short-circuiting. He was reduced to SSS, slurred single
syllables, for the rest of the flight.

I gestured, with my fingers starting out
horizontal and then tipping down slowly to vertical. I did it over
and over again, but he didn’t understand me. What did he think, I
could hold on to his heavy jet with two fingers forever?

“
She wants me to drop the landing
gear! Christ, what kind of pilots are we? Drop the gear! Prepare
for landing!” And then finally he gave me an
okay
gesture and a smile. I responded
with thumbs up, and labored to climb back down the
fuselage.

The radio crackled frantically. “One eighteen,
apply power and climb immediately! One eighteen, do you copy? Pull
up! Pull up!”

The pilot sat smiling, and then turned off all
the alarms and began the checklist for landing. The copilot was
still frantically trying to restart the engine when the pilot
reached over and pulled his hands away from the controls. “It’s
okay, Nick, just let go. Prepare for landing.” Nick gave the pilot
a wary look from short-circuited eyes, then began preparing to shut
the plane down.

Within thirty seconds, the plane had stopped
its forward motion and begun a short descent, as if it were a
helicopter. I set it down gently just outside the gate.

I read that the captain then unbuckled and
leapt to the window where I had been. The copilot sat SSS-ing. Half
of the passenger cabin leapt to their collective feet and began
cheering. The other half remained in shock.

An RFD with two flash wands stood for twenty
minutes waving the plane into the gate before realizing that the
plane wasn’t moving. Several other RFDs claimed to have seen a
flash in black run out from under the plane after it landed, but
who believes them?

* * *

I hid in the shadows on the concourse roof
overlooking the jet way where I had landed Flight 118, all the
while rubbing and stretching my sore arms and shoulders. They had
been in an awkward position to keep that seventy-thousand-pound jet
stable, and the idiots in the cockpit constantly trying to change
course and start the second engine hadn’t been any help. It burned
especially between my shoulder blades, where the fuselage had
rested.

I watched until all the passengers had left the
plane—no one required assistance and no one was injured. I smiled
with satisfaction when, finally, the flight crew walked out.
Everyone looked good except the copilot, who didn’t look like he
was ready to party any time soon.

The airline and Federal Aviation Administration
people began inspecting the mangled wing, engine, and tail section,
which was shredded with holes. I let out a small laugh as I watched
the officials rush onto the plane to retrieve the black box
recorders. I could imagine the readings and cockpit voice
recordings they would find.

With my job done, I got ready to leave. I
caught the image of my reflection in a window and saw the tangled
mess of my hair. “Crap.” Then I was gone.