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“To take off, your thrust, uh, has to be more powerful than your drag and your lift has to be more powerful than your weight. To land, it’s vice versa. Drag dominates thrust and weight dominates lift.”
When he didn’t say a word in reply, she shrugged and continued. No way was she going to drive herself nuts, just sitting there, letting her thoughts take over. So she blubbered on.
“Weight and drag are natural forces. You see, weight is merely gravity trying to yank the plane back to earth, and drag is like the wind on your face when you’re running. It’s air pushing against you when you’re trying to go forward. Therefore thrust and lift are fashioned by the plane mechanically to get it up and going.”
And here came thrust and get it up in the same sentence. Jesus.
“The propeller makes up our thrust to. . .to work against the drag and keep us heading forward, and lift happens when air blows above and below the wings, helping us go up and down.”
Grady remained stonily quiet; she didn’t have a clue whether he was listening to her prattle or not. There was no way she was going to glance over again though. Her hormones had nearly fried themselves out the last time she’d snuck a peek.
“So, once you’ve got your lift and thrust overpowering weight and drag,” she droned on, sounding more like an encyclopedia than herself, “you’re in the air. Now once we’re sky bound, we deal with pitch, roll and yaw to keep the plane going in the direction we want.”
Lifting her hand to demonstrate, B.J. held her hand flat, palm facing down.
“Pitch is moving the nose of the plane up and down.” She lifted her fingertips higher than her wrist. “Roll steadies the wings.” She moved her thumb higher than her pinkie and then rotated back to dip her thumb lower than her pinkie. “And yaw,” she finished, “is controlled by moving the rudder to change the direction of the plane left and right.” She kept her palm flat and twisted her hand at her wrist, moving the tips of her fingers to the left and then to the right.
“So, what’re all those meters for?” Grady asked, surprising the spit out of her when he pointed to the gauges in front of her.
For a moment, she was too startled to speak. But Holy Lord, the man was actually listening to her boring lesson. She quickly licked her lips and dove headfirst back into the tutorial.
“This here’s called the instrument panel. And this. . .” She motioned to six round gauges in front of her. “. . .is the basic T arrangement. The attitude indicator is always the top center gauge.”
“Attitude indicator?”
B.J. grinned and risked an ornery grin his way. “Yeah, it tells us if the plane’s in a bad mood or not.”
When he just stared at her, she rolled her eyes. “Okay, so it really shows the plane’s pitch and bank. It tells us if the wings are even and where our nose is according to the horizon.
“Here,” she offered. “Let me just roll us a little to the side, and you can watch the change on the indicator.”
When she tipped them over toward the right, Grady immediately snaked his hand out and latched his fingers
around the edge of his seat.
B.J. cleared her throat. “Sorry about that,” she offered and leveled the plane back to rights.
Grady remained stiffly quiet.
“Anyway,” she went on, rubbing at the back of her neck, “to the right of the attitude indicator is the altimeter. Right now, it’s adjusted to measure feet above sea level. And to the left of the attitude indicator is the airspeed indicator, comparable to a speedometer in a truck. See this white band here? That’s the normal speed for operating when you’re landing and the flaps are open. The green range is for normal operation without the flaps all the way out. And yellow is for smooth air operation, only you don’t make any abrupt control movements when you’re going that fast.”
B.J. sucked in a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Then there’s this small little red line,” she concluded.
As she pointed at it, she glanced Grady’s way. “Never redline it,” she told him seriously.
The red line showed the maximum airspeed and was never to be exceeded for any reason. B.J. liked to fly in the caution zone under the yellow band, pushing her limits. But she’d never redlined it before. Certainly not like she’d done last night in the hotel when she’d pushed a certain someone beyond his limits. What had resulted was a complete malfunction of a total gentleman. Redlining a plane was a lot like the explosion that had happened to Grady when she’d pushed him past his yellow zone.
“So, where’s the gas gauge?” he asked before she could finish explaining the basic T arrangement.
“Oh, it’s right—” As her finger landed on the gauge, she paused and frowned. “What the hell?”
Instantly alert, Grady whirled from inspecting the panel to studying her face. “What?”
“We’re low on gas.”
“What?” he said again, a little more anxious this time.
“We shouldn’t be this low,” she murmured to herself. “I filled up before we left yesterday, and a single tank should be able to get us—damn,” she muttered, clicking the mike of her headphones to a different frequency.
