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“This is your chance to relate to one, to me, in another way.”
“That way is no fun. No fucking fun.”
He returned to the bedside table, picked up the bottle of beer, and took a swallow from it. As far as he was concerned the conversation was over. But Bellamy continued to watch him with those damn soulful eyes that pulled him in and under, and, before he’d even planned it, he asked, “What do you want to know?”
“You were the co-pilot?”
“Yes.”
“You spilled your coffee?”
“Isn’t that what I told you?”
“The mechanic, replacing the electrical panel—”
“All true.”
“The weather?”
“Also a factor, but not severe enough to ground us.”
“But when you were on takeoff—”
“The most critical time of any flight.”
“—you were instructed to turn left to avoid a thunderstorm.”
“Which was the right call.”
“Lightning struck the plane.”
“Popping several circuit breakers, including one that controlled the CVR. Cockpit voice recorder. Which wasn’t relevant until later.”
“A fire warning came on for the left engine, but there wasn’t a fire.”
“Just like I told you. False warning.”
“But the captain shut down the left engine.”
“Correct.”
“That’s what he did.”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I flew the frigging airplane!”
His shout was followed by an abrupt, charged silence. Bellamy sat upright. He cursed himself and moved back to the bed, where he sat down on the end of it and pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. He kept them there for a minute or more, then slowly lowered his hands and looked over at her.
“The captain didn’t like me, and the feeling was mutual. He was a totally by-the-book kind of guy, and that kind of pilot. He regarded me as a misfit who didn’t fit the image and didn’t deserve to wear the uniform. In a best-case scenario, we wouldn’t have been scheduled to fly together. But we were. That was the hole in the first slice of Swiss cheese.”
He stopped to collect his thoughts, to relive that instant in time when he realized that the captain had made an egregious error. “I told you earlier that he reacted as he’d been trained to do on a 727. The thing was, that’s not what we were flying. We were flying an MD80. He’d been trained on the 80, of course, but his upgrade had been recent. When the event occurred, an older reflex kicked in. He reacted to the fire warning without checking the instruments for secondary indications of a fire. Oil temp. Oil pressure. EGT. Exhaust gas temperature.
“I instantly checked the gauges. Nothing said fire or damage. I realized the goddamn warning was false. By now we’re in a steep left bank, and our airspeed is decreasing. The right engine is pushing the airplane further to the left. The nose is dropping, right wing is tipping up. The airplane wants to roll over.”
“That’s what you reacted to.”
