Same for the flaps and spoilers.
The DC-10 had a wingspan of over one hundred and fifty-five feet. Its fuselage was a hundred and seventy feet long. It was more than just an airplane. It was literally a ship that sailed the sky, the very definition of a “jumbo jet,” and virtually the only way they now had to steer it was with the two General Electric/Pratt & Whitney engines. Which was only a little better than a driver trying to steer a runaway automobile by leaning to one side and then to the other, desperately struggling to influence its course with his shifting weight.
A few minutes had passed since the tail engine exploded, and they were still aloft.
Holly believed in a god, not due to any life-altering spiritual experience, but largely because the alternative to belief was simply too grim. Although she had been raised a Methodist and for a while toyed with the idea of conversion to Catholicism, she had never made up her mind what sort of god she preferred, whether one of the gray-suited Protestant varieties or the more passionate Catholic divinity or something else altogether. In her daily life she did not turn to heaven for help with her problems, and she only said grace before meals when she was visiting her parents in Philadelphia. She would have felt like a hypocrite if she had fallen into prayer now, but she nevertheless hoped that God was in a merciful mood and watching over the DC-10, whatever His or Her gender might be and regardless of His or Her preference in worshipers.
Christine was reading one of the pop-up storybooks with Casey, adding her own amusing commentary to the adventures of the animal characters, trying to distract her daughter from the memory of the muffled explosion and subsequent plunge. The intensity of her focus on the child was a giveaway of her true inner feelings: she was scared, and she knew that the worst had not yet passed.
Minute by minute, Holly slipped deeper into a state of denial, unwilling to accept what Jim Ironheart had told her. It was not her own survival, or his, or that of the Dubroveks that she doubted. He had proven himself to be singularly successful when he entered combat with fate; and she was reasonably confident that their lives were secure in the forward section of the economy-class seats, as he had promised. What she wanted to deny,
Over Iowa, Flight 246 passed out of Minneapolis Center, the air-traffic-control jurisdiction after Denver Center, and now responded only to Chicago Center. Unable to regain hydraulics, Captain Delbaugh requested and received permission from United's dispatcher and from Chicago to divert from O'Hare to the nearest major airport, which was Dubuque, Iowa. He relinquished control of the plane to Anilov, so he and Chris Lodden would be able to concentrate on finding a way through their crisis.
As a first step, Delbaugh radioed System Aircraft Maintenance (SAM) at San Francisco International Airport. SAM was United's central maintenance base, an enormous state-of-the-art complex with a staff of over ten thousand.
“We have a situation here,” Delbaugh told them calmly. “Complete hydraulic failure. We can stay up awhile, but we can't maneuver.”
At SAM, in addition to United's own employees, experts were also on duty twenty-four hours a day from suppliers of every model of aircraft currently in operation by the airline — including a man from General Electric, where the CF-6 engines had been built, and another from McDonnell Douglas, which had designed and manufactured the DC-10. Manuals, books, and a massive amount of computer-accessible data about each airplane type was available to staff at SAM, in addition to an exhaustively detailed maintenance history of every craft in the United fleet. They could tell Delbaugh and Lodden about every mechanical problem their particular plane had experienced during its lifetime, exactly what had been done to it during its most recently scheduled maintenance, and even when upholstery damage had been repaired — virtually everything except how much loose change had fallen into its seats from passengers' pockets and been left behind during the past twelve months.
Delbaugh also hoped they could tell him how the hell he was supposed to fly an aircraft as large as an apartment building without the aid of elevators, rudders, ailerons, and other equipment that allowed him to maneuver. Even the best flight training programs were structured under the assumption that a pilot would retain
Pete Yankowski, the flight instructor from Denver, returned from his trip to the rear of the plane and reported that through a window he had spotted an eighteen-inch hole in the horizontal part of the tail. “There's probably more damage I couldn't see. Figure shrapnel ripped up the rear section behind the aft bulkhead, where all the hydraulic systems pass through. At least we didn't depressurize.”
Dismayed at the rippling sensation that quivered through his bowels, achingly aware that two hundred and fifty-three passengers and ten other crew members were depending on him to bring them home alive, Delbaugh conveyed Yankowski's information to SAM. Then he asked for assistance in determining how to fly the severely disabled aircraft. He was not surprised when, after an urgent consultation, the experts in San Francisco could come up with no recommendations. He was asking them to do the impossible, tell him how to remain the master of this behemoth with no substantial controls other than the throttles — the same unfair request that God was making of him.
He stayed in touch with United's dispatcher office, as well, which tracked the progress of all the company's hardware in the air. In addition, both channels — the dispatcher and SAM — were patched in to United's headquarters near O'Hare International in Chicago. A lot of interested and anxious people were tied to Delbaugh by radio, but they were all as much at a loss for good suggestions as were the experts in San Francisco.
To Yankowski, Delbaugh said, “Ask Evelyn to find that guy from McDonnell Douglas she told us about. Get him up here quick.”
As Pete left the flight deck again, and as Anilov struggled with his control wheel in a determined if vain attempt to get at least some response from the craft, Delbaugh told the shift manager at SAM that a McDonnell Douglas engineer was aboard. “He warned us something was wrong with the tail engine just before it exploded. He could tell from the sound of it, I guess, so we'll get him in here, see if he can help.”
At SAM, the General Electric expert on CF-6 turbofan engines came back at him: “What do you mean, he could tell by the sound? How could he tell by the sound? What did it sound like?”
“I don't know,” Delbaugh replied. “We didn't notice any unusual noises or unexpected changes in pitch, and neither did the flight attendants.”
The voice in Delbaugh's headset crackled in response: “That doesn't make sense.”
McDonnell Douglas's DC-10 specialist at SAM sounded equally baffled: “What's this guy's name?”
“We'll find out. All we know right now is his first name,” Sleighton Delbaugh said. “It's Jim.”
As the captain announced to the passengers that they would be landing in Dubuque as a result of mechanical problems, Jim watched Evelyn approach him along the port aisle, weaving because the plane was no longer as steady as it had been. He wished she would not ask him what he knew she had to ask.
“… and it might be a little rough,” the captain concluded.
As the pilots reduced power to one engine and increased it to the other, the wings wobbled, and the plane wallowed '
like a boat in a swelling sea. Each time it happened, they recovered quickly, but between those desperate course corrections, when they were unlucky enough to hit air turbulence, the DC-10 did not ride through it as confidently as it had done all the way out from LAX.
“Captain Delbaugh would like you to come forward if you could,” Evelyn said when she reached him, soft- voiced and smiling as if delivering an invitation to a pleasant little luncheon of tea and finger sandwiches.
