Miller yawned and stretched. After twenty-eight years at Trans-United, he had enough seniority to get the two things he’d always wanted: a nine-to-five dispatcher’s shift, and assignment to the Pacific desk. Now that he had them both, he was bored. He almost yearned for the night shift and the more hectic South American desk again. Such was life.
Miller flipped absently through the pages of his Sports Illustrated, then laid it aside. He looked at his computer console, at the display of assigned trips. He was, at that moment, responsible for monitoring only four flights: 243 from Honolulu, 101 from Melbourne, 377 to Tahiti, and 52 to Tokyo.
The weather across the Pacific routes was good, and all the flights had ample reserve fuel. No problems. Not much to do. On days like this, he found himself watching the clock. Miller’s eye caught an empty entry on his display screen. He regarded the blank column for a second. “Dennis.” He spoke in a voice that years of practice had trained to penetrate the ambient sounds of the room without actually rising above the noise. “Dennis, did you forget 52’s update?”
“Hold on.” The young man walked over to a stack of computer messages on a countertop and leafed through them. He went through them a second time, more slowly. He looked up and called across the room. “Didn’t get one. It’s overdue. Want me to send a request?”
Miller didn’t like Dennis Evans’s choice of the word “overdue.” Overdue connoted something quite different from late in airline parlance. Miller looked at the wall clock. The fuel and position report was only a few minutes behind schedule. Late. It was purely routine. Minor information. Yet Miller would not, under any circumstances, turn anything over to Evans that wasn’t perfect. Twenty years before, he had left an open item on his sheet and gone to dinner. When he returned, he’d found the dispatcher’s office full of company executives. One of their new Boeing 707s had gone down somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. That was the night that the euphemism “overdue” became clear.
Miller glanced back at the wall clock, then at the computer screen again. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t overly concerned. “Well… we’ve got time.” He punched the computer keys to get a different screen, then looked down at the names of the crew. He was familiar enough with the name Alan Stuart. Like a lot of modern business relationships, this one was totally electronic. Just a voice on the telephone and the radio. Yet he felt he knew the man, and he knew that Flight 52’s captain was dependable. Miller wasn’t familiar with the other names on the crew list, but he knew that Stuart ran a tight ship. Miller was certain that Stuart would soon discover the oversight and send an update. Bugging a pilot, especially a conscientious one like Stuart, was the quickest way to become a disliked dispatcher, and Jack Miller had no intention of doing anything like that during the remainder of his career. It was the sort of stunt that Evans was noted for. He looked up at Evans, who was going through the messages again. “We’ll get the update soon. If we don’t, then…” Miller paused and considered. He didn’t want to request Flight 52’s updates by relaying a message through air-traffic control for everyone to hear. His eyes fixed on the door to the small glass-enclosed communications room that housed the data-link machine. “If we don’t hear from them by, say, twelve o’clock, type out a request to them on the link.”
Evans grunted a reply. The radio was faster and easier than the data-link-sometimes link messages just didn’t get through-but Miller was always concerned with discretion and politeness. If a captain was sitting on his thumb up there, he ought to be called on the radio and told about it. Evans pushed the computer messages aside and sat back at his desk.
Miller glanced at the computer screen again, then punched a button to turn off the display. “It’s a nice day out there,” he called to Evans. “They’re drinking coffee and daydreaming.”
Evans mumbled something as he worked on another flight’s data.
Miller watched the clock. The room became still except for the background noises of the electronics. Miller focused on the sweep second hand. He was accustomed to this kind of waiting, but it always made him uneasy. Like the times his wife was overdue. Late. Or his teenaged son or daughter. The clock moved, not slowly, but quickly, at times like this, running through the minutes, making the awaited party more awaited. Making one wonder all sorts of things.
John Berry sat strapped into the captain’s seat of the Straton. The midday sun poured through the cockpit windows, bathing him in bright sunlight. He pressed the talk button on the hand microphone again and spoke loudly. “Do you read me? Does anyone read?” Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead, and his mouth felt dry.
With his right hand, he made careful adjustments on the audio panel. “Mayday. Do you read Mayday? Any station. Do you read Mayday?” He sat back and listened. Listened for the familiar crackle, the squelch-break that was the electronic equivalent of a man clearing his throat before he spoke. But there was only the persistent, unbroken hum of the speakers.
Berry slumped into the seat. He was confused. If there was one thing he knew from his years of flying, it was how to work a radio. It seemed simple enough even in the Straton. The airliner’s radios did not seem much different from all the other sets that he had operated. Yet there must be something different about them, some small esoteric task that had to be performed before the radios would transmit. But what? And why? Why should these radios be different? “Damn it.” Berry wondered how in God’s name he could ever fly the aircraft if he couldn’t even work the radios.
The urge to talk to someone had become overwhelming. It had gone beyond the simple necessity to report the disaster and ask for assistance. It had become an overpowering need to hear a human voice just for the sake of hearing it. But as each minute of silence passed, Berry was losing hope and was becoming alternately frantic and despondent. His hand shook so badly now that he stopped trying to transmit and sat back and tried to calm himself. He glanced at the instruments. Everything looked good, but after his failure with the radios, he was beginning to doubt his ability to read even standard gauges. And the majority of the Straton’s instrumentation was standard enough to be familiar. But the markings-the altitudes, speeds, fuel reserves, engine temperatures-were incredibly amplified. He tried to imagine he was in the Skymaster and tried to reduce the problems and the instrument panels to manageable proportions.
He looked at the fuel reserves. Less than half full. What this meant in flying time at the present speed and altitude, he didn’t know. But he’d figure it out soon enough as the needles drifted leftward and the minutes passed. He stared at the control wheels as they moved slightly-inward, outward, left, right. The rudder pedals made small movements. The flight was steady.
Something odd caught his eye and he looked down near his left knee. He stared at the open protective cover and read the words above it. AUTOPILOT MASTER SWITCH. He stared at the toggle, which was pointing to ON. He understood. The Captain had either lost his nerve or lost consciousness before he could complete his last mission. Berry nodded. It sort of made sense. But for Berry, there was no such easy way out. Not yet. He reached down and snapped back the protective cover.
He found he was building up a healthy anger toward fate and toward death, if for no other reason than to tell his wife what he really thought about her. Unfinished business. He reached down and grabbed the microphone. “Mayday! Mayday, you sons-of-bitches! Answer Mayday!”
He began changing the frequency he was using, alternating between the frequencies left on the radios. When he transmitted, he knew he should keep to the universally understood words. He could save the explanations for when he made contact. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” He waited for a reply, but again there was none.
Out of desperation he began to randomly turn the dials and transmit on every channel and on each of the four radios in the cockpit. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
He switched back to the original frequency. “This is Trans-United Flight…” What was the flight number? What difference did it make? He tried to remember his boarding pass but couldn’t. “This is the Tokyo-bound Trans-United Airlines Straton 797. Mayday. Do you read Mayday? Trans-United Operations, this is the Tokyo-bound Straton 797, we have an emergency. Do you read?” He waited. Nothing.
He could see that the radio’s transmission lights blinked whenever he pressed the microphone button. He could tell from the sidetone in the cockpit speakers that the radios were operating. But for some reason they were not putting out. He suspected that something-the antenna perhaps-had been damaged. He had hoped that someone in the cockpit had been able to put out a distress signal, but he was fairly certain now that they hadn’t. The fault in transmitting was not his-he’d known that, really. The radios were all set by the pilots to transmit. They simply weren’t sending. That’s all there was to it. No distress call had been sent and none ever would be sent.
No radios equaled no chance of flying the plane home. He almost felt a measure of relief. The responsibility of flying and landing this huge machine was not a prospect he’d looked forward to. But he did want to live. He put the microphone down and stared at the clear skies around him. His problems on the ground were in their proper
