seeing it coming out of the sky in front of him was something else. He opened his mouth and drew a short breath. “Good God, I’ve never seen… anything… Oh, my God, look at it.” Metz felt like running, and in fact had slipped his hand in his pocket and found his car keys. He turned, dazed, toward Johnson. “We’re finished.”
Johnson shook his head. “Not yet.”
The Straton glided in closer to the approach lights, hardly more than a mile away now, barely 200 feet above the airport, dropping a few feet every second, its long landing wheels reaching out tentatively.
The crowd was becoming almost delirious with emotion as the drama of the moment swept away the last inhibitions. Men and women, reporters and emergency personnel shouted, jumped, wept, and embraced.
In the cockpit of the Straton airliner stood First Officer Daniel McVary and more than a dozen passengers- mostly men, some women, and a few children. They were babbling and wailing, their residual instincts telling them that they were in danger. Their faces and arms were covered with freshly coagulated blood from the battering they had taken during the descent into the storm.
Sharon Crandall stared at them. “John…”
Linda Farley fought to keep from screaming. Her body began shaking.
“John!”
Berry’s whole existence had been reduced to the controls in front of him and the runway looming up outside his windshield. “Ignore them! Stay in your seat! Linda, put your head between your legs and don’t move.” It was hardly more than one mile to the threshold of the runway. Thirty more seconds. The Straton’s speed was too high and its altitude too low. Berry could feel someone’s hand brush against the back of his neck. He tried to ignore what was behind him. He concentrated on the airport and his approach path.
Berry could see the crash trucks racing in from all directions, converging on the entire length of the runway. He glanced quickly at the airspeed indicator. Still too fast. They would overshoot the runway and land in the bay or veer off and crash into the buildings outside the airport boundary. He made another adjustment with the throttles and the flight controls.
As the airliner streaked toward the threshold of the runway, Berry became more aware of the press of bodies jammed into the cockpit of the Straton. He suddenly realized that someone was standing barely inches from him. Berry glanced to his right.
Daniel McVary stood at the rear edge of the center console. His body leaned forward, hovering threateningly over the flight controls. The other passengers stepped to the front of the cockpit, cautiously, tentatively, like unwelcome visitors.
Sharon Crandall drew away from McVary. Her voice came out in a barely audible whisper. “John…”
“Stay strapped in. Don’t move. Don’t provoke them.”
McVary reached out and put his hand on the copilot’s control wheel.
Berry felt the pressure on his wheel, then felt a cold, clammy hand on his face. He heard Linda trying to fight down a mounting hysteria. “Christ, Jesus!” The threshold of the runway was half a mile away. The excessive speed was dropping off and the nonexistent fuel was still flowing to the engines. Please, God. He eased farther back on the throttles and felt McVary’s hand on his. “For God’s sake, get the hell out of here!” He swiped at McVary’s hand.
With the other hand still wrapped around the copilot’s control wheel, Daniel McVary pulled hard. This was his control wheel, that much he remembered, although he had no idea what it was for.
Berry could feel the man’s pull. He pushed forward against the captain’s control wheel with as much force as he could, to counterbalance what McVary was doing with the copilot’s wheel. Berry’s arms ached. “Get away, you stupid son-of-a-bitch. For Christ’s sake…”
Crandall struck out at McVary with her fists. “Stop! Stop! Go away! John. Please!”
“Steady… steady…” They had only a quarter of a mile to go, but Berry knew that he was losing in this battle of brute strength. Whatever the copilot had lost in mental ability hadn’t affected his muscle power. “Sharon! Get him off! Now! Fast!”
Sharon tried to pry the man’s fingers from the control wheel, but McVary held to it with an incredible strength. She bent over and bit savagely into the back of his right hand, but McVary was almost totally beyond pain.
Daniel McVary pulled against the copilot’s control wheel even harder, and it caused the Straton to suddenly pitch up and its right wing to dip low as the tail began to yaw from side to side. The stall-warning synthetic voice began to fill the cockpit again with its frightening chant. AIRSPEED. AIRSPEED. Several of the passengers howled. Linda screamed.
Many of the people standing in the cockpit were thrown off balance by the sudden erratic motions of the Straton. They lurched back toward the bulkhead; some of them fell against the circuit-breaker panel.
McVary held firmly onto the wheel and kept his balance.
“You bastard! Let go, you son-of-a-bitch.” Berry knew he had only a few seconds left to get the Straton back under control. If he didn’t, they would die-right here, right now. The runway was only a short distance ahead. “Sharon! Help me! Help!”
Sharon Crandall felt the flesh in McVary’s hand break under her teeth, and blood run over her chin and down her neck. Still, the hand would not move. She picked her head up and shot her hand out, jabbing a finger in McVary’s eye.
The copilot screamed, and released the wheel.
Berry pushed his control wheel abruptly forward, rotated it to the left, and pressed hard against the rudder panels. The Straton seemed to hang in its awkward position for a long second. The stall-warning synthetic voice was still sounding, the repetition of its one-word vocabulary now continuous. AIRSPEED, AIRSPEED, AIRSPEED. Berry could see the ground streaking by outside his windshield at an incredible angle, then suddenly the horizon straightened and the runway centerline swung back to the middle of the windshield.
But the Straton had lost too much airspeed. Even without the continuous blaring of the stall-warning voice, Berry could feel the sickening sensation that told him the airliner was nearly done flying. In another moment the Straton would fall uncontrollably, like an elevator cut loose from its cable, its 400 tons crashing to the runway below.
“John!” Sharon screamed. The ground rushed up toward them. She covered her eyes.
Waiting as long as he dared, Berry made one last and desperate pull on the flight controls with all the strength he had left.
Captain Kevin Fitzgerald’s experienced eye told him instantly that the pilot had suddenly lost control. He found himself running toward the plummeting airliner, shouting as he ran. “He’s losing it! It’s pitching on him! Oh, goddamn it, he’s losing it. Christ Almighty!” The pilot had managed to get the giant airliner within a half mile of the runway, and now, inexplicably, he was letting the ship get away from him. He shouted like a coach trying to play the game from the sidelines. “Goddamn it! Goddamn you! Hold it, you bastard, hold it! Kick the rudder. The rudder! Kick the goddamn rudder, you son-of-a-bitch!” He suddenly stopped running.
Just before the Straton’s wheels hit the runway, Fitzgerald could see that the pilot had made one final, desperate control input. That, coupled with the aircraft’s low airspeed, was all that averted instant and total catastrophe. But the aircraft’s unspent downward energy was still far too great for its designed limits of strength. As Fitzgerald watched, the Straton sank down onto its undercarriage, then the huge sets of landing gear snapped off as if they were made of glass. Broken wheels and struts catapulted in all directions. The airliner fell onto its belly and skidded down the runway at over a hundred knots, a shower of sparks rising beneath and behind it. The aircraft yawed left and right, dangerously close to a complete spin. Fitzgerald could see the speed brakes extend above the wings. The rudder was still working back and forth; Fitzgerald knew the pilot had not given up.
The crowd on the grass began running as the uncontrolled airliner, as tall as a three-story building and as long and wide as a football field, began skidding toward them. Some of the crowd jumped on retreating vehicles; others hit the ground.
Fitzgerald knew that no place was safer than any other if the Straton went off the runway, and he stood his ground and watched. Around him, four news cameramen stood in the grass, recording the progress of the giant airliner plowing across the runway less than 3000 feet away. The sound of scraping and tearing metal rose above the screaming of the engines as the tortured Straton 797 came closer.
Wayne Metz said to Ed Johnson, in an awed, faraway voice, “Did he make it?”
“Sort of.”
