Fourteen Minutes to MCO
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Captain Travis Daniels had been flying 737s for sixteen years, and in all that time he’d never seen lightning like that.
The flash hit at 1:09 PM, right over the part of Florida where Daniels had logged maybe a thousand approaches. He’d flown through every kind of weather, every kind of emergency scenario the sim techs could dream up. Nobody had ever mentioned this. It came from everywhere and nowhere. Not a strike but a wash of light that turned the world white-pink for a few disorienting seconds. Daniels’ hands stayed steady on the yoke through pure muscle memory while his retinas screamed. Beside him, First Officer Eli Thorne sounded like he’d been punched.
Then the lights went out.
All six display screens: the PFDs, the navigation displays, the EICAS showing engine status, died in perfect synchrony. The familiar electrical hum that formed the backdrop of every flight, something pilots stopped hearing after their first hundred hours, simply ceased. Only the airflow hiss remained, and underneath it, something wrong with the engines.
“I have the aircraft,” Daniels said, his voice catching. With the thrust gone, the nose wanted to drop, but Daniels eased back on the yoke, arresting the descent. He turned instinctively toward the brightness. There, far to the west and impossibly high, a luminous sphere swelled against the sky, green-white and wrong, toxic, blooming outward. In a decade with the Navy he’d never seen anything like it. He forced his jaw to unclench and brought his eyes back to the horizon.
For the moment, his training was in charge. He was heavy on the controls, trading the aircraft’s high descent speed for altitude, bleeding it off from nearly 300 knots down toward the 220 he needed for best glide. Eyes outside: sun at two o’clock, horizon level, scattered cumulus below at maybe eight thousand. The 737 was still flying, still answered the yoke. The engine note sagged, the turbine’s roar dropping in pitch as the life drained out of them.
“Confirmed, you have control,” Thorne said, his hands already working the overhead panel. “All displays down. Main and transfer buses are dark… Battery bus isn’t picking up either. APU start…” A click, followed by silence where there should have been the auxiliary power unit spinning up. “Dead. Everything’s dead.”
Daniels felt it now in his feet, in his spine, the deceleration as both engines wound down. Not the shove or yaw of a single engine failure, but both simultaneously and abruptly absent. “Sounds to me like both engines are windmilling.” Normally he was trained to distrust what his body told him. Today he had nothing else.
Thorne listened to the dying turbines with an engineer’s ear. Fifteen years younger than Daniels, he’d come up through the regionals flying CRJs, but was already as fluent in the -800 as some pilots with a decade on type. “Roger that. No igniters. No fuel flow. They're not even trying to relight.”
The whine settled to the faint, steady whistle of the engine's inner core, the high-pressure shaft that powered the hydraulics. It was no longer driven by fuel and merely spinning in the wind. With no combustion there was no thrust. That feeble whistle was the only thing keeping the engine-driven hydraulics alive, and it would only last if they stayed fast. They were now flying a 174,000-pound glider.
Daniels compartmentalized the impossibility and filed it away for later. Fly the airplane first. Always fly the airplane first.
“We still have hydraulics?” he asked. The word shook something loose. For a heartbeat, he saw his father’s elbows sticking out from under the Buick, heard the hiss and clatter as pink fluid sprayed across the driveway. His father’s startled laugh — “Well, that’s one way to learn about pressure!” He never did have his father’s gift for mechanics. An unwelcome wave of grief— gone almost four years, but always so proud. Then, feeling a tremor through the yoke— the cockpit came rushing back.
Thorne’s eyes found the old-style analogs, among the few needles on the jet that weren’t screens. They flickered, then held. “Showing pressure. A and B both in the green. As long as N2 keeps windmilling…”
“We’ll have flight controls, but only if we haul ass fast enough to keep ‘em.” Daniels finished the thought, recognizing the razor’s edge equation they’d have to perch on: keep the airspeed up, keep the turbines spinning, keep the pressure.
Murmurs rose behind the reinforced door: one hundred sixty-two passengers feeling their airplane go quiet.
“Radios?” Daniels asked, already knowing.
Thorne tried both boxes, the transponder, checked the standby. “All dead. Transponder dark. And…” he pointed at the whiskey compass, “…this thing is wandering. The needle won’t settle.”
Daniels processed this with the same clinical detachment he’d used when an engine had thrown a fan blade over Denver. Workload was a gift: too much to do to panic properly. “How’re we looking on the field?”
Thorne didn’t need a chart. “Orlando International straight ahead. Thirty-five, maybe forty miles south-southeast. Two long north-south parallels with twelve thousand feet available. We’re already on the right side of the sky.”
“Inside the numbers?” Daniels asked.
“From fifteen-five, figure about three miles per thousand feet clean. That’s forty-six miles theoretical.” Thorne drummed the dead glareshield. “Call it two-ten to two-thirty indicated, minimum, to keep pressure in the green. We’ve shed the excess speed, so we’re gliding in earnest now.”
They both saw the picture: fast, clean, no flaps, no ground spoilers, no reverse. One shot.
“Commit MCO,” Daniels said. “Clean configuration, visual approach. Hold the speed. And Eli? Start thinking about how we’re going to stop.”
Captain Daniels had been spared thinking about that unholy fireball for about sixty seconds. His hands were literally full flying the plane and besides, some primitive part of his brain kept insisting this was a simulator running one of those impossible failure scenarios they threw at you maybe once every few years in recurrent training. Total electrical failure, dual engine flameout, maintain aircraft control and locate nearest suitable airport. Except in the sim, you always had battery power. In the sim, the standby instruments worked. In the sim, when you pushed the radio button, someone answered.
“Let’s try the APU again,” he said, knowing it was useless but needing to be thorough.
Eli moved the switch. Nothing. Not even the click of a relay trying to engage. The quick reference handbook didn’t have a checklist for nightmarish green explosions, but he didn’t need one to know the systems weren’t coming back. “It's not just dead, Travis. It’s more like the entire electrical system doesn’t exist anymore.”
Florida’s flat terrain splayed ahead of them in the hazy afternoon light, reflecting off countless lakes. Through the windscreen Daniels could see the Boeing’s shadow racing across the landscape below, moving fast but steadily losing the battle against altitude. Every second, they traded height for distance, spending fuel they couldn’t replace from an account they couldn’t refill.
Ahead, the air was turning hazy blue-gray, the kind of afternoon buildup that Florida specialized in– small storm cells, short-lived but thick enough to eat an airplane whole. With the radar dead they had no picture of what waited inside.
“Cabin crew?” Daniels asked.
Eli tried the interphone. Unsurprising silence. He unbuckled and cracked the cockpit door. The sound hit them immediately—alarmed voices offering one hundred versions of what the fuck? It was the beginning edges of panic. But also, Daniels noted with professional pride, the calm, commanding voice of their lead flight attendant.
“Carla’s handling it,” Eli reported, sliding back into his seat. “But they obviously know something’s really wrong. No PA, no interphone. Emergency lights are on—those have their own batteries.”
“Small miracles.” Daniels watched the altimeter he could barely read in the afternoon glare. Fourteen thousand seven hundred feet. They were bleeding altitude at about a thousand feet per minute. Fourteen minutes to sea level, but they needed to arrive at MCO with enough altitude to maneuver, to line up on a runway they'd have to identify visually.
“Travis.” Eli’s voice carried a note Daniels hadn’t heard before. “You were Navy. That thing we saw. The way everything died at once. Could that have been…?”
“An EMP. Yeah. High altitude burst, maybe.” He glanced back to the west. Whatever it had been was lost now in the glare. “Doesn’t change what we need to do.”
“If it was that… if that’s what happened…” He didn’t finish and didn’t need to.
“Then there’s nothing we can do about it from up here. We fly the airplane. We get these people on the ground. Everything else comes after.”
Thorne habitually checked his iPhone, intending to text his wife, but realized immediately it was useless. “My daughter’s at daycare in Tampa.”
Stop. Fly the airplane.
“Eli, what’s our ground speed going to be?”
Eli unclipped the Quick Reference Handbook from the sidewall pocket, thumb finding the tab for Emergencies instantly. "Okay... QRH, Dual Engine Failure... got it." His finger traced the chart on the plastic-laminated page. “Two-twenty works. But below two-ten we’re in trouble. Can’t drop under two hundred until we’re over the fence, and even then we’ll lose anti-skid. Steering’s going to be mushy.”
“Noted. What’s our touchdown speed going to be?”
“No flaps? Call it one-seventy, one-eighty over the fence.”
Daniels had landed 737s in every condition imaginable—crosswinds that tried to flip the aircraft, ice that turned runways into skating rinks, thunderstorms that threw the plane around like a toy. But he'd never landed at that speed without engines, not even in the simulator. They always gave you power to correct your mistakes. The 737 touched down around 140 knots normally. At 180, they'd be eating up runway at 270 feet per second.
“Well let’s make damn sure we’re on MCO's longest.”
“We want One-Eight Right. Twelve thousand feet.”
Twelve thousand feet. It sounded like a lot. It was a lot. Enough even for the B-52 bombers it was built for back when this was still McCoy Air Force Base, Cold War bombers taking off for missions that, thank God, never came. Today was different. At their touchdown speed, with compromised braking, they’d need most of it. Maybe all of it.
William’s crying cut through the hum of the engines– except there wasn’t any hum anymore. “His ears hurt Joel,” Melissa snapped, her usual patience worn thin. “Help me get the ibuprofen or it’s only going to get worse when we land.”
Four minutes of terror had left Missy raging. William’s angry sobs had started a pulsing pattern that told Joel he was past all reasoning.
“I was trying to see if there’s anything going on out there,” Joel said unbuckling to reach for the overhead bin. “At least the seatbelt sign isn’t on.” The joke hit the air and went nowhere.
Joel knew the flight attendant wasn’t going to approve; she’d already told three other people to sit down and keep their seatbelts on, but his mission was medical, he figured justice was on his side. Right on cue she swooped into action.
“Return to your seats and keep your seatbelts on.” Carla Ruiz, lead flight attendant and human PA system announced loudly next to them in row 18. She spoke to the full plane, but she had an audience of one.
“Sorry ma’am, I’m a nurse. We both are actually,” Joel motioned to Missy. “Our son’s ears are popping and it’s driving him crazy. I’m just grabbing some ibuprofen and I’ll be back down in 30 seconds.”
As he flailed around for the bottle overhead, Joel noted a woman two rows up abandon her efforts to resurrect her tablet, stowing it instead in her seat pocket.
“Sir, we’ve started our desc…”
Hundreds of oxygen masks dropped from overhead compartments, hitting shoulders and heads of terrified passengers with a flimsy thud. Quite a few, petrified even before this, screamed.
Clutching the medicine, Joel jumped back into his seat. Missy’s fingers fumbled against the elastic, her hands shaking but her voice friendly. “Happens all the time.” She lied.
“Pull the mask down with a firm tug to start the flow of oxygen,” Carla called as she retreated back up the aisle to retrieve her own mask.
Joel yanked his down and immediately smelled it— sharp, acrid, almost metallic. The mask felt warm in his hand, then hot. What the hell? Around them, passengers were noticing too.
“Something’s burning!” A man shouted from across the aisle.
Joel’s medical training was useless here. The mask seared against his palm. Hospital oxygen was cold, clean—this was chemical, metallic, wrong. He caught Missy’s eyes over William’s head. She’d pulled her mask on and was helping their son with his, but her hands were shaking worse now. She didn’t know either.
“That smell is normal: chemical oxygen. Keep them on!” Carla was working her way back, walking the aisle and insisting everyone wear their masks.
Eli Thorne wasn’t timid, but felt glad Daniels had the controls. Travis was as fine a stick and rudder pilot as the airline had, and Eli had his own problems to solve.
Normally the cockpit would be alive right now with master cautions flashing, the bong of the aural warning, EICAS would be filling up with red and amber: ENG FAIL L/R, GEN OFF BUS, HYD PRESS LOW. The autopilot would have kicked off with its two-note shriek, leaving the glideslope pointer hunting for something to intercept.
Instead there was nothing. No alarms, no checklists to reach for, none of the chaos that usually followed a failure. Just the slipstream outside and the scratch of his pen on the back of a checklist card. It seemed louder than any alarm he’d ever heard.
He kept resisting the urge to grab the QRH. He knew the quick reference handbook had nothing for this. The airplane wasn’t merely broken; it was erased. So he did what was left to him: long division on cardboard. A thousand feet per minute at two-twenty knots meant maybe ten minutes to the field. It didn’t matter, but he wrote it down anyway, and hoped the hydraulics would hold long enough to get them there.
Turning his attention back to systems, his eyes found the battery switch on the overhead, with the STANDBY POWER guard still set to AUTO. He flipped it to BATT. Nothing happened for a moment but then the amber BAT DISCHARGE light warmed dimly to life. The voltmeter needle wiggled just above twenty-four volts.
“Battery’s alive,” he reported. “Feeding the standby bus.”
The little attitude gyro between them gave a faint whir, the horizon bar twitching back toward level. He exhaled through his teeth. Not much, but something. He should have thought to try it earlier.
He scanned the panel again. Standby altimeter and old school airspeed gauges were functional.
“Hydraulics still green,” he said. “Airspeed steady.”
Daniels gave a curt nod, eyes forward.
The altimeter’s needle drifted through ten thousand. He didn’t quite trust the number but called it out by instinct. “Passing ten.”
The horizon ahead darkened where the small storm cell ahead had been growing, feeding off the humidity colliding with the sea breeze. It wasn’t wide– maybe ten miles across– but it was right in their path.
“Cell building off the nose,” Eli said.
Daniels nodded once. “Can’t go around. We’ll punch through.”
At least we won’t ice up. Freezing level should be a couple thousand feet above us.
They hit it less than a minute later, sunlight vanishing faster than your eyes can adjust. The cockpit went nearly black. Rain hammered the windshield hard enough to sound like gravel, sheets of water blurring the world outside into streaks. Without wipers or anti-ice, the glass fogged instantly.
The jet shuddered, a low-frequency buffet that worked its way up through the pedals. Daniels rode it out, holding a two-degree nose-down altitude by feel and memory. Lightning strobed white through the side windows, evoking the nightmare that began this minutes earlier.
Eli gripped the glare shield, watching the attitude indicator jitter and settle again. “Still level,” he said, though his own voice sounded weak in this noise.
Then the bottom dropped out. A violent shear slammed them downwards, making both pilots feel weightless and disoriented for a couple breaths. The left wing dropped sharply, and the airframe groaned under a load that it wasn’t designed to bear in silence. Daniels met it with a sharp, instinctive input of right aileron and rudder, fighting the controls. But it was the other sound that cut through the hammering rain. Thin but unmistakable through the reinforced door, a collective human shriek from the cabin. A raw wave of pure terror made audible only by the absence of their engines. It was the sound of the 162 souls he was trying to save.
The turbulence unceremoniously eased off after that. The rain thinned to mist, then disappeared entirely. Sunlight burst back through the windshield, bright enough to make him squint.
Below the grid of central Florida spread out in hard afternoon light. Off the right side, a long gray slice of concrete caught the sun.
“I’ve got the field,” Eli said.
Daniels leaned forward, shading his eyes with one hand. Two parallel runways– MCO– lay dead ahead. No flashing beacons. No approach lights. No motion at all.
He gave a short breath, more exhale than sigh. “Field made.”
"We’re high on the profile,” Daniels added. “I want to start thinking about the gear.”
“Manual extension only,” Eli said automatically, reaching behind the throttle quadrant. “Cover’s latched, handle in the well.”
Daniels nodded. “Don’t touch it until I call it. Once it’s out, we’re committed.”
“Roger that.”
The altimeter wound past eight thousand. The airport was still twenty miles out, but climbing the windscreen as they sank toward it. Daniels trimmed forward holding the airspeed that kept his hydraulics nominal without wasting the energy that kept them flying.
Eli cross-checked the standby needles. Holding two-twenty. Altimeter rolling down on cue. The gyro hummed faintly behind his knee, the only sound in the cockpit besides the wind.
“Seven-five,” he called.
“Copy,” Daniels said. “We’re still high. I want the field made before we dirty up.”
Eli already had the manual-gear cover unlatched, fingers resting on the edge without opening it. Inside waited the three red handles, each one a promise that couldn’t be taken back.
They dropped through seven thousand, maybe five minutes to go. The sunlight ahead was merciless now, flattening the world into glare. The twin runways of MCO stretched north-south.
Nothing moved down there. No beacons. No shimmer of traffic.
Daniels shaded his eyes with one hand. “We’re committed.”
He took a breath, calm and certain. “Gear down.”
Eli didn’t hesitate. He flipped the access panel open, revealing the three red T-handles. He’d practiced this dozens of times in the sim, but there the levers are lightweight. These, he knew, would be take significant force. He grabbed the first, for the left main, braced his feet against the floor, and heaved.
It resisted for a moment, then released with a loud CLANG that echoed in the tense cockpit. A deep, vibrating rumble started instantly, a shudder that ran the length of the fuselage as the massive gear assembly dropped into the 220-knot wind.
He grabbed the second handle for the right main. Another CLANG, and the rumble intensified, the airframe now groaning under the immense drag.
The nose gear handle was the worst. He had to put his whole body into it, pulling until his knuckles were white. The release was a violent jolt, followed by a higher-pitched roar as the slipstream caught the nose gear doors.
For three agonizing seconds, there was only the continued rumbling. Then, from the floor beneath them, came the payoff. A solid, bone-jarring THUNK. Followed by another. And after a shuddering pause, the third.
Daniels felt the change instantly, the aircraft wanting to dive as it clawed at the air. He pulled back on the yoke, his muscles straining. “Gear’s down and draggin’,” he grunted. “Now we just have to fly it.”
His eyes instinctively shot to the center console where the three green gear-down indicators should have been glowing. The panel was a black mirror, reflecting his own tense face. A useless, ingrained reflex. There was no electricity, no confirmation. This alone is a state of emergency on a normal day. They had traded three lights for three thunk noises and it would have to be enough. With their glide ratio now so much worse, the runway was rising up to meet them fast.
Travis Daniels found himself actively scanning the horizon for Disney World in service of an irrational need to believe the Magic Kingdom had been spared. The I-4 corridor was on his right, and there they were— optimistic little landmarks poking out of the green. From this far he could indulge the fantasy; nothing was visibly wrong. A guilty bubble of relief worked through him at the thought, all he had time for.
Fantasyland didn’t extend all the way to Orlando however, and something was wrong ahead off the left the aircraft. A disquieting dark smear of haze floated 15-20 nautical miles out.
“Is that more weather at our 10 ‘o clock?” Weather was better than the alternative.
“No, we’ve got smoke, south of the field.” Thorne tried to sound matter of fact. Adding a moment later, “Passing 1,800 feet.”
Going from bad to worse, Travis didn’t like the runway either. The far end looked dirty. Was there equipment downfield? Sometimes at MCO you do see stuff around the far end.
“1400” called Eli. He was shooting glances at the gauge but the bulk of his bandwidth was spent looking for other traffic. Landing in the blind at one of the world’s busiest airports was dangerous with TCAS and engines that worked. Doing it like this was completely absurd.
“1100, you’re center lined on one eight right.”
“God damnit. Traffic on the runway – that’s an aircraft – not moving.” Daniels resisted the fatal urge to pull up and begin some kind of go around, but it was a literal physical effort. The unnatural tension of at once pulling back, and pushing forward on the yoke.
It really didn’t look like this airplane’s seatbelt would hold William’s car seat right, so Joel pulled furiously on the strap to cinch it an extra fraction of an inch while Missy pushed it, hard, into the seat back. He knew she’d helped a hundred insecure new dads check their carseat installations; two years working Labor and Delivery will do that. Except real cars don’t have stupid flopping, clanking belts like this. She wasn’t moving like a nurse now, she was in panicked mom mode and at war with this thing.
“I love you buddy, you’re fine now.” Joel said and kissed his toddler’s head. He squeezed Missy’s hand and made eye contact. She had tears in her eyes but she still looked more pissed off than scared, which he found comforting.
“Brace! Brace! Brace!” Joel listened with ineffective terror to Carla and the rest of the flight crew shouting again and again. Their voices were about the only system working on this piece of shit plane. The Hursts had been told to keep their heads down and hold onto their legs tightly. They did.
“Eight hundred.”
Daniels heard him, but the hydraulics were cratering now that they were under 200 knots– manual reversion now. He heaved against the yoke with all the strength he had to get any response at all. “Help me keep her steady. Controls are barely responding!”
Eli, obliging, pulled hard on the yoke, but it barely budged.
“Five hundred.”
They could see everything now. An A320 was maybe 8,000 feet down the runway, and spun partially around– their left wing jutting towards them like a broadsword. Thank you discount airline for the gaudy bright yellow livery, it helped pick them out through the fogged up windscreen.
“We’re over the threshold. Dump it– now, Eli!” Travis wondered irrationally whether it was physically possible to break the yoke as he forced the nose through the flare with everything he had. The plane slammed into the runway, bounced hard twice. They were down.
Daniels snatched for the speed brake lever and hauled it to UP. This wasn’t a cable-to-panel system, he knew, but held out hope the hydraulics could do something with the spoilers. He heard a couple of panels cough up and settle, but it wasn’t much and he felt even less. “Speedbrakes… not there. No spoilers.”
“Affirm. Lever up, no deployment,” came Eli’s bitter reply.
“Help me hold the nose up, aerobrake– … no, nose down, need weight for brakes!”
“Accumulator only– no anti-skid.” Eli shouted.
The tires shrieked as Daniels stomped his foot for maximum braking– stamp, release, stamp. Each shove as violent as he could manage, his back cracking against the seat. The brakes were worse even than he’d feared and there was no anti-skid at all.
He feared it wouldn’t be enough. Not much point in a 12,000 foot runway if third of it is covered in traffic.
“Max brake,” Daniels grunted, standing on the pedals like an old truck driver. The rudder was going soft as the hydraulics bled away making the nose want to shimmy. “Stay on the centerline for me.”
The runway rushed by in white dashes. Off the left side, a black sign flashed by: 8.
“Eight thousand remaining,” Eli called. His voice sounded tight, but clean now. “Airspeed one-seventy… one-sixty… still high.”
“Come on, come on…” Daniels rocked on the pedals. The 737 answered, but slowly. It was more used up shell than aircraft now.
Another board: 7
“Seven thousand remaining.”
Ahead, the A320 was a blockade. Spun to its left by maybe thirty degrees, leaving her tail and left wing stabbing into their lane.
“I see him,” Daniels said. “Keep the calls coming.”
“Airspeed one-forty… one-thirty.”
At this speed the nose wanted to fly again and the lift was stealing his brakes. Daniels forced it down. They needed weight on the wheels.
“Six thousand,” Eli said as the 6 board slid past. “Braking poor. We are not stopping before him at this rate.”
“Understood.”
“Roll it right?” Eli offered, eyeing the grass and the taxiway.
“Negative– that’s the FBO and fuel trucks,” Daniels shot back. “Nosewheel’s gone anyhow. We stay on the runway.”
“Five thousand remaining,” Eli said. The number sounded way too large for how big the other airplane was getting.
“Give me a stop number,” Daniels said, eyes locked on the yellow tail.
“At this rate?” Eli glanced down to the standby, back out. “You’ll be forty, maybe thirty-five at him.”
“Alright.”
“Speed ninety… eighty-five…” The A320 now filled the windscreen bottom to top. Eli’s voice was higher now. “Four thousand remaining!”
Daniels shoved again. The pedals kicked back once as the brake accumulators dumped the last of their pressure. He felt the decel fall off.
“Brakes fading!”
“Seventy knots!”
The A320’s tail cone was now just there, with rivets and dirt streaks and a registration he couldn’t quite read.
“Sixty knots! We are gonna hit.”
“I’ve got it.”
Daniels squared the yoke to keep the wings level, gave up on finesse, and just stayed on the brakes.
“Fifty… forty-five… forty—”
The whole world was a yellow wall.
“IMPACT—”
The 737’s nose slammed into the Airbus’s tail with a deep, metallic rending that came up through the floor more than the ears. The nose gear punched backward, the cockpit pitched down savagely, overhead panels spat open and dumped binders and checklists onto their heads. The windshield starred but held.
Daniels tasted blood and plastic. “Eli?”
“Ouch,” was all Joel said, and even that quietly. He’d been hurt worse. It was hard to orient himself with a spinning head and ringing ears, but they seemed to have stopped.
“Release seatbelts!”
He recognized the slightly angry accent.
Missy, a step ahead of him as usual, already had screaming William out of his carseat and held tightly against her. She was looking around the dusty cabin, where there was as much crying as screaming now. They recognized the sound of people in pain. Not everyone had been as lucky as them.
“Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!”
That voice Joel didn’t recognize. It was too smoky to see to the front of the plane, but he had no doubt it was a pilot. That was a command from somebody who gave commands every day.
“Leave everything! Come this way!” Ruiz again– her commanding tone cutting through screaming.
“You guys okay?” Joel asked Missy who was getting into the aisle.
“I think William’s fine.”
Florida sun made the ultimate exit sign. The main door was open up ahead where a flight attendant they didn’t recognize was half shoving passengers down a slide. He must have opened it about the time they got to the aisle– even from back here Joel had heard the whoompf of the gas inflating.
There were maybe seven people between them and the exit. The new crew member was shouting now. “Jump and slide! Run! Move away from the aircraft!”
“I can hold him on the way down.” Joel said, shocked how high off the ground they were, and realizing for the first time that there was a serious fire out well beyond the slide, coming out of the yellow jet. I thought this plane was silver?
“No way. Let’s go Joel!” Missy emphasized “go” with angry finality. With that she slid to the tarmac, hugging William to her chest.
“Keep your feet together. Move away from the fire when you’re down,” said the crew member. Oh that one’s a man, Joel realized, and obeyed.
The slide did its job; he was down. A strange boxy-looking green-yellow firetruck was a hundred feet back from the fire, circled by a big crew working two hoses to knock down the flames, thick smoke drifting away from them. Another big truck, its hood up, sat useless much further back.
“This way! Keep moving! Get off the runway! Over here!”
Firefighters in reflective suits were waving fluorescent orange paddles to get people’s attention and show where to go.
Joel and Missy rushed onto the grass infield between runways, carrying nothing with them except the baby. There was a medical triage setup here near another vehicle. Tarps, extinguishers, and mass casualty kits.
Spinning back to the scene, Joel finally understood. There were two planes. They’d smashed into the back of a yellow one, which was now burning worse than before— the nose of their 737 was crumpled into it. On their jet, the evac slides were still in use. On the flaming yellow jet, empty slides were fluttering in the wind in surrender.
Daniels stood beside the crumpled nose of his aircraft, watching the last passengers slide down. His legs were shaking– adrenaline finally catching up. Eli appeared beside him, a gash on his forehead but walking.
“One sixty-five souls,” Eli said quietly. “Three didn’t make it. Row 4, Row 9, and….” He gestured at the A320, where firefighters were pulling a body from the cockpit.
Daniels looked at his watch, his father’s old Omega, still ticking. 14 minutes and 23 seconds from flash to stop. They’d been lucky. To the north, another smoke column was rising— someone who hadn’t been.
“Captain?” A firefighter in an aluminized suit approached. “We need to clear the runway. We’ve got more coming in.”
Daniels looked up. High above, he could just make out another aircraft, silent and gliding.