“You think we should bring her down at the nearest airport?”
Quinton looked at his dials and meters. The spindles spun and flickered without any sense of reason. They were flying blind. “I’m beginning to think so.”
“Okay,” said James. “I’ll try and contact ground support at Paris. They should be able to receive us.”
Quinton nodded his agreement and continued to examine his controls. The autopilot navigation system was displaying random error codes in sequence, as if it could not decide what its problem was. The dials continued to spin and the altitude indicator seemed to think that the plane had banked to the left 90-degrees. In twenty years of flying, Quinton had not witnessed such a catastrophic failure of instrumentation.
“I can’t reach anyone,” said James without any sign of exaggeration.
Quinton looked at him. “What?”
James thumbed at buttons and switches on the console but gave up with concerned sigh. “I’m getting nothing but static.”
“That’s nonsense. De Gaulle is only thirty-miles away.
“They’re not responding. I’m not even sure they’re reading us.”
Quinton did not like this at all. “Okay, we’ll hold position in the area for thirty minutes. Keep trying to reach someone. Try Heathrow.”
James nodded uncertainly and went back to twisting dials and flicking switches. Quinton would have liked to have inputted some commands into the guidance system and gone and stretched his legs, but the way things were, meant that he had to remain at the plane’s manual controls. He steered in a steady curve, planning to circle until they spoke to someone on the ground.
As was natural to an airline pilot in the 21st Century, Quinton began to worry about the bogeyman of all frequent flyers. He wondered whether his aircraft had been the target of terrorists. Had the on-board systems been tampered with in the effort to bring the plane down? Was this just step one of 9/11 part two?
No. Something told Quinton that his concerns were misplaced. For all the effort and planning it would take to disable a plane’s systems so entirely, it would be just as easy to plant a bomb on board or hijack the cockpit. Whatever was going on here had to be down to some other cause. Quinton couldn’t understand why, but he felt that it had something to do with the weather.
A knock at the cockpit’s door startled Quinton and he spun around on his cabin chair. After a hostess identified herself, he pressed the lock release and a red light above the door turned green. Samantha entered with a mug of coffee for both him and James. Coffee was as necessary to a pilot’s job as aircraft fuel and he couldn’t have welcomed anything more at that moment. He took one of the steaming mugs from the hostess and thanked her. She looked back at him with a scrunched up expression that he supposed meant she had an issue to raise with him.
“What is it?” he asked her.
She took in a breath as though she had many words to get out. “It’s really bizarre. I don’t even know how to explain it really. At first it was just one or two passengers but then more and more people started to complain, and now I think it’s everyone.”
“Spit it out,” Quinton told her.
“Okay, okay. Well, it would appear that anything electrical has gone a bit haywire. The passenger’s phones, ipads, mp3 players, et cetera have all gone a bit…funny.”
Quinton raised an eyebrow. “Funny?”
Samantha nodded. “All the displays have gone squiggly as if something is interfering with them.”
Quinton turned around and looked at his own malfunctioning gadgets. Something wasn’t adding up here, and anything unknown aboard a plane could be extremely dangerous. He leant forward and pressed the intercom button. The normal ding! sound did not occur. In fact nothing happened at all.
“Damn it! The intercom is down. Samantha could you inform the passengers to turn off all electrical devices. Tell them that…we’re passing through an electrical storm and leaving them on could permanently damage them. Also, please inform them that we will be performing an unscheduled landing due to adverse weather conditions.”
Samantha nodded, but didn’t seem comforted by his suggestions. Quinton couldn’t blame her, he wasn’t either. He turned to his co-pilot. “You got anything, James?”
James’ bleak expression told him the answer was no.
Quinton bit at his lip. There were no protocols for this. In the event of system failure, the plane needed to land, without question, but the danger of coming down unguided in the thick snow blizzard that hid beneath the cloud cover would be a near suicide-mission. The situation was dire, and as Captain it was his responsibility to decide what to do next.
“Okay, James, enough. We’re going to bring her down.”
The co-pilot’s eyes went wide. “We’re going to land blind?”
“What choice do we have? I would rather that then run the risk of falling out of the sky if the engines fail.”
James nodded. Quinton knew the other man thought he was right. It just didn’t make the decision any easier.
“Okay,” said James. “Reducing speed. Descending to 20,000 feet.”
Quinton prayed that the plane’s landing gear would deploy when approaching the runway. Being mechanical, he hoped they would. After all, the flaps and rudders were all responding.
Many tense minutes of ensuing silence were eventually broken when James spoke again. “Cruising at 20,000 feet. Runway is approximately twenty miles out.”
“Reduce altitude to 10,000 feet.”