Read We Will Be Crashing Shortly Online
Authors: Hollis Gillespie
“Why not inflate it all the way?” LaVonda asked of Trixi’s life vest.
I tried to smile reassuringly. “She weighs too little, you know, so if the ocean is rough, you don’t want her too buoyant in the water.” In other words, she could get tossed around and end up floating face-down otherwise. LaVonda’s eyes widened, and the clarity of our situation set in again.
I saw that Flo was instructing Malcolm to likewise situate Captain Beefheart in his own life vest, so next I went to Officer Ned. He was breathing rapidly, and the new pillow had already soaked through with blood. I quickly replaced it with another one, draped a life vest over his head, then helped him secure the straps around his waist. I showed him the inflation tabs and told him to yank on them only as he exited the aircraft. Each vest contained small CO
2
canisters designed to immediately inflate the flotation chambers, exactly like the kind you find in automobile airbags.
I put my hand on his good shoulder and he put his hand over mine. Looking into my eyes, he smiled pallidly and said, “How many crashes does this make now, April? Five? You always make it through, April. Don’t change now. Make sure you make it through.”
I embraced him as best I could what with his shot-up arm and all, and assured him I’d make it through. I knew he was telling me to save myself, to not risk my safety for his sake. Despite my assurances to him, I could no easier leave him—or any of them—behind than I could perform eye surgery on myself. It wasn’t in my nature. I’m sure it wasn’t in theirs either.
Thus confident everyone was as best prepared for impact as one could hope, I kicked into gear. I had about four minutes to grab as many supplies as possible. I started by trying to gather more crew life vests, only to discover they were all gone from the front closet. I pulled what I could from under some seats and tossed them into the cockpit, along with the remnants of the emergency medical kit, the onboard defibrillators, and every flashlight from beneath every jumpseat on the aircraft. Next I grabbed Molly’s large rucksack to gather more things. It was heavier than I remembered from back when I was trying to keep her from getting sucked out of the plane. But I was full of adrenaline then, as opposed to now, when the adrenaline had worked its way out the other side of me, leaving nothing but a simple resolution to complete each step as it came to me.
I stuffed a supply of Kotex from the lavatory into the bag (they make excellent bandages), then the soap dispenser, then the two rolls of toilet paper. I rifled through every galley cubby within reach of the cockpit, emptying them of anything that could remotely be of use: latex gloves, alcohol swabs, aspirin, Band-Aids, even an ancient jar of cocktail olives. I zipped the rucksack shut and clipped it to the D-ring protruding from the bustle at the right front door. This door would be our only option for an organized escape, as it still contained a slide raft engineered to deploy upon impact with the water.
Otis’s voice suddenly blared over the PA system. “Thirty seconds to impact. Assume the brace position.”
I stepped inside the cockpit, latched the door against the wall so it stayed open, then turned to look back at the cabin. It was this image, at this precise moment, that I swore I’d carry with me for the rest of my life, if there was even to be one. Each face before me—each dear face—ogled me with hope and fear. Anita held Malcolm’s hand tightly against her chest, her cheeks stained with tears but her lips set in a firm line of determination. Between them lay Captain Beefheart, calmly wagging his tail under their protective hands. LaVonda gazed at me with heartbreakingly false confidence, as though attempting to comfort me—me, who got her into this and was keeping her from her home and loved ones right now. Tiny Trixibelle, attuned with canine intuition, shivered through her life vest in LaVonda’s protective embrace. Officer Ned sat across the aisle from them, his head back, exhausted from loss of blood. He watched me through hooded eyes, his breath shallow. A smile softened his face.
What’s that?
I wondered. Then it occurred to me. He was proud of me. This man, who could be in his executive office right now, polishing his prized motorcycle boots or joyously ordering people around, or with equal joy grumbling at LaVonda with false curmudgeonry,
was proud of me
. It was enough to make my heart break like a bone.
Then I looked at Malcolm. My best friend. He was such a good friend, in fact, that he reliably made me reconsider my lack of faith in humanity. If not for Malcolm I’d have probably been found face-down in a bathtub years ago. We were so different, the two of us—me the progeny of blue-collars, him of blue bloods—yet life without him would be inconceivable. He looked back at me with an expression weighted with guilt. Tears poured down his cheeks, and his shoulders shook. Anita patted his chest in an attempt to be comforting. Following her suit, I tried to smile at him upliftingly, but a sob caught in my throat instead.
Suddenly Flo appeared before me. “Kid,” she said, embracing me briefly, “it’s go time.” She took her jumpseat, secured her safety straps, and began calling out her crash commands.
“Brace! Brace! Heads down! Stay low!”
I hurriedly slipped into the captain’s seat and strapped myself in. We were mere feet from the ocean. An odd thought entered my mind at that moment:
Wow, look how blue it is.
It was literally the color of my mother’s eyes. Otis let out another hoot like this was fun for him, then turned to me and laughed, “You’re my left eye, Crash!”
I felt the saltwater mist hit me through the opening in the cockpit window. Otis began the countdown. “Impact in minus five seconds . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”
The left wing was the first to break off. It hit a wave and took with it a large part of the starboard side of the aircraft. The sound was monstrous as the plane tore in half. Then the right wing sank into the sea like a keel at the bottom of a ship, briefly upending the remainder of the fuselage so that we hovered cruelly above the ocean before crashing back into it with the might of two planets colliding. I was alarmed by the sound of screaming until I realized it was my own.
“Brace! Brace! Heads down! Stay low!”
Then came the water. It gushed through the cockpit window with the force of a fire hose. I released my seatbelts and stood, only to have my feet slip out from beneath me as the flood of water carried me out of the cockpit and down the aisle.
“Release seatbelts! Get up! Get out!”
I kept screaming. Flo was already out of her jumpseat opening the aircraft door. The slide raft should have been deployed as soon as the girt bar separated from the door bustle. That was the point. It should have been automatic. But things rarely go as they should. Instead, water gushed through the opening, pushing the flaccid slide raft aside like it was a vertical window blind.
“Get up! Get out!”
I couldn’t even tell anymore if it was me or Flo screaming the commands, or perhaps it was the two of us now, one voice in unison. LaVonda sailed past me down the aisle, still clutching Trixibelle. I grabbed the collar of her life vest and held on. My foot gained purchase against a seat rail and I used my body to block the flow of any more people down the aisle. The point was to exit through the front forward door and into the raft, but I began to question this logic since the last I saw the raft didn’t inflate.
An explosion deafened me even further. I realized it was the sound of the CO
2
canisters detonating the air into the raft. Flo must have found the manual inflation handle that is present on all slide rafts in the event they didn’t deploy automatically. I felt a moment of relief only to be crushed again by the sound of LaVonda screaming.
“Trixi!” she wailed. The explosion had unnerved LaVonda and caused her grip to slip on the dog. Trixi yelped as she washed away from us and out the torn opening of the aircraft. “Trixi!” LaVonda cried again, reaching away from me toward the dog’s direction.
“LaVonda, no!” I screamed. She was trying to extricate herself from my grip, trying to go after Trixi. “Please, don’t.” But it was no use. Within seconds she had writhed herself free and was washed out into the ocean after Trixi. I cried her name as I heard Anita and Malcolm cry mine. The force of the water was crushing. It pounded me like a ton of gravel as it washed through the fuselage. It was impossible to struggle against it to make my way toward the others, and just as impossible to keep my grip on the seat railing.
Suddenly I felt someone beside me. It was Officer Ned sliding past me down the aisle. He grabbed onto my waist with both arms. The weight of him forced loose my grip on the seat rail, and my fingers opened like reluctant flower petals. Soon we were both awash in the rushing water. It startled me that the cabin was completely submerged now, and here I’d forgotten to take a last gulp of air before going under. My lungs screamed in pain as we passed through the torn aircraft and into the open sea. When I looked above me I realized I didn’t have near enough air in my lungs to last me to the surface. Even though Officer Ned gripped my vest with his injured arm and flailed toward the surface with the other, I knew I wouldn’t make it. The last thing I remembered before feeling the water begin to fill my chest was the sight of the bottom of the raft as it floated what seemed like a mile above us.
Thank God somebody made it
, I thought. Then the world went white.
“Airline Heiress, Unofficial Mascot Among the Missing in Disappeared Jet”
April 4, 2014
by Clay Roundtree
It’s either official or far from it. Whatever the case, the ongoing mystery surrounding WorldAir’s disappearing airplanes took a new twist today when WorldAir spokesperson Rand Appleton confirmed reports that April Mae Manning, the temporarily deposed heiress to controlling stock in the company, along with the service dog Captain Beefheart, the airline’s beloved unofficial mascot, is among those missing aboard WorldAir flight 9000 (also codeshared as Peacock Airways flight 0001), which disappeared over the Caribbean Sea two days ago after departing Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport for Grand Cayman. This brings the list of those passengers missing on WorldAir flights in the past year to a grand total of 272, a number that includes flight 0392, a 747 that vanished off the coast of Australia November 18.
This list remains frustratingly unofficial, though, due to the fact that one name on the passenger manifest—Morton Colgate—was discovered to belong to a body at the North Fulton County coroner’s office that had been dead for days prior to the plane’s disappearance. Another person on the departure report, crew member Teddy LaVista, was found to be alive and well and incarcerated at the Fulton County prison on drunk driving charges.
Appleton also confirmed that Ash Manning, April’s adoptive father and the airplane’s pilot, who had been in a raft off the coast of Cancún, claimed in his statement to the NTSB that he was the sole survivor of the L-1011 wreckage.
“His statement reads, ‘Everyone else died on impact,’” Appleton said of Captain Manning’s statement. “That is a verbatim quote.”
Copilot John Dyer, a Grand Cayman national, was found floating in a life vest a half a mile away from the raft. He remains in a hospital in Cancún, Mexico, recovering from exposure and deep lacerations along his left thigh. Peacock Airways spokesperson Paul Packard reports that Dyer is unavailable to provide either a statement to the NTSB or a comment to the media at this time—other than what Dyer was recorded saying when the Mexican coast guard pulled him into the rescue vessel: “That prick Manning tried to feed me to the sharks!”
Dyer is not the only one skeptical of Mr. Manning’s integrity, or his assertions regarding the survivors of the flight. The most vocal is Elizabeth Coleman, April’s mother and Ash Manning’s ex-wife. “Don’t believe a word that bastard says,” she insists of Mr. Manning. “Don’t you dare stop searching the ocean for that plane! I know my daughter. I know she’s alive.”
The L-1011 aircraft, at the time of its disappearance, was being ferried to its new base in Grand Cayman after its sale by WorldAir to Peacock Airways. It vanished from the radar thirty-seven minutes after takeoff. At the same time all cockpit communication ceased. Search vessels from several countries were dispatched to an expanse of the Caribbean Sea between Cancún, Mexico, Nueva Gerona, Cuba and the Cayman Islands. The area was triangulated according to a radar blip believed to be the last captured from the injured aircraft.
Update: “Former WorldAir Pilot Ash Manning an FBI Informant”
5:16
P.M.
Ash Manning, the former WorldAir pilot pulled from the sea yesterday after losing control of the L-1011 passenger jet he was piloting, was revealed to be an FBI informant after documents and intercompany emails leaked to the media surfaced this afternoon. The emails detail Manning’s FBI-sanctioned involvement with a suspected counterfeit airplane-parts smuggling operation headquartered in Atlanta in which a network of airline and airport employees were involved. The emails reference Manning’s release from detainment after the crash of WorldAir’s flight 1021 in Albuquerque last year, a condition of which was that he turn State’s witness against those involved in the hijacking and further assist in the agency’s investigation into the Atlanta-based smuggling ring.
In one email exchange between Manning and WorldAir CEO Vernon Wadley, Manning discloses that his ex-wife, mother of April Mae Manning, the teenager set to inherit controlling stock in the airline, had confided to him during their marriage that April was conceived via in vitro fertilization using donated sperm. This email is dated two days before April Manning was forcibly removed from the airline’s executive offices pending confirmation of her lineage to late engineer/inventor Roy Coleman.
The world was still white, and I still floated in it, but in a different way than when I was floating in the ocean. This world was warmer, for one, and so bright. I felt a familiar hand caress my face. I kept my eyes closed and smiled.