It was six-thirty in the morning when Cash Airlines Flight 4892 was finally within range of Los Angeles International Airport. The flight from Sao Paulo to LA had taken between twelve to thirteen hours, and a backup crew had flown the plane for half the duration of the flight to let the primary crew get some more needed sleep before they finally returned to the cockpit and land the plane. However, when the pilot of Flight 4892 requested for permission to land on the airport, they received a reply that they were certainly not expecting.
"Cash 4892, LAX," the air traffic controller replied, "you are to enter a holding pattern. We are simply overloaded at the moment."
Captain Miley Stewart of Flight 4892 looked at her copilot before turning her attention back to the ATC. "Say that again, LAX," she said. "You're overloaded?"
"Roger that, Cash 4892," the ATC replied. You arrived at a very busy time for us right now. We got a lot of other flights being diverted to us from San Diego and San Francisco."
"What kind of problems?"
"We don't know much of anything yet, and what we're hearing is all conflicting anyway. They're claiming everything from a strike to a riot to an earthquake. That's California for you."
"How's that gonna affect us? Our flight, I mean."
"We're sorting out all the flight as we speak, 4892. You're all gonna be landed as soon as possible once you're all sorted out."
Miley was not reassured much by the ATC's words, and judging by the looks on the rest of her flight crew, neither were they. But at least it was better than nothing at all. "Roger that, LAX," Miley told the ATC. "We'll be going quiet for now, but we will still be in touch." To her copilot, she asked, "What do you think, Alex?"
"I think it's really something serious," First Officer Alex Russo replied. "The ATCs take their jobs very seriously, and there's no way any of them will try to pull a prank on a flight crew. Worst case scenario is that it'll take them at least an hour or more to do all this 'sorting out.' At most it'll take them an hour and a half, but by then we should already be on the ground."
"Okay," Miley nodded. "We're agreed in that. Sonny, how's our fuel situation?"
Flight Engineer Sonny Munroe turned to look at her instruments before facing Miley once again. "We've got at least ninety minutes to a hundred minutes of fuel left," she said in reply.
"More than enough," Alex added.
Miley nodded. "All right, girls," she said. "We'll just keep this holding pattern until we finally get clearance. That okay with the both of you?" Alex and Sonny nodded their agreement. Miley then switched to the plane's PA system. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking," she said. "We'll be experiencing a slight delay in our arrival today due to a situation that has developed on the ground…"
An hour after Flight 4892 had entered a holding pattern in the skies above Los Angeles, Miley asked the ATC once again, "LAX, Cash 4892. How are we going with that clearance?"
"Roger that, Cash 4892, it's coming along," the ATC replied. "You are number fifteen to land on runway seven left."
"Sweet niblets," Miley muttered to herself. "Number fifteen to land. What else could go wrong?"
"Miles, the weather radar's picking up a big low pressure area just off the coast of LA," Alex said. "It's gonna be over LAX in five minutes or less. And our pattern's gonna touch the edge of the area, so we're gonna be in for some rain."
"Oh, this is unbelievable," Miley muttered. You just had to tempt fate, didn't you, she thought to herself.
They entered the rainstorm that had developed from the low-pressure area just four minutes later, just as Alex had predicted. As the wipers wiped off the rain that was pattering away at the cockpit's windows, Miley contemplated calling LAX again about their clearance, or just up and declaring an emergency. Finally, she decided to give the tower one more chance, and she switched frequencies and said, "LAX, Cash 4892. How goes the clearance?"
"Cash Airlines 4892, this is LAX," a different voice, a different ATC, said. "You are cleared as number sixteen to land on runway seven left."
"Say what!" This time Miley didn't even bother going off the comms. "We were number fifteen to land on LAX just five minutes ago! Now you're telling me that we've gone down to number sixteen?"
"We apologize for the inconvenience, Cash 4892," the ATC said, not sounding genuinely contrite at least to Miley's ears. "We are handling such a large amount of traffic right now, and the rainstorm's also added more delays to the landings."
"Well, you better get your stuff sorted together, and soon!"
"Is it that time of the month again for her?" Sonny asked Alex, nodding towards Miley's general direction. She took care to cover the microphone of her headset, but she was sure that the cockpit voice recorder would still be able to pick up what she just said.
"With Miley, you never know," Alex whispered back.
"Jesus Christ," Miley muttered to herself. "Things are going to shit down there. Five more minutes, and I'm going to declare an emergency. Get the cabin crew ready."
Beck Oliver, Cash Airlines Senior Air Steward, picked up the telephone mounted on the wall separating the front galley from the passenger compartment, and said, "Yeah?"
"Beck, it's Alex," Russo said from the cockpit. "There's all sorts of shit going down on the ground, and the captain's planning on declaring an emergency just to cut ahead of the line."
"How are we doing, exactly?"
"Well, we're not yet really low on fuel, but we're certainly about to hit it," Alex replied truthfully. "We're just about to fly on fumes now. Miley wants everyone back there to get ready in case we do go for broke."
"Got that." Beck then hung up, and then he called over the rest of the cabin crew. There were twelve of them in total, three men and nine women. Beck explained the situation to them as best as he could, and while they were all in agreement that the situation was alarming to say the least, they also agreed that there was no need to alarm the passengers just yet.
"Sonny, how much fuel do we have left?"
Sonny made a tutting sound. "Something's definitely wrong here, Miles," she replied. "According to the math, we should still have twenty to thirty minutes of fuel left. But every time I run them now, it says that we've only got ten minutes left."
"Are you sure you're doing the math right?" Miley asked. "Are you carrying the one, multiplying before adding, and all that?"
"Of course I am," Sonny replied, a little defensively. "That's why all this isn't making any sense. The math says that we've got at least twenty minutes' flying time. But the plane is saying that we've only got ten minutes left."
"That's probably a fault in the instrumentation," Alex added.
"Okay, that settles it," Miley said. "Now we're really in an emergency. Shit! Shit just escalated quickly. This was just supposed to be cutting in line. Now it's a real thing." Miley keyed the mike and said, to the LAX tower controller, "LAX, Cash 4892; we are declaring an emergency. There appears to be a problem with our instrumentation. According to our instruments, we only have ten minutes of fuel left, but our flight engineer's saying that we should still have twenty to thirty minutes left. We're not gonna take the risk."
"Cash 4892, LAX, we copy your emergency," the controller replied. "You are now to enter a holding pattern around waypoint NASSER, on flight level 120." Flight level 120 translated to twelve thousand feet.
"Roger that, LAX," Miley replied. "4892 out." To Alex, she said, "Get the cabin crew ready to prep the passengers. This is gonna be a fast descent."
As Alex got in contact with the cabin crew, Miley turned on the FASTEN SEATBELTS sign. "Seatbelts, ladies," she said. Aside from the conventional seatbelts that went around the waist, the pilots' seats were also equipped with four-point harnesses that resembled those worn by racecar drivers. "Ready?"
"Like hell I am," Alex muttered. Even in an aerial emergency, Alex's natural sarcasm still managed to make its presence felt among the rest of the flight crew.
Miley leaned towards the autopilot controls and turned a white knob. Beside it, a red display began counting down from the 14000 that it had been initially displaying down to 12000. The 747's nose began to tilt to a shallow downward angle. The four Pratt and Whitney engines began to whine as more air was forced into their intakes by the descent. But then suddenly, an alarm went off inside the cockpit. It wasn't a very loud alarm, meaning it wasn't a master alarm or something else that was serious.
Alex looked at the numerous instrument dials in the middle of the cockpit. "Engine four is losing power," she said. "Nope, make that engine four just lost power. Oh, man, this is not looking good."
"Shut it down," Miley ordered. Sonny reached out and lowered the throttle for the number four engine down to the IDLE position. "We'll wait for the plane to level out first, and then we'll try to restart it." The three of them waited as the altimeter settled to twelve thousand feet. As the autopilot held the plane level in the altitude assigned to it by the pilots, Alex and Sonny went over the proper procedures for restarting a 747 engine.
"Okay, let's try for twenty percent," Alex said.
Sonny moved forward the throttle a little bit. The central instrument display showed that engine four was now producing twenty percent of the thrust that it was capable of producing. "Okay, let's take it up to fifty percent now," Alex said. But just before Sonny's hand could move the throttle forward once more, the engine lost power once again. This time, despite their best efforts, the engine wouldn't start again. "It just won't start," Alex finally said in defeat.
"Okay, forget about engine four for now," Miley said. "We still have three working engines. We can fly on three engines, right? Besides, we only got a few more hundred miles to fly, and then this will finally be over. We can do this."
Seven minutes later, the crew could finally see the landing lights leading them towards LAX and safety. "Gear down," Miley commanded. Alex reached for the landing gear lever and lowered it. Slowly, the lights indicating that the landing gear was fully deployed and locked in place went on one by one. For a brief moment, the crew let a bit of optimism into their minds. Maybe they were gonna make it out of this emergency alive and unscathed, after all.
Suddenly, the other three engines went silent too. The entire cockpit went dark now that there was nothing to provide power to the plane, and everyone's ears rang from the silence, after having become used to the background hum of the engines for almost thirteen hours. Everything electronic within the plane, from the lights to the instruments to the flight computer itself, went out. The sudden silence was very eerie, and it set off a primal fear within the hearts and minds of everyone onboard the plane, both passengers and crew.
Miley looked at Alex in disbelief. Alex looked at Sonny in terror. Sonny looked at Miley in horror.
"We're fucked," Miley thought as she saw the ground below rush up very quickly towards, as if eager to claim its latest victim.
There was a horrible crunching sound as metal made contact with earth. And then came the earsplitting sound of metal being torn apart, and just as Miley Stewart felt that she would to tear her ears off just to keep from hearing that horrifying sound again, the world thankfully went black.
A/N: Once again, any comments and commentary are very much welcome!