J.P. Hesford
I
The woman arrives at seat 3K, stows her carry-on in the overhead, and slides smoothly into the leather seat. She places a chestnut-colored Coach briefcase bag at her feet and accepts a dampened washcloth from the flight attendant, still grateful for the amenity despite her status as a veteran first-class flier. She gives her face a gentle wipe with the cool cloth, which brings a moment’s relief from thoughts that have weighed on her throughout the day.
Engaging with her partners and the executive board was always a tinged experience, like drinking clean water from a rusty cup. Her position at the firm is secure, she leads a standout division. But security isn’t tranquility. Despite her successes over the past decade, there is an edge to every meeting, a lingering undertone in every conference call. A residue from the past, recognized but ignored. To others, a bruise. To her, a fracture. Press on and persevere or speak out now and resolve? She tables the question. Better left for mid-flight, after a cocktail, or two.
***
The aft pressure bulkhead of the Boeing 747 the woman flies on sits like a giant aluminum bowl rotated onto its side, sealing off the back of the pressurized cabin. It comprises 18 pie-shaped bays that arc inward and converge at the bottom of the bowl. Rib-stiffened with radial reinforcements, it measures more than 13 feet in diameter at its widest point and is mounted just forward of the plane’s massive vertical stabilizer –the tail fin, in layman’s terms.
Hidden from passengers, the aft pressure bulkhead is the exclusive realm of specialized airframe mechanics and company tech reps. Low on its surface, where the dome curves downward toward the tail cone floor, an incongruency. A repaired section, no larger than a trash can lid, implemented after a long-ago flight when the aircraft landed hard with a higher-than-normal pitch angle, causing a tail strike that fractured the bulkhead. A major repair but a minor blemish. After tens of years and thousands of flights, the added metal has lost its sheen and collected the usual grease and dust smudges that adorn the rest of the bulkhead. It attracts no special attention.
II
She finishes her Manhattan before the aircraft reaches 10,000 feet. Seat K on the far right, for a northbound flight. The glaring light of an imminent sunset unseen to the left, a cerulean sea out the window on her right. She reverses the arrangement on southerly flights. Impatience gets the better of her, and she pulls her laptop from the briefcase and connects to the inflight wi-fi. The “question” remains tabled for the moment, but she has a mind to raise it closer to the surface. Or address it head on. There is nothing specific that’s drawn her focus to the issue, just a constant nag she’s grown weary of enduring. Let’s give it one more drink and another 30 minutes.
She is a few years removed from 50, with no kids left in the house and an ex-husband who is pleasantly out of the picture. Taxes up to date, finances in great shape, and a love life she can live with. She stays in close touch with girlfriends, always a priority and always a refreshing break from the grind. Everything in good order.
But the unfinished business that refuses to dislodge itself has begun taking more energy to ignore than address. She relents.
Pulling up a fresh draft email, she considers the potential recipients. A targeted group, fully in the know, and she could be oblique. A wider group, aware of the gist but not the details, would require a more direct approach. She is courting exposure and vulnerability either way, but the bone must be reset. Circumspection has always been a challenge, so she chooses the wider distro list, then pulls her fingers from the keyboard and sits back to think.
***
The Boeing standard for remediation of a fractured aft pressure bulkhead calls for one continuous doubler plate bridging the cracked area. Fastener rows adhering the plate to the bulkhead are required to match the original load path. Yet, there they are–two separate splice plates, side‑by‑side with a butt joint between them, and misaligned fastener rows. The two repair plates look good, as sturdy as the day they were installed. They’ve passed inspection after inspection. Not cursory, these are detailed, granular level assessments conducted by certified technicians and signed off by highly experienced quality assurance inspectors. But beneath the repair plates, at an innocuous rivet hole in the actual bulkhead frame, a crescent shaped pinhole.
Miniscule. There are greater flaws on the face of Michaelangelo’s David, which also go unnoticed. The pressure exerted against the aluminum alloy of the bulkhead as the aircraft reaches a cruising altitude of 35 or 40 thousand feet is manageable, imperfections are tolerated. Individually. But successively, the toll compounds. The pinhole becomes a crack starter notch. Then a crack, which grows. A fraction of a millimeter here and there. Outside air temperature and the corresponding air density factor in. A morning flight, no change. An evening flight, another hundredth of a millimeter. Veneered by a perfectly intact repair plate, nothing seems amiss.
III
She types deliberately and with ease. No need to vacillate over word choice, her thoughts become sentences without effort. She seeks resolution and her writing demonstrates resolve. She is measured, not reckless. But she’s not skirting. There is no resentment, just a reckoning of events and characterizations that have gained unwarranted legitimacy through years of neglect. The peeling back begins to sustain itself and the freshness of specificity serves as a tonic. Words and phrases that were previously off-limits become surprisingly easy to enunciate. She re-affirms “the definitive finding that no embezzlement took place” and explains the “the calculated decision to forego judicial proceedings” in detail. She peppers her narrative with data from the intervening decade: sales figures, revenue, shareholder value. Illustration over justification, she is never defensive.
But she is treading a fault-line, she reminds herself. And concludes that straddling it would feel safe but this was no time to equivocate. So she edges away from the middle ground. Right but not righteous, tone matters. “…courses of action that have since vindicated the decision-making process and can now be said to retroactively exculpate parties upon whom censure was erroneously applied”–she particularly enjoys that line. Ungainly, but perhaps the grammatical stiffness demonstrates her neutrality? Nothing personal here.
A voice on the intercom coincides with the completion of her email. The captain announces level-off at cruise altitude and permission to move about the cabin. She didn’t need that second drink after all.
***
As the aircraft climbs and the pressure differential between the air in front of and behind the aft bulkhead grows, the crack responds. Predictably, at first. Another 1/100th of a millimeter, then another. A stable fatigue regime. But the crack then unexpectedly splits and branches outward into a V-shape. Stuttering fractions are abandoned and the new twin cracks gorge themselves on a buffet of millimeters. The magnitude is still small relative to the size of the repair and the bulkhead; the V-shape couldn’t yet hold a dime.
But the physics are ominous. As the branches of the crack widen, they create a triangle of critical stress intensity between them. The misaligned rivets on the butt plate, unhelpful before, are now completely useless. The integrity of the massive bulkhead frame is solely dependent on the tensile strength of its aluminum alloy, which is being incrementally reduced by the advancing and spreading cracks.
As the aircraft levels off at cruise altitude, the progression of each crack regularizes. The repaired section of the aft pressure bulkhead, hidden under the splice plates connected by a faulty butt joint, is, effectively, becoming unzipped.
IV
She re-reads the email and considers revisions, then decides against and hits send. She checks her watch, calculating that everyone on her distro list will still be in the office or assiduously monitoring their inbox from home. She expects the first response within minutes and flags down a flight attendant while she waits. Time for the second drink.
Her inbox chimes and her confidence wavers. Here we go. The sender is a colleague, friendly. A fellow vice president from a related division with whom she is on good terms. The email contains nothing of substance, just questions. Where are you right now? Can you call me asap, or can I call you? What is this? Unsettling. No affirmation or hints of support, and this from an ally. From the far back of the plane, nearly a football field away, a muffled boom. Like a drink cart slamming into something. She’s mildly alarmed but quickly distracted. Chime, pause, chime, chime. Her inbox pulsates.
***
Sixty-five rows to the rear, the boom is anything but muffled. The fatigue cracks accelerate beyond the stable regime and become overload cracks, curving outward toward the highest available stress path across a final fast-fracture zone. Rivet holes elongate and tear out. In a matter of microseconds, the unzipping is complete. The repaired section of the bulkhead and two adjacent pie-shaped bays are breached.
A pressure differential of 8 psi, which equates to a half ton of force per square foot, causes a jet of high-pressure cabin air to rip through the bulkhead into the unpressurized tail section. There is a vent door on the floor of the 747, designed to relieve a sudden surge of excess pressure before damage to flight control components can occur. It opens, but is unequal to the task.
An 890-pound auxiliary power unit, located just aft of the bulkhead, is torn free from its mountings and smashes through the aft torque box, shredding all four of the aircraft’s hydraulic fluid lines in the process. Ailerons, elevators, and rudder –all of the plane’s flight control surfaces–immediately cease to function. The central nervous system is dead.
V
She scans the first five or six emails in her inbox. More of the same. Concern, confusion, alarm. She recalibrates. They’re all missing the point. She cues up a “reply all” email and then thinks the better of it. Whose opinion matters right now? The firm’s general counsel, who responded in private with a brief, even-handed text, could reset the conversation. She is momentarily reassured, optimistic.
Sonia, sorry to have flipped the lid on Pandora’s Box, but I think things are needlessly accelerating in an unhelpful direction here. I am not trying to justify or mitigate past events. I am simply summarizing where things stand at present and how we can shift perspective on the issue. Anxious for a rational take, and quickly. Can you provide? Confident your voice would carry weight.
She takes a gulp from drink number two and registers the aircraft’s motion. The end of a long slow climb transitioning into a gentle descent, with a noticeable roll to the right. An odd deviation from steady flight at cruise altitude, but the seat belt light hasn’t illuminated and the masks haven’t dropped. Something is happening but it must not be an emergency. She can hear grumbling from the rear of the plane and is grateful to be seated so far forward.
***
The captain leans in, checks his primary instruments, and then focuses on the annunciator panel. Diagnose the problem.Two or three hundred routine flights for every emergency. Industry standard. And “emergency” doesn’t automatically trigger alarm. Serious system malfunctions in a modern 747 are vanishingly rare. In-flight abnormalities are more often valuable training opportunities for young first officers than causes for alarm.
His complacency is short-lived. He pulls back and left on the yoke and is greeted with a complete lack of response. A wrist with no pulse. His reaction is not panic, just acute awareness. No question of first officer training, he focuses on recovery and survival. The aircraft is flying –two good wings and four good engines; 40,000 feet and minutes, not seconds, between itself and the ground. But the captain understands intuitively that everything is at stake. This is real.
With the yoke inoperable, temporarily, God willing, he adds power. He advances the throttles of all four engines an inch forward to counter the dropping nose, then adds another two inches to the two engines on the right wing. Differential thrust to offset the right roll. It works. The time calculus resets, this will be a battle of wits rather than instincts. He can engineer his way out of this.
VI
She focuses on her inbox and tries to tune out the aircraft issues, whatever they are, and the noise coming from the back of the plane. Emails continue to flood her inbox, she skims them but keeps an eye out for anything from the GC. Little else matters at this point. One clear statement of support and she’s back in control. And then a ping from the CEO. Reply all. It’s devastating, full blown damage control and a negation of everything she’s tried to assert.
Damn. She’s forced to respond, no possibility of sitting this one out. She acknowledges his point of view but gently rebuts his argument. She’s no slouch, she can pit logic against logic and hold her own. The CEO isn’t particularly popular, she imagines she’ll break even. Half the firm will see her point and give her props for not backing down. She waits to see if anyone has the gumption to support her, even obliquely.
She never sees how her rebuttal lands. The GC weighs in, playing it safe, and aligns herself firmly with the CEO. Nails in the coffin. Last ditch measure, she decides the best defense is a good offense and goes all in. Make or break. She’s ready to hit send when the plane lurches violently. The drink cart enters her field of view, off to the left. It’s airborne and slams into the back of a man’s head seated one row in front of her.
***
The captain continues managing the 747’s nose motion with increased and reduced power, favoring the left and right engines as needed to counter roll. There’s nothing to be done about yaw, they are rudderless. Each iteration of climb/descent demonstrates that he’s the respondent. Phugoid oscillations–they start innocently, appear gentle, and then achieve a self-amplifying, aircraft-killing dynamic.
Manipulating thrust works for a time, but later in the sequence as the nose comes up, it doesn’t stop rising when it should. Same with roll, the aircraft passes through wings level and cants unreasonably hard to the left. The captain pulls more power than he knows he should and splits the throttles further than makes sense. A long shot attempt to regain the upper hand, hoping to fine tune later when he’s established control. There is no later.
Aviate, navigate, communicate. The prioritized trifecta for dealing with a serious emergency. He can’t aviate, at this point the aircraft is reacting counter to his inputs. He doesn’t care about navigating, they have plenty of fuel and he’d gladly land on any strip of runway along their flight path that isn’t made of seashells, if only he could get there. So he communicates. His voice is steady, to his credit. But his calls are desperate and, ultimately, purposeless. A narration of demise.
VII
She is strangely unconcerned that the flight will end violently, destination unreached. She tries to tune out the surrounding chaos and panic. Distractors. The working part of her mind focuses on her laptop, which has been propelled where? Forward, backward, sideways? Scattershot thoughts about the CEO and GC, regaining the upper hand. Then clarity. There are no more emails to be sent, no more arguments to be made.
***
The captain assesses. Nothing went unobserved and he made no mistakes. It was never a fair fight. So much experience and acumen he never had the chance to tap. His windscreen fills with deep blue sky as the nose of the aircraft makes one final, terminal pitch upward. The yoke shakes violently and a piercing aural cue rings out in advance of the stall. He gamely deploys the leading-edge flaps in response, because there’s nothing else to do.
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J.P. Hesford is an emerging fiction writer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is active in veterans’ writing groups and workshops.