Billionaire and the Sisters Ch. 97

I jammed the rudder to the firewall and turned the ailerons further to the left to stop the roll - just barely ... OH, FUCK ... NOT ENOUGH. I screamed as I tried to hold on. I watched the right wing dip below horizontal; heard a terrible ripping of metal and then knew that I had no more control or the sleek jet. I instantly shut down everything, jerking the throttles back and shutting the engines down as I felt the G forces throwing me towards the left side of the cockpit. I shut off the fuel flows somehow. The plane slewed down the foamed runway at somewhere near hundred and forty miles an hour, increasingly rotating on the low right wing.

I felt the plane spin faster as its forward momentum slowed, my body telling me that I was on some wild circus ride that was trying to make me barf. I was sure that the left gear broke off. The plane left the ground again because the grinding metal sound stopped for a couple of seconds, but at some point it came back down on its belly with a vengeance. The noise became deafening. I remembered those crazy twisty rides from an amusement park in my youth. This was worse but I didn't lose my cookies.

I heard a couple of pops as we tore up some runway edge lights. The nose wheel broke away as we slewed sideways at high speed. I was thrown into my harness again. I went in another spinning circle, and I caught a glimpse of the terrain; I was between the runway and taxiway. Maybe we were only going a hundred miles per hour.

Then the world stopped turning and everything froze. The silence was deafening. I looked out the windshield but mostly I saw mud and muck. Then the mud dissolved as a sheet of foam covered the windscreen. The fire and rescue guys were on the scene spraying down the plane. I was alive. I was shaking.

I quickly unseated myself and stumbled to my rear and to the exit. I cracked the door and then felt the door open out of my hands. A fireman in full fireproof regalia helped me jump to the ground from the aircraft door. I noted that it wasn't very far. He told me to run and pointed me to a fire engine a hundred feet away.

We ran from the aircraft but as I looked back I realized there probably wasn't going to be any fire. The engines had stopped and I couldn't smell any jet fuel. The jet had slid from the runway into the adjacent grass strip between the runway and taxiway. It looked as though I'd done a belly landing, so I guessed that all three gear had sheared off.

The fireman pulled his hood off. "You OK, Miss?"

"No, but thank you for asking," I responded and then dissolved into tears on the shoulder of his flame retardant suit. He guided me towards a fire department ambulance that pulled up on the adjacent taxiway at just that instant.

"Let's just have the EMT's take a quick look-see at you, Miss." I nodded and struggled to get control of my emotions again. I was numb and the shock of what had just happened for the past hour started to wash through me. Had it only been an hour? I started to sob uncontrollably again. Fuck. I'd almost died. I collapsed into the arms of the paramedic who'd been checking my blood pressure.

Additional cars and emergency vehicles were pulling up near the aircraft from all directions.

I got a superficial checkout while I sat on the rear bumper of the ambulance. Mark appeared running full tilt from between two of the fire trucks.

"OH, MARK!" I cried, "I BROKE YOUR AIRPLANE!" I leapt up and into his arms, sobbing harder as I finally had an anchor in my life to hold me. He caught me. I cried uncontrollably into his chest with huge gasping sobs. He led me back to the ambulance at the insistence of my fireman escort. I was so glad to be alive.

Mark kept a steady stream of "It's all right. Everything's alright. You're safe now. Nothing can hurt you. You did a magnificent job. We'll fix the plane. Don't worry."

I sat on the back deck of the ambulance as they checked me over some more. I was fine except that I couldn't stop shaking or crying for a while. I'd almost lost everyone, or they'd almost lost me. I thought of everyone in the family and then all our friends, and then Philip Emerson.

Wes appeared, and he hugged and kissed me. He was very solicitous of me, and praised what I'd done.

I looked back at the plane as the foam started to run off it and slide to the ground in a light drizzle. The plane had left the runway in a spin and veered through a dirt drainage ditch coming to rest halfway between the runway and the parallel taxiway. All three landing gear had broken off after the wing tip had hit. Mark described his view of the landing as he stood atop a fire engine in the run-up area. He said the whole landing from ground contact to stop had only taken about twenty seconds and that he thought the plane had made three complete turns to the right as well as a significant leap back into the air.

I finally stopped crying as the adrenalin slowly burned off, and I became so grateful the fates had decided not to kill me that day. I'd now had two near misses with death: Tanner and the plane crash.

Mark and I sat on the back of the ambulance and watched as the airport ground crew started to ponder what to do with the massively injured jet. I clung to Mark. Cindy, Mel, Izzy, and Sheila were allowed to join us. I loved my sisters. Their presence made me cry again as I hugged and kissed each of them.

Amazing to me was that throughout that entire late afternoon I never heard anything from Mark other than supportive and encouraging words. I never even heard him rue the plight of his airplane. I guess he also figured that he'd ask me some other time how the meetings I had in Las Vegas had gone. I smiled inwardly; those meetings in Las Vegas now seemed like they'd occurred years earlier.

Dusk quickly came and with it some large spotlight trucks, a huge flatbed trailer, and a mammoth crane. The crew used the crane and sling to tilt the aircraft one way and another and work some other slings underneath it both ahead and behind the wings. The job was messy and muddy because of all the foam used to guard against fire and a couple of passing rain showers. I had been given a hooded parka from one of the fire trucks so I wasn't completely drenched. The crane eventually hoisted November Two Mike Whiskey back into the air as though it were a toy plane without wheels. The truck backed the trailer under the plane and huge cushions were inflated under the plane on the truck for its short ride to the repair shop across the airfield.

Mark and I walked behind the truck as it slowly crawled along the taxiways to the shop. The crane followed and helped remove the plane from the trailer onto another set of giant stationary cushions. I examined the bottom of the plane. I'd seriously scraped every bottom surface on the plane. I might have even bent the right wing. Mud and muck covered the entire plane as well as residual fire foam. There was a lot of dirt in the engine nacelles too. Mark's limousine mysteriously appeared behind the ambulance that had followed behind us as we walked.

I retrieved my luggage, briefcase and flight bag from the plane at the repair facility with Cindy's help. We shut the door. Cindy had graciously talked to the repair facility and made sure they had our contact information. We drove home with Mark and my sisters giving encouraging words and affirmations of their love for me. I continued to sniffle.

My landing made the Channel 7 news on the six-thirty and eleven p.m. news that night. We used the DVR and replayed the film clip several times to study it. The right main gear had never completely descended into position, even after the severe bounce I'd delivered to the plane; that was the reason the plane veered off the runway and into the muck. I'd spun around four times after settling onto the ground. What to me had been a little hop in the plane just before we left the runway at one point turned out to be a spinning turn like a Frisbee about thirty feet in the air, slamming me back down tail first in a huge spray of mud before coming to a stop after a further half turn.

I realized how lucky I was to be alive. Mark wrapped me in his arms in bed that night. I fitfully slept, reliving and reliving every second of my flight and trying to find some way I could have saved the plane. I was prone to break into a good cry every few minutes for a while. Damn, I wanted to be cool, calm, and collected, but I was anything but.

I called Adam and Wes the next morning and thanked them for their help. I had calmed down by then. Mark had talked to them on his cell phone while we'd waited for the plane to get raised and trailered to the shop so they knew that I'd gotten through this unharmed. They too were full of praise and sympathy for the accident.

When I finally got back to work later in the week, my colleagues at Darwin Architecture Group marveled at my survival. Many had apparently seen the news and watched my ignominious arrival back in the city Tuesday afternoon. I got a lot of hugs and well wishes from everyone. Stacy had fortunately run interference for me during the days I was tied up before I could go back to work.

Mark picked me up after work that night. He had a big smile. I asked, "What's up? You look too happy given that I crashed your aircraft." I still thought that I owned some responsibility for the accident.

He answered, "I just got back from the airport. The plane's quite fixable although it will take a month or two to repair. You did not bend the wing spars, just the sheet metal and a few ribs. Same with the bottom of the plane - lots of sheet metal work and some new antennas, but all right otherwise. The landing gears all need replacement, of course. They all broke off from the stresses in the landing, particularly the lateral forces in the spin; new ones are being shipped and should be here tomorrow so the plane will soon have 'feet' to move it around the repair facility. Even better, the engines are fine; we just need to clean out some foam residue and dirt, and they'll be quite serviceable. Lastly, it's all covered by insurance. It's all good news given the circumstances."