Start the Chase

Chapter 4

4

Discovering that the ground under the deep snow was decidedly uneven, she’d spent the next three hours creating a proper snowy scaffolding to perform her inspection.

First she’d forged a path around the plane’s perimeter. Then she’d backfilled low spots and tromped more snow into place. When she was done, it was a squared-off trench a meter wide and half a meter deep that completely encircled the plane.

With an acceptable perimeter, she began her inspection again, recording each step with her vocal notes and her new Canon EOS digital. The efficiency of skipping the steps of developing film, and scanning prints to build the sample NTSB reports she’d created, had convinced her that it was worth the ten thousand dollars for the camera.

She allowed herself a thirty-minute lunch break in the cockpit, eating the turkey sandwich she’d packed against the possibility of no food to her liking at her planned refueling stop in Rapid City, South Dakota (airport location identifier RAP). As an exercise during lunch, she reviewed all of the details she could remember about RAP’s approaches and runways, then double-checked them against the Jeppesen guide. Then the NTSB reports for RAP: fourteen incidents with five fatalities in the last forty years.

After lunch, other than the area of the wing under the fallen tree—which she couldn’t inspect further without a saw or a come-along winch—all that remained was the engine.

Excluding everything else first had seemed to make sense when she’d first thought of it.

The snow that the tree had dumped over her airplane’s nose this morning had been partially melted by the cooling engine. Now it was a hard sheen of ice over the closed and latched cowlings. Beating it with gloved fists wasn’t sufficient to break free the ice.

All of her fears about the start of her new job had cost her last night’s sleep. Could she do this? Or would she fail as she had at so many things most people found to be so easy?

It was her first-ever step from academia to the “real” world.

No matter how encouraging Tante Daniels declared the transition to be, Miranda could feel the overwhelm awaiting her like a microburst of wind shear ready to smash her into the ground just like the 1985 crash of Delta Airlines Flight 191 at Dallas/Fort Worth that had killed a hundred and thirty-seven people.

Unable to tolerate the sense of pending destruction, she’d changed her flight plan and departed three hours before she’d intended, well before dawn.

Per the revised plan, she should have been in Rapid City an hour ago for refueling.

However, the FAA still wouldn’t be alerted. Per her filed flight plan, she intended to travel the additional two hours to Sioux City, Iowa (SUX)—three incidents, a hundred and fourteen fatalities—so that she was past halfway to DC before stopping for the night. Her flight plan would still be open until late in the afternoon. Only thirty minutes after her anticipated arrival, when she failed to close the flight plan in a timely fashion, would any search begin.

Which reminded her of a step she’d failed to make. It wouldn’t be relevant until someone came looking for her, but it seemed wise to do it sooner rather than later. Per Figure 6-2-1 of the Airman’s Information Manual, she created a large V on top of the airplane’s fuselage with duct tape. It was the signal for “Require Assistance.” With that, she went back to trying to break the ice over the engine.

However, she was exhausted. After the third time she stumbled into the propeller, she returned to the cabin for a nap.

Still fully dressed, she curled up on the narrow back seat, and pulled an emergency thermal blanket over herself. All she needed was a short nap.

Then she’d continue.