Miranda Chase

Chapter 5

Six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two pounds of Cessna 208 Caravan impacted the west side of the hundred-and-ten-foot-high loft above McCaw Hall’s stage.

The thin steel wall and its lightweight supports burst inward like a bullet tearing a hole through a playing card. The fifty-two-foot wingspan cleared the heavy structural beams at the corners of the tower. Had it failed to do so, the fuel-laden wings would have ripped open and a fireball would have consumed the plane, the tower, and destroyed eighty-five percent of the hall as well as the opera and ballet offices to either side.

Instead the high wing held strong, slicing a wide slot high on the wall. The single hundred-and-six-inch, three-bladed propellor mounted on the nose shredded a large hole directly in front of the fuselage.

The landing gear were sheared off by a lateral support beam. The three wheels would fall nine stories, impacting the roof over the three-thousand-seat house at fifty-four-point-six miles an hour. Their broken mechanical supports would each impact first, punching into the roof, leaving only the tires exposed to the sky.

Other than the missing landing gear, the plane entered the building largely intact.

The sole fatality until this moment was the pilot, Larry Block. One of the lightweight supports, rather than being shredded by the spinning McCauley propeller, was snipped off and heaved through the windscreen like a javelin that slammed into his heart. Little blood spilled as he died speared to his seat. Had he avoided the crash, he would have suffered a major heart attack over the tulip fields and died along with all of his passengers and two entire busloads of Japanese tourists who had flown to America specially to see the blooms.

But he died in the opera house instead.

The purpose of the fly loft tower was to allow for scenery, curtains, and lighting instruments to be lowered into view as needed yet stored out of sight above the stage when they weren’t. To achieve this, a hundred feet above the stage and fifteen feet below the roof, a vast metal grid was hung. From this grid, one hundred and twelve pipes dangled horizontally above the stage, each spaced six inches apart.

Each of those pipes was supported from above by a series of ropes that ran from the pipe, up through the grid and over pulleys, then tracked sideways to the end wall. From there, the gathered ropes for each pipe turned once more to lay against the wall and descend into a vast system of counterweights: a centralized control area thirty feet above the stage.

The myriad array of ropes—some simply attached to an empty pipe but others from which hung hundreds, even thousands of pounds of lighting instruments and scenery—acted like an aircraft carrier’s arresting wire to assist in a jet landing.

After the Cessna 208 Caravan punched through the wall, it had lost only twenty-seven knots of its speed at impact. The remaining one hundred and fifty-six knots were absorbed as the plane snagged more and more of the horizontal ropes.

Pipes jerked aloft as the plane was slowed by not just one-of-three arresting wires as on a carrier’s deck, but by hundreds of heavy manila lines sharing the shock.

This is when the only other fatality occurred.

Stephen’s side of the windshield had saved him from the debris, shattering in the process. At the moment of impact, the heavy camera and lens shot forward and tumbled onto the grid. The strap, which he’d placed around his neck out of habit, broke his neck before it slipped free.

As Stephen’s body went lax due to his severed spinal column, his foot slid off the knapsack he’d been keeping pinned to the floor. The abrupt deceleration of the aircraft was accompanied by a sharp nose-down movement. The knapsack, floating independently in the chaos, flew free and followed the camera out the missing front windshield.

Though the Caravan was not destroyed, neither were the wings undamaged.

Highly volatile Jet A fuel spilled from a punctured tank and caught fire.

Because of the open nature of the steel grid on which the Caravan now rested, the fire spilled down over the set of tonight’s opera.

To keep the audience safe—if there’d been one at this early hour—several events happened simultaneously.

Temperature sensors triggered the fire alarms.

The heat above the stage was sufficient to melt three thermocouples.

One released a massive deluge of water from the sprinkler system that showered the plane and the set.

A second opened the large louvers atop the fly loft roof and large fans engaged to suck the fire-heated air up and out.

The last thermocouple released the fire curtain. A metal-framed wall, covered on both sides in burn-resistant fiberglass, slid down across the proscenium. The sixty-foot-wide, thirty-five-foot-tall opening between the stage and the seating was now fully blocked.

The surviving eight passengers in the “Around the Block Air Tours” Cessna 208 Caravan—now parked atop the fly grid one hundred feet above the burning stage—began to scream.