"Yep," she's saying apologetically to a person in first class, "the wifi's pretty flaky over the ocean. I'm sorry. Can I get you another drink?"

He's getting himself one. A Coke Zero, even though it doesn't taste the same as the real thing, in a big thermos rather than the little plastic cups. "The wifi is out?" The flight crew cares a lot when the wifi is out. The cabin crew does not really care at all but it's polite to at least murmur sympathetically. 

"Sure is. We've got some stressed out folks who are worried they'll miss an email."

"It's a Sunday morning."

"Is it? - huh, sure is. Well, we're at work, so're they, I guess." She stands by while the captain stretches his legs and fetches his sandwich; he tries not to take too long about it. And then she'll take the first class passenger his apology drink for the wifi outage which has lasted all of twenty minutes. 

"Hey, Davidson?"

He straps himself back in. The rule is maximum of ten minutes for breaks, because the one remaining pilot has to keep their full attention on the instruments and no one can do that nonstop for too long. There was a flight where the first officer was on a long break, the captain got bored and started taking pictures of the sunset in the cockpit, and a dozen people ended up with life-altering spine injuries.

"Yeah?"

"I'm not hearing any radio chatter at all. I know we're out over the ocean, but usually United 901 is twenty minutes behind us, there's some other folks out and about."

"I'll see if I can scare you up some company."

He can't.

It's not obviously that the radios aren't working; they report that they're working fine, he can apparently tune to different frequencies without trouble. 

"This is Southwest Airlines 8684, feeling a little lonely up here," he says, mostly jokingly, into the radio after a few minutes of nothing. 

"See what I mean? It's a bit uncanny."

"I'm going to run through the checklist for two-way radio communications failure," he says, slightly more tensely than ten minutes ago. The GPS goes out sometimes; the IRS will seamlessly reintegrate when it comes back. Radio communications failure is rarer and significantly more important. 

"Continue the flight by the route assigned in the last ATC clearance received. That's 1140, cleared at flight level 340 -"

"Up to 360 if we needed it to get over the top of that storm."

"Then I think you should actually take her into a bit of a climb, because the next thing here is altitude. Altitude should be the highest of the altitude or flight level assigned in the last ATC clearance received; the minimum altitude for IFR operations; or the altitude or flight level ATC has advised may be expected in a further clearance."

He tells the autopilot to take the plane to 36,000 feet. 

He's following the rest of the checklist, reading it out where relevant. Setting the transponder to 7600, which is the international radio code for 'this plane has a problem that's not a hijacking and not a threat to the safety of anyone on board'. 

In addition to monitoring the NAVAID voice feature, the pilot should attempt to reestablish communications by attempting contact:

On the previously assigned frequency; or

With an FSS or with New York Radio or San Francisco Radio.

If communications are established with an FSS or New York Radio or San Francisco Radio, the pilot should advise that radio communications on the previously assigned frequency have been lost giving the aircraft's position, altitude, last assigned frequency and then request further clearance from the controlling facility. The preceding does not preclude the use of 121.5 MHz. There is no priority on which action should be attempted first. If the capability exists, do all at the same time.

The checklist to try to get two way radio communications working again (they do not know if their outbound transmissions are heard or not; they make some with a summary of the situation and their intentions, three times, just in case) is a long one. This is soothing, because it's not untl the end of it that he has to admit to himself that the plane is out of radio contact with the ground and by then he's cheered himself up about it. It's a problem that is going to cause everyone else flying into LAX this afternoon some serious inconvenience, as all other traffic gets routed around the unpredictable plane, but it's not going to actually cause them that much inconvenience. They're not supposed to deviate from their flight plan; sticking to it is more predictable. Assuming the radios don't start working again in the next few hours for no clear reason, they'll head towards the airport as if they'd been cleared to do so and then just proceed on in to land as if they've been cleared to do so.

The electronic messaging system is also out, which is another troubling pointer at some kind of generalized malfunction.

(The traffic collision avoidance system seems to be working normally. The navigation still seems to be working normally. It's supposed to be good weather in LA. This could be a lot worse.)

"We don't have a runway at LAX." They change it up based on the winds. They'll have to just...pick one, and try to land on it.

Okay, yes, it could also be a lot better. 

"25L. It's the longest, it's the one they use for emergencies." Some airports switch runway directions based on the winds, and would be a nightmare to land on with no access to the weather. But LAX is on the coast and has predictable prevailing winds. You land over the water from 12am to 6am, and coming in from the east the rest of the time, and all four runways are parallel. 

"If the radios are fully nonfunctional, they won't see the 7600, right? Just hoping we're out there until we show up on ground radar?"

" - I doubt the radios are fully out. I admit I have no idea what's wrong with them. But yeah, could be they'll be fretting over our missed handoffs for an hour or two before we show up right on schedule. I guess they might send someone out to see if they can see us in the air."

"You pull that over DC, you get an escort. Not that I'd be upset, honestly, to see an escort right now." It'd help with the unpleasant prickling sensation of being completely alone which has been nagging at him since the radio silence got pronounced.

"We might have one way comms. Could be they heard everything we transmitted, and we just can't receive, and they're not worried except about all the paperwork."

"Maybe."

"And even if we get an escort, we're still two hours from the airport, so we shouldn't expect to meet them for an hour yet. Maybe longer." The fighter jets are, ultimately, to shoot the plane down if it looks like it's been hijacked and is headed for a skyscraper, and they're out over the ocean where no conceivable situation could be improved by shooting them down. Probably the easterly approach to the airport will make whoever's job it is to worry about hijackings have a very stressful twenty minutes but it's indicated for LAX's expected winds.

"Right." 

Ghaffries flew for the US military. They both did. It's still the best way to get your pilot's license without being born into money. If he forgot that fighter jets take time to fly the thousand miles still remaining between them and LA, and aren't likely to be sent out that far at all, and aren't going to be very fussed about this minor malfunction, it's because he's pretty rattled. 

"I want to fly the descent. Why don't you take a spin through the checklists, see if I missed anything, and then finish preparing this approach briefing. And, you know, man the radios." That is generally the job of the pilot monitoring. Generally there are radios. It's a pretty bad joke. Barely counts as a joke, really. 

He's probably also rattled. It's lucky in a sense that this happened two hours out; they'll have time to prep it to death and by the time it actually comes, it'll be boring. 

"Your aircraft." He reaches over for the reference handbook. "- I'm going to rerun the checklist for the GPS, too, actually, if that's all right. In case it's related. I'm not sure we've heard any radio chatter since the GPS went out."

"My aircraft," he replies automatically to the first part of that, and "Good idea." It is a good idea, and it's more important than usual to say that, when they're both under more stress and need to be thinking more flexibly. Planes do not, generally, crash because of instrument malfunctions; they crash because pilots fail to notice the overall situational picture their instrument malfunctions are disguising from them.

Ghaffries retries the GPS checklist, then the missing two way radio checklist. Nothing observably changes.

He makes another outgoing transmission on the emergency frequency stating their call sign, position, altitude, route code, intentions, predicted deviation range. Sets a timer to do it again in fifteen minutes. Cross-checks the altimeters.

"She handled fine for you?"

"Yeah. Is she handling fine for you?"

"Yes. I was thinking I might fly her manually, to get more of a sense of - whether there's anything up that's not with the radios - but I don't fly as smooth as the computer, and we want to stay very cleanly on course. Probably better to leave her be if she's clearly doing fine."

"Probably. Everything else I've looked at looks good."

"Wifi is out. Or it was twenty minutes ago. I guess we should check if it still is. If it's not, we can ask someone to, uh, email HQ, tell them our intentions that way. That's not on the checklist but I bet it'll be in the next edition."

"Good luck sounding reassuring on the PA for that one. 'This is your captain speaking. Can somebody please send LAX an email and ask them which runway they would like us to land on? Thank you for flying Southwest Airlines."

"No, see, easy, you just end by thanking them for flying United. 

- do go check now if the cabin wifi is working. I don't know how long to expect it to take to set up communication with ATC that way but it might take a while and I'd want to start immediately."

"Yes, sir." And he opens the doors to the cockpit and flags the flight attendant down. "Is the wifi working?"

"Nope. Did you try something? Maybe make an announcement that you tried something, so our customers feel that their struggles are heard."

"Nothing we can actually do except turn it off and back on again, and we did do that, because we're also out of radio comms right now."

"Great. You train for that?"

"Of course we do! It'll be fine. Really, we're the luckiest plane headed into LAX, everyone else is going to be circling and they have to roll out the red carpet for us since we can't do what we're told. But if you get wifi - and you probably won't, probably it's the same underlying malfunction - let us know, so we can, uh, be in contact with ATC that way.

You can plan on a normal descent and landing."

"Sure. I'm going to go ahead and refund everybody their eight bucks."

Right, she'd requested that they make an announcement about the wifi. He'd expect the passengers to be this worked up about a wifi outage on, say, New York-London, full of grumpy people who work in finance, but this flight is Honolulu-LA, full of families with small children. ...conceivably those care a lot about the wifi so the small children will watch Cocomelon and not scream. 

"Sounds good," he says. "Just let me know if it does happen to kick back in. - while I'm here, are our exterior lights on?" That's on the checklist for a plane flying without comms; it improves their visibility to other planes. The system says the lights are on but why trust what you can check just by looking out the window. 

"Sure are. Is that related to the radios being out?"

"Yep. You know, as a last resort, we can try looking out the windshield for other planes." It's not a very good last resort. They're going five hundred miles an hour; so would be anyone whose airspace they strayed into, if they had some kind of navigation problem now. It doesn't give you a whole lot of reaction time, even when visibility is great, as it is here.

The second-to-last resort is TCAS, which notices when two planes are near each other and gives instructions that must be obeyed immediately - 'you go up' and 'you go down', usually. In the last case he heard of where there was a complete loss of contact with ATC, TCAS was also offline. It claims to be working normally, here, but it's not as if there's a way to check.

The third-to-last resort is that planes on routes out over the Pacific Ocean don't actually get anywhere close to each other, and the handbook has traffic patterns if they do need to deviate from their course without clearance which keep them safely distant from everyone else. LAX will have noticed by now that they have a blind flight incoming and started arranging for no one to be near them there either. 

He heads back to the cockpit. "No wifi. I'm going to double check our navigation."

"Good idea," he says approvingly. "Any thoughts on what takes out the GPS and the wifi and the radios?"

Bermuda Triangle shit. A nuclear war that has taken out all of civilization leaving only them survivors. He is aware this is not a great mental route to go down right now and also aware that there'll be an incident report which may involve the FAA reviewing several hours of cockpit audio and he'll feel like a damn idiot if he's recorded claiming there's been a nuclear war, so he doesn't say it. 

"I don't know but I was thinking the last total loss of two-way comms incident I heard about, TCAS was out as well. So - double checking the nav, just making very sure we're where we're supposed to be."

He double checks the nav. They are flying precisely their assigned route, according to both of the INS systems, which agree. 

His fifteen minute timer goes off. He picks up the radio and tells everyone on the emergency frequency their call sign, position, altitude, etcetera etcetera. He feels mostly calm, by now. "Do you have a theory?"

"I don't think the wifi and the GPS and the radios share any systems, and even if they did, the backup radio's separate and the VHF is separate. I figure.... one of the passengers has some kind of signal jammer, or we're passing through some kind of - something." 

"Could do a PA. 'If you are using top secret military technology to cut this plane off from all external communications, please stop that, thanks for flying with us.'"

"Maybe I jostled a button with my elbow and put the airplane in Airplane Mode, which means no inbound or outbound communication." Checking that all of the switches and buttons are set correctly is of course part of the checklist. He's joking. It's a slightly better joke than the last one. 

"All right, ready for one bastard of an approach briefing?"

They want the long final approach, so it's easy for air traffic control to see which runway they're heading towards; without GPS and with the likelihood they'll be a couple miles away from where they think they are when they hit the coast, they want a runway with ILS, which all of LA's runways have but which aren't always working and of course they can't ask in advance which runways have it working. They are assuming all four runways are open and that the southern two are for arrivals (though, realistically, with a 737 coming in blind the airport may hold all departures and most other arrivals, and that the winds are their usual, so they want to approach from the east. If they have to go around -- which is probably likelier than usual, because if there's some obstruction on the runway or weather problems or something, no one can warn them in advance -, they'll want to meticulously stick to the published go-around procedure, which he's going to cover for their favored runway and for their backup runway if they're having trouble locking on to the ILS for their favored runway. 

Here are the altitude minimums for each stage of the approach. The plane has two ground proximity warning systems, the GPS based one which isn't working and the very rudimentary 'detect if there is ground below the plane' one which only works if they get very very close. They do still meet all the criteria to make an instrument landing with low visibility if needed.

Their diversion airport is Ontario. It would suck enormously to have to divert while without radio contact, but he does the whole approach briefing for Ontario as well, because if they do have to they'll be extraordinarily busy and right now they're not, in fact, busy.  Their backup diversion airport is San Diego.

He is in the middle of the approach briefing for San Diego when the airplane, which has been peacefully travelling over the tops of clouds, breaks out of them. 

They're over land.

" - now, hang on just one second."

"What the fuck." They shouldn't be coming up on LA for another hour. They are still six hundred miles out at sea. 

" - we're lost. 7600 - did that already - climb to the highest minimum anywhere in the radius travelled since we last knew where we were - 360, should be fine anywhere. Right?"

" - last known location is an hour ago, there's no land within five hundred miles of our last known location -"

"So that is not our last known location, last known location is Honolulu, we are within twenty five hundred miles of Honolulu, what's minimum for, I don't know, the fucking Andes? What's minimum for the Himalayas?"

"The Andes are not within twenty five hundred miles of Honolulu and the Himalayas aren't even close, we'd run out of gas first." He's checking the book anyway, though.

"240, if you're lost near the Andes. 320, if you're lost near Mount Everest. Which, again, we can't be, it's six thousand miles. ...both of them are six thousand miles. LA is damn near the nearest land from Honolulu and we shouldn't be there for an hour yet."

"Nav checklist, then. - actually, declare an emergency, then nav checklist."

"Pan, pan, pan," he tells the useless radio, "this is emergency aircraft Southwest Airlines 8684, we are declaring an emergency. We have lost two way radio contact, we have lost GPS, our location is unknown, our last known location is Honolulu at 830 local time. Flight level is 360, heading is 062, we are over land and weren't expecting to be. We intend to proceed to the nearest airport."

"On the bright side, radios might not be out after all, we might just be checking all the wrong frequencies - I'll take the radios while you run the nav checklist -"

"Which one? We don't have an FMC fault, we don't have an IRS fault, we don't have - there's not actually a checklist for 'all instruments fully functional, airplane is nonetheless in the wrong place by a thousand miles -"

"It seems likely that we do have an IRS fault or a FMC fault and it failed silently, so run through those." 

"- right." That's going to take a while, since usually you're responding to a specific failure message rather than to the generalized fact that there must be some failure which you have no messages about. He gets started. 

And he will start trying to tune the radio for places one might conceivably be if the only thing one knows is that one took off from Honolulu less than five hours ago. And try to think what to do if this fails to turn up radio contact. 

He's not, actually, trying to think what happened. It's an interesting question but at this point unlikely to yield some insight that lets them figure out where they are, and an answer that doesn't let them figure out where they are is flatly not very useful right now. What matters are the current capabilities of the aircraft and the options to get it on the ground.

If the instruments aren't working and the radios aren't working, they'll need to pick out a location to land visually and land it visually. This is fine; any pilot is trained to land a plane that way. Ideally a runway; in a pinch a paved rural road currently devoid of cars will do fine. In more of a pinch you can land an airplane in a field, but - not safely, not with a plane this big which lands this fast. Having been an overwater aircraft before they abruptly weren't overwater, they're also decked out for a water landing, but that's a true last resort. 

Nearly three hours of fuel left. They can cover more than a thousand miles in that time. If they did get badly turned around, they're honestly in extraordinary luck to be over land; a flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles that ends up pointed in the wrong direction might easily end up starving for fuel over the ocean. In a thousand miles, there'll be lots of airports; the problem will be finding them with nothing to do but look. They're too high up to clearly identify airports on the ground below. If they descend, they'll be burning fuel much faster, and they'll be below altitude minimums for a lost aircraft. ...probably it's a bit silly to maintain altitude minimums for Mount Everest, which Ghaffries correctly pointed out is more than six thousand miles from Honolulu. But -

- they didn't pass over an isolated island which could conceivably not be on the charts if it was a secret military base or something. They were over land, and are still over land. There is no land like that near Honolulu. So - conceivably they're not near Honolulu, and at that point he has no idea at all where they are. 

Have they been flying for much longer than their clocks claim? No, then they'd be out of fuel. ...is the sun in the correct position for their heading? He will draw himself a diagram when he's done tuning the radios (which isn't working).

"Next step is disengaging the autopilot," he says when he gets to it on the checklist, and pauses. Disengaging the autopilot will mean the captain will have to fly, and will be busy flying, which isn't great when there are two peoples' work of debugging to do here. On the other hand, the autopilot has clearly not discharged its duties as a crew member here, what with how it cannot possibly have been flying the displayed heading. 

"Give me two minutes to finish with the radios first."

"Acknowledged, pausing there. Do you mind if I bring in a flight crew member to look out the window and tell us if we're literally hallucinating terrain - actually fuck, you know what, oxygen masks."

- the captain looks completely baffled but that's not an instruction you fuck around with. He drops the radio and puts on his oxygen mask. The masks have inbuilt radio so they can talk to each other wearing them, and that radio, it turns out, works fine; after a minute of twiddling they have comms again. 

"I don't see a pressurization problem, are your instruments showing one -"

"My instruments are showing completely normal pressurization. But - hypoxia makes you bad at thinking about what's happening, right, lost situational awareness, confusion - if there is some kind of pressurization problem, and we have low-grade hypoxia, then instead of being in a completely incomprehensible situation we're in a normal one we were steadily losing the ability to comprehend. So. Oxygen masks."

- it takes him a second to wrap his head around the logic. It's brilliant, though, in a sideways way. People have died because the plane depressurized and they got too bad at reasoning about consequences to put on their masks. Better to have a rule that if you feel like you're going crazy you put on an oxygen mask, though it's not in fact on the checklists for 'really weird things start happening', probably because hypoxic people are not correctly executing the checklists anyway. 

He breathes for a minute or two before saying more confidently, "the situation remains just as confusing. The radio appears correctly configured. I think all of our decisionmaking was reasonable."

"Yes, agreed. All right, what I was going to say before I thought of that was that we should ask a member of the flight crew if they also see land so we know it's not just that we're both hallucinating."

"Sounds good." He takes off his oxygen mask; they might need the oxygen later if more things go wrong. "You go ahead and do that, and I'll finish up with the radios before we turn the autopilot off. - I also wanted to try to figure out if the sun is in the right place."

Mask off. "That'll be easier when it's not pretty much directly overhead, but I guess we can refresh our memory of how navigating by the sun works while we wait for that. - you have a plan?"

"If we can't get anywhere with the radios? Find an area without clouds, lose some altitude, look for an airport or a road or a cornfield. I guess. You have anything?"

"You can get cell service down below 2,500 feet. I don't love getting that close to the ground without a map but if we had good enough visibility - just a minute would be long enough to figure out what country we're in. ...though if we're outside the US I don't know if you can still count on cell service below 2,500 feet. Airport, road, cornfield - we're decked for a water landing -"

"Plane's got a lot of kids, I don't want to end up in a situation where we need a fast evacuation if we can possibly avoid it. If we land in a cornfield I think we want to land near-empty, to avoid a fire, and if we land on the water - I don't know. Sully went down right next to a bunch of rescue ferries, they were there in three minutes. I think the wings were sinking within fifteen."

"Sully had no engine power, they were having a hard time maintaining speed, they landed outside parameters and the plane was damaged. I think a full engine power water landing looks a lot cleaner, it's just no one does that because if you have full engine power you have better options. Probably." If they're in a sufficiently uninhabited bit of the Amazon or something they might not. He doesn't, in fact, see the distinctive squares of intensively farmed land in the distant terrain below.

"We've still got more than a thousand miles of range. We've got better options, we've just got to figure out how to find them. Ask the flight crew while you're at it to keep an eye out in case we do get a jet escort. I imagine we're making a lot of people on the ground nervous too, and I'd be flatly delighted to follow someone to the nearest patch of level ground."

"I'll tell them."

It is not, actually, procedure to tell passengers that there's a major problem with the aircraft until you know what you need them to do (brace for a hard landing, mostly). Talking will never prevent your plane from crashing; only flying your plane will prevent it from crashing. Even talking with ATC is much less important than flying your plane. This plane is in fact flying fine, and they're trying everything they can think of on the navigation front, so they could make an announcement, but he's inclined to wait until they have something concrete to tell them.

He flags down the lead flight attendant. 

"Hey! What's going on, we're over land sooner than I expected."

"Great question. Really fantastic question."

"Do we need to prep the cabin for an emergency landing -"

"It is looking fairly likely there'll be an emergency landing today, but not in the next two hours, we have plenty of fuel and plenty of things to try and we're staying at cruise altitude until we can figure out what's going on. I take it you are confirming that the plane does appear to be over land."

"Yes. I assumed we were getting in early and LA won't give us a runway yet."

"Our charts think we're still 400 miles from LA over the ocean. We're going to hang out at altitude and sort it out. Uh, if you see an escort show up, let us know. Since we're out of radio contact. ..I assume the wifi is still not back."

"No, but we have some great inflight movies you can check out instead," she says chirpily. " - sorry."

"You're good. Uh, I don't know if there's anything else - actually, can you be very sure to hydrate everybody? We might do a water landing or land in the middle of nowhere and if they're going to be stuck for hours and hours -"

"If you're going to maybe do a water landing we need as much notice as possible to get everyone in life vests, especially the kid-sized life vests that aren't under the seat, and to show people how to safely brace. And yeah, we can do another round of drinks. Nonalcoholic drinks. I assume you're very busy so I'll knock if there's an escort or a fire or another serious systems failure and not otherwise."

"Thanks." And he ducks back in. 

"Nobody on the radio."

"Right." He sits down, heavily. Straps in. "Great weather. I appreciate the great weather. Should I disconnect the autopilot?"

"Go ahead."

Then he'll work the rest of the way through the checklists for a failure of the navigation instruments. This doesn't turn anything up.

"Have we thought through whether we want to continue on this course."

"I've been thinking about it. The thing we want most is good visibility so we can descend, and no mountains. We've got pretty good visibility here, looks like a little bit of mountains. Looks clear up ahead, too. I'm thinking once we get past the mountains maybe we start descending, look for, uh, signs of human habitation or lakes or rivers."

"Flight crew wants notice if we're putting down in the water, so they can distribute the baby life jackets."

"Christ. Yeah, of course. All right, help me out with figuring out if the sun is where it's supposed to be."

They've been trained to fly by dead reckoning, of course. It pretty much will never come up, not in a modern aircraft, but you train for a lot of things that will pretty much never come up, and at some point in a long career, one of them will.  

It's been a long time. It's not one of those skills you refresh on every six months, like landing with an engine out or some normal malfunction like that. It takes them a while.

"...which is...062. Which is what we wanted."

"Yep."

"And what should have taken us to LA."

"Yep."

They should in fact have the California coast in their sights, by now, with visibility this good, though LA would still be more than a hundred miles away. Navigation errors can lead you surprisingly far astray, but - Baja California maybe, or San Francisco maybe, there's no fathomable -

"- I'm out of explanations."

"Doesn't really matter, right. We've gotta get her down. Next radio callout, tell them our intentions are to navigate visually and descend to 200 and see if we can catch any landmarks, and that we are actively looking for a safe place to land."

"This is emergency aircraft Southwest Airlines 8684, position unknown, flight level 360, descending to 200, visual navigation, looking for landmarks" he transmits on the emergency frequency, though at this point with a sense that they're definitely shouting into the void. "Uh, 14,000 pounds of fuel and a hundred seventy five souls on board. We're looking for a safe place to land."

He gives hypothetical air traffic control which can hear their transmissions fine some time to move other planes out of their way and then begins the descent, though he too does not really believe that air traffic control can hear their transmissions fine. Even at 200 they'll be well above the mountains they've just passed. 

"We could consider reengaging the autopilot, if it's not the problem."

"I guess it'd be good to have both sets of eyes peeled." He re-engages the autopilot to manage the vertical descent, then looks back up out the windshield.  "Oh hey, look ahead, that's a big lake. There's our worst-case scenario, then."

"- that's got to be enough of a landmark to figure out where we are. That's - the size of Lake Michigan, or something -"

"And I think that might be civilization next to it, though at this height I'm not sure." It's certainly not a city, but a small town, maybe, or an abandoned Air Force base - there are some things that look like regular lines -

He's consulting a map. "It continues to not make any sense for us to be in central America but that could in principle be Cocibolca, near Managua, though we shouldn't have flown over any mountains to get there. It could be, uh, Maracaibo in Venezuela? If so, the sea should be right north of it -"

The lake is misty enough he can't see the far banks. "Could be."

"Those are, to be clear, both much smaller than Lake Michigan, but maybe we're misestimating the size because we're trying to visually navigate under weird conditions -"

"- maybe, but I don't think so. That's a big lake, there. I've flown over Salt Lake City at 200 and that's bigger than Salt Lake."

" - it's called Great Salt Lake."

"Well, I may not know what it's called, but I know what it looks like at 200. What bigger lakes are there."

"Central and South America do not actually appear to have any lakes the size of Lake Michigan. ...and also, we would've run out of gas, and the heading is wrong."

"Right, so, the lake doesn't suggest any new frequencies to try and we can't look it up to find our minimums," he says curtly because continuing this line of inquiry seems like it'll at this point be distracting.

"I'm, uh, really kind of feeling like we're not in Kansas anymore, so to speak."

"I want to try broadcasting more frequently, on more channels. In case they have radio but aren't listening to the standard emergency frequencies for any reason," such as "time travel" or "we are on an alien planet" or "we are overflying the lost continent of Atlantis which just resurfaced" or whatever else. "I'm going to stay at 200 for a while, follow the coast of that lake when we reach it and see if there's a city anywhere."

Sure, he'll cycle through frequencies repeating himself. They are emergency aircraft Southwest Airlines 8684. They do not know their position. They believe they're at flight level 200. They believe they're at heading 062. They have 13,000 pounds of fuel remaining. They are approaching a very big lake in about a hundred miles and they cannot find the very big lake on their maps.

They do not get any responses by the time they've reached the lake.

"You see any roads or runways?"

"Nope." Seen up a little closer, those are definitely buildings, but not runways. And none of the distinctive squares of intensively cultivated farmland, either. You could probably land a plane like this in a cornfield, intensively graded and levelled and all the rocks and ridges and so on removed. You can't just land it in an ordinary field; it's too big and heavy, lands too fast and rolls for too long, and it'll hit rocks and trees and come apart. 

"Gonna follow the coast of Lake Mystery here, see if we find something bigger than a village as we go. Why don't you take a look at the checklists for a ditching in Lake Mystery."

"All right." He starts reading it out. 

Send distress signals. Determine position, course, speed, altitude, situation, intention, time and position of intended touchdown and transmit mayday. Report type of aircraft and request intercept.

"I'm hoping if we fly in low and slow over the fishing village or whatever it is they'll figure we've got a problem and help with evacuation. But we probably want to land close enough to shore we can paddle the rafts in without help in a worst case scenario."

"Water near the shore is going to be shallow, though, and if we break up on some rocks we lose everybody."

"Yep. I don't know what the ideal guess is, without knowing anything about Lake Mystery. Half a mile out to sea?"

"We don't have enough life rafts for everyone if the aft rafts don't deploy, and they probably won't, if that part of the plane's submerged. Some people will be swimming with life vests, or hanging off the edges - half a mile out is also pretty hard on would-be fishing boat rescuers. They're going to have to make a lot of trips. How deep do we need?"

"The checklist doesn't say?"

"No."

"I think 1549's nose fully submerged while decelerating and then popped back up? Which would be, what, how tall is this guy -"

That's in the handbook. "Forty feet."

"Unfortunately I also don't know anything about lakes and don't know if that is a usual depth for a lake or not or what would alert us to whether Lake Mystery is a deep lake." He banks gently so the airplane can follow the lake around.

Alert the cabin crew to prepare for ditching and seat passengers as far forward as possible.

"Should I do that now?"

"Not yet, we're going to be in the air at least another hour and now that we've determined that this is an inhabited place I'm still hoping we can find an airport."

3 Burn off fuel to reduce touchdown speed and increase buoyancy.

4 Plan to touch down on the windward side and parallel to waves and swells.

5 Plan a flaps 40 landing unless another configuration is needed.

6 Set VREF 40.

7 Do not arm the autobrake.

8 Do not accomplish the normal landing checklist.

9 Checklist Complete Except Deferred Items.

"Makes it sound easy."

"How much fuel are you thinking of landing with?"

"- enough for one go-around, if there are no new developments? The plane's buoyancy sounds important, and we don't have a second location to divert to, and the less fuel on one's crashing airplane the better, really, as long as the engines are still running. Say we plan to land at 2,000 pounds."

That's one of the inputs for the VREF 40 calculation, which will tell them what speed to target as they try to land. You want to hit the water as slowly as you can, of course, but a plane that is going too slowly stalls and falls out of the air, and that's wildly more deadly than a successful landing with a vertical descent of nearly nothing. He puts it into the computer; they can change it later if they change their mind about what weight to land at. 

After Impact Procedure Review

Set both engine start levers to CUTOFF. This closes fuel shutoff valves to prevent discharge of fuel from ruptured fuel lines.

Open flight deck windows. This ensures no cabin differential pressure prevents the opening of the doors or emergency exits.

Start the evacuation. Proceed to assigned ditching stations, launch rafts and evacuate the airplane as soon as practicable.

The airplane may stay afloat indefinitely if fuel load is minimal and no serious damage was sustained during landing. 

"Engine start levers to cut off, open flight deck windows, start the evacuation. I think we should seriously prioritize the thing where the aircraft floats indefinitely, given the uncertain rescue situation and that this is going to be a slow passenger evacuation."

"I figured that when you said you want to land at 2,000 pounds. Uh, deferred checklist items are -

Below 5000 feet

LANDING GEAR AURAL WARN circuit breaker (P6-3:D18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pull

This prevents the warning horn with gear retracted and landing flaps selected.

The flight deck chime for an incoming call from the cabin crew is unavailable.

Passenger signs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ON

Engine BLEED air switches (both) . . . . . . . . . . OFF

This allows the airplane to be depressurized with the outflow valve closed.

Pressurization mode selector . . . . . . . . . . . . . MAN

Outflow VALVE switch . . . . . . . . . . . Hold in CLOSE until the outflow VALVE indication shows fully closed. 

This prevents water from entering the airplane. Note: the outflow valve takes up to 20 seconds to close. 

APU switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . OFF

GROUND PROXIMITY GEAR INHIBIT switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GEAR INHIBIT

 

GROUND PROXIMITY TERR INHIBIT switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TERR INHIBIT

Life vests, shoulder harnesses and seat belts . . . On

Confirm that passenger cabin preparations are complete.

They're not actually doing the checklist yet - he's still hoping that if he follows this coastline long enough there will appear some more serious signs of civilization, and an alternative to the ditching - but it's useful to know what to expect, because once they're getting close their lives are going to be very stressful. He stands up to get a different angle on the ground outside the plane. There's still just - not that much out there. Lots of trees, lots of scrubland, not a single recognizable asphalt road. 

A field would not have to be a very good field to be an improvement on a water landing. Water landings are dangerous, and hard, and a lot of things have to go right, and some of them are out of his control. He'd take a cornfield, any cornfield. 

He just doesn't see any.

"Broadcast intent to descend to 100 for better visibility, and that we're preparing for a water landing. And then tell the cabin crew to prepare for it, I guess."

He broadcasts on the emergency frequency and then on some other frequencies. There's no response. 

He head back out to find the lead flight attendant. 

"We're going to be making an emergency landing, likely in the water."

"All right. When?"

"An hour to ninety minutes, we want to land light and we want to keep looking if there's some bigger city we can land near. It may be a while before we can expect support from emergency services."

"Our phones should work once we're on the ground, right?"

"...probably not because we're probably not in the United States."

" - my phone plan works in Mexico also, because I'm there twice a week."

" - so, we have been unable to identify any geographic features we've flown over including some big notable ones. I'd say 'okay, so my Central and South American geography isn't that great', but we also haven't flown far enough to reach Central or South America. We have no fucking idea where this plane is, and I hope your phone works when we land but I bet it won't. So - we're trying to find a better place than the lake to land but also a populated city to land near if we land in the lake."

"That's not funny."

"Prep the cabin for a water landing. There's a note in the guidelines to make sure no one opens the aft doors, they may be partially submerged and if they are they'll just let water in. We'll tell you the ditching is imminent at 500 feet. The chime that lets you call us is going to be disabled below 5000 feet."

"How do you get lost in a commercial plane in 2023."

" - sorry. We'll prepare the cabin for an emergency water landing. Seat people as far forward as possible, life vests, check the people with the overwing exits can operate them, make sure no one tries to get their bag out of the overhead bin, brace at 500 feet. Need anything else?"

"No." I'm sorry, he wants to say, for getting this plane lost and putting these people in danger, but they both need to do their jobs, not talk about their jobs. 

He sits back down. 

"Visibility's worse on the north side of the lake, I'm turning back around. There's a couple of small towns, no paved roads, and that's all we've got. They do appear to have harbors with boats, so if we get their attention hopefully the boats will come out to see if we need help. I think I'm going to target about a third of a mile from shore. I don't have any idea how to tell how deep the lake is but it's probably deeper out towards the middle. A third of a mile is - a strong swimmer can make it, get the rest of us some help."

"Flight crew was less than impressed with 'we don't know where the plane is and we don't expect to be able to call for help'."

"I bet they'll have to make a half dozen new regulations about whatever it is we did wrong.

I want to try to go in pretty low over the water where we'll be landing, see if we can get a sense of the wind conditions, any obstructions, and maybe the depth of the water that way. And a closer view of the town, in case it helps us identify the location better. Then I intend to climb again and hold over the south shore of the lake at five thousand feet, do our landing checklists, get confirmation from the cabin crew that they're ready, get to our desired fuel levels, and then start the descent - over the town to get their attention, over the lake to get a feel for the winds, and then land."

"And if we need to go around?"

"Up and to the left, climbing back to five thousand and the hold we were just using."

"That's a steep climb."

"You like four thousand better?"

"I think so? It means the second approach is a little different from the first but not that much and it's not like most of the usual reasons to climb farther after a go-around apply."

"Sure. Climb back to between four and five thousand as convenient given our workload if we go around. If visibility is worsening, we land immediately. If we get radio contact before we've committed to the landing, we go around and ask what they'd like us to do. If that part of the lake isn't suitable for landing when we take a look, we try other parts of the lake, near the other towns ideally."

"Works for me."

"Let's do a touch rehearsal of the ditching checklist." You bring your fingers to each button like you're pressing it, and call it out and get confirmation from your copilot exactly like you're doing it for real. It should mean they're a bit less fumbling about it, on the actual final descent. 

"Pressurization, Land Alt."

"Land Alt."

"Recall checked."

"Checked."

"Autobrake off."

"Off."

"Landing data VREF 40."

"VREF 40."

"Approach briefing completed."

"Completed."

And so on through the rest of it. It's honestly soothing. "All right. I guess we should go get a good look at our runway, now."

"I guess so. Broadcast our intentions, we'll go swing around and get a look."

"This is emergency aircraft Southwest Airlines 8684. We're descending to flight level 60 to go get a look at the lake we plan to land on. We have nine thousand pounds of fuel remaining and a hundred seventy five souls on board. We're going to pass over what looks like a small town, turn on a heading of forty and then on a heading of one hundred, pass over our intended landing site, and then hold at that altitude while we finalize our plans to land."

"Technically we also now need to call a fuel emergency as we anticipate landing below our minimums."

They'd have had to call an emergency soon anyway for the water landing but it's darkly amusing that, technically, this became a fuel emergency first. "Right. Mayday, mayday, mayday, we're anticipating an emergency landing over the water at below our minimum reserve fuel. Southwest Airlines 8684." 

"All right, let's take her around."

There is an enormous dragon making lazy laps in the sky above Vellumis. The laps are, to be clear, blindingly fast, once you account for how big and distant the dragon is, but they're still somehow managing to look lazy.

In a sense, of course, this is very threatening. Dragons do not tend to circle your cities because they are in a friendly mood. 

But in another sense, it is - weirdly non- threatening? Because a dragon you're unprepared for is a catastrophe, but a dragon you're prepared for can be driven off, if all of the most dangerous people who you consider allies have time to arrive and observe and prepare. So either the dragon is confident it can take the most powerful people Vellumis can call on, or it's not here to kill them. Which raises the question of what it wants.

Vellumis is the capital of a civilized country. They do a Sending to the dragon and ask. 

The dragon does not answer. 

No one can keep up with the dragon on its flight, but they can get briefly close enough to see it. It's shielded with its own powerful magic from every divination they think to try. It is copper and blue. 

On its side are painted words. Someone gets a look at them with Comprehend Languages up and returns to report that the dragon reads 'South. West. Air. Lines.'

Ominous.

And then the dragon descends. The civilians flee into the castle keep, if they can, and cower in terror, and three hundred archers are assembled on the walls to fire magic arrows when the dragon gets close. They are protected against electricity, because the people of Vellumis know how blue dragons work, and also against fire and acid and ice, because the bluecopper dragon would not be the first dragon to think of employing a ruse.

The dragon, on this pass over the city, roars a terrible roar that can be heard from a great distance, and does not pass quite low enough for it to be wise for the archers to fire.

"Is that a castle?"

" - sure looks like it." He spends a minute trying to think of possible explanations. "...I've got nothing."

"I'm going to disengage the autopilot and fly this manually. Keep a look out for rocks, or changes in coloration in the water, anything that might suggest we want a different part of the lake for our landing site."

He's still squinting out the window. "Those are some pretty big sailboats."

"You figure the lanes the boats travel in will be clear of rocks and obstructions, and sufficiently deep? Because that sounds better than guessing if we found a deep enough part of the lake."

"Sailboats have a pretty shallow draft. I'll look where they seem to be, especially if the boats seem to be being careful of their route in a way that suggests there are rocks, but I don't think it's sufficient." 

"Descending to flight level 40, disengaging the autopilot." And he sweeps out over the lake.

Unfortunately neither of them are lake experts. There aren't visible rocks sticking out of it, at least, except over in the distance near an island. The surface is flat and glassy, with only a bit of wind. "Landing parallel to the wind, so that looks like it'll be facing east."

"Not much wind, not much waves."

"All right. I'm going to climb and hold while we configure the plane to land and confirm that the cabin is ready."

The cabin is nearly ready. They've helped people extract their life vests from under their seats and they've distributed the kid life vests to all of the kids and she's gone on the PA to give the safety briefing about an emergency water landing to an unprecedentedly attentive audience. They've told everyone to identify their nearest exit and told the people in the back to plan on exiting through the middle doors and the people in front of the wings to plan on exiting through the front. The Miracle on the Hudson is making their lives a lot easier. Everyone knows that this happens sometimes and that everyone was okay. Of course, half the reasons everyone was okay don't apply this time, but you take what you can get.

A lot of people are crying. A lot of people are praying. Some are probably in shock. They walk the parents with young kids through how to brace the young kids for impact. 

Scared people are not very bright. And they're not very good at learning. So the thing flight attendants are trained to do in a real emergency is - sure, to give as much of a talk as there's time for, to walk down the aisle identifying people who have problems and getting them ready, to remind them of the pre-flight briefing. But people will remain scared and confused and they won't reliably do what you told them to do. And the most important thing for them to do is brace themselves so that their heads don't smash into the seat in front of them in the sudden deceleration.

The thing you do, when the cabin crew communicates that the emergency landing is imminent, is you start chanting, at the top of your lungs. "Brace! Brace! Brace!" On some airlines, it's "Brace! Brace! Brace! Heads down, grab your ankles!" You chant that until the plane is slowing safely down.

It's terrifying, if you're used to the cheerful customer service voice. It is not at all complicated. It is impossible to overthink. It works even on people who are confused and scared. 

The flight crew of Southwest Airlines 8684 goes around securing everyone's life vests and confirming that the people in the emergency exit rows have the upper arm strength to operate the door and they remind everybody that plane crashes are actually totally survivable! And they wait to hear that they're at 500 feet and it's time to stop reasoning with people and start chanting at them. 

"Flaps 30."

        "Flaps 30."

"Flaps 40."

        "Flaps 40."

"Can you think of anything we're missing?" 

They've completed the checklists, except the parts that have to be done on their final approach to the water. They've touch-rehearsed the whole thing a second time. They're down to three thousand pounds of fuel. They've reported the intended location of the ditching on the radio. They've had a glass of water and stretched their legs. 

At some point there's nothing to do but land your airplane. 

"They say any landing you walk away from is a good landing."

"I have some bad news for you."

"I was gonna add, any landing you paddle away from is a good landing too."

"Engine bleed air switches both off?"

"Off."

"Pressurization mode selector. MAN?"

"MAN."

"Holding the outflow valve switch until it shows fully closed. .... .... fully closed."

"Fully closed."

"Ground proximity gear inhibit switch, gear inhibit."

        "Gear inhibit."

"Ground proximity terr inhibit switch, terr inhibit."

        "Terr inhibit."

"Life vests, shoulder harnesses, and seatbelts on."

        "On."

"Confirm that passenger cabin preparations are complete." He gets up and opens the cockpit door. "Ready?"

"We're ready."

"1000 feet."

"One thousand feet."

"You're a little fast."

He pulls the thrust back.

"800 feet. 

700 feet."

"Visually I can't tell at all - call out every ten, in the last hundred."

"Six hundred feet."

He goes on the PA. "This is the captain speaking. We're coming in for an emergency landing. Brace yourselves."

"BRACE BRACE BRACE BRACE BRACE BRACE BRACE -"

- it actually gets most of the babies to stop crying. Maybe they can pick up on that it's something different, something important, because they trained precisely to make it a sound that speaks to people as something different and important.

"Four hundred. 

Three hundred. 

Two hundred. Cabin crew brace for impact. 

One hundred. Ninety. Eighty. Seventy. Sixty. Fifty. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten."

The bluecopper dragon comes lower, on its next terrifying swoop. Their current guess is that it's trying to wait out the Protection from Electricity. The archers fire. Most of them miss; it's fast. You can see one or two arrows sticking out of its underbelly as it sweeps away but it's hard to imagine they much inconvenienced it. And then it swoops over the water, lower than it did before, and plows into the water, moving through it so swiftly and gracefully that it seems the water is truly its natural element. It leaves an enormous wake behind it as it slows. 

And then it bobs back up to the surface, and rests there, quite placidly. 

"Reduce thrust to idle."

"Idle." 

"Set both engine start levers to cutoff."

"Cutoff."

"Open flight deck windows."

He's working on it. The air smells - lake-y. It's not a pleasant smell. It makes him tear up slightly. "Open."

"Commence evacuation -"

It has already commenced. Passengers who know that their airplane is in the water are not inclined to wait for orders from flight crew to start opening the emergency exits. The aft ones have two flight attendants stationed there to make sure they don't get opened if they're halfway underwater; the overwing ones are already open, as is one of the front ones. The inflatable yellow slides take a little while to deploy, but then there they go.

He opens the other front door, and herds people out. From up here in the front it doesn't look like the plane is taking on water, but then it wouldn't. The real test of whether they landed just right is how much water the back is taking on. 

You're supposed to be able to evacuate a plane in ninety seconds. You usually have ninety seconds and you often don't have longer. Human beings being human beings, some of them will go for the overhead bins and some of them will be wrangling three toddlers. They are not all off the plane in ninety seconds.

In three minutes, though, the only two people remaining on the plane are the captain and the lead flight attendant. They walk its length, checking that every seat is empty. There's only about a foot of water in the aft, really. 

"One seventy five, right?"

"Yeah." It's going to be very difficult to get a good count. They're using all six life rafts and people are still standing on the wings of the plane and at least one person swum for shore to get help.

"Well, none of them are here. Let's go."

They go down the slide. It detaches from the side of the plane. The not-yet-sinking plane. He had intended to stand - the rafts are fairly crowded - but when he tries it doesn't quite happen. Someone is trying to thank him. He doesn't really know what to do with that. 

The man who swam over from the seadragon reaches the dock and doesn't quite possess the upper arm strength to haul himself up onto it, but of course they get a hold of him and haul him up. He doesn't speak Taldane. He doesn't speak Hallit. This exhausts the language knowledge of these dock workers.

He indicates with gestures that he would like them to approach the dragon. They indicate back with gestures that this seems terribly ill-advised, really. He indicates more emphatically that ...it's a baby sea-dragon? This is not really reassuring. 

But Vellumis has called many people to its defense who are usually busy about important work elsewhere, and some of them are wizards, and some are both wizards and skilled in diplomatic negotiations with dragons, and shortly there is someone present who can weave the magic about him that lets him speak in the tongues of strangers. 

"What does the seadragon want?"

       "What does the - what? We want you to go take the boats and go rescue everybody! A bunch of them are kids! Some of them are on the wings of the plane and it might sink!!!"

" - and the seadragon won't eat the boats when they draw close?" the wizard says skeptically. He can indeed see the horde of innocent children. The seadragon would not be the first seadragon that could look like a flock of civilians. That he cannot pierce the illusion means little; it is obviously a very powerful seadragon.

       "- do you mean the airplane? It's - it's a machine, it doesn't eat people, and it's not going to be doing a lot of being an airplane anymore, either, is it? Come on, are you really all going to watch a bunch of people drown -"

"The airplane was your - ship? But it's not meant to be in the water?"

       The soaking wet man takes a deep breath. "No. No, it is not meant to be in the water. It's a fucking airplane. It was - taking people from Honolulu to LA, okay? But something went wrong, and - god damnit, we need help. And you can help or get out of my way so I can go talk to someone else."

       "Who is the captain of your airplane?"

"- uh, he said his name but I forgot. He'll be back at the plane, probably, with everyone else."

        "Can he speak to us?"

"If you get the hell over there with your boats, you bet he can."

        "The art of translation I am employing makes your words sound very blasphemous," says the wizard disapprovingly. And then he gestures dramatically, says an ancient word of power, and takes off soaring through the air towards the airplane and its people. 

"What the actual fuck."

Captain Davidson blinks blearily at the...flying person. That does seem to be what he is seeing. Possibly the decision to not think about what the fuck was going on, though it seemed like a reasonable decision at the time, is now going to come back to bite him. 

           "May I speak to the captain of the airplane?" says the flying person.

At that he finds he does after all have it in him to stand up. "That's me. Captain Andrew Davidson. What do you need."

         "Captain Davidson. Would you be willing to come back with me to Vellumis so we can learn more about this airplane and this situation?"

"Sorry," he says, "what? No! Absolutely not! There are children here, and this plane might be sinking. You can get every person on my plane all out of here and to safety, and then we can talk. One hundred and seventy five."

 The flying person descends and hovers. "Sorry, one hundred and seventy five what?"

" - one hundred seventy five souls on board. The plane. Well, they're not on the plane now, but - one hundred seventy five people it's my job to get to Los Angeles. Or at least to dry land... where are we."

"Vellumis. ...the plane doesn't pose a danger to ships drawing near it?"

" - no? Or at least I don't think they had any problems in New York."

"All right. Any injured?"

"I don't know. I would assume so. We were in a plane crash."

"I'll get a priest out here and some boats."

"Well I sure hope no one's injured in a way where you need to call a priest. Just call, you know, an ambulance. ...where is Vellumis relative to, say, Los Angeles."

"The translation is offering me 'the angels'? We are on a different plane from the angels."

"No, just the city. It's named after the angels, I guess, but it's just a city. In America."  

"I haven't heard of it. Will the airplane take offense if I go inside it?"

"I am now concerned I have a head injury or something."

        "It's not you, the man has a screw loose," says a nearby passenger helpfully. "It's an airplane. It can't take offense at things. It's a bad idea to go inside, though, because it might sink."

"The airplane is a construct, a machine, and it is unsafe to enter only because it may sink and that would make it difficult to leave?"

"Yes. You said you were going to call us some goddamned boats." 

The wizard looks affronted. "We will rescue your people but the boats will not be goddamned boats. We are a people in the service of the Good gods."

"- sorry. The - divinely blessed boats. The urgently needed boats. The boats that will cause these people to not drown."

The flying man swoops into the airplane's open door. They tiredly watch him go. 

A minute later he swoops out and back off to where the boats are.

"Have you heard of, uh, Vellumis?"

"That man was flying."

"Yeah. He was."

"We're really not in Kansas anymore."

The fishing boats come over, at first a little tentatively, to tow everyone to shore. They send a priest, too, and he waves his hands and says something dramatic and everyone does in fact feel kind of weirdly better after that, including a couple people who'd been worried about broken collarbones. The plane doesn't sink. Some more flying people come to poke around it some more. 

Kim is counting. 

"Have I counted you already?" 

       "Yeah."

"And you?"

      "Yeah."

"And you, and the baby?" 

       "No."

She's pretty sure after the first count, but not sure enough, so when they're standing on shore, the baffling locals eyeing them suspiciously, the priest wandering around patting people and saying incomprehensible things in a foreign language, she makes them split up into groups of ten and stay still for a moment, and then she recounts them, and then she is finally sure.

"One hundred seventy five."

"Thank God."

"No one's reporting any injuries. Though we should still get looked at, probably."

"Yeah. I - I'm sorry we got the plane lost."

"I think you got the plane so lost it swings back around to it was an act of God. And - you landed it."

"Captain did that."

"Pretty sure it takes two."

"Will you talk to us now?" a flying person asks the captain of the airplane. "All of your people are safe. We're trying to figure out sleeping arrangements."

"Southwest will pay for it," he says automatically before he realizes that, well, Southwest may not in fact be well positioned to do that. "And - yeah. I'll talk to whoever. Uh, we should - stop the cockpit voice recorder, actually, before it's too late - probably happened automatically, but if it didn't - there's a couple of boxes inside the plane that record all the things we did in the course of flying it in the leadup to the incident. If your people are flying around in there anyway, you should go and stop those. My people will want them, when they find us. It's how we - how we learn how to land planes."

"Is it difficult?"

"Little bit. Yeah. On a bad day."

"Was this a bad day?"

"Hey, you know, any landing that you paddle away from."