Chapter 4 - The Art of the ThrottleAt 8,000 feet above the rolling green hills of the Columbia River Gorge, Sarah Mitchell was engaged in a brutal, exhausting dance with physics.
Flying a commercial airliner using hydraulics is a matter of smooth, hydraulic-assisted inputs on a control wheel. Flying a commercial airliner using only engine throttles is like trying to balance a bowling ball on the tip of a broomstick while riding a unicycle.
To turn left, Sarah had to slightly increase power to the right engine while reducing power to the left engine. But increasing power to the right engine also created extra lift on the right wing, which caused the aircraft’s nose to pitch upward. To compensate for the unwanted climb, she then had to slightly reduce power to both engines simultaneously—without reducing it so much that the heavy jet stalled and fell out of the sky.
Every single movement of her hands had to be calculated seconds in advance to account for the slow, lagging spool-up time of the massive jet engines.
Sweat dripped from Sarah’s forehead, stinging her eyes. Her stiff, scarred hands burned with intense muscular fatigue, but her grip on the chrome throttle levers never wavered by a millimeter.
"Speed is two-forty knots," First Officer Jennifer Park called out, her eyes scanning the primary flight display. "Distance to Portland is forty-two miles. We are maintaining seven thousand feet."
Captain Thomas Reed sat in the left seat, his hands resting lightly on his lap, watching Sarah with pure admiration. In thirty-eight years of flying, he had never seen a human display such raw, instinctive mastery over an aircraft.
"You're feeling the air through the engines, aren't you?" Thomas asked softly.
"The aircraft talks to you through the airframes," Sarah replied, her eyes locked on the distant horizon where the grey ribbon of the Columbia River wound toward the Pacific. "Every buffeting vibration on the wing tips tells you what the air is doing. You don't fly the plane, Captain. You negotiate with it."
Suddenly, a loud, metallic CLANG echoed through the floorboards.
The aircraft lurched violently to the left. The airspeed indicator began to drop rapidly: 230 knots... 210 knots... 190 knots.
"What was that?!" Thomas shouted, checking his engine instruments. "Did we lose an engine?!"
"Negative!" Jennifer yelled, pointing to the hydraulic status panel. "The air pressure in the secondary standby lines just blew the main landing gear doors open! The main gear just gravity-dropped into the airstream!"
The landing gear—three massive sets of rubber tires and steel struts—had dropped into the 200-knot slipstream without hydraulic dampening. The immense aerodynamic drag hit the aircraft like an invisible brick wall.
The nose of the Boeing 737 pitched downward sharply.
“AIRSPEED LOW! AIRSPEED LOW!” the cockpit warning system barked.
"We're stalling!" Jennifer cried out. "Speed passing one-seventy! Stall warning in ten knots!"
"Full power! Both engines, full power!" Sarah roared, slamming both throttle levers all the way forward to the mechanical stops.
The twin CFM56 engines screamed, dumping thousands of gallons of jet fuel into their combustion chambers. The massive wall of thrust pushed the jet forward, but the asymmetric drag of the hanging landing gear forced the right wing back down toward the earth.
The aircraft was twenty miles from Portland, dropping through 4,000 feet, trapped in a low-speed, high-drag descent toward the suburban sprawl of Vancouver, Washington.
"She won't hold level with the gear down at full power!" Thomas shouted over the roaring engines. "We don't have enough engine thrust to overcome the gear drag!"
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Sarah’s teeth gritted so hard her jaw ached. She looked out the windscreen. Five miles ahead, the Columbia River stretched out like a wide, shining silver highway.
"We don't need to hold level," Sarah said, her voice dropping into a deadly, focused register. "We're done flying high. We're taking her down to the water."
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