B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm

In memory of Sergeant Ronald Rex Hall,

9th Battalion Parachute Regiment

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R
ANSOME
A
IRWAYS
F
LIGHT
189 to New York was one of 753 scheduled to depart from London’s Heathrow that Sunday in early January. During peak times at the world’s busiest international airport, one plane would take off and another land every minute. There was little room for error either human or mechanical, still less in the uncertain realm where the two connected.

At forty-six, Captain Dan Murray was one of the oldest pilots on the payroll. With a wife and three teenagers to support, he had chosen to sacrifice union representation and the perks he had enjoyed with his former company for the money in hand offered by Guy Ransome’s buccaneering airline. His basic salary barely covered the weekly groceries bill, and stopovers were spent in the cheapest airport hotels, but each transatlantic return trip earned him a little over £2,500. In a shrinking industry you had to make your money while you could.

Departure was scheduled for nine a.m. Murray hauled himself out of bed at five, slowly came to life in the shower, and minutes later was behind the wheel of his eight-year-old Ford. The persistent headache that had been bothering him lately had thankfully failed to take hold, and for once he didn’t have to spend his morning commute waiting for the painkillers to kick in.

It was an hour’s drive to Heathrow, and even at this ungodly hour of the day the motorway was filling up with angry traffic. He pulled into the car park of the Ransome building on the outer fringes of the airport at a little after six-thirty, collected his flight case from his locker and took a shuttle bus to Terminal Four. The short journey was shared with a dozen drowsy cabin crew dressed in Ransome’s trademark purple uniforms. Some would join him on the flight to New York; others were bound for Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Taipei. The younger hostesses discussed rumours of staff cuts on long-haul flights, but the older ones and Captain Murray kept their thoughts to themselves. Experience had taught them that Ransome Airways had little patience with gossips or trouble-makers.

First Officer Ed Stevens was already hard at work in the landside crew room when Murray joined him for breakfast. The twenty-eight-year-old had a newborn daughter and a wife who had been made redundant as soon as her pregnancy had started to show. He needed his job even more than his captain did and was keen to impress. After a few moments’ chat, Murray opened his company laptop, hooked into the firm’s intranet and listened while Stevens talked him through the flight plan.

The precise route they would follow from London to New York was contained in the electronic flight information pack, a series of files in an email issued in the early hours of the morning by Sky Route. The company’s sophisticated software was designed to get aircraft to their destinations as cheaply as possible, taking account of the weather, and passenger and cargo payload. 10 per cent of flight costs were incurred in landing fees and over-flight charges, 90 per cent in aviation fuel. A strong headwind could add 30 per cent to the cost of a flight and turn it into a loss-maker for the company; finding the cheapest route on a given day was critical.

Sky Route had taken account of all the satellite-generated weather data and decided on a southerly course to avoid strong winds in the north Atlantic. They would fly due west from Heathrow, level off at 31,000 feet over the Severn estuary and make their way towards the southern tip of Ireland. Midway across the Irish Sea they would climb to their cruising altitude of 39,000 feet and follow an almost direct line across the ocean. An estimated flight time of eight hours would have them on the ground at New York’s JFK at midday, Eastern Standard Time. Having talked his captain through the main points, Stevens drew his attention to several Notices to Airmen (NOTAMS) that warned of pockets of thunder cloud over the western British Isles and Irish Sea. It was unremarkable weather for the time of year and nothing to cause either pilot anxiety.

Captain Murray had always preferred flying the Atlantic to complex routes over a patchwork of countries. Beyond Irish airspace there would be no air traffic controllers to deal with until they skirted southern Canada. And once aloft the Airbus virtually flew itself; in fact, if correctly programmed, it would even land and come to a halt on the JFK runway without human intervention.

Satisfied with their proposed course, Murray ordered a second cup of coffee and set about checking the fuel-load calculations. Operating on the tightest of margins, Ransome Airways insisted its captains take on only the regulation minimum 3 per cent of total fuel load as a contingency, which amounted to approximately thirty extra minutes in the air. If a captain chose to take on more and didn’t use it, he would be fined according to a sliding scale: every two litres of fuel taken on board required another litre just to keep it airborne. Satisfied that there were no weather systems reported over the Atlantic likely to require a significant deviation, Murray confirmed Sky Route’s suggested order for 105 tonnes of kerosene and hit the send button, filing his flight plan with the company dispatcher.

It was ninety minutes before take-off.

Greg Patterson was having a bad weekend. His ten-year-old daughter, Amy, was in tears, people were staring, and nothing he said would console her. To make matters worse, he could feel his wife’s disapproval across the three thousand miles of ocean that separated them. Taking the vice-president’s post in London had seemed to him just the sort of fillip his tired marriage had needed, but Michelle had refused to leave Connecticut. A professor in applied mathematics at Hartford University, she had been offered a visiting lectureship at King’s College, London, but when departure day loomed she claimed she couldn’t bring herself to desert her elderly mother. Greg knew full well there was more to it than that, but for the sake of his daughter he had agreed to go alone, and to suffer a monthly intercontinental commute.

Michelle had brought Amy over for Christmas but had had to fly home four days early to look after her mother, who, with impeccable timing, had broken a hip during her absence. Greg had persuaded Michelle to let Amy stay on with the promise that he would fly to New York with her en route to a business meeting to Washington. He had seen very little of his daughter during the previous eight months and relished the prospect of a few days alone with her. All had been well until the previous Friday morning, when, in typically autocratic fashion, Greg’s CEO cancelled his Washington trip, dictating that he had more pressing business to attend to in London. Greg had briefly toyed with the crazy idea of flying to New York with Amy on Saturday and back to London twenty-four hours later, but his plan was skewered when late on Friday evening the airline bumped them onto a Sunday flight, claiming that their Saturday departure had been unwittingly overbooked. Michelle had failed to be understanding. As far as she was concerned, Greg’s intention to fly their daughter home as an unaccompanied minor was tantamount to child abuse.

Amy clung on to him and wept at the desk in the departure hall as he completed the forms entrusting her to the airline. The Ransome hostess tried her best to soothe the child, promising movies, video games and an endless supply of treats until she met her mother at the other end, but Amy wouldn’t be mollified. Greg attempted and failed on three separate attempts to get her to put on the purple tabard that singled her out as a child travelling alone, and it was the hostess who finally insisted that he just go and leave them to it. With a lump in his throat he disappeared into the crush of travellers with his daughter’s tearful pleas ringing in his ears.

One aspect of service on which Ransome didn’t skimp was its VIP lounge. Cattle-class tickets barely covered costs; the airline’s profit was made in business and first class. Attracting wealthy customers was the chief priority. One such was Jimmy Han – a name the young entrepreneur had adopted for the benefit of his Western business associates – who had clocked up more miles with Ransome Airways than any other customer. Once every two weeks he travelled from his company’s manufacturing plant in Taipei to its offices in Frankfurt and London. This week, for good measure, he was adding a three-day hop across the Atlantic to his schedule. He had spent the previous night at the Savoy, but its luxurious spa had felt a little tired compared with the one he was currently enjoying in the newly overhauled Ransome lounge: lying face-down on a massage couch, he drifted into a doze as a beautiful young woman kneaded his back with scented oils.

The semi-educated boy from Shanghai had come a long way in twenty years. He had worked hard, been lucky and grown exceedingly rich. There was much he intended to give back in return for his success, but that was no reason not to enjoy his wealth. When an interviewer had once asked him if he ever tired of the high life, Han had replied that those who came from nothing appreciated luxury like no one else, for at the back of their minds was always the thought that it might all be suddenly snatched away.

The Airbus A380 was the world’s largest commercial airliner. 73 yards long, 24 yards high and with a wingspan the length of a football pitch, it dwarfed the 747s that stood alongside it. Designed to carry 525 passengers in a normal three-class configuration, Ransome Airways bunched things up a little more tightly in economy to squeeze in closer to six hundred.

Pre-flight preparations were in full swing. Outside in the freezing drizzle a pumping truck transferred fuel from underground containers into the tanks in the aircraft’s wings, while the ground engineers carried out their final inspections. Inside a team of cleaners was working against the clock as the eighteen cabin crew checked that the galleys had been correctly loaded and searched the passenger manifests for those with special requirements: the ‘problems’. There were unusually few: three in wheelchairs and a smattering of fussy eaters. Amy Patterson was the only unaccompanied minor. The words ‘Will need attention!’ had been entered next to her name. The crew unanimously decided that she would be the responsibility of Kathy Flood, the newest and youngest of their number, whether Kathy liked it or not.

After twenty years flying US-made Boeings, Captain Murray had found retraining to fly the Airbus a challenge. But having conquered his initial scepticism at the aircraft’s semi-robotic flight control systems, he was now a fully committed convert. It wasn’t perfect – he would have preferred a conventional centre stick to the arcade-style electronic joystick positioned at his right side, and a nostalgic part of him would have liked at least a few mechanical analogue instruments for use in the last resort – but he accepted that he was flying an incomparably safe machine. Fly-by-wire technology meant that all the vital systems were controlled by a highly sophisticated network of computers and electronics. Rather than the rudder, spoilers and tail elevators being moved by cables and hydraulics operated manually from the cockpit, the pilot’s controls transmitted only electronic signals to the various moving parts.