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Chapter VII

The Landing

“Great job on the landing, Captain.”

Captain Brian Eckerson, sixty-one, stood in the cockpit doorway of the Boeing 757 and nodded acknowledgment of Edmunds’s comment. Edmunds had both hands filled with his luggage and garment bag as he left first-class and headed for the exit door located just behind the flight deck.

Eckerson was a pleasant-looking man. He stood five ten and was a trim one hundred and seventy-five pounds. His captain’s cap covered a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. His polite manner and quiet features belied his one-hundred-plus combat missions in an F-14 that had earned him the Silver Star. That kind of flying under fire, literally, made him one cool customer at the controls. Eckerson took decisions instantly. The general consensus among his peers was that he had ice water in his veins.

Edmunds had felt the huge jet slide in the moments before touchdown at Boston’s Logan Airport, a sensation his fellow passengers did not share and would not have recognized as the result of a dangerous wind shear if they had. Edmunds had immediately braced himself, anticipating the worst. Then he heard the engines spool as the pilot immediately advanced the throttles to counter the loss of lift resulting from the sudden loss of airspeed. The surge of power from two Rolls-Royce RB211-535E4B engines rated at 43,500 pounds of thrust apiece allowed 234,000 pounds of aircraft to touch down without so much as a bump. It wasn’t an easy maneuver, and a lot of pilots, good ones, would not have reacted quickly enough to have managed it successfully, especially in equipment as large as a Boeing 7-5. As far as Edmunds was concerned, someone on the flight deck had just won the airmanship of the year award, and it was unlikely that the recipient would be the twenty-something-looking first officer sitting in the right seat.

It was the way Edmunds looked directly into the captain’s eyes along with his tone of voice that made Eckerson realize it was not a perfunctory remark from an oblivious de-plaining passenger. It was a sincere compliment from someone who had realized what had happened and knew that only the pilot’s skilled response had prevented a “hard landing,” which most probably would have resulted in structural damage to the aircraft and passenger injuries. Eckerson returned Edmunds’s gaze. The ever-so-slight nod of his head and knowing look completed the understanding between the two men.