And Recovers
“Why does Twilight get the private jet?”
I sighed in frustration. “Twilight is technically royalty and is considered a very important person by us. You’re lucky to be flying in business class. I’m just here to keep an eye on you.”
Dash’s ears folded back as she slouched into her seat. “It’s unfair.”
“When I flew with my family last week to Colorado, I had to sit in the back where you’re packed in like sardines. Here we say ‘life is unfair.’”
I felt a tap on my seat and looked over my shoulder. Fluttershy, sitting behind me, smiled back. “It’s okay, Daniel. I think it’s neat.”
Starlight chuckled, sitting next to Fluttershy. “It’s more than neat if you ask me. I got a few friends that’ll want to hear about this.”
“Rainbow,” Fluttershy giggled. “Go easy on him.”
“Pfft,” Dash grunted before turning and staring out the window. The plane was still parked at the stand and boarding. There wasn’t much to see apart from the occasional aircraft parking or leaving the stand.
I glared at Dash in return, trying to think of a way to stop her from complaining. It was bad enough being the one secret service member that stuck with the side job instead of the job of a lifetime, let alone getting stuck with the whiny one. Still, I had to find a way to keep her from complaining and keep my own sanity. An idea popped in my head as I pulled my laptop out of my bag, booted it up, and nudged her.
“What?” she snapped.
“Have you seen the cockpit of this plane?” I pulled up an image of a 737 NG cockpit and turned it towards her.
Her eyes widened at the mass of dials and switches. “Huh?”
“Every one of those buttons has a specific purpose and has to be checked prior to takeoff. There are even autopilot and autoland features that allow the plane to almost fly itself.”
“How does anypony fly with all of that?”
“Well, it takes two people and a lot of training to get the job. I think you’d understand it better than I would.”
“I bet.”
I ignored her passive-aggressive comment. “I can pull up some videos on how to fly this plane. We get free internet in business class so don’t worry about it.”
She nodded.
I took a few seconds to find a playlist online and passed the computer to Dash. I also gave her my headphones so she wouldn’t bother the rest of us.
After a painful 30 minutes, the doors finally closed and the captain gave us his greetings through the intercom. A minute later and we taxied out through the airport and onto the runway. The whining of the engines powering up along with the force pushing me into my seat gave me a rush. Gently, the wings of the plane bent up and lifted the aircraft into the air. I wouldn’t consider myself an avid flyer but I always enjoyed the power behind these machines.
The force of the takeoff was the only thing that drew Dash’s eyes off of the screen for a moment. Once in the air for a minute or two, she went back to her videos.
And then came the boring part of the flight. With Dash occupying my laptop, I wasted my time on my phone instead. After thirty or so minutes (I’m not sure; I wasn’t keeping track of the time) of mind-numbing phone games, I decided to stretch out my legs and go to the bathroom.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” I mentioned to the girls as I unbuckled myself and stood up. Dash kept her eyes glued to the laptop as Starlight rested her head against the window and dozed off. “She napping?”
Fluttershy yawned. “It’s okay. I’m a little tired too.”
“I thought you two slept well last night. Dash was the only one who stayed up late last night fiddling on my laptop.”
“Maybe it’s just flying. In a plane, I mean?”
“Beats me.”
I walked down the aisle, noticing a fair amount of passengers dozing off too and striking me as odd. Once inside the bathroom, I collapsed on the toilet and took a breather. Although Fluttershy and Starlight kept Dash in check, herding the three of them around was in stark contrast to the focussed and fast-paced travel of government officials. Their ignorance of much of human life honestly felt like herding children. I put my hand to my mouth and yawned. Something did feel a bit odd.
A yellow cup fell from the ceiling and dangled in front of me.
A passenger oxygen mask.
I stood up and grabbed the mask before uttering a “Fuck.” I pulled the mask down, took in a few breaths of air, and opened up the bathroom door. Yellow masks dangled along the whole cabin.
Half of the passengers fumbled the masks while the other half sat slumped over. I swapped masks with one in the front row and examined a passed-out passenger. His lips turned a faint shade of blue.
“Daniel, what’s going on?” Dash asked with ears and eyes darting around the room. Behind her, Fluttershy and Starlight leaned over unconscious.
“Why don’t you have a mask on?”
She pointed to her muzzle. “It doesn’t fit.”
I sighed. “Was there a sudden rush or anything?”
“I didn’t feel anything.”
I looked at the man beside me. “Hypoxia, the cabin’s depressurizing. Hopefully not suddenly.”
She plopped the mask on her muzzle even though it didn’t cover her mouth.
Down the aisle, a flight attendant wearing an oxygen mask hooked up to a bottle in his hand walked toward us. Tucked within his other arm were three more bottles. He stopped in the center of the aisle, looked around, and mumbled “Shit.” He held up his hand as a few passengers nearly panicked. “Stay calm, we’re awaiting a briefing from the captain.”
“Why haven’t you heard from him yet?” I asked.
“Give them a minute to work through the problem first. I assure you…”
“I’m with the secret service. I demand you tell me what’s going on.”
“Look, I’m doing what I’m trained to do. I grabbed these bottles in case anyone needed them and now half the cabin needs them.” He approached Dash and me, plopped two oxygen bottles on my seat, and nodded at Dash. “Watch these for a bit.”
Dash nodded back as he turned to me and handed me the third bottle. “Put this on and help me get the rest of the business class hooked up to the overhead oxygen. The passenger oxygen system only lasts twelve minutes and I want everyone to use it before it's gone.”
I grabbed the bottle and slipped the attached mask over my face. Row by row, the two of us checked for any unconscious passengers without an oxygen mask. For everyone unconscious or struggling with their mask, we reached over and slipped them on. A couple of unconscious seniors leaned to the side and had to be repositioned, but working through the business class didn’t take long. Once done, the attendant and I made our way back to the front of the cabin, sat down, and waited.
I looked over to Dash who sat on the seat looking back. “You’re holding up pretty well.”
She breathed in her nose and through the yellow mask. “I said I live in a cloud. Altitude doesn’t bother me.”
“Yeah, but thirty thousand feet?”
She wiggled the mask on her nose. “I’m trying my best, okay?”
I smiled. “I spent last week in the mountains in a cabin at nine thousand feet. The acclimation probably gave me just a bit longer to react before I would’ve passed out.”
I turned to the attendant. He looked at his watch. “Six minutes.” He stood up and walked over to an intercom mic. Grabbing it, he held it to his mouth. “Cabin crew to flight crew, respond.”
As he spoke, the plane tilted to the right as the whining of the engines softened. The attendant stumbled before replanting himself. “Shit, something’s wrong!”
He rushed to the cockpit door with me behind him and pounded on the door. No response.
With a jolt, he reached to the side and punched in a code. He stepped back and stared at his watch. “Thirty seconds until we can get in.”
“Dammit,” I muttered, lifting my hand to pound on the door too.
“It’s bulletproof and they’re not responding. Twenty five seconds.”
I stepped back next to him. The plane banked further forcing me to widen my stance. “Can you fly a plane?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just in case.”
He hesitated. “I want to but haven’t got inside a cockpit yet.”
“That makes two of us.”
Each second ticked by one by one down to 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…
The attendant yanked the door open, revealing two pilots slumped over the controls. The hand of the captain sat on the throttle. The body of the first officer pressed the yoke down to the right.
“Shit!” I jumped to the captain. The attendant and I hooked an arm underneath his armpit and, on the count of three, pulled him out of the seat. After dragging him out of the cockpit, I knelt down and examined his face. Blue lips. “Oxygen. Where’s the oxygen?”
“Here!” Dash shouted, lunging with both oxygen bottles in her forehooves. She let go of her yellow oxygen mask and hopped next to us.
I hesitated. “But…”
She nodded. “I’m okay.”
I grabbed one out of her hooves, unfolded the mask, and wrapped the mask around the captain’s face. Clicking the valve on, the cylinder hissed as oxygen flowed to the captain. “How long till he’s awake?”
“I don’t know,” the attendant responded. “It’ll take a bit for the oxygen to get into his blood and…”
“Airspeed low, airspeed low.”
Dash, the attendant, and I snapped our heads toward the cockpit. That was a cockpit alarm.
The attendant and I rushed to the first officer and pulled his body off of the yoke. Dash slipped in behind us and slid into the captain’s seat. With another yank, the attendant and I pulled the first officer out of his seat and pulled him into the cabin.
“Bank angle.” Another alarm.
I jumped back into the cockpit and sat in the first officer’s chair. “What’s going on?”
“We’re losing speed, bank angle is too high. This looks bad.”
“Level us out. We’ll go from there.”
She paused. “What?”
“I said level us out.”
“But that would…”
“We gotta do something and I’m the one in charge here, okay?”
“We might…”
“Just do it already!”
She gulped, wrapped her hooves around the yoke, and tilted it to the left. The yoke rattled, causing me to jump back. Rumbling shook the plane. The plane leveled out, turned past level, and kept turning. A second later the horizons swapped. I looked up to the ground.
We were upside down.
I opened my mouth. “How the…”
“Shut up!” Dash shouted. “Nose down.”
She pulled up on the yoke. Up was now down.
“Thrust off.”
She moved both throttle levers back. The plane nosedived as the ground filled our view. Wind rushing past the plane roared and reverberated throughout the cockpit.
“Speed brakes.”
She moved a lever next to the throttle back a notch. A clacking sound filled the cockpit along with a “sink rate.” Details on the ground appeared.
“And slowly pull up.”
Dash gently pulled back on the yoke as the nose rose slowly. Shaking enveloped the plane as the roaring deafened my ears. A faint “pull up” cut through the noise.
“Come on.”
The nose rose to 30 degrees and to 20 and 10. The shaking intensified. “Terrain terrain, pull up!”
“Almost there.”
The nose pulled above the horizon. The rumbling weakened as Dash pulled the plane into a 20 degree incline. Once the rumbling followed by the clacking sound stopped, she disengaged the speed brake lever and slowly applied thrust to engines. As she leveled out the plane, we both sat there silent.
I turned to look at her. “What the fuck just happened?”
She kept her eyes on the instruments. “Our left wing stalled when you told me to level the plane out. Because our right wing still produced lift, I couldn’t stop the roll and we flipped over.”
“Yeah but… we were upside down and…”
She cut me off. “And so I brought the nose down, cut the thrust, turned on the speed brakes, and slowly pulled out of it. Pretty basic if you ask me.”
“Don’t tell me you learned that from the videos.”
“What!? No… every pegasus knows how to get out of a stall, even a roll over stall like that. That was the first thing my dad taught me when I started learning to fly. Nose down, stop flapping, that’s lesson number one.”
“I’m just…” I leaned back and took a few deep breaths. “That just happened.”
She chuckled. “I mean, the videos showed me what most of the buttons and things here did but I guess it was just pegasus instinct after that.”
“Honestly, I’ll give you credit.” I point at her. “Don’t ever expect to hear that again.”
She laughed. “Yeah right.”
The two of us sat there for a minute silently processing what happened. By the time it became awkward, I realized something. “So, can you land it?”
“Pfft, no,” she laughed.
“Then we should call someone, right?”
“One twenty one point five.”
“Huh?”
She pointed with her hoof to a panel behind the throttle and beside me. “Set that radio frequency and use the switch below it to transmit. I did learn that from the videos, by the way. You’ll need a headset too.” She pointed past my lap to a cable beside me.
I followed the cable, found the headset below me, and put it over my head. Then I dialed 121.500 on the active radio and saw a mass of buttons and dials below. “Uh, what about these dials and buttons below?”
“Hit VHF two and use the R slash T switch to transmit.”
I hit the button and pushed the transmit switch up. “Maday, mayday. I’m a passenger flying from D.C. to Chicago. Both of our pilots are incapacitated and we just pulled out of a roll-over stall a minute ago.”
A second later and a raspy voice came through the headset. “This is Pittsburgh International Airport ATC. Did you say you pulled out of a roll over stall?”
I smiled and nodded toward Dash. “I didn’t. My friend did and she’s currently holding the aircraft level.”
“Is your autopilot engaged?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Set the altitude dial to your current altitude and press the engage A button above the white disengage bar.”
“Dash, what’s our current altitude?” I asked.
“Uh…” She leaned her head into the instruments. “Fifteen thousand… that’s in feet, right?”
“Yes it is.” We were supposed to cruise above 30,000 feet. Did we really fall that far? I set the dial accordingly and pressed the engage button. After a second, Dash took her hooves off of the yoke and the aircraft flew itself. Both of us breathed a sigh of relief.
“Autopilot is engaged and working,” I transmitted to ATC.
“If you really pulled out of a rollover stall, check the wings for any damage.”
The flight attendant stumped into the cockpit after I spoke, holding a hand to his forehead. “What the hell happened in here?”
“Uh…” Dash giggled. “I uh…”
I turned to the flight attendant and cut her off. “Are the pilots up yet?”
“The captain’s kinda up and I just got the mask on the first officer. FAA rules require a twenty minute recovery period after waking up before a pilot can take controls, although I’m not sure if that applies here.” He paused a glance at the pilots behind him. “They also took a bit of a tumble. I don't think they should fly.”
“Okay then.” I leaned my head over, getting a glimpse of the pilots. Both of them were sprawled out and contorted on the ground not where we left them. “Can you take over?”
“I guess. I almost got thrown around back there too.”
I slid out of my chair, let the attendant take over, and walked through the cabin. The wings and remaining cabin looked fine, at least from what I could tell. Nothing snapped off or bent out of shape. I knew planes were generally over-engineered, but damn did it hold up well. As I walked back, Fluttershy woke up and tried to nudge Starlight awake too.
“Daniel,” she stopped me, looking around. “Um, I have a little headache. Did anything happen while I was asleep? Where’s Rainbow?”
“She’s in the cockpit. I’ll explain later.”
“Did she do anything wrong?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.”
By the time I reached the cockpit again, the flight attendant took off his oxygen mask as Dash reclined in her seat.
“We’re at ten thousand feet. The pressure is fine now,” the attendant noted.
“Dude, you weren’t kidding when you said this thing can fly itself,” Dash touted. "All we gotta do is push buttons and the thing does all of the work for us.” She sat up and pointed to the overhead panel. “Get this, the only reason the plane depressurized was because one switch was set to manual instead of auto. All of that because of one switch.”
“I’ve seen worse,” I laughed.
The rest of the flight went by smoothly with Dash and the attendant listening to ATC and guiding the plane to a soft touchdown at Pittsburgh International Airport. Once the plane slowed to a stop on the runway, the inflatable evacuation slides deployed as a horde of emergency vehicles surrounded the aircraft. Within a few minutes and with the help of emergency personnel, the whole plane was evacuated.
I joined Dash a couple of hundred feet away from the plane. She sat down on the grass with a blanket wrapped around herself and stared at the plane.
I sat down next to her and stared at the plane too. “How you holding up?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Okay? When is the cocky and jealous Rainbow Dash ever ‘okay?’”
“Shut up,” she snapped before letting out a sigh. “Back home in Equestria, I like to help and save ponies and take a lot of credit in the process. But I’ve never felt like this before.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, shaken? I’ve been nervous before but I never felt like I could die if I made the wrong choice, let alone other ponies. I’ve never felt that kind of pressure before. I don’t know what to think of it.”
I leaned back. “As a secret service member, I’m taught to take a bullet or get stabbed if it means protecting someone else. I’ve only been in that situation once when I was watching over some niece of the VP. It was a similar job like this and she was kind of a brat like you. But when someone tried to snatch her up and point a knife at me, I had the guy on the ground in less than a second. I barely even registered until a minute later. I just did things.”
“Hmm,” Dash grunted and looked down. “And here I am just doing tricks and trying to look cool.”
“Hey, that training saved a lot of lives today.”
“I guess.”
— — —
A couple of hours later and Twilight arrived, galloping over to us. “Rainbow!”
Dash and I sat at a table in the airport terminal trying to kill time. Starlight, Fluttershy, and most of the passengers were still in the process of being checked and treated for hypoxia. When Dash heard Twilight, she perked up as Twilight ran up and hugged her.
“A little tight, Twilight,” Dash muffled.
“Sorry,” Twilight pulled away and stepped back. “When I heard you guys touched down, I canceled everything I had for today and flew here.”
“With the private jet, I assume,” Dash whispered.
Twilight raised an eyebrow. “What was that?”
Dash shook her head. “Nothing.”
“So,” Twilight winked at me. “She didn’t cause any trouble, did she?”
I smiled. “Eh, she’s smarter than she looks.”
As the months went by and well after Twilight and her friends’ trip ended, I caught word of the FAA’s investigation into the incident. The report stated that the combination of aileron input assisted by spoiler caused a low speed stall on the left wing, flipping the aircraft over. There was much debate over whether we should’ve pulled out of the dive or attempted to roll the plane back over. The official statement on the FAA report was that “the actions of Rainbow Dash and Daniel were sufficient enough to save the aircraft and everyone on board.” The report then went on to lambast the pilots, but I didn’t care about that.
Almost every time I was asked about the incident, I declined to comment as I didn’t like the spotlight. However, one reporter asked me what I thought of Dash after the incident. “She’s smarter than she looks,” I told the reporter. “And because of that, I’m still alive.”