Page 1 of Final Approach

I’d planned my death in vivid detail multiple times in the last three decades. Some gruesome, a few peaceful. All with the same inevitable outcome: my heart no longer pumping, my brain no longer firing, the pain of living no longer housed beneath the surface of my skin.

But I didn’t expect to die today.

“Marley, pull up!”

At Jamie’s order, I forced my hands to close around the plane’s controls as the plane veered hard right. My belly lurched into the back of my throat as the gray skyline dipped toward the dense tree canopy. Rich red bathed us in somber light as an aggressive alarm blared overhead. My flight training kicked in overdrive and my body moved automatically, leaving my brain free to assess the situation.

Fire. Right wing.

A red-page emergency.

Don’t think, just do.

Shit, shit, shit. Panic’s icy kiss flooded through my veins. Just DO, Marley!

First priority, cut the fuel to the engine. I slapped the fuel control switch on the center console.

I struggled to keep the yoke on a stable path as the 15,000-pound metal bird careened eastward.

Thick dewdrops of sweat melted into ribbons along my forehead. I’d never had to use that switch before.

My co-captain, Jaime, and I danced in sync, hands working over the dash in a practiced rhythm. He engaged the round red button behind the center control panel to discharge the suppressant.

Fire suppressant. Right.

A bubble of air caught in my chest as I waited the single agonizing second for the chemicals to engage.

One … tw—

When the shrill beep finally fought through all the other noise in the cabin, I let it out in a forced burst of air like a gunshot. Jamie’s hazel eyes met mine as he settled back into his seat, his face glossy with a grim mix of horror and determination.

But the right wing flaps weren't responding to commands at all. If the 19-passenger plane went belly-up mid-air over the bowels of the Colombian jungle with no civilization for miles, our chances of survival were slim to none.

I pulled upward on the yoke, the panic swirling in my gut stifled by the task at hand. As I worked to level out our Cessna SkyCourier, Jamie orchestrated the switches on our dashboard to adjust our pitch.

“What the fuck happened?” he yelled over the cacophony of alarms filling the cabin, his calm body language at odds with the urgent grate of his tone.

It wasn’t our usual route, or even our usual plane. We’d been five hours into the nine-hour trip from São Paulo to Mexico City when we’d flown into a pocket of extreme weather. Instead of giving everyone on board a brain bleed, we’d dropped altitude and changed course to get out of the thunderstorm still raging in the thick clouds above our heads.

“No idea!” I shouted back. Could he even hear me over the pounding of my heart?

Adrenaline fueled my limbs with every flick, switch, and turn of a dial over the control panel, my nerve endings electrified with the desperate will to keep us upright. The dashboard lit up in a fiery rainbow of red, yellow, and orange, each light pulsing with its own menacing heartbeat.

Over 1500 flights in 15 years, and this was my first real crisis.

Well, first plane crisis. The West family only knew tragedy and heartbreak.

The invitation of death was a comforting companion most days—but I wasn’t a masochist. Suffering wasn’t my kink. When I finally went through with it, I wouldn’t take 18 innocent people with me.

Certainly not people who’d trusted me with their safe passage. Even the criminal in seat 1B hadn’t been sentenced to death for his crimes.

My empty steel coffee mug, a relic from my years at Purdue, flipped out of its holder when the aircraft banked hard right, toward the damaged wing again. Pulling up on the yoke to counteract basic physics, my lungs held tight to the air in my chest as I held tight to the hope we had a way out of this. We needed to get the fire away from the rest of the plane. A side slip was the only way.

One … two … three …

Finally, the plane responded, banked left, forcing the right wing upward, the smoke careening in the opposite direction. It wasn’t enough. Without one active wing, the drag on the plane was slowing us down too quickly. We were dropping too rapidly.

Airspeed is life. Altitude is insurance. Having neither meant death.