Inside the cockpit, the explosion, the shock, the concussion, and the vibration were as severe as if they had hit the ground. The airspeed dropped one hundred knots as the huge bomber uncontrollably heaved and rocked across the sky — the Black Knight seemed to spin violently to the left, toward the dead number-one engine. The controls shook violently, then turned mushy and completely unresponsive, then seemed to freeze. The left wing dipped lower and lower, and there seemed nothing Cobb could do to stop it.
“We’re hit!” Cobb screamed. He hauled on the sidestick controller with all the strength of his right arm. “Get on the controls!” he shouted to McLanahan. “Get the left wing up!”
McLanahan unstowed his sidestick controller, which was normally stowed underneath the right instrument panel glare shield. He moved the grip but nothing happened. “It’s not active!”
The interphone died as the number-one generator popped off-line. Cobb ripped off his oxygen mask and screamed, “Then get out, Patrick! Get out!” Despite the emergency, Cobb still wasn’t going to yell “Eject!” — that would elicit an immediate response from any well-trained crew dog.
“Get the wing up, Henry!” McLanahan yelled. Cobb took his left hand off the throttles and pushed on his control stick. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the left wing seemed to rise — and McLanahan decided right then and there that he wasn’t going to eject. The bomber could be milliseconds from hitting the ground, there could be a fire spreading through the bomb bays — but unless Cobb ordered him to eject he was going to stay. There was enough of a hint of aircraft control left to convince him they still had a chance…
Several loud bangs rattled the three-hundred-thousand- pound bomber as if a giant hand were throwing them against a mountainside, picking them up, then hurling them again.
McLanahan turned away from his pilot and scanned the engine and flight instruments. “Airspeed one-eighty… RPMs on number-one engine fifty percent, TIT and EGT on redline… number-one engine compressor stall, shut down number one. Number-one throttle.” McLanahan put his left hand on the center console throttle quadrant, guarding the three good engines to make sure Cobb didn’t shut off a good engine. The leftmost throttle snapped back to idle, then to “Cutoff.” A compressor stall was a common but potentially dangerous engine malfunction in which the airflow through the engine is disrupted and the engine stops producing thrust — but fuel continues to flow through the engine and ignite in terrific shuddering explosions, one after the other, causing a huge fire inside the combustion chamber.
“Off!” Cobb yelled back.
“Turbine inlet temperature and exhaust temps,” McLanahan said. Hie checked the right-side multi-function display, but it had gone dead when the number-one engine generator popped off-line, so he went to the rows of tiny standby gauges. “RPMs on number-one forty percent, TIT and EGT still redline. All the others are OK. Gotta shut number one down.” Since the MFDs had shut off, they couldn’t tell if the computer had already initiated the shutdown procedures, so they assumed it had not. “Fuel cutoff T-handle, number-one engine, pull.”
“You get it!” Cobb yelled — he dared not take a hand off the control stick. McLanahan released the inertial reel lock on his shoulder harness and reached across the forward instrument panel to a row of yellow-and-black-striped handles labeled “Emergency Fuel Cutoff Pull.” He laid his left hand on the first handle, stopped, double-checked that he had the right one — again, to avoid shutting down a good engine and killing them for sure — then pulled the handle.
“Number one T-handle, pull. Fire lights.” McLanahan checked the row of engine fire lights near each T-handle — all four were out. He hit the “Press to Test” button to doublecheck that the bulbs were still good — they were. “Fire lights out. Engine instruments.” The pilot’s right multi-function display was black, so McLanahan ran his fingers across the standby engine instrument gauges at the bottom center of the forward instrument panel. “TIT and EGT high but coming down… EGT below redline. I think we got it. Number- one primary hydraulic system is out. Electric system is reset — turn the number-one generator off when you can.”
“I can’t.”
McLanahan was going to continue reciting the rest of the emergency checklist, but all of the critical “bold print” items were done — the rest of the items were double-checks. The Black Knight bomber apeared to be wings-level, and finally Cobb was able to take his left hand off the control stick. He spent a few moments shutting off equipment that ran off the number-one engine, then slowly resumed his usual stony position — one hand on the throttle, one hand on the sidestick controller, eyes caged straight ahead, although this time with a few more noticeable glances around the cockpit.
