In last week’s episode, David conducted his first interview while the St. Paul sank slowly towards the sea without any electronic controls. In this week’s episode, have the electronics have been restored in time to avoid the deadly weather?
Captain Pruitt was happy to be back in the cockpit and back in control. The last half hour of drifting and waiting for the systems to re-boot had been nearly unbearable for him. The St. Paul was gaining altitude rapidly now, and Pruitt urged Foote to control the rate of ascent, “Ease her back a little, Jim. We’re climbing too fast.”
“It’s not me, Captain.” There was alarm in Foote’s voice. “She’s caught in a powerful updraft.”
Singh’s fingers flew across his control panels until his eyes grew wide with concern. He asked, “Sir, could you activate the Barco dome? You should see this.”
Pruitt cast nervous glances from Foote to Singh and activated the controls to the Barco dome. As if by magic, the top of the flight deck seemed to disappear, and the three men gazed in horror at the sight of a long spiral arm of storm clouds, like the tentacle of some great airborne octopus, reached out from the distant mountain of flashing cumulonimbus storm clouds, forming just in front of the St. Paul.
“Those are precipitation cells,” Singh noted clinically.
They were developing fast, and the flight crew could practically watch them growing before their eyes. “Escape route?” Pruitt asked sharply.
“Working on a solution now, sir,” Singh replied, turning back to his station.
Pruitt placed his hands on the control stick on his side of the cockpit and turned to Foote, saying, “Captain’s weather, FO.” It was customary for the captain to be the most experienced pilot on the ship, and therefore the captain was expected to be at the helm during dangerous weather. As co-pilot, Foote would be busy attending to the ship’s needs at the captain’s direction.
Pruitt was scanning the skies overhead in the Barco dome, trying to get a sense of what the weather was doing when he noticed David opening the overhead compartment in preparation for stowing his survival suit back. “Leave it on, Mr. Wilson!” Pruitt called from the cockpit. He didn’t need to say it, but the crew instantly understood the implied message: “We’re not out of this yet.”
The St. Paul was well over 10,000 feet now and still climbing. Pruitt had stopped trying to arrest the ship’s ascent. The St. Paul’s maximum ceiling was well over 20,000 feet. I’m going to need all the altitude I can get soon. The wind shear warning alarm began ringing, and Pruitt switched it off. He didn’t need an alarm to explain the situation to him. “LT, I need that escape route!”
Pruitt knew he was pushing the navigator. Singh was accustomed to these types of calculations, but he’d never been required to make them so fast. Pruitt usually gave him hours to plot courses and run simulations. Nevertheless, Singh’s voice was firm and strong when he answered, “I recommend a heading of 87 degrees, sir. We’re in the gust front now, coming at us primarily from the north. I calculate a southerly drift at about 10 degrees. That should pop us out the other side on a track of approximately 95 degrees.”
When warm moist air is drawn up to high altitudes in a low-pressure system, the air cools, and great clouds form. These great towering formations can easily rise as high as 40,000 feet in the air. The system the St. Paul was entering into was a newly forming cumulonimbus calvus, or bald storm cloud. It would soon reach the edge of the tropopause at the rate it was growing, and the top of the cloud would be shredded into the distinctive fibrous-looking cumulonimbus capillatus. Pruitt considered it a positive sign that he wasn’t flying into the heart of an anvil-shaped thunderhead and brought the engines up to full power as he adjusted his heading to 87 degrees.
The St. Paul was now above 15,000 feet and climbing when the turbulence began in earnest. A distinctive drumming sound could be heard coming from outside the hull, and the view of the Barco dome began to grow hazy. “Here comes the rain,” said Pruitt.
Pruitt noticed that Ranell and David were having difficulty strapping into their seat belts in the main cabin. Seatbelts were almost never used on St. Paul, and the crew was having trouble finding them. “Hurry up!” Pruitt barked over his shoulder. We’re about to enter the downdraft!”
Airship flight was typically so smooth that turbulence was seldom encountered, and even then, it was only mild. This was different, violent, but not in the way of an airliner. The St. Paul’s envelope seemed to twist and shudder more like an animal than rattle and shake like a machine. There were dangerous sounding groans and squealing coming from different points of the gondola. Pruitt felt a sensation of lightness similar to the one experienced when an elevator descends, only it seemed to last forever. He braced his legs against the cockpit and gripped the control yoke in a desperate attempt to maintain his heading.
The onslaught of rainfall experienced by the St. Paul was simultaneously accompanied by a very powerful downdraft. “Microburst!” Singh called from his station. Super-cooled droplets of moisture in the sub-zero conditions at this altitude cause the water to freeze instantly upon contact with the St. Paul’s envelope, adding tons to her weight in a matter of moments. And she fell from the sky.
“What’s our airspeed, Jim?” Pruitt’s eyes focused upon some distant point on the horizon that he was steering for. With this much ice on her hull, only forward airspeed would generate enough aerodynamic lift to keep the St. Paul aloft.
Foote read the gauges. “We’re in a tailwind now. We’ve gained 20 knots.”
“Altitude?”
“Nine thousand five hundred… we’re dropping something like 6,000 feet per minute,” there was alarm in his voice, although Foote struggled to keep it even.
The Barco dome was useless now. It darkened as the growing ice crystals on the hull blotted out the light to the cameras mounted there. Foote switched it off, and a more normal light was restored to the flight deck.
The crew kept steady at their stations while Pruitt gunned the engines for all they were worth. The St. Paul wasn’t built for speed, and even with the tailwinds they were picking up, it still seemed like they were crawling through the dangerous weather.
“Altitude 3,000 feet,” Foote commented mechanically, the tension evident in his tone, “I’m dumping the remaining ballast.”
“Belay that, FO!” Pruitt shouted and reached out his hand to stop Foote’s action. Their eyes met with shared intensity. “That’s exactly what happened to the Akron. No, Jim, the only way out is to run through it.”
Foote pulled his hand away from the ballast control with dawning understanding, but he cast a dubious eye at the up-rushing sea.
“Trust me, we’re going to make it,” Pruitt said through gritted teeth as he struggled to maintain control of his beloved ship, “Think about it. When that air hits the surface, it’s got to go somewhere. We’ll hit that cushion, and it will push us through the far wall.”
Below them, the surface of the Atlantic Ocean was being tossed in different directions by powerful winds. The chaotic resonance of the 20-foot swells would occasionally converge to form a massive rogue wave. One such wave was forming below them now as the St. Paul careened downward, the froth of its forty-foot white cap spewing foam behind it as it rose to devour the delicate craft above.
When they hit the cushion of air as Pruitt predicted, the downward velocity of the St. Paul was slowed but not stopped. The accumulation of ice on her envelope weighed her down, and her controls were sluggish. Pruitt turned the vectored thrust of his propellers up as much as he dared so as not to lose the desperately needed forward momentum, and he angled her nose up slightly to gain every scrap of aerodynamic lift the old girl could generate. There was a shockingly loud thump, and the whole ship shuddered as if from impact.
“What do we got, Jim?” Pruitt’s voice cracked in alarm.
Foote desperately scanned the gauges, trying to determine the cause. “We’ve still got speed, 120 knots,” he called.
“It felt like we hit something.” It was more of a statement than a question from Pruitt.
“I’m not getting any indications here,” Replied Foote, hands flying across the gauges.
“What’s our altitude?”
“700 feet and climbing …rapidly.”
“I think we made it across,” Singh called hopefully from the navigator’s seat.
Singh’s suspicions were confirmed when the St. Paul’s altitude began to increase dramatically as the ship entered the turbulent gust wall on the far side of the microburst. Now Pruitt angled the bow downward to maximize their forward velocity, but the St. Paul continued to climb. Like a surfer sliding down a breaking wave, the St. Paul increased both altitude and velocity as she slid down the face of the rising column of air into the relative calm of the high-pressure system beyond.
The shocked crew sat breathlessly quiet for long moments after the turbulence subsided. Sunlight flooded through the flight deck and main cabin as the St. Paul passed beyond the gust front of the microburst and left the spiraling arm of storms behind them.
It was left to Singh to make the announcement, “We’re through!” And the crew of the St. Paul cheered together in earnest.