Page 15 of Air Force One
A series of ocean waves is not a symmetric, consistent medium. The period between waves is affected by wind speed and ocean depth. Gusts, currents, and distant storms can each add their own factors to the final ever-changing wave form.
The Elizabeth River of Virginia is not one of the nation’s great waterways. No massive Ice Age drainage occurred to create a huge undersea delta across the continental shelf like the lethal sand bar guarding the entry to the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. Nor does the Elizabeth drain a great silt-producing watershed, creating an extended underwater landform far from shore like the Mississippi River Delta. Not even a deep canyon like the one New York’s Hudson River sliced into two hundred kilometers of the continental shelf.
Generally overwhelmed by the effects from Chesapeake Bay, the Elizabeth River still had placed its own unique stamp upon the underwater landscape. The ten-kilometer-long tidal estuary that defines the Elizabeth River has existed for thousands of years. Its watershed includes a section of the Great Dismal Swamp. Most of these fine muds were swept aside, overshadowed by the effects of the great tidal pump of the Chesapeake Bay and its twelve thousand square kilometer watershed.
But the Elizabeth River did drive some the Great Dismal’s fines out to sea with each tidal flush of the estuary. These were deposited as a gentle range of deepwater hills and valleys, trending northeast from the mouth of the Chesapeake. They extended along the deep coastal plain, only to be gradually swept north by the Gulf Stream currents.
A severely out-of-season hurricane had passed well to the south two days earlier. Only the forecasters and the climate-change deniers debated whether it was late season or early season, everyone else agreed there were no defined storm seasons anymore.
The storm’s low pressure had allowed a massive storm surge to inundate the Georgia coast. Now, the post-storm rise in the barometric pressure pushed down on the ocean’s surface, squeezing down as if a giant had stomped his foot on the ocean over a fifty-thousand-square-kilometer area off Savannah. It sent a pulse of water north over the continental shelf.
This pulse was forced toward the surface when it struck the low underwater hills created over the millennia by the Elizabeth River. The extra burst of water shifted a hundred million tons of fine sand to the north, some by meters, some by tens of kilometers.
Driving against the barrier of underwater hills, the water surge created a rolling wave crest, moving from south to north. No surface ship would have detected this without very sensitive equipment. The ocean in the area gradually became one-point-three meters deeper for the duration of the surge’s passing.
The USGC cutters Bear, Harriet Lane, and Northland certainly detected nothing as they raced toward Air Force One’s projected landing zone.
However, the generally east-to-west surface waves approaching the coast interfered unpredictably with the rising crest of the deeper south-to-north pulse.
Sailors call it a confused sea when the regular pattern of waves is broken. Unlike Sarah Feldman, neither General John Owen nor Colonel Sandra Ames were sailors, not that it would have helped them once they flew into the affected area.
The neat lines of waves they’d been crossing above jumbled into chaos as Air Force One expended the last of its carefully nursed lift. In some places, waves disappeared as a peak met a trough and they canceled each other out. When two troughs met, deep holes bigger than any fishing boat could appear, only to be replaced seconds later by a towering peak of water when two wave peaks overlapped.
This was precisely what happened as General Owen prepared for his final last-ditch effort to create a survivable landing. He let the 747 settle until the biggest waves licked the bottom of the fuselage. He braced himself to heave back on the yoke and plant the airplane’s tail hard in the water like an anchor. Or would the airplane’s massive rudder act as a ship’s rudder allowing him some modicum of control in how she belly-flopped? Only one way to find out; he kept his toes light on the pedals in case this worked.
General John Owen sent one last prayer for salvation aloft just in case God was listening on this overcast gray morning.
Warm air driven north by the storm had increased the temperature thirty-four degrees above the normal range for the first full week of January. If it hadn’t, the denser, cooler air of a normal midwinter morning would have added fourteen more tons of lift throughout his descent. Though insignificant in comparison to the plane’s overall weight, it would have lifted Air Force One clear of what happened next.
The low mud hills of the continental shelf drove the heart of the deep-running northbound storm surge to the surface beneath an already large wave. In a period of one-point-eight seconds, the two-meter wave rolling along steadily ahead of Air Force One’s flight path grew to a towering six-meter giant called a rogue wave. The ten-meter width of the wave, generated by the interference pattern, heaved a million kilograms of water into the 747’s path. At a thousand tons, the rogue wave out-massed the airplane by a factor of five times.
Had the fuselage plowed into it, it would have slowed the plane enough that as many as two-thirds of those aboard would have survived. However, the greatest mass of the wave rose directly ahead of the Number Four engine, hanging farthest to the right on the wing’s underside. At a hundred and fifty knots, a hundred and seventy-two miles per hour, relative speed, the engine acted like an anchor tossed over the side of a speeding boat in shallow water.
It stopped in place.
The stress sheared the four breakaway bolts holding the engine to the wing and Number Four rapidly sank beneath the waves. But the damage was already done.
At the impact, General Owen instinctively yanked back on the control yoke to complete the maneuver he’d been nurturing in his thoughts. But with its right wing buried in the wave, Air Force One no longer had the lift to raise the nose clear of the maelstrom in one last desperate effort to save the lives of those aboard.
Though relieved of the burden of the Number Four engine, the right wing was twisted down by the impact. It acted like a propellor blade that drove the whole right wing deeper into the water. General Owen’s final maneuver generated powerful lift in the left wing, raising it high above the waves.
Air Force One cartwheeled.
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The strongest part of any plane is the wing box where the wings attach to the fuselage. With the right wing boring downward, the left wing—that shone so brightly and so briefly on the US Coast Guard helicopter’s radar—stuck high in the air before the fuselage twisted around to plunge nose first into a wave trough. The trough formed by the same wave interference pattern close ahead of the rogue was also far deeper than normal.
Streamlined to fly through air, Air Force One dove cleanly into the ocean depths.
The skin of the airplane was designed to keep pressure inside the aircraft when exposed to the low-pressure environment of two-tenths normal pressure existing outside the airplane at its normal flight level. It was not designed to keep out water pressure measured in tons per square foot.
The fuselage of the 747-200B used as Air Force One measures two hundred and thirty-two feet long, over seventy meters. Before it achieved neutral buoyancy due to the air trapped inside, the nose of the plane reached forty meters below the surface. Had General Owen chosen to dump the twenty-eight thousand gallons of fuel from the wing tanks, they would have been automatically refilled with nitrogen to avoid a flashover fire like the one that destroyed TWA 800.
This would have had two effects. One was that the plane’s glide, while landing in the same spot, would have taken seven minutes longer and the storm surge would have already passed through that area. The second was that the dumping of fuel would have made the plane a hundred and ninety thousand pounds lighter, which would have kept the plane from penetrating so deeply into the water.
He hadn’t. Fuel is only typically dumped if an emergency is declared shortly after takeoff and the plane is too heavy to safely land.
The pilot’s view from the USCG helicopter only revealed the tail section of Air Force One, which stuck straight up in the air. The fighter jets had overflown the mark and were circling back.
