Captain Fallon entered his domain by climbing the stairs from the entry level to the upper cabin, then walking forward through the flight-deck door. Within minutes the two captains and the remaining First Officer had their jackets off, hung behind the door of the rest room, and were in their seats. Fallon of course took the left-hand one and installed his senior First Officer to his right. The relief skipper kept out of the way by retiring to the bunk room to study the stock market.
When he began his career and graduated from the Belfast milk run to the long-hauls, Fallon was still in the days when he would have had a navigator and a flight engineer. Long gone. His engineer was now a bank of technology above his head and facing him from wall to wall; enough dials, clocks, levers and buttons to do whatever an engineer could do, and more. His navigator was confined to three Inertial Reference Systems, ‘black boxes’ which between them could accomplish all a navigator’s duties and faster.
While the First Officer ran through the first of the five separate lists of checks, the Before Start checks, Fallon glanced at the load sheet which he would have to sign when all the luggage was confirmed aboard and the passenger list tallied with Mr Palfrey’s head-count. Every captain’s nightmare is not so much the passenger on board with no luggage – that can follow on later; it is the luggage on board but a passenger who has decided to do a runner. The whole baggage hold has to be emptied until the rogue suitcases are found and expelled. They could contain anything.
The entire aircraft was still powered by its Auxiliary Power Unit, the APU, in truth a fifth jet engine of which few passengers knew anything. The APU on this giant aircraft is enough to power a small fighter by itself; its power enables everything on the aircraft to function independently of any source from outside – lights, air, engine-start, the lot.
In the World Traveller departure lounge Mr and Mrs Higgins and their daughter Julie were already tired and the child becoming fractious. They had left their two-star hotel four hours earlier and, in the manner of modern travel, it had been slog all the way. Luggage on board the coach, ensure that nothing has been left behind, queue and wait, sit in a tiny seat, traffic jams, worry about being late, more jams, decant from the coach at the airport, try to find luggage, child and trolley at the same time, line up in the milling crowd for check-in, queue and wait, security X-ray machines, body-search because the belt-buckle triggered the alarm, the child yelling at being separated from her dolly as it went through the X-ray, pick out some goodies in Duty Free, queue and wait . . . and finally the hard plastic seats on the last stop before boarding.
Julie, clutching her dolly, made locally and a present from Phuket, was bored with the waiting and began to wander. A few yards away a man called to her.
‘Hi, kid, nice doll.’
She stopped and stared at him. He was not like her father at all. He had cowboy boots with Cuban heels, soiled and ragged jeans, a denim shirt and ethnic beads. By his side was a small haversack. His hair was matted and probably unwashed and a straggly beard dangled from his chin.
Had Julie Higgins but known it, which at the age of eight she did not, the Far East is rife with Western backpackers and the man who had just addressed her was such a one. The Far East is like a magnet to thousands of them, partly because life there can be relaxed and cheap and also because in many cases there is easy access to the drugs they favour.
‘She’s new,’ said Julie. ‘I call her Pooky.’
‘Great name. Why?’ drawled the hippie.
‘Because Daddy bought her in Poo-Ket.’
‘I know it. Great beaches. You just vacationed there?’
‘Yes. I swam with Daddy and we saw fishes.’
At this point Mrs Higgins jabbed her husband in the foot with one toe and nodded towards their daughter.
‘Julie, come here darling,’ Mr Higgins called out in a tone his daughter understood. It was one of disapproval. She trotted back towards them. Higgins glared at the hippie. It was a kind he loathed: footloose, dirty and almost certainly a user of drugs, the last person he wanted his daughter talking to. The hippie got the message. He shrugged, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, saw the No Smoking sign above his head and wandered off towards the smoking area before lighting up. Mrs Higgins sniffed. The public address system called for boarding to start, beginning with rows thirty-four to fifty-seven.
Mr Higgins consulted his boarding pass. Row thirty-four, seats D, E and F. Summoning his family around him, he checked they had all their carry-on pieces, and joined the final queue.
The 11.45 p.m. take-off time would not be met, but that was merely the published timetable, broadly speaking a work of fiction. What interested Captain Fallon was that he had a take-off slot from Bangkok Tower for five after midnight and he wanted to make it. In the modern world of civil aviation getting a take-off and landing slot was what counted. Miss your slot in Western Europe or North America and you could hang about for an hour waiting for another.
Not that a twenty-minute delay would matter. He knew he could make it up. Because of strong headwinds over Pakistan and the southern parts of Afghanistan his flight plan predicted a flight of 13 hours and 20 minutes. With London on GMT there was a seven-hour difference in time zones. He would be touching down in London about twenty past six on a bitter January morning with the outside temperature close to zero, a long call from Bangkok where the midnight thermometer was showing 26 degrees centigrade and humidity in the high nineties.
There was a knock on the cabin door; the CSD entered with the passenger manifest. He and his staff had done their head-count.
‘Four hundred and five, skipper.’
It checked. Fallon signed off the load sheet and gave it to Palfrey, who went back down to hand it through the last remaining open door to the BA ground staff. Outside the mammoth flying machine the last of the courtiers were finishing their tasks of subservience. Baggage hold was closed, hoses disconnected, vehicles backed off to a respectful distance. The giant was going to start those four huge Rolls-Royce engines and roll.
In the First Class cabin Mr Seymour had allowed himself to be relieved of his beautiful silk jacket which was hung in the forward wardrobe. He kept, but loosened, the silk tie. A glass of champagne bubbled at his elbow and the CSD had endowed him with a fresh Financial Times and a Daily Telegraph. A snob to his boot heels, Mr Palfrey loved what he called ‘the quality’. With even Hollywood stars resembling bag ladies, it was such a relief to look after the quality.
On the flight deck Fallon supervised the Cleared for Start checks. Glancing out and down he could see the tractor and, at its controls, that anonymous but vital minion sometimes referred to as Tractor Joe. Without him Speedbird One Zero was going nowhere because it was pointing straight at the terminal and could not turn round unaided.
From Bangkok Ground Control Fallon received his start-engines clearance. Simultaneously Tractor Joe’s tiny but immensely powerful vehicle began to ease the 747–400 backward
s and the four Rolls-Royce 524s came to life. Fallon needed no power from the ground for this; his APU would handle it all.
On Fallon’s command, his co-pilot reached up to the overhead panel, pulled the start switch for number four engine, whilst with his other hand he operated the same number fuel-control switch. He repeated these actions three more times as he ripple-started the engines four three two and then one. Meanwhile the automatic fuel control brought the engines slowly up to ‘idle’.
Tractor Joe was moving Speedbird One Zero round through ninety degrees so that her nose would be pointing to the taxi track while the wash of her jets would not blow away anything behind her. When he had done, he called up the flight deck on the headset he wore, the flex of which was still plugged in near to the aircraft’s nose-wheel. He asked for parking brake.
He was right so to do; this Thai wanted to become an old man one day. To disconnect himself he had to descend from his tractor, walk to the nose of the jumbo and pull his flex from the socket. A Tractor Joe who disappears under the front wheel of a jumbo while doing this comes out like hamburger steak. Fallon put on the parking brake and gave the word. Thirty feet below him the Thai disconnected himself, stood back and held up the flag he had taken from the flex socket, as per procedure. Fallon gave him a grateful wave and the tractor drove off. Ground Control gave permission to roll and passed them over to Tower Control.
In Row 34 the Higginses were finally settled in. They had been lucky. Seat G was vacant so they had the whole row of four. John Higgins took D which was on one aisle; his wife had G at the other end of the row and on the other side aisle. Julie was between them, fussing over Pooky to ensure she was comfortable and able to enjoy a restful night.