CRASHED
By Dawn Ramble
The owner of a small air transport company experiences an overload. All characters are over 18.
Chapter 1
I was so angry I was ready to explode. It would have been nice to blame somebody else but in the end the responsibility was all mine. I'm Amy Earhart, Yes Amy, not Amelia, but I do fly a plane. I'm Australian, thirty-four, single again after a brief and messy marriage, and a small business owner. I'm five foot nine and in good shape. I have some aboriginal blood in my veins, which accounts for my darker complexion. People generally find me quite attractive. Of course there are still some bigots who belong with the dinosaurs.
My plane is my business; it's a somewhat beat-up Cessna, currently configured for pilot, and up to six passengers with single suitcases and about 1800lbs of cargo, which cost my company a bit over seven hundred thousand Australian dollars and that was a deal. Even after the downpayment the bank has a lien on just about everything the company and I personally currently own. I live and work in Rockhampton City in Central Queensland and ferry cargo and passengers up and down the coasts between Port Douglas in the North and Melbourne in the South with occasional runs to Papua New Guinea or other islands in the Coral Sea within my flight range of 2,000 kilometers. With my regular clients there's just enough traffic to keep me afloat and I'm on call for various types of emergencies.
My present predicament started yesterday when a client asked me to take a load of gourmet food items to Port Moresby for onward shipment to a resort in Vanuatu. Apparently, a shipment by another carrier got spoiled so it was essential they get there today. I got a call later in the evening asking if there would be room for a passenger on the flight.
"It's Jake Thuresby's boy, Raiden. He's got his Aussie passport, so he'll be able to get tourist visa on arrival. I said that would be fine as it would nicely fill my load capacity and give me some company.
That was before the weather forecast changed. When I woke up this morning and checked, the computer screen was red. As I looked for more detailed information, I saw that the potential track of a cyclone that had been well to the north had shifted southwards. It still wasn't directly on my planned route, but it was closer than I liked and there was a potential for thunderstorms in the surrounding area. Not Good!
I headed to the office thinking, if we could get moving on time, we had a window. I really did not want to disappoint this client. Weather is a tricky excuse as things can clear up as quickly as they can get bad and then your excuse looks pretty lame.
I had only been at the office fifteen minutes when my assistant, Pam, arrived and I heard her escorting two people in with her. So, my passenger was on time. Then I heard a bit of a discussion, not quite an argument.
Pam stuck her head round my door. "Amy, we may have a problem."
"I know, I've seen the forecast. I think we have a window if we leave in the next half hour."
"No, it's with the passengers. Raiden's brother, Mike, wants to come too."
"What will that do to our payload?"
"He's a nineteen-year-old, six-four and weighs 89.4 kilos."
"What about luggage?"
"They've both got light bags. That shouldn't be a problem, but I have weighed it all."
"Okay, I'll talk to them while you get me a total loaded weight."
I talked to boys. Raiden firmly told me he was now Ray; he hated his parents' choice of name. Turned out his brother Mike was originally going to stay with a friend, but they had had a falling out and now he wanted to come. If he couldn't come, he did not want Ray to go. So, they went around the issue arguing among themselves. I could tell they were nice boys, and it seemed a shame to leave him behind. I didn't really know Jake Thuresby. I remember there used to be sniggers about him among some of the women closer to my Mum's age.
I did remember seeing him once at the beach with his two young boys. We girls were all naked as usual and I remember thinking as he passed by us, he seemed to have a one-eyed python in his boardies. We all laughed about it. Of course, he was a married man with these two boys by then and everyone said he was a devoted father.
Meanwhile Pam came back and gave me the total gross weight. I like a ten percent contingency factor but including Mike would cut into that. We would be within our limit but not by as much as I liked.
Time was wasting, so I said, "Let's go," and mentally crossed my fingers. It took us another twenty minutes to make sure everyone and everything was loaded properly and do the flight check. The radar said the cyclone hadn't shifted but a steady rain was starting to fall as we rolled down the runway to our take-off position.