Ok, he thought. Now. Now I will do this thing. He turned and reached for the headset, moved it from the pilot’s head. He had one eye on the plane, but it did not dive. The microphone switch was hard to get loose, and he bumped his elbow against the steering wheel, making the plane dive again. He pulled up too much, and the plane went up and down for awhile, scaring Brian.

He put on the headset and microphone, pressing the switch. “Help! Somebody help me,” he screamed. “I’m in the plane and don’t know…don’t know…don’t know…” He heard no voice and started crying. Then he remembered using his uncle’s CB radio. He had to press the switch off for it to work.

For a second he only heard the whussssssssh of empty radio waves. Then through static he heard a voice. “Whoever is calling, turn off your mic switch. You’re talking over me. Over.”

Brian hit the switch. “I hear you! I hear you. This is me.” He released the switch.

“Roger I have you now.” The voice was very faint, hard to hear. “Please state your difficulty and location. And say over to signal the end of transmission. Over”

State my difficulty, Brian thought. God. My difficulty. “I am in a plane with a pilot who is – who had a heart attack or something. He is –can’t fly. And I don’t know how to fly. Help me. Help…” He turned the microphone off without saying, “Over.”

“…can’t hear. Your location please. And flight number Over.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know! Over.”

Brian waited two minutes, three minues, and ten minutes. No answer. Brian turned on the switch again.

“I don’t know where I am. My name is Brian Robeson. We left from Hampton, New York headed to the Canadian oil fields.” He waited a second. His voice was shaking. He took a deep breath. “If anyone knows how to fly a plane, please answer.”

He waited half an hour for a response but heard nothing. He threw the headset on the ground in anger. It was all so hopeless. Even if someone answered, they couldn’t teach him how to fly a plane. It was hopeless.

Nothing could help him now. An hour passed. He picked up the headset and tried again. It was all he had. There was no answer. He felt like a prisoner. A prisoner flying through the sky, just flying until… Until what? Until he ran out of fuel. When the plane ran out of fuel it would go down. Crash. Period.

Or he could make the plane crash now. He had seen the pilot slow down. He knew how to do it. He had seen the pilot. But he had no idea where they were going. He thought they were off the course, but he just couldn’t bring himself to crash the plane. He thought it was wrong, and he thought he was going in the wrong direction, but he couldn’t bring himself to crash the plane. Now, flying in the air he was safe. Safe, until the engine stopped.

He decided what he would do. He would push the nose down to keep flying speed and just before he hit, he would pull the nose up to slow the plane as much as possible. The problem was that he only saw trees. Flying into trees would kill him. He needed to find a lake.

Easy to say, he thought, hard to do. Easy say. Hard do. Easy say. Hard do. Easy say. Hard do. Impossible to do. He repeated his radio call seventeen times, every ten minutes. He touched the pilot once more, but his skin was cold. Hard cold. Dead cold.

Brian kept imagining how it would go. Fly to the nearest lake. Pull up right before he would crash. Over and over he imagined it. He tried to be ready. But in between the seventeenth and eighteenth radio transmissions, without a warning the engine coughed, roared violently for a second and died.

He did what he could, tightened his seatbelt, got ready and rehearsed his plan. Now, there was sudden silence. Brian pushed the nose of the plane down and threw up.