Getting Air Read Online Free PDF

anything about flying?” I asked Arcadia. I figured a flight attendant might have picked up a thing or two in her work.
    “No!” she replied. Then she called out to the old ladies, “Does anybody know anything about flying?”
    “Goodness, no!” one of them said.
    A few of the others started praying again. Nobody jumped up and offered to take the controls.
    “We gotta land this thing!” David said. “Henry, sit here! Zimmerman, help me drag these guys outta here.”
    “B-but I just took one lesson!” Henry protested.
    His mother always complains that Henry never sticks with anything. He’s one of those kids who takes one lesson of something and drops out. Then he takes a lesson of something else and drops out. The good thing is, Henry knows at least a little bit about everything.
    “This is Greek to me!” Henry said, his voice rising in panic. He was just sitting there staring at the controls.
    “You must have learned something ,” David begged Henry. “Think!”
    “I know there’s an electrical system, fuel system, navigational system, communications system, fire-detection system, hydraulic system, cabin-pressurization system. But I don’t know how to work them!”
    I couldn’t blame Henry for freaking out. The dashboard or control panel or whatever it was called had dozens of dials and gauges and switches all over it. How could anyone know what they all did? Some of the glass covering the dials and gauges had been broken in the fight. Some had blood on them. You couldn’t even see through them.
    “Okay, calm down, Henry,” David said. “Do you remember any of the basics, like how to make the plane go up and down, left and right?”
    “Yeah,” Henry said, taking a deep breath. “The plane flies straight and level if you don’t do anything. You pull on the yoke to go up, and you push it forward to go down. Same with left and right.”
    I didn’t even know what a yoke was, but Henry pulled on some doohickey in front of him that looked like a video game joystick and I could feel the plane tilt up a little.
    “That’s good, Henry,” David said, putting a hand on his shoulder. I knew he was trying to be positive and comforting. Henry was going to need our support.
    “It’s not like the Cessna I took my lesson in,” Henry said. “It’s bigger. Heavy. Slow.”
    “Can you land it?” David asked.
    “How should I know?” Henry said, his voice rising again.
    “Okay, calm down,” David said.
    “Where would I land it, anyway?” Henry asked.
    It was a good question. We all looked out the window. The plane was pretty low. There was nothing but trees and lakes down there. If there was a highway, maybe we could land on it. But there wasn’t. Maybe we were wrong when we thought we had turned back toward the East Coast. Maybe we were flying over Canada.
    “The sun is to the right of us,” Julia said. “That means we’re heading north, toward Canada.”
    “How do you know?” asked David.
    “Girl Scouts,” she replied. “The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.” Julia has been a scout since she was five. I dropped out of Boy Scouts as soon as I took up skateboarding.
    Arcadia came back into the cockpit to check up on us.
    “Did you figure out how to make the radio work?” she asked.
    The radio! Of course! We could radio somebody and they could “talk us down.” I saw somebody do that in a movie once. It hadn’t even occurred to me. Henry picked up a headset. He fiddled with it and yelled “Mayday! Mayday!”
    “It’s busted,” he said, “and I think they disabled the transponder.”
    “The trans what ?” I asked.
    “It’s like a receiver that tells the air traffic controllers where we are,” Arcadia told me.
    “So we’re not a blip on some air traffic controller’s radar screen?” David asked.
    “Possibly not,” Arcadia said. “What about fuel? Maybe we can keep flying until we find a better place to land.”
    We hunted all over for a fuel gauge. There were a