NTSB Headquarters, 4:20 PM, October 7, 2024
It’s a quiet day.
Then again, that’s how it should be. It’s not often that a plane spirals into the ground.
Investigators bustle back and forth. Shuffling paperwork, mostly. Busy office drones, each taking their own paths across their sky.
In a quiet corner, a one-way receiver crackles with static. It can pick up transmissions, and that’s about it. But this is the NTSB, not air traffic control. Once upon a time, they were one and the same.
It’s a novelty, a relic of a forgotten age, when transportation regulation was in its infancy and the government didn’t quite know what to do.
Nowadays, of course, it rarely gets used. Sometimes, an airplane passing by will shoot a message for the fun of it.
An intern idles by the coffee machine. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the receiver flashing. Letters start to appear.
“Hey, anyone else seeing this?”
A small crowd begins to gather.
MAY DAY
MAY DAY
PLEASE BE ADVISED THAT...
The letters pause. A visible atmosphere of apprehension descends across the room. What terrible problem could bring a mighty airliner down to its knees, to plead for help to nameless strangers on the ground?
YOUR
“Who, us?”
BALANCING
The experienced investigators immediately begin running over scenarios. Center of gravity problem, aileron reversal, catastrophic pitch control. Out of all the problems that can appear on an aircraft, loss of balance is one of the worst.
SUX
For a moment, no one speaks, as they try to make sense of the confusing message.
Suddenly, a lone, droning roar of engines reverberates from the distance. It grows louder, louder, louder, becoming deafening and then all at once there’s screeching and clanging and dust and ash and fire.
In a matter of seconds, the NTSB headquarters are nothing but a smoking crater.
Over the next few years, experts will debate over how Pie Airlines Flight 420 could have so tragically crashed into the world’s leading aircraft investigation center.
Ultimately, the probable cause is determined to be salt contamination in the engines, but few believe this.
And for those who really know? Well, dead men tell no tales.