I lay there with my eyes closed and did the thing I’d trained a lifetime to do without wanting to: I listened past the words and started building the picture.

A commercial captain asks for a fighter pilot for exactly one reason — because whatever has failed can’t be flown by procedure and checklist anymore, and needs to be flown by feel, by hands that have held an airplane together when it was actively trying to come apart.

That is not a fuel problem or a weather problem.

That is a control problem, or a crew problem, or both, and either way it meant that somewhere ahead of me, past a locked door, two people were running out of the one thing you can never make more of in the air, which is time.

I knew all of that before I’d decided to move.