The frightened mind runs straight to the worst outcome and circles it, rehearsing the disaster, spending its fuel on a future it cannot change, and a pilot who does that is already halfway to making it true.

You plan, instead, toward the landing, the specific achievable sequence of correct actions that ends with wheels on a runway, and you break the impossible whole of it into pieces small enough to actually do, and then you do the first piece, and then the next, and you do not let yourself look past the one in front of you.

The storm was large and the fuel was thin and the airplane was wounded and one of its pilots was a mother who had not flown in a year and a half.

None of that could be solved.