The North Atlantic winds had been far stiffer than predicted. Most of the night traffic was eastbound this time of day, and those aircraft carried a lot more fuel than a Dassault Falcon 9000. Twenty minutes’ more fuel. Ten minutes more than they needed. Their indicated air speed was just over five hundred knots, altitude twenty-five thousand feet and falling.
“Gander Approach,” he said into his radio microphone, “this is Hotel zero-niner-seven Mike Foxtrot, inbound for gas, over.”
“Mike Foxtrot,” came the reply, “this is Gander. Winds are calm. Recommend runway two-niner for a normal approach.”
“Calm winds?” the copilot observed. “Damn.” They’d just come through more than a hundred knots of jet stream right on the nose for three hours of minor buffeting, not too bad at forty-one thousand feet, but still noticeable. “This is about as long a hop over water as I like.”
“Especially with winds like this,” the pilot replied. “I hope the engines work on fumes.”
“We set with customs?”
“Should be. We’ve done the CANPASS, and we’re cleared into Moose Jaw. Do immigration there?”
“Yeah, right.” Both knew better. This flight would be a little on the unusual side from Gander on in to their final destination. But they were being paid for it. And the euro-dollar exchange rate would be working in their favor. Especially Canadian dollars.
“Got the lights. Five minutes out,” the copilot said.
“Roger, runway in view,” the pilot said. “Flaps.”
“Flaps coming down to ten.” The copilot worked the controls, and they could hear the whine of the electric motors extending the flaps. “Wake up the passengers?”
“No. Why bother?” the pilot decided. If he did this right, they wouldn’t notice a thing until the acceleration for the next takeoff. Having earned his spurs and twenty thousand hours with Swissair, he’d retired and bought his own used Dassault Falcon to charter millionaires and billionaires across Europe and around the globe. Half the people who could afford his services ended up going to the same places—Monaco, Harbor Island in the Bahamas, Saint-Tropez, Aspen. The fact that his current passenger was going none of those places was a curiosity, but as long as he paid, the destination was none of his business.
They passed downward through ten thousand feet. The runway lights were easy to see, a straight lane in the darkness that had once accommodated a wing of United States Air Force F-84 interceptors.
Five thousand feet and descending. “Flaps to twenty.”
“Roger flaps twenty,” the pilot acknowledged.
“Gear,” he commanded next, and the copilot reached for the levers. The sound of rushing air entered the cabin as the landing-gear doors opened and the struts came down. Three hundred feet.
“Down and locked,” the copilot replied.
“One hundred feet,” the computer voice said.
The pilot tensed his arms, then relaxed them, easing the aircraft down, gently, gently, picking the proper spot to touch down. Only his skilled senses could tell when the Falcon touched down on the ten-meter concrete squares. He activated the thrustreversers, and the Dassault slowed. A truck with blinking lights showed him where to go and whom to follow as he headed off to where the fuel truck would be waiting.
They were on the ground for a total of twenty minutes. An immigration officer queried them over the radio and determined that there were no changes from the CANPASS data. Outside, the fuel truck’s driver disconnected his hose and secured the fuel valve.
Okay. That’s done, the pilot thought. Now for the second segment of the three-part flight.
The Falcon taxied back out to the north end of the runway, going through the pre-liftoff checklist, as he always did, after waiting at the end of the runway. The acceleration went smoothly; then the wheels came up, then the flaps, followed by the climb-out. Ten more minutes and they were at thirty-seven thousand, their initial assigned altitude from Toronto Center.
They cruised west at Mach 0.81—about 520 knots, or 600 miles per hour true air speed—with their passengers asleep aft while the engines gobbled fuel at a fixed rate of 3,400 pounds per hour. The aircraft transponder broadcast their speed and altitude to the air-traffic-control radars, and aside from that there was no need for radio traffic of any sort. In rough weather they might have requested a different, probably higher, altitude for more comfortable cruising, but Gander tower had been correct. Having passed through the cold front that had opposed their flight into Newfoundland, they might not have been moving at all, except for the muted roar of the jet engines hanging on