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The air in Houston is too hot to support the plane. Oh, considering that during take-off from Schiphol Airport, the Queen’s jet could have landed there, it has converted 10,000 kilograms of fuel into carbon dioxide and released it into the atmosphere. However, after refueling, it could not take off safely until the heat wave broke out. And it was a hurricane to break it.

Under the guidance of the air traffic controller, Frederica Matilde Luisa Saskia-because this is the Queen's name-and her co-pilot, a Dutch royal named John Captain of the Air Force, began to fly a jet plane for a series of maneuvers, and finally Waco.

Now, maybe Waco is not their best choice. But there is no need to argue about this. This business jet was slightly packed with seven people and flew higher and faster than the passenger plane. When they got news about the lack of air in the city, it had been passing through the lower stratosphere at speeds higher than 600 miles per hour and was almost ready to begin its descent into Houston. A decision must be made. This is not necessarily the best decision.

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The Texan’s voice told her on the radio that William came to the cockpit with whatever he had collected from the plane’s data link. In the past few hours, a thunderstorm swept Waco and reduced the temperature to just 45. Or 113, because they measure things in the United States. In any case, it is low enough that they can at least look it up in a table of important numbers calculated by the jet manufacturer thirty years ago, when the design was certified. Those people never thought that Houston would get so hot today, so the table is not that high.

Waco Airport will provide them with everything they really need.

It has two runways arranged in a V shape. The current wind requires them to land on a runway further west, that is, southbound. The air traffic controller told them what to do. They did it.

These controllers were busy handling a large number of aircraft-mainly passenger aircraft-and were also disappointed in their hopes of landing in Houston. Most of them need a larger airport, so it seems wrong to argue with them whether Waco is perfect. Anyone with a radio can hear these transmissions. They are being recorded. It is very important that they do not cause a sensation and do not attract people's attention to themselves. The queen has been raised since her infancy, and she never appears to be arrogating royal privileges. Because doing so will be non-Dutch. It will only provide ammunition to the anti-royalist party. Her security chief Lennert turned to think Waco would be fine. There is a hangar suitable for this jet aircraft. William has booked a hotel room and studied how to rent a car.

All she had to do was let the jet plane land on the ground. She is very good at this. Even if she is not, John can do it without her help. In addition to the royal family and wealth, she inherited this strange pastime of flying a jet plane from her father. Despite being a king, he worked part-time as a pilot for the Royal Dutch Airlines (Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij), whose logo is actually the crown. As my father explained to her a long time ago, he became a pilot for a reason. It is precisely because when he is under control, he not only has the opportunity, but also has the sacred obligation to focus on the machine that keeps him and his passengers alive.

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The little princess Frederica Mathilde Luisa Saskia did not fully understand two things about this sentence at the time.

One (more obvious): Because mom and dad tried to train her to look like a normal person, she didn't understand how much attention the crown requires for a person until a long time later. Now she knows this very well.

Two (found her only recently): "The machine that keeps him and his passengers alive" is a Dutch metaphor: if the Dutch does not continue to push to the right, it will kill many Dutch engineering buttons.

During the descent and landing preparations, she felt a sense of freedom and sobriety while controlling the aircraft. This is all about manipulating the controls to keep certain numbers within a certain range. When the jet passes over the Waco runway, its speed needs to be reduced to a number denoted by VREF. This varies with conditions such as temperature, aircraft weight, and runway conditions; but in any case it can be calculated from the tables thirty years ago, and there are known procedures to reduce the aircraft's speed to that number.

At the same time, they need to traverse the entire troposphere vertically down—the air crust around the earth, where the weather occurs—until the altimeter numbers match the height of Waco. Once again there are known procedures to achieve this, all of which need to be matched with a series of turns prescribed by those busy Texas air traffic controllers. In order to achieve these goals systematically, the operation of the jet's control device, the concise, incisive, but completely calm communication with John and the radio on the radio, all of which brought her into what the Dutch call the normal state. The stress is in the second. Syllables. Something completely different from English "NORMal".

A full explanation of "norMAL" will fill a book, but the most important thing is that if you happen to be a member of the Dutch royal family, then "norMAL" is what the royal family is always suspected to be, and so you can do anything Your normal things are desirable; and because it can be easily faked, it is most effective if it is an activity that will cause you to die if you do it wrong.

If you go to school by bike, as she did when she was a little girl, haters can and will claim this is a publicity stunt and laugh at anyone who innocently falls in love with it. But even the most bubbling anti-royalists cannot deny that the king or queen really landed the plane, and if they just pretended, they would eventually die. Moreover, this is not what a monkey can do. Even a member of the royal family cannot be certified until she has studied quite a bit of mathematics, physics, engineering, and meteorology. In the distant past, the kings showed their original intentions to the world. They carried their swords on their backs, set foot on wars, and put their lives in danger. Getting rid of the control of the aircraft and pointing it towards the runway is the same public blood oath that people can reasonably approach in the modern world.

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Considering her current responsibilities, her employees are considering details that she would not consider—nor should they. It is a natural mistake to think that Waco is cool, just because it is not as hot as Houston. But in fact, the moment the plane lands, it becomes an oven. Getting rid of it won't make much improvement; inside and out, it's just a matter of time before their heatstroke. Therefore, a plan is needed to keep the aircraft and its passengers in at least the shade, preferably within a few minutes after landing. Of course, they have earth suits in their cargo compartments, which are charged and ready, but the idea of ​​dismantling them so early is scary and amateurish.

She just needs to put things on the ground, and there is no reason why it is particularly difficult. The hurricane threatening Houston is hundreds of kilometers above the bay. After the earlier thunderstorm, the air was choppy, but she did not fly many times in the Dutch sky. In broad daylight, around four o'clock in the afternoon. The spiral elliptical descent commanded by the air traffic controller gave her a good understanding of the Greater Waco area. It is flat green. Not as flat as at home. But this is an endless landscape, nothing like a hill. The green is darker than the pastures and farmland in the Netherlands-there are many forests and bushes.

Slowly, her eyes widened. They lined up on the runway, still too far away to be clearly seen. Outside the airport is the city itself, with only a few buildings and towers raising their heads above the shady tree canopy that appears to be carefully taken care of. It has many parks. The suburbs of the city are gradually turning gray-maybe it is a new development project, the trees are not mature? Just to the right of their planned route is a large lake, which is covered by a thick vegetation in the middle of the open green area of ​​the airport. The dark green is almost black. She could tell from the shape of the lake that it was man-made. As if she were a Dutch woman, she couldn't help tracking its coastline until she determined that it must be the long, straight part of the dam. This is a low soil structure penetrated by a spillway, not far from the end of the runway.

In the ten minutes or so after the plane landed, these impressions were almost all gathered together in an almost subconscious way. During that time, there was almost nothing to do. She and John adjusted the aircraft so that its weight exceeded the lift generated by the wings. According to the laws of physics, this causes it to lose height in a stable and predictable manner. The airspeed slowly dropped to 200 knots towards VREF, which is 137 knots today. Soon they will deploy their flaps. Her eyes glanced round and round among several key indicators. That is an old plane. Many controls are mechanical switches, set in a black bakelite panel with embossed white letters, very old. But the important content in the middle is what the pilot calls "all glass": a gorgeous jewel-colored screen with virtual instruments, modified into the old dashboard. Her eyes know where to find the really important data-airspeed, altitude, roll, pitch, yaw.

But it's also important to look at the real world from the windshield. A small single-engine plane landed and taxied far in front of them. The earth flickered here and there unexpectedly. They see this all the time at home. There was a flood in the area. It is not enough to flood a large area, but it is enough to spread the stagnant water and add luster to the flat landscape with slow drainage and saturated soil. When one of the puddles hit the sun, the light slipped into her eyes. However, the airport seems to be well-drained-the tower will warn them of the puddles on the runway. The runway is easy to see now, right ahead, right where it should be, full of damp but not wet places. The last method keeps them low in a market segment. Most of the airports scattered to their left. There is only a narrow grass on the right side of the runway, located between the apron and the safety fence. Just outside and parallel to the fence is a two-lane highway. This adjoining dark forest land stretches for a kilometer or two to the intricate shore of the lake. Some places in the woods are scattered with spots and hardly ever erupted dark red soil, while in other places there are blue rectangles-tarps over temporary camps.

What always fascinates her is this slow, unstoppable amplification. Twenty minutes ago, she found it difficult to identify the larger Waco metropolitan area under the black and blue arches of the stratosphere, but now when they descend to a height of 100 meters, she can see the blue in the backyard of the house. Swimming pool-lighter than the blue of the tarps in the woods. The children—probably better than those under the tarp—jump on them after school to cool off. Her thoughts drifted to her daughter for a while, but she temporarily wiped Lotte from her mind, and instead checked the instrument a hundred times. The movement on the right side of the runway caused a moment of anxiety, until she saw just a pickup truck driving two lanes with cracks and water stains outside the airport fence. For some reason, its brake lights are on. Without her care.

They cleared the fence near the end of the runway. In the last few seconds of the flight, any anxiety about whether her speed, altitude, and angle of attack were correct was dispelled by the fact that John was completely relaxed. They are one. Just wait for this moment, any second now, when the tires touch the tarmac, the jet will become a very expensive and bulky car. The high position of the windshield, coupled with the slightly upward attitude of the jet, prevented them from directly seeing the runway ahead. But the jet’s belly is equipped with a camera that allows them to see the content below on a small screen placed in the panel between the pilot and co-pilot seats. She usually ignores it when landing, because it never shows anything but a clean and unobstructed sidewalk. But she heard shocked exclaims from people in the cabin. On the right side of the plane, they had apparently just witnessed something incredible. Unbelievable and bad. She likes to leave the cockpit door open so that curious passengers can look ahead from the aisle; but now it sounds like they see things she can't.

She first wondered if they might need to abort the landing because of abnormal motion on the abdominal camera screen.

She glanced at it, just to see a group of black four-legged creatures just below the plane, moving through their path from right to left.

The jet yanked violently to the right. The correct landing gear under the wing hit something that shouldn't be there. They haven't landed yet, so there are no tires on the ground. The nose swung violently to the right as it dived down, hitting the nose gear onto the sidewalk at an awkward angle—before it hit other obstacles on the runway.

They were driving on VREF, which according to Texans' measurements is about 160 miles per hour. The sidewalk came towards her. The sideways movement of the jet was at least as much as the forward movement—passing so violently that her eyes couldn't focus on the instrument. Most of the screen of the abdominal cam turned red, and the camera lens was splashed with blood or hydraulic oil. Where it is not red is fuzzy, green. No, that is the color of the sky. No, it's green again. She was hit into the seat belt. The inside of the plane was filled with the thumping of flying luggage. Some parts of the jet-the wing tip? ——It must have been dug on the wet ground. Now there is no other way but to get rid of the 160 miles per hour by destroying the landscape.

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