Come Fly With Me Outtakes

Deleted Scene - Live from the Tarmac

This next scene was meant to fit in between Scott's POV of being carried out of the plane and Mitch's POV of waiting in the hospital.

Mitch paces in front of the windows, watching the rescue crews work. He watches the fire crew finish spraying down the gears and then start a more detailed inspection of everything else. He watches the stair trucks approach and then connect themselves to doors at the front and behind the left wing. He watches the med teams clamber up and inside, hauling stretchers and red bags full of supplies. He watches his own team get back to work, still coordinating the rescue, but also starting the long process of re-establishing full services to the runways that are still open.

Between deboarding the injured and then the able passengers, inspecting and then towing the plane, and cleaning up the fire retardant and other debris, 18 Right is going to be closed for hours. And the nearby 18 Left won't reopen until all passengers are secured and emergency services are complete.

Adding to the issue is that the shitty weather is going to cause further problems for both arriving and departing flights. From the snippets Mitch is overhearing and his own logical deductions, he knows many flights have already diverted to other airports. But there are planes still circling overhead that need to get down, and others on the ground that need to leave, and as they've managed to avoid a major catastrophe, it's time to start prioritizing getting everything back up and running.

This is the sort of thing Mitch excels at. While he doesn't love the stress of a complicated shift, he's good at solving problems and expediting traffic. If he wasn't so distracted, he'd be itching to unravel the snarled planes lined up for runways they can't currently use. A quick glance at the ATIS readout tells him the wind is still fucked up, so at least for the next little while, they'll probably send all narrow-bodies and perhaps even some of the smaller heavies out to 13 L and R, which are better angled for the wind. That'll mean longer taxis to and from the apron for all those involved, which will further delay things.

But Mitch is distracted; he can't take his eyes off of Scott's plane for more than a moment at a time. He wants to get down there. Wants to get as close as the camera crew who's somehow managed to already get authorization to set up next to the runway. He wonders, idly, what they'd been there to film before everything went south. Something must have already been planned to put them in such a good position this soon.

He looks up at the screens hanging from the ceiling above him and sure enough, several of them are tuned to CNN's breaking coverage. A news anchor is on half the screen, babbling as they do, while the other panel is alternating between a replay of the landing, and a live shot of the activity around the plane.

It's a far better view than Mitch has with his own eyes, so he spends most of his time watching it, trying not to wince every time the closed captioning reveals the reporter doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

If Mitch never hears or sees the word 'tarmac' again, it'll be too soon. Still, he manages to find the TV remote and turns the volume up just loud enough to hear.

A few moments after that, the first EMT crew goes in, and when they come out again, they're carrying a stretcher between them. That gets the reporters excited, but even on the TV screen, it's hard to see who they're transporting.

CNN figures it out before Mitch does; a chyron scrolls across the bottom of the screen as the camera zooms in and the panel switches to be the main one on the screen. "Hero pilot rescued from downed plane."

'Downed' is a bit of an exaggeration, given that what occurred was an emergency landing rather than a crash. But the semantics don't really matter.

Mitch holds his breath. The man on the stretcher is wearing a pilot's uniform, three yellow stripes visible on his epaulets. It's hard to see the details of his face through the neck brace and oxygen mask they have on him, but then Mitch catches sight of the tuft of black hair on top of his head. It's not Scott.

Not that that stops the reporter from waxing poetic about how well he landed the plane. Of course, the media rarely manages to realize that more than one pilot exists on any given flight, so Mitch supposes that makes sense. And it doesn't really matter, it's just darkly amusing. At least until Mitch realized that this must be the pilot Scott was very concerned about during his approach, and that takes any levity at the expense of national broadcasts out of his mind.

The next person removed from the plane isn't Scott either, but a woman, this time wearing the remains of an American flight attendant's uniform and carried out the back door rather than the front. The third also comes out the back door, but the live footage is then shunted back over to the side so the anchor once more takes up the main panel part of the screen before Mitch can get a good look. Still, it looks like whoever the person is, they're far too petite to be Scott.

It's only through Mitch's familiarity with the body shape and hair of his lover that he recognizes the fourth person carried out, this time from the front door, as Scott. No heroic fanfare or chyron goes by this time. Instead, CNN is playing the recording of the conversation between Scott and Fort Worth Center that they've clearly downloaded from liveATC.net. It's weird, hearing Scott's voice yelling to be heard over the wind and Center's futile responses transcribed on the screen so laymen can make them out, all while watching Scott be literally carried off that same plane without any sort of acknowledgement, minimized to the far corner.

Mitch needs to get out of here. Scott's down there, and Mitch has nothing to do up here. He can do nothing just as well from wherever it is they're taking Scott. He's looking around, trying to determine the quickest way to get that information, when Vincint takes his arm.

"C'mon. I'll drive."

I spent a long time imagining this scene, with Mitch frantically waiting to see Scott exit the plane. It amused me to have Scott's lack of uniform lead to the media assuming he was just another passenger, and news reports often seem to forget that no airliner flies with only one pilot. However, once the scene written, I realized it didn't add anything to the plot and its main emotional impact would be making the reader mildly annoyed that Jeff was getting credit for landing the plane, albeit briefly. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to be even subconsciously blaming Jeff for anything, so I removed it.