Through the windows she could see how the hot grit had sandblasted the 747’s leading edges. The paint was stripped, the windscreen and landing light covers opaqued. The dust got into the aircraft’s pitot tubes — airspeed sensors — and caused conflicting information on the flight deck. The engine nacelles, intakes and fans looked as if they had been shot-blasted.

The crew allowed Jane onto the deck — Jack was here, wide-eyed — but they barely reacted to her presence.

The cabin was filled with a bluish, acrid mist, sucked in by the compressors before the engines died. There was only grey cloud ahead of the aircraft, dancing electric light on the windscreen.

The Crew were following their procedures, the drill Jane recognized as preparing for an in-flight start-up of the engines.

They all looked incredibly young.

“…Mayday, mayday, mayday. Our position is forty miles west of Glasgow. We have lost all four engines. We’re descending and we’re out of level 370.”

Prestwick here, have you got a problem?

“We’ve lost all four engines.”

Understand you have lost engine number four?

The Senior First Officer — a thin, nervous young man — groaned at his captain, a competent fifty-ish woman. “The fuckwit doesn’t understand.”

Jack’s eyes got rounder.

“Then tell her until she bloody does,” the captain said. “Tell her we want radar assistance to get back to Prestwick. What about number four?”

“Fully shut down.”

“All right.” The captain checked the position of that engine’s fire handle and thrust lever. “We’ll go for a restart. Begin the checklist.”

The crew struggled through their checklists and drills — start levers to cut-off, standby ignition on, start levers back to idle — and Jane felt for them, forcing themselves through their complex procedures, mastering their own fear.

Kerosene ignited in the engine, and a huge flame shot from the jet efflux. But the engine didn’t restart.

The silence was eerie. Jane could hear the crew’s scratchy breathing.

The captain was using her autopilot, Jane saw. Five hundred feet per minute descent. She picked up a little of what was happening from the crew’s terse conversation. They were trading height for speed; their airspeed was two hundred and seventy knots, somewhere near the speed for minimum drag for the present all-up weight. And the pilot was turning back towards Prestwick. Good, Jane thought, somebody who knows what she is doing. Even after total engine failure, the aircraft was still under control. In fact it could glide for another twenty minutes or more from this height, and surely the engines would restart at a lower altitude.

But still, a dead stick unpowered landing back at Prestwick — or worse, a ditching — would be no fun.

A warning horn sounded in the cockpit. Cabin pressure was dropping. No air was being pumped into the aircraft.