Steve Peters was sitting at the anchor desk, a model of the plane in front of him. “It means just what it says, David. Just like you do at home when your computer locks up. You kick it a few times, and when that doesn’t work you turn off everything, count to ten, and turn it on again.”

Both Jenny and I had checked in with our offices. There didn’t seem to be any need for us to show up there—certainly we would be fairly useless—but we needed to confirm that. We had each received several calls. This was one of those unnerving events that made you need to reach out to other people.

“Will that work?” Muir wondered.

Peters frowned. “It’s dicey,” he admitted. “But I’ve seen it work on simulators.” After the still-unsolved 2014 loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, also a Boeing triple 7, he continued, engineers had gamed every conceivable problem and solution in an attempt to figure out what had happened to that aircraft. This was one of the scenarios they’d run.

“So we know it does work?” Muir asked.

Peters clearly did not want to be nailed down. “It has been successful in regaining control, yes.”

“Right,” I said to Jenny. “There’s a lie of omission. I guarantee you. He isn’t telling us about the times it didn’t work.”

“So what do you want him to say? That they’re all gonna die?”

For one of the few times in my life, I didn’t have an answer.

Muir asked, “About how long does the reboot take?”

Peters hedged, “With luck, about a minute.”

Whoa, that took my breath away. It meant that for about a minute one of the largest airplanes ever built—an extraordinary complex jumble of steel and aluminum, fabric and wires, and 330 human beings—was going to have to remain airborne without enough power to flush the toilets.

Muir asked the only question that mattered: “How long can this airplane stay in the air without power?”

“With luck, about a minute.”

The long pause that followed was broken by Muir, looking for some cause for optimism. “Sully kept his plane in the air longer than that, didn’t he?”

“That’s right,” Jenny agreed.

I had written about that. “Little more than four minutes,” I said.

CNN was still receiving texts from the plane. An incredibly subdued Anderson Cooper reported that Steve Sanchez had finally informed his passengers about their situation. “He spoke very calmly.” He shook his head in some combination of awe and admiration. “I’m reading the text here. He told them that, this is a quote, ‘I’ve got a lot of confidence in this bucket of bolts, but we need your help too. We’re all pretty nervous…’”

Cooper paused again and pursed his lips, then appeared to wipe away a tear.

“‘… but we need you to stay as calm as you can. This airplane was built to fly, not be on the ground. So just sit tight and work with me, and we’re all gonna have a hell of a story to tell our grandkids.’” Cooper just sat there for several seconds. What else was there to say?