Then McMahon felt the water pouring through the open door, and a new realisation hit him: they had to get out of there, fast. Uemoto was slumped next to him, shocked and bleeding but still conscious. He got his bearings and realised that he was, miraculously, OK. McMahon and Uemoto were thrown forward violently, as if rear-ended by a semitrailer. It struck the surface with an explosive, shuddering impact, water spraying over the windscreen as the aircraft plunged into the ocean.
Then everything flashed white as the plane made contact. At the very last moment, with the Pacific filling her field of vision, she pulled back on the yoke, nudging the Apache’s nose up a little. The air roared in her ears as the ocean rose up to meet them. As the plane hurtled towards the ocean, she forced herself to imagine a runway stretching along the choppy surface of the water. Just land as if you’re landing on the ground, Uemoto told herself. If she allowed one wingtip to hit the water first, the plane could cartwheel uncontrollably and wrench the aircraft into pieces. If she hit the water at too steep an angle, the force of the collision would kill them. She knew the chances of survival were slim. In pilot school, they teach you about ditching a plane, but you never actually practise dumping your ride into the ocean. “We’re 25 miles northwest of Kona,” she said to air traffic control. At about 300 metres and falling quickly, Uemoto made their last distress call.
Now they wouldn’t get trapped inside after the expected marine landing. Following their emergency training to a T, McMahon handed the controls to Uemoto and, fighting a rush of warm air, propped open the cockpit door.
As they began to lose altitude, the pilots powered through the items on the emergency checklist – turning on fuel pumps, pushing the throttles to full – which can sometimes restart the engines. The next few minutes were a blur of activity. It took them a moment to process the fact that they might crash. Sitting in their metal compartment high above the ocean, they heard what every pilot dreads: an eerie quiet. Then, without warning, the pilots lost power to the right engine. When they heard the sound, shortly after three o’clock, McMahon brought the plane down to 1000 metres, where the engines seemed to run more smoothly.
They were just two young pilots, strangers to each other, looking for flight time and taking a short trip with no passengers. Up to that point, the two-hour flight from Oahu to the island of Hawaii had been uneventful. Her copilot, 26-year-old Dave McMahon, heard it, too. As her twin-engine Piper Apache sliced through the postcard-blue sky 1524 metres (5000 feet) above the Pacific Ocean, 23-year-old pilot Sydnie Uemoto heard the sound – a subtle change in timbre as the engines began to strain and rattle.
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