It didn’t have to be the best possible decision.Īs she was informed by Texan voices on the radio, as well as Willem coming up to the cockpit with whatever he’d gleaned over the jet’s data link, a thunderstorm had swept over Waco in the last few hours, dropping the temperature to a mere 45. It had been slicing through the lower stratosphere at bet ter than six hundred miles per hour, almost ready to begin its descent into Houston, when they had gotten the news about the insufficiency of that city’s air. The business jet, slightly crowded with seven souls aboard, flew higher and faster than airliners. But there was no point in quibbling over it. Now, maybe Waco was not the optimal choice for them.
Under the direction of air traffic controllers, Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia-for that was the queen’s given name-and her co-pilot, a Royal Dutch Air Force captain named Johan, began to drive the jet through a series of maneuvers that would culminate in Waco. And what was going to break it was a hurricane. Refueled, though, it could not safely take off until the heat wave broke. Oh, the queen’s jet could have landed there, given that, during the flight from Schiphol, it had converted ten thousand kilograms of fuel into carbon dioxide and dumped it into the atmosphere. Houston’s air was too hot to support airplanes.
I works on the levee, mama both night and day If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to breakĪnd the water come in, have no place to stay.