A Professional Engineer (a tale)

There was dark and cold night. I didn’t remember that how long I slept. I was woke up by sounds like explosion in an airplane. Suddenly, all of lamps lighted and showed a view of the airplane. Beside of me, my kids were crying and my wife was terrified. I thought a worst scenario about the air going to outside. But the wind was stable, and we could breath still. What was happened?

After few seconds later, an captain controlling the airplane began talking by using speakers. According to his story, the airplane’s fuel system got troubled, and it leaked to some electrical rooms for engines. For this trouble, the fuel caught fire, and three of four engines didn’t work. Also the airplane was not able to control from cockpit. Unfortunately, the airplane would be into the ocean in 7 minutes.

In terrible situation, someone said “I had an idea to prevent we would died”. He looked not strong man, but his voice had enough confidence to argue the people. He opened his laptop, and tried to hack the airplane system. It was not difficult for him because the system was not used newest technology, and he was good engineer.

First, he had to make sure overview of the airplane system. The airplane had just one usable engine which located inner left side. He calculated an equation of motion to control the airplane. Normally, to fly in the sky, the machine should have 6 degree of freedoms. For this reasons, airplane has four turbo engines, two pitch control wing, and one yaw control wing. However, actually, airplanes are robust systems, if you solve an equation for the airplane, it is possible to fly in the sky by using one engines and pitch yaw wings. After that, the control network of engines was hacked by him. His idea was controlling engine by using his laptop directly.

This operation was successfully, and the people made loud cheers. The airplane got stable speed, and went to the airport safely. I tried to find him to say him thanks. But anybody could not find him. After few weeks later, I saw an article at a library. An airplane engineer was dead by an experiment of airplane at his laboratory just one years ago. The picture of the engineer was similar to his face. I realized that he saved our life as his last professional job.