55 pages • 1 hour read
Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421
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Chapters 6-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
The novel skips back to three hours before the crash. Chris, Will’s estranged wife and Shannon’s mother, is renovating the house in Hawaii that she and Will designed and built together. They bought the house 16 years ago and named it ho’oa’a, which means “to develop roots” (49). They designed and worked on the unfinished house together until six years ago, when their oldest daughter, Annie, died. Annie slipped and hit her head during a trip to the public pool and died from her head injury. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Will and Chris drifted apart and fought constantly before finally deciding to separate. Last year, Chris started to work on the house again on her own.
Will’s car pulls up to the house, and he reflects on Annie’s death. He is worried about Shannon’s upcoming trip and thinks that they should not take the flight—she is going to camp in San Francisco, and Will insists on flying with her. He goes into the house to pick her up anyway. Chris tells Will that while he and Shannon are gone, she plans to finally pack up Annie’s room, but Will is resistant to this. Shannon interrupts their argument and complains about Will’s overprotectiveness.
Will goes to Shannon’s room to get her bags and looks in Annie’s untouched bedroom before leaving. Chris says goodbye to them and remarks to Will that Shannon is “more capable than [he] think[s]” (60).
Chapter 7 Summary
Jackie “Fitz” Fitzgerald, Coast Guard District 14 Commander, arrives at the crash site by helicopter. The scene is “more chaotic than anything he could have ever imagined” (63). One of the rescuers on his team is Mikey Tanner, dive officer supervisor. The rescue helicopters head for the crash site, and the Coast Guard sends out a notice to all available boats to assist. Civilian boats arrive to help, but most of the passengers on the water are caught in the flames. Fitz identifies a female passenger, and a rescue helicopter manages to save her. Tanner tries to save the passengers on the life raft but can save only one out of the 25—Ed Vernon, one of the flight attendants. Tanner reports that they located the plane, possibly with survivors still on board. Fitz looks at the plane manifest and notes that out of 99 passengers, they will be able to save very few.
Chapter 8 Summary
Chris is diving alongside her colleague, Peter Feeny, performing hull maintenance on a Navy ship. Noah Murphy, another member of their team, reports over the comms that they must finish for the day due to an emergency. Chris and Feeny come to the surface and see Coast Guard helicopters overhead. All the Navy sailors on board the ship are hurrying somewhere; Chris stops one to ask what is going on, and he says that they are responding to a mass rescue operation for a commercial airline ditching. Chris is horrified when she realizes that the crashed aircraft is Will and Shannon’s.
Chapter 9 Summary
The plane has stopped sinking and is still sealed with the air pocket intact. The passengers are fine. Kit thinks of a pair of survivors she read about recently; they assigned specific tasks to each other, which gave them a sense of purpose and meant that someone else was counting on them, which was instrumental to their survival. Kit does the same now and assigns roles to each of the remaining passengers: medical tasks, searching for supplies, and finding food and dry clothing. She gives Maia and Shannon her phone to take pictures and videos. Will marks the wall to note where the water has risen and calculates the size of their air pocket, estimating they have enough oxygen for about five or six hours. Ryan is searching for supplies when he finds a reading light, which reminds him of his late wife, Jenny, and he feels a wave of grief. Andy asks if anyone above knows that there are survivors on the plane, and they decide to find a way to communicate with the surface.
Chapter 10 Summary
The Coast Guard has located the plane; it is stationary, about 10 miles from Molokai, one of Hawaii’s islands. Fitz gives orders to deploy video recording devices so that they can look for signs of life. Chris watches the news coverage of the crash, forcing herself to be “numb” until she knows for sure what is going on. She and Feeny follow the Navy soldiers and slip into a meeting, where Navy Fleet Master Chief Patricia Larson is speaking to Fitz over a monitor. She reports that they rescued fewer than 10 people on the surface, but there may still be survivors in the plane. Larson and Fitz discuss their options for rescue, and the only viable one seems to be a Submarine Rescue Diving and Recompression System (SRDRS), also known as the Falcon, which is designed to rescue people from a sunken submarine. However, Danny Rogers, a Navy officer, reports that the Falcon has a broken piece and is unusable.
Chris speaks up and says that she can find a way to make it work. Fitz, noting her last name, realizes that she is related to one of the passengers. She insists on staying and helping, if not for her own family, then for others’ families. Fitz agrees to let her stay and observe only, and he orders Larson to deploy the Falcon to the crash site but to focus on vessel recovery and lift the plane out with a sling. Chris objects to this—if there are still passengers on the plane, moving the plane could kill them. She asks for the Falcon’s blueprints and specs so that she can figure out how to fix it.
Chapter 11 Summary
Back on the plane, the passengers are trying to figure out how to communicate with the surface. Molly hands out snacks to Shannon and Maia, but Shannon has a severe allergic reaction to peanut butter crackers and stops breathing. Will dives under the water to find her backpack with her EpiPen inside while the other passengers try to help her breathe. Kit finds the air-to-ground phone to reach MedLink, which will also allow them to communicate with the surface. The phone is complicated to use, so Kaholo finds a company phone with the flight attendants’ manual. Molly and Bernadette perform CPR on Shannon, and finally, Will resurfaces with her backpack and injects her with the EpiPen. Kit presses a button on the phone, though she cannot tell if it is the right one.
Chapter 12 Summary
A telemedicine specialist is watching the footage of the crash when she answers a call, but she can barely make out the voice through the static. It is Flight 1421.
Chapter 13 Summary
Chris and her team look at the plans for the SRDRS system and try to figure out how to attach it to the plane. Rogers hesitates to give details about it since they’re “classified” and says that Chris should simply let the Navy and Coast Guard handle it. Chris reminds him of the gravity of the issue and that she is certain their plans will not work. Rogers relents.
Meanwhile, Fitz watches a medic work on one of the surviving passengers. Tanner reports that they pulled only two people out of the water alive, and Fitz reports seven rescued by the civilian boats. A Coast Guard member gives Fitz a stack of topographical images of the crash area; the plane landed on a shallow shelf and is only about 55 meters below the surface. The recording devices have been deployed, and the team can see the plane over their monitors.
On the plane, the passengers are startled by a flash of light outside. The cameras show the rescue team above that the plane is intact. Steve Milton, one of the Coast Guard rescuers, brings Fitz a phone with Kit on the line. The camera reaches a window, and the rescuers can see her face.
The rescue team can see all the passengers smiling, and “a newfound sense of purpose and hope fill[s] the room” (109). They see Will and Shannon, and someone goes to let Chris know they are okay. The other camera, however, pulls back to a wide-angle shot of the whole plane, which they realize is “teetering on the edge of a cliff” (110).
Chapters 6-13 Analysis
In the second part of the novel, Newman begins to weave in the parallel plotline concerning the rescue mission and introduces the other member of the Kent family—Will’s estranged wife and Shannon’s mother, Chris, who is another protagonist. Flashing back to just before Shannon’s trip, Newman provides context for the reason why Shannon and Will are traveling by plane and the family’s dynamic and conflict, which is the emotional core of the story. The narrative reveals that the loss of their firstborn daughter, Annie, drives Will’s protectiveness over Shannon and is primarily what damaged his relationship with his wife.
Here, Newman leans deeper into the theme of The Complexities of Familial Relationships. This is primarily explored in Chapter 6, which takes place in the family’s home, which Will and Chris designed and built themselves. The house symbolizes their relationship and family life; it is something they built together and put effort and care into by constantly renovating and adding to it. However, they stopped working on it in the wake of Annie’s death, reflecting the theme of Healing From Trauma and Grief. Will and Chris have been unable or unwilling to make changes to the house, clean out Annie’s room, or work on their marriage because these acts symbolize moving on from their tragic loss, which both of them have struggled to do over the last six years. However, in the present day, Chris is shown renovating the house by herself and tells Will that she is ready to pack Annie’s room; she is ready to move on alone, while Will is still stuck. His resistance to moving forward from his grief bleeds into his approach to parenting Shannon; the perceptive 11-year-old understands that Will’s pain over Annie manifests as stifling overprotectiveness and resistance to her growing up. The disconnect between Will’s and Chris’s approaches to parenting Shannon and dealing with their grief is the core of their marital conflict. Through the Kent family’s struggles, Newman explores the idea that trauma and grief can either bring people closer together or dredge up conflict and tear them apart.
Newman further expands the novel’s cast by introducing the team of rescuers from the Coast Guard and Navy, who race to save as many survivors as possible. The rescue team’s efforts at the crash site underscore the importance of Everyday People in the Role of Heroes during such a catastrophe. The civilians who “put their work, vacations, and honeymoons on hold” to assist the rescue efforts are instrumental in saving the few survivors on the water (64), either by directly recovering victims or administering first aid. This theme is also at the heart of another central conflict: Chris’s efforts to save her family in the face of resistance from the Navy and Coast Guard professionals. As a civilian diver with no rescue experience, Chris’s expertise is underestimated in favor of the Coast Guard and Navy’s, setting up competing rescue efforts that will complicate the passengers’ chances of survival.
Building upon the theme of Human Resilience and Survival Against the Odds, the passengers on board Flight 1421 are tasked with figuring out how to survive until help arrives. Using what few resources they have, they manage to stay dry, fed, and hydrated, and Kit assigns every passenger simple, specific tasks to keep them busy. Still, the odds are stacked against them; in Chapter 13, Newman highlights how uninhabitable the ocean is by providing specific facts about it and stating that the majority of the ocean is “so dark, cold, and uninhabitable that mankind’s most advanced science and technology ha[s] only allowed them to obtain merely a hint of basic understanding about it” (106). The author sets up the classic conflict of humanity versus nature by presenting the ocean as dangerous, mysterious, and completely foreign. Fitz, reflecting on this, is pessimistic about recovering the passengers until they discover the plane on a shallow shelf and establish contact with Kit. Given the bleak state of victim recovery on the surface and the danger of the deep ocean, the crashed aircraft is ironically a place of relative safety. Newman provides a glimmer of hope for the passengers’ safe return when they make contact with the rescuers on the surface but subverts it by ending the chapter on a literal cliffhanger, raising the stakes even higher and setting the stage for the intense rescue attempt to come.
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By T. J. Newman
