"Maybe."

"And even if we get an escort, we're still two hours from the airport, so we shouldn't expect to meet them for an hour yet. Maybe longer." The fighter jets are, ultimately, to shoot the plane down if it looks like it's been hijacked and is headed for a skyscraper, and they're out over the ocean where no conceivable situation could be improved by shooting them down. Probably the easterly approach to the airport will make whoever's job it is to worry about hijackings have a very stressful twenty minutes but it's indicated for LAX's expected winds.

"Right." 

Ghaffries flew for the US military. They both did. It's still the best way to get your pilot's license without being born into money. If he forgot that fighter jets take time to fly the thousand miles still remaining between them and LA, and aren't likely to be sent out that far at all, and aren't going to be very fussed about this minor malfunction, it's because he's pretty rattled. 

"I want to fly the descent. Why don't you take a spin through the checklists, see if I missed anything, and then finish preparing this approach briefing. And, you know, man the radios." That is generally the job of the pilot monitoring. Generally there are radios. It's a pretty bad joke. Barely counts as a joke, really. 

He's probably also rattled. It's lucky in a sense that this happened two hours out; they'll have time to prep it to death and by the time it actually comes, it'll be boring. 

"Your aircraft." He reaches over for the reference handbook. "- I'm going to rerun the checklist for the GPS, too, actually, if that's all right. In case it's related. I'm not sure we've heard any radio chatter since the GPS went out."

"My aircraft," he replies automatically to the first part of that, and "Good idea." It is a good idea, and it's more important than usual to say that, when they're both under more stress and need to be thinking more flexibly. Planes do not, generally, crash because of instrument malfunctions; they crash because pilots fail to notice the overall situational picture their instrument malfunctions are disguising from them.

Ghaffries retries the GPS checklist, then the missing two way radio checklist. Nothing observably changes.

He makes another outgoing transmission on the emergency frequency stating their call sign, position, altitude, route code, intentions, predicted deviation range. Sets a timer to do it again in fifteen minutes. Cross-checks the altimeters.

"She handled fine for you?"

"Yeah. Is she handling fine for you?"

"Yes. I was thinking I might fly her manually, to get more of a sense of - whether there's anything up that's not with the radios - but I don't fly as smooth as the computer, and we want to stay very cleanly on course. Probably better to leave her be if she's clearly doing fine."

"Probably. Everything else I've looked at looks good."

"Wifi is out. Or it was twenty minutes ago. I guess we should check if it still is. If it's not, we can ask someone to, uh, email HQ, tell them our intentions that way. That's not on the checklist but I bet it'll be in the next edition."

"Good luck sounding reassuring on the PA for that one. 'This is your captain speaking. Can somebody please send LAX an email and ask them which runway they would like us to land on? Thank you for flying Southwest Airlines."

"No, see, easy, you just end by thanking them for flying United. 

- do go check now if the cabin wifi is working. I don't know how long to expect it to take to set up communication with ATC that way but it might take a while and I'd want to start immediately."

"Yes, sir." And he opens the doors to the cockpit and flags the flight attendant down. "Is the wifi working?"

"Nope. Did you try something? Maybe make an announcement that you tried something, so our customers feel that their struggles are heard."

"Nothing we can actually do except turn it off and back on again, and we did do that, because we're also out of radio comms right now."

"Great. You train for that?"

"Of course we do! It'll be fine. Really, we're the luckiest plane headed into LAX, everyone else is going to be circling and they have to roll out the red carpet for us since we can't do what we're told. But if you get wifi - and you probably won't, probably it's the same underlying malfunction - let us know, so we can, uh, be in contact with ATC that way.

You can plan on a normal descent and landing."

"Sure. I'm going to go ahead and refund everybody their eight bucks."

Right, she'd requested that they make an announcement about the wifi. He'd expect the passengers to be this worked up about a wifi outage on, say, New York-London, full of grumpy people who work in finance, but this flight is Honolulu-LA, full of families with small children. ...conceivably those care a lot about the wifi so the small children will watch Cocomelon and not scream. 

"Sounds good," he says. "Just let me know if it does happen to kick back in. - while I'm here, are our exterior lights on?" That's on the checklist for a plane flying without comms; it improves their visibility to other planes. The system says the lights are on but why trust what you can check just by looking out the window. 

"Sure are. Is that related to the radios being out?"

"Yep. You know, as a last resort, we can try looking out the windshield for other planes." It's not a very good last resort. They're going five hundred miles an hour; so would be anyone whose airspace they strayed into, if they had some kind of navigation problem now. It doesn't give you a whole lot of reaction time, even when visibility is great, as it is here.

The second-to-last resort is TCAS, which notices when two planes are near each other and gives instructions that must be obeyed immediately - 'you go up' and 'you go down', usually. In the last case he heard of where there was a complete loss of contact with ATC, TCAS was also offline. It claims to be working normally, here, but it's not as if there's a way to check.

The third-to-last resort is that planes on routes out over the Pacific Ocean don't actually get anywhere close to each other, and the handbook has traffic patterns if they do need to deviate from their course without clearance which keep them safely distant from everyone else. LAX will have noticed by now that they have a blind flight incoming and started arranging for no one to be near them there either. 

He heads back to the cockpit. "No wifi. I'm going to double check our navigation."

"Good idea," he says approvingly. "Any thoughts on what takes out the GPS and the wifi and the radios?"

Bermuda Triangle shit. A nuclear war that has taken out all of civilization leaving only them survivors. He is aware this is not a great mental route to go down right now and also aware that there'll be an incident report which may involve the FAA reviewing several hours of cockpit audio and he'll feel like a damn idiot if he's recorded claiming there's been a nuclear war, so he doesn't say it. 

"I don't know but I was thinking the last total loss of two-way comms incident I heard about, TCAS was out as well. So - double checking the nav, just making very sure we're where we're supposed to be."

He double checks the nav. They are flying precisely their assigned route, according to both of the INS systems, which agree. 

His fifteen minute timer goes off. He picks up the radio and tells everyone on the emergency frequency their call sign, position, altitude, etcetera etcetera. He feels mostly calm, by now. "Do you have a theory?"