Mask off. "That'll be easier when it's not pretty much directly overhead, but I guess we can refresh our memory of how navigating by the sun works while we wait for that. - you have a plan?"

"If we can't get anywhere with the radios? Find an area without clouds, lose some altitude, look for an airport or a road or a cornfield. I guess. You have anything?"

"You can get cell service down below 2,500 feet. I don't love getting that close to the ground without a map but if we had good enough visibility - just a minute would be long enough to figure out what country we're in. ...though if we're outside the US I don't know if you can still count on cell service below 2,500 feet. Airport, road, cornfield - we're decked for a water landing -"

"Plane's got a lot of kids, I don't want to end up in a situation where we need a fast evacuation if we can possibly avoid it. If we land in a cornfield I think we want to land near-empty, to avoid a fire, and if we land on the water - I don't know. Sully went down right next to a bunch of rescue ferries, they were there in three minutes. I think the wings were sinking within fifteen."

"Sully had no engine power, they were having a hard time maintaining speed, they landed outside parameters and the plane was damaged. I think a full engine power water landing looks a lot cleaner, it's just no one does that because if you have full engine power you have better options. Probably." If they're in a sufficiently uninhabited bit of the Amazon or something they might not. He doesn't, in fact, see the distinctive squares of intensively farmed land in the distant terrain below.

"We've still got more than a thousand miles of range. We've got better options, we've just got to figure out how to find them. Ask the flight crew while you're at it to keep an eye out in case we do get a jet escort. I imagine we're making a lot of people on the ground nervous too, and I'd be flatly delighted to follow someone to the nearest patch of level ground."

"I'll tell them."

It is not, actually, procedure to tell passengers that there's a major problem with the aircraft until you know what you need them to do (brace for a hard landing, mostly). Talking will never prevent your plane from crashing; only flying your plane will prevent it from crashing. Even talking with ATC is much less important than flying your plane. This plane is in fact flying fine, and they're trying everything they can think of on the navigation front, so they could make an announcement, but he's inclined to wait until they have something concrete to tell them.

He flags down the lead flight attendant. 

"Hey! What's going on, we're over land sooner than I expected."

"Great question. Really fantastic question."

"Do we need to prep the cabin for an emergency landing -"

"It is looking fairly likely there'll be an emergency landing today, but not in the next two hours, we have plenty of fuel and plenty of things to try and we're staying at cruise altitude until we can figure out what's going on. I take it you are confirming that the plane does appear to be over land."

"Yes. I assumed we were getting in early and LA won't give us a runway yet."

"Our charts think we're still 400 miles from LA over the ocean. We're going to hang out at altitude and sort it out. Uh, if you see an escort show up, let us know. Since we're out of radio contact. ..I assume the wifi is still not back."

"No, but we have some great inflight movies you can check out instead," she says chirpily. " - sorry."

"You're good. Uh, I don't know if there's anything else - actually, can you be very sure to hydrate everybody? We might do a water landing or land in the middle of nowhere and if they're going to be stuck for hours and hours -"

"If you're going to maybe do a water landing we need as much notice as possible to get everyone in life vests, especially the kid-sized life vests that aren't under the seat, and to show people how to safely brace. And yeah, we can do another round of drinks. Nonalcoholic drinks. I assume you're very busy so I'll knock if there's an escort or a fire or another serious systems failure and not otherwise."

"Thanks." And he ducks back in. 

"Nobody on the radio."

"Right." He sits down, heavily. Straps in. "Great weather. I appreciate the great weather. Should I disconnect the autopilot?"

"Go ahead."

Then he'll work the rest of the way through the checklists for a failure of the navigation instruments. This doesn't turn anything up.

"Have we thought through whether we want to continue on this course."

"I've been thinking about it. The thing we want most is good visibility so we can descend, and no mountains. We've got pretty good visibility here, looks like a little bit of mountains. Looks clear up ahead, too. I'm thinking once we get past the mountains maybe we start descending, look for, uh, signs of human habitation or lakes or rivers."

"Flight crew wants notice if we're putting down in the water, so they can distribute the baby life jackets."

"Christ. Yeah, of course. All right, help me out with figuring out if the sun is where it's supposed to be."

They've been trained to fly by dead reckoning, of course. It pretty much will never come up, not in a modern aircraft, but you train for a lot of things that will pretty much never come up, and at some point in a long career, one of them will.  

It's been a long time. It's not one of those skills you refresh on every six months, like landing with an engine out or some normal malfunction like that. It takes them a while.

"...which is...062. Which is what we wanted."