I killed 341 people tonight.

The first officer was a thirty-something I had never flown with before. He was a skinny guy with acne scars on his face – not quite the handsome type that would catch the stewardesses’ attention. With my salt-and-pepper hair neatly trimmed under my captain cap, the plain navy uniform that I had had custom-made and embroidered with the airline’s distinctive wings, and the suave demeanor of an experienced pilot who has seen it all in his thirty-plus years of flying, I am clearly the leader of the pack. The crew will go silent and listen intently when I speak during the pre-flight briefing; and my commands will go unchallenged at all times. I am the king of this castle in the clouds, thirty-three thousand feet over the Atlantic, cruising at mach .89 towards a destination that everyone on board still believe they will reach uneventfully.

As I rest my right hand thoughtfully on the engine quadrant, the first officer tells me he needs to go to the lavatory. I have been waiting for this moment since takeoff. I am cool and serene.

I call out the standard “I have controls and comms” and watch him as he unbluckles his harness, moves his seat back and gets up. He exits the cockpit, leaving its door ajar as per the airline’s standard operating procedures. This is to ensure that a pilot can return promptly to his seat in case of unforeseen heavy turbulence, or to prevent the “no-pilot in command” situation. Last year, on a transatlantic flight, the captain was taking a piss when the first officer walked out of the cockpit to get a refreshment from the galley. The cockpit door shut behind him and all first-class pax enjoyed a nerve-wrecking half-hour while the two pilots, livid, eventually succeeded at busting the door with the onboard fire axe, thankful that the autopilot was maintaining cruise altitude. Such a mistake would definitely not happen under my captainship. At least not unwillingly.

I count to five, get up and quickly reach for the cockpit door, closing it and making sure it is properly locked from the inside. I feel determined and peaceful. I return to my seat, not bothering to put the comms headset on. In a moment the radio will start blaring with the concerned voice of some air traffic controller, located thousands of miles away and staring in disbelief at his radar screen, as my glorious B773 starts losing altitude. The gray-blue panels of the cockpit are lit only by the dim flight displays and the waning moon outside, casting a white trail of light on the ocean far below. I cannot seem to hear the engine noise any longer, after all those years getting accustomed to filtering out the monotonous roar during long hauls. Soon the two Rolls-Royce Trent 892 powerplants, delivering up to ninety-two thousand pounds of thrust each, will go quiet anyway. Rarely have I felt so peaceful.

My right hand grasps the smooth curves of the engine quadrant, as I ponder for an instant. Breaking news will soon flood the tickers. Distressed calls will be made. Search and rescue efforts will be launched, only to turn into a recovery mission. Articles will be written, questions raised, investigations launched, and my life, just like that of the entire crew, will be dissected in a vain effort to understand the chain of events that led to this very moment. Thousands of people, from air crash investigators to grieving family members to news analysts and so-called experts, will throw all their brainpower into answering one single question – why? Certainly, a disaster of this magnitude should warrant a compelling explanation. Some logical -or at least comprehensible- reasoning must account for the deaths of so many at the hands of just one.

But I am ahead of the pack. They will boil the oceans in search of answers, when really there is none. Even I do not know how or why I have come to doing this. All I know is that I have never felt so good, so serene, so complete in my entire life.

I gently pull back the throttle on the engine quadrant and nudge the control yoke towards my lap, effectively disengaging the autopilot and slowly bringing the airspeed below the stall limit. It is now only a matter of seconds before the wings lose lift, the nose dives, and a terrified first officer struggles vainly to reach the cockpit door. Soon all thirty three thousand feet that separate us from oblivion will be eaten up; a fireball will light up the ocean surface, like a giant flare that stands for no living soul to see, an extravagant farewell to no one in particular.