For twenty minutes, the aircraft was a metal tube of absolute, practiced coldness. No one cried because no one had the permission to. They were all holding their breath, suspended in a vacuum where emotion had been surgically removed.
Captain Elias Thorne watched the altimeter drop with a sickening lurch. Outside the cockpit glass, the sky over the Andes was a bruised purple, flickering with lightning that looked like cracks in the world. [S9E5] Leave Your Emotions at the Cabin Door
Elias didn't move. He sat in the dark, staring at the cabin door. He had told them to leave their emotions there, but he knew the truth: once the flight is over, you have to open that door and pick them all back up again. And they always felt twice as heavy as when you left them. For twenty minutes, the aircraft was a metal
Should this story lean more into the of the crew, or Captain Elias Thorne watched the altimeter drop with
“Whatever you’re carrying—the grief, the fear, the 'what-ifs'—leave them at the cabin door,” Elias commanded. “Right now, you aren't a daughter or a person. You’re a series of calculations. If you feel, we fall. Do you understand?”
“Airspeed’s decaying,” his co-pilot, Miller, whispered. Her knuckles were white on the yoke. This was her first trans-continental flight since her father’s funeral, and Elias could see the tremor in her hands.