At the nine-second mark, the 747 Cargo stalls. For the next thirteen seconds, the seven men on board will be fully aware of their fate, powerless to change it, powerless to act.

It’s a strange sense of disconnected weightlessness and it strikes you in the seconds between the time you fuck up (or something is fucked up on your behalf) and the impact. As a young BMX racer I became intimately acquainted with it, the moment that you realize you’ve made a mistake in midair and now you’re going to land, not on your wheels, but on your knees, or your hands, or your jawbone. Then, when I graduated to racing cars, I learned a slightly longer version of it; the two or three seconds between the time you make the mistake and the time you hit the wall. Classic example: the “Damn it, Tim!” guy:

That’s a solid three seconds between the mistake and the five-figure repair bill. You can get a lot of thinking done in that time. There’s plenty of space in those seconds for regret, anger, and swelling fear. Sometimes it’s financial in nature; I doubt the R8 driver thought he was going to be injured in any fashion beyond the trivial. Sometimes it’s real fear, as when I got turned around at Mid-Ohio five years ago and glanced the wall at maybe ninety miles per hour. As I slid through the grass towards the red-and-white concrete barriers, I thought about my fellow comp-school graduate John Engle and his death, which had occurred just a year before. Luckily I had a strong cage and a proper approach to the impact; I wasn’t even scratched. But in those few seconds where you are just along for the ride, after all possible actions have been taken and you’re just waiting for the decision of fate, there’s time to think.

Last night I thought about the men in that 747 and what it must have felt like. There was, perhaps, a crash as the cargo shifted, a booming to fill their ears in that long metal tube. There was the high-g shift of the plane; it looks gentle in the video as the 747 stalls out but it must have shaken the fillings out of all of them, belted down for takeoff in their final chairs.

Then there was the fall. The pilots must have thrown the turbojets to full, hoping against hope that they could slow the giant aircraft down as it fell from the sky. It must have screamed all the way down. And that’s what it did: stalled out, it just fell, an apartment-building-sized thing, the 747, surely one of the top five technological achievements of humanity, coming out of the air that had supported its three hundred tons with the solidity of steel but then proved to be completely insubstantial in the stall, falling with accelerating size and presence and reality into the field of view of the dash cam.

One of those seven men was the load master. Was it his mistake? Did he know, for those thirteen seconds, that he had killed everyone on board?

In most plane crashes there’s a hope. There’s a prayer for a Sully-style miracle, the lift regained, the jarring but survivable accident, the broken limbs, the conventional terror of the conventional dead-engine landing. Not this time. Nobody survives a half-mile fall out of the sky in a metal tube holding sixty-three thousand gallons of kerosene.

In those thirteen seconds, I imagine they thought about the mechanism of their deaths. The ceiling, collapsing on them and snapping their necks with a sound so loud they can seemingly taste it. I’ve had my neck broken. It’s a unique experience. Or the seats breaking loose and throwing them into the bulkheads. Or the brain-melting krangggggg of the crash, the moment of amazed survival, then the fireball sucking the oxygen out of their lungs and melting their eyeballs out of their skulls.

It’s no charity, those thirteen seconds. Prometheus never asked for death; he took every moment of life strapped to the rock, the eagle sawing away at his innards with the beak and the raspy tongue. Most of us would choose to live in any form when it came right down to it. But take those thirteen seconds away, we do not want them, nobody wants that, the fall with the engines straining and the weightless feeling and the roulette wheel of death awaiting them at the end.

In those thirteen seconds, perhaps nobody on that plane pondered the superiority of reason, or of progressive doctrine, or of a society that owns its children communally like a misunderstanding of a village that exists only in the muddled mind and teaches them to be gentle and kind and to step out of the way of scary people on the street and to huddle in their homes when the Boston authorities command it and to consume and consume and consume and consume and consume. Perhaps they thought of their children, if they had any. Perhaps they briefly pondered what they’d left on a computer or in a notebook somewhere, a humiliation or a mistake now past erasing. They may have remembered a loved one, a moment of passion, the most important thing to them, whatever it was, or something trivial, thirteen seconds of a panicked mind running in circles around a missed oil-change appointment.

My suspicion is that in those thirteen seconds, everyone on board pondered the nature of God. As they fell down the stairsteps of Maslov’s pyramid the same way their plane was unlatching itself from the sky, down to the dusty ground where imminent death is a certainty, they must have considered the nature of the Almighty, the afterlife, all the big questions we feel like fools for asking when everyone else around us seems to be profitably focused, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. The mind, the eye, the face of God.

And now they know.