31 January

31 January, identified in the narrative as a Sunday, is a tightly defined temporal marker for two scenes unfolding fifteen minutes apart. At 0000 GMT, a first-person account from Vatnajökull records a German crewman’s violent agitation; at 0015 GMT, the narrative shifts between Kristín confronting an overwhelming sight on the glacier and Vytautas Carr waiting at Keflavík Airport as a C-17 is prepared to remove the aircraft’s two halves. The date links the human crisis at the wreck to the operation poised to take it away.

The midnight entry on Vatnajökull

At 0000 GMT, the account describes Kreutz, apparently the youngest man despite his rank, first speaking calmly to another German and then becoming increasingly agitated. He jumps up, paces, hammers on the cabin door, and pounds the fuselage. In the confined aircraft, the other German eventually tackles and overcomes him after a struggle, while the writer stays in the cockpit.

The outburst also worsens the crew’s physical circumstances. Kreutz knocks over a kerosene lamp, and the men cannot relight it; only one lamp remains, its fuel running low. The account ends with the prospect of total darkness, making the timestamp more than a neutral marker: it fixes a moment when the crew’s confinement, conflict, and dwindling light converge.

The quarter-hour turn

At 0015 GMT on the glacier, Kristín encounters a sight that feels surreal after her exhaustion and ordeal. She struggles to place what she sees in context, wondering whether the events around her might be a nightmare or hallucination. The account presents her disorientation as part of the scene rather than supplying an explanation for it.

At the same time, the date marker places Carr in the doorway of hangar 11 at Keflavík Airport. He cannot see the C-17 in the darkness, but knows it is being prepared for take-off. The aircraft’s two halves are due to be airlifted from the glacier imminently, and Carr expects them to leave Iceland within three hours if the plan succeeds. The movement from the midnight account to these two 0015 scenes compresses the interval between a crisis around the wreck and the planned removal of the wreck itself.