Airframe (11 page)

“Any travel?”

Richman smirked. “Just personal.”

“How’s that?” she said.

“Well, since Marketing had nothing for me to do, I went skiing.”

“Sounds like fun. Where’d you go?” Casey said.

“You ski?” Richman said. “Personally, I think the best skiing outside of Gstaad is Sun Valley. That’s my favorite. You know, if you have to ski in the States.”

She realized he hadn’t answered her question. By then they had walked through the side door, into Building 64. Casey noticed the workers were openly hostile, the atmosphere distinctly chilly.

“What’s this?” Richman said. “We got rabies today?”

“Union thinks we’re selling them out on China.”

“Selling them out? How?”

“They think management’s shipping the wing to Shanghai. I asked Marder. He says no.”

A Klaxon sounded, echoing through the building. Directly ahead, the big yellow overhead crane cranked to life, and Casey saw the first of the huge crates containing the wing tooling rise five feet up into the air on thick cables. The crate was constructed of reinforced plywood. It was as broad as a house, and probably weighed five tons. A dozen workers walked alongside the crate like pallbearers, hands up, steadying the load as it moved toward one of the side doors and a waiting flatbed truck.

“If Marder says no,” Richman said, “then what’s the problem?”

“They don’t believe him.”

“Really? Why not?”

Casey glanced to her left, where other tools were being crated for shipment. The huge blue tools were first packed in foam, then braced internally, and then crated. All that padding and bracing was essential, she knew. Because even though the tools were twenty feet in length, they were calibrated to thousandths of an inch. Transporting them was an art in itself. She looked back at the crate, moving on the hoist.

All the men standing beneath it were gone.

The crate was still moving laterally, ten yards from where they stood.

“Uh-oh,” she said.

“What?” Richman said.

She was already pushing him. “
Go!
” she said, shoving Richman to the right, toward the shelter of the scaffolding that stood beneath a partially assembled fuselage. Richman resisted; he didn’t seem to understand that—

“
Run!
” she shouted. “It’s going to break loose!”

He ran. Behind her, Casey heard the creak of rending plywood, and a metallic
twang!
as the first of the hoist cables snapped, and the giant crate began to slide from its harness.
They had just reached the fuselage scaffolding when she heard another
twang!
and the crate smashed down onto the concrete floor. Slivers of plywood exploded in all directions, whistling through the air. They were followed by a thunderous
whomp!
as the crate toppled over on its side. The sound reverberated through the building.

“Jesus
Christ
,” Richman said, turning to look back at her. “What was
that
?”

“That,” she said, “is what we call a job action.”

Men were running forward, hazy forms in the cloud of lingering dust. There were shouts, and calls for help. The medic alarm sounded, ringing through the building. At the opposite side of the building, she saw Doug Doherty, shaking his head mournfully.

Richman looked over his shoulder, and pulled a four-inch splinter of plywood from the back of his jacket. “Jeez,” he said. He took the jacket off, inspected the tear, putting his finger through the hole.

“That was a warning,” Casey said. “And they’ve also wrecked the tool. Now it’ll have to be uncrated and rebuilt. This means weeks of delay.”

Floor supervisors in white shirts and ties ran forward into the group around the fallen crate. “What happens now?” Richman said.

“They’ll take names and kick ass,” Casey said. “But it won’t do any good. There’ll be another incident tomorrow. There’s no way to stop it.”

“This was a warning?” Richman said. He put the jacket back on.

“To the IRT,” she said. “A clear signal: Watch your backs, watch your heads. We’ll see falling wrenches, all sorts of accidents, whenever we’re on the floor. We’ll have to be careful.”

Two workmen broke away from the group around the crate, and started walking toward Casey. One man was burly, wearing jeans and a red-checked work shirt. The other was taller, and wore a baseball cap. The man in the work shirt held
a steel drill-press stanchion in his hand, swinging it at his side like a metal club.

“Uh, Casey,” Richman said.

“I see them,” she said. She was not going to get rattled by a couple of floor goons.

The men walked steadily toward her. Suddenly a supervisor appeared in front of them, holding his clipboard, demanding the men show their badges. The men stopped to talk to the supervisor, glaring at Casey over his head.

“We won’t have any trouble with them,” she said. “An hour from now, they’ll be gone.” She went back to the scaffolding, picked up her briefcase. “Come on,” she said to Richman. “We’re late.”

Chairs scraped as everyone pulled up to the Formica table. “Okay,” Marder said, “let’s get started. We’re having some union activity, aimed at stalling this investigation. Don’t let it get to you. Keep your eye on the ball. First item: weather data.”

The secretary passed sheets around the room. It was a report from the LA Traffic Control Center on a form marked “Federal Aviation Administration / R
EPORT OF
A
IRCRAFT
A
CCIDENT
.”

Casey read:

“We still have satellite data coming, but I think the evidence speaks for itself. The three aircraft nearest in time and location to TransPacific report no weather except light chop. I’m ruling out turbulence as a cause of this accident.”

There were nods around the table. No one disagreed.

“Anything else for the record?”

“Yes,” Casey said. “Passenger and crew interviews agree the seat-belt sign was never illuminated.”

“Okay. Then we’re done with weather. Whatever happened to that plane wasn’t turbulence. Flight recorder?”

“Data’s anomalous,” Casey said. “They’re working on it.”

“Visual inspection of the plane?”

“The interior was severely damaged,” Doherty said, “but the exterior was fine. Cherry.”

“Leading edge?”

“No problem we could see. We’ll have the aircraft here today, and I’ll look at the drive tracks and latches. But so far, nothing.”

“You test the control surfaces?”

“No problem.”

“Instrumentation?”

“Bravo Zulu.”

“How many times you test ’em?”

“After we heard the passenger’s story from Casey, we did ten extensions. Trying to get a disagree. But everything’s normal.”

“What story? Casey? You got something from the interviews?”

“Yes,” she said. “One passenger gave a report of a slight rumble coming from the wing, lasting ten to twelve seconds …”

“Shit,”
Marder said.

“… followed by a slight nose up, then a dive …”

“God
damn
it!”

“… and then a series of violent pitch excursions.”

Marder glared at her. “Are you telling me it’s the slats again? Have we still got a slats problem on this aircraft?”

“I don’t know,” Casey said. “One of the flight attendants reported that the captain said he had an uncommanded slats deployment, and that he’d had problems with the autopilot.”

“Christ.
And
problems with the autopilot?”

“Screw him,” Burne said. “This captain changes his story every five minutes. Tells Traffic Control he’s got turbulence, tells the stewardess he’s got slats. Right now I bet he’s telling the carrier a whole different story. Fact is, we don’t know what happened in that cockpit.”

“It’s obviously slats,” Marder said.

“No, it’s not,” Burne said. “The passenger Casey talked to said the rumbling sound came from the wing or the engines, isn’t that right?”

“Right,” Casey said.

“But when she looked at the wing, she didn’t see the slats extend. Which she would have seen, if it happened.”

“Also true,” Casey said.

“But she couldn’t have seen the engines, because they’d be hidden by the wing. It’s possible the thrust reversers deployed,” Burne said. “At cruise speed that’d produce a definite rumble. Followed by a sudden drop in airspeed, probably a roll. The pilot shits, tries to compensate, overreacts—bingo!”

“Any confirmation thrusters deployed?” Marder said. “Damage to the sleeves? Unusual rubstrips?”

“We looked yesterday,” Burne said, “and we didn’t find anything. We’ll do ultrasound and X rays today. If there’s something there, we’ll find it.”

“Okay,” Marder said. “So we’re looking at slats and thrusters, and we need more data. What about the NVMs? Ron? The faults suggest anything?”

They turned to Ron Smith. Under their gaze, Ron hunched lower in his seat, as if trying to pull his head between his shoulders. He cleared his throat.

“Well?” Marder said.

“Uh, yeah, John. We have a slats disagree on the FDAU printout.”

“So the slats
did
deploy.”

“Well, actually—”

“And the plane started porpoising, beat hell out of the passengers, and killed three. Is that what you’re telling me?”

No one spoke.

“
Jesus
,” Marder said. “What is the
matter
with you people? This problem was supposed to be fixed four years ago! Now you’re telling me it
wasn’t
?”

The group fell silent and stared at the table, embarrassed and intimidated by Marder’s rage.

“God
damn
it!” Marder said.

“John, let’s not get carried away.” It was Trung, the avionics head, speaking quietly. “We’re overlooking a very important factor. The autopilot.”

There was a long silence.

Marder glared at him. “What about it?” he snapped.

“Even if the slats extend in cruise flight,” Trung said, “the autopilot will maintain perfect stability. It’s programmed to compensate for errors like that. The slats extend; the AP adjusts; the captain sees the warning and retracts them. Meanwhile the plane continues, no problem.”

“Maybe he went out of autopilot.”

“He must have. But why?”

“Maybe your autopilot’s screwed up,” Marder said. “Maybe you got a bug in your code.”

Trung looked skeptical.

“It’s happened,” Marder said. “There was an autopilot problem on that USAir flight in Charlotte last year. Put the plane into an uncommanded roll.”

“Yes,” Trung said, “but that wasn’t caused by a bug in the code. Maintenance pulled the ‘A’ flight control computer to repair it, and when they reinstalled it, they didn’t push it in the shelf far enough to fully engage the connector pins. The thing kept making intermittent electrical connection, that’s all.”

“But on Flight 545, the stewardess said the captain had to fight the autopilot for control.”

“And I’d expect that,” Trung said. “Once the aircraft exceeds flight params, the autopilot actively attempts to take over. It sees erratic behavior, and assumes nobody is flying the plane.”

“Did that show up on the fault records?”

“Yes. They indicate the autopilot tried to kick in, every three seconds. I assume the captain kept overriding it, insisting on flying the plane himself.”

“But this is an experienced captain.”

“Which is why I think Kenny is right,” Trung said. “We have no idea what took place in that cockpit.”

They all turned to Mike Lee, the carrier representative. “How about it, Mike?” Marder said. “Can we get an interview or not?”

Lee sighed philosophically. “You know,” he said, “I’ve spent a lot of time in meetings like this. And the tendency is always to blame the guy who’s not there. It’s human nature. I’ve already explained to you why the flight crew left the country. Your own records confirm the captain is a first-rate pilot. It’s possible he made an error. But given the history of problems with this aircraft—slats problems—I’d look first at the aircraft. And I’d look hard.”

“We will,” Marder said. “Of course we will, but—”

“Because it’s to no one’s advantage,” Lee said, “to get into a pissing match. You are focused on your pending deal with
Beijing. Fine, I understand. But I would remind you TransPacific is also a valued customer of this company. We’ve bought ten planes to date, and we have twelve more on order. We’re expanding our routes, and we are negotiating a feeder deal with a domestic carrier. We don’t need any bad press at the moment. Not for the planes we’ve bought from you, and certainly not for our pilots. I hope I’m being clear.”

“Clear as a fucking bell,” Marder said. “I couldn’t have said it better myself. Guys, you have your marching orders. Get on with it. I want
answers
.”

“Flight 545?” Felix Wallerstein said. “It’s very disturbing. Very disturbing indeed.” Wallerstein was a silver-haired, courtly man from Munich. He ran the Norton Flight Simulator and Pilot Training program with Germanic efficiency.

Casey said, “Why do you say 545 is disturbing?”

“Because,” he shrugged. “How could it happen? It does not seem possible.”

They walked through the large main room of Building 202. The two flight simulators, one for each model in service, stood above them. They appeared to be truncated nose sections of the aircraft, held up by a spidery array of hydraulic lifts.