Airframe (15 page)

Crossing the plant, she fished her cell phone out of her purse, and called Marder. His assistant, Eileen, said he was in a meeting.

“I just left Jack Rogers,” Casey said. “I think he’s planning a story that says we’re shipping the wing to China, and there’s trouble in the executive suite.”

“Uh-oh,” Eileen said. “That’s not good.”

“Edgarton better talk to him, and put it to rest.”

“Edgarton isn’t doing any press,” Eileen said. “John will be back at six o’clock. You want to talk to him then?”

“I better, yes.”

“I’ll put you down,” Eileen said.

It looked like an aviation junkyard: old fuselages, tails, and wing sections littered the landscape, raised up on rusty scaffolding. But the air was filled with the steady hum of compressors, and heavy tubing ran to the airplane parts, like intravenous lines to a patient. This was Proof Test, also known as Twist-and-Shout, the domain of the infamous Amos Peters.

Casey saw him off to the right, a hunched figure in shirtsleeves and baggy pants, bent over a readout stand, beneath an aft fuselage section of the Norton widebody.

“Amos,” she called, waving as she walked over to him.

He turned, glanced at her. “Go away.”

Amos was a legend at Norton. Reclusive and obstinate, he was nearly seventy, long past mandatory retirement age, yet he continued to work because he was vital to the company. His specialty was the arcane field of damage tolerance, or fatigue testing. And fatigue testing was of vastly greater importance than it had been ten years before.

Since deregulation, the carriers were flying aircraft longer than anybody ever expected. Three thousand aircraft in the domestic fleet were now more than twenty years old. That number would double in five years. Nobody really knew what would happen to all those aircraft as they continued to age.

Except Amos.

It was Amos who had been brought in by the NTSB as a consultant on the famous Aloha 737 accident, back in 1988. Aloha was an inter-island carrier in Hawaii. One of their
airplanes was cruising at 24,000 feet when suddenly eighteen feet of the airplane’s outer skin peeled off the fuselage, from the cabin door to the wing; the cabin decompressed, and a stewardess was sucked out and killed. Despite the explosive pressure loss, the plane managed to land safely at Maui, where it was scrapped on the spot.

The rest of Aloha’s fleet was examined for corrosion and fatigue damage. Two more high-time 737s were scrapped, and a third underwent months of repairs. All three had extensive skin cracks and other corrosion damage. When the FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive mandating inspections of the rest of the 737 fleet, forty-nine more planes, operated by eighteen different carriers, were found to have extensive cracking.

Industry observers were perplexed by the accident, because Boeing, Aloha, and the FAA were supposedly all watching the carrier’s 737 fleet. Corrosion cracking was a known problem on some early-production 737s; Boeing had already warned Aloha that the salty, humid Hawaiian climate was a “severe” corrosion environment.

Afterward, the investigation found multiple causes for the accident. It turned out that Aloha, making short hops between islands, was accumulating flight cycles of takeoff and landing at a faster rate than maintenance was scheduled to handle. This stress, combined with corrosion from ocean air, produced a series of small cracks in the aircraft skin. These were unnoticed by Aloha, because they were short of trained personnel. The FAA didn’t catch them because they were overworked and understaffed. The FAA’s principal maintenance inspector in Honolulu supervised nine carriers and seven repair stations around the Pacific, from China to Singapore to the Philippines. Eventually, a flight occurred in which the cracks extended and the structure failed.

Following the incident, Aloha, Boeing, and the FAA formed a circular firing squad. The undetected structural damage in Aloha’s fleet was variously attributed to poor
management, poor maintenance, poor FAA inspection, poor engineering. Accusations ricocheted back and forth for years afterward.

But the Aloha flight had also focused industry attention on the problem of aging aircraft, and it had made Amos famous within Norton. He’d convinced management to begin buying more old aircraft, turning wings and fuselages into proof test articles. Day after day, his test fixtures applied repetitive pressures to aging aircraft, stressing them to simulate takeoffs and landings, wind shear and turbulence, so Amos could study how and where they cracked.

“Amos,” she said, coming up to him, “it’s me. Casey Singleton.”

He blinked myopically. “Oh. Casey. Didn’t recognize you.” He squinted at her. “Doctor gave me a new prescription … Oh. Huh. How are you?” He gestured for her to walk with him, and he headed toward a small building a few yards away.

No one at Norton could understand how Casey was able to get along with Amos, but they were neighbors; he lived alone with his pug dog, and she had taken to cooking him a meal every month or so. In return, Amos regaled her with stories of aircraft accidents he’d worked on, going back to the first BOAC Comet crashes in the 1950s. Amos had an encyclopedic knowledge of airplanes. She had learned a tremendous amount from him, and he had become a sort of adviser to her.

“Didn’t I see you the other morning?” he said.

“Yes. With my daughter.”

“Thought so. Want coffee?” He opened the door to a shed, and she smelled the sharp odor of burned grounds. His coffee was always terrible.

“Sounds great, Amos,” she said.

He poured her a cup. “Hope black is okay. Ran out of that creamer stuff.”

“Black is fine, Amos.” He hadn’t had creamer for a year.

Amos poured a cup for himself in a stained mug, and waved her to a battered chair, facing his desk. The desk was piled
high with thick reports.
FAA/NASA International Symposium on Advanced Structural Integrity. Airframe Durability and Damage Tolerance. Thermographic Inspection Techniques. Corrosion Control and Structures Technology
.

He put his feet up on the desk, cleared a path through the journals, so he could see her. “I tell you, Casey. It’s tedious working with these old hulks. I long for the day when we have another T2 article in here.”

“T2?” she said.

“Of course you wouldn’t know,” Amos said. “You’ve been here five years, and we haven’t made a new model aircraft in all that time. But when there’s a new aircraft, the first one off the line is called T1. Test Article 1. It goes to Static Test—we put it on the test bed and shake it to pieces. Find out where the weaknesses are. The second plane off the line is T2. It’s used for fatigue testing—a more difficult problem. Over time, metal loses tensile strength, gets brittle. So we take T2, put it in a jig, and accelerate fatigue testing. Day after day, year after year, we simulate takeoffs and landings. Norton’s policy is we fatigue test to more than twice the design life of the aircraft. If the engineers design an aircraft for a twenty-year life span—say, fifty thousand hours and twenty thousand cycles—we’ll do more than twice that in the pit, before we ever deliver to a customer. We know the planes will stand up. How’s your coffee?”

She took a small sip, managed not to wince. Amos ran water through the same old grinds, all day long. That was how it got this distinctive flavor. “Good, Amos.”

“Just ask. There’s more where that came from. Anyway, most manufacturers test to twice the design life. We test up to four times the spec. That’s why we always say, The other companies make doughnuts, Norton makes croissants.”

Casey said, “And John Marder always says, That’s why the others make money, and we don’t.”

“Marder.” Amos snorted. “It’s all money with him, all bottom line. In the old days, the front office told us, Make the
best damn airplane you can. Now they say, Make the best airplane you can for a price. Different instruction, you know what I mean?” He slurped his coffee. “So. What is it, Casey—545?”

She nodded.

“Can’t help you there,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“The plane’s new. Fatigue’s not a factor.”

“There’s a question about a part, Amos,” she said. She showed him the pin, in a plastic bag.

“Hmm.” He turned it over in his hands, held it up to the light. “This would be—don’t tell me—this would be an anterior locking pin for the second inboard slat.”

“That’s right.”

“Of course it’s right.” He frowned. “But this part’s bad.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So what’s your question?”

“Doherty thinks it failed the aircraft. Could it?”

“Well …” Amos stared at the ceiling, thinking. “No. I got a hundred bucks says it
didn’t
fail the aircraft.”

Casey sighed. She was back to square one. They had no leads.

“Discouraged?” Amos said.

“Yes, frankly.”

“Then you’re not paying attention,” he said. “This is a very valuable lead.”

“But why? You just said yourself—it didn’t fail the aircraft.”

“Casey, Casey.” Amos shook his head.
“Think.”

She tried to think, sitting there, smelling his bad coffee. She tried to see what he was driving at. But her mind was blank. She looked at him across the desk. “Just tell me. What am I missing?”

“Were the other locking pins replaced?”

“No.”

“Just this one?”

“Yes.”

“Why just this one, Casey?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Find out,” he said.

“Why? What good will that do?”

Amos threw up his hands. “Casey. Come on, now. Think it through. You have a problem with slats on 545. That’s a wing problem.”

“Correct.”

“Now you’ve found a part that’s been replaced on the wing.”

“Correct.”

“Why was it replaced?”

“I don’t know …”

“Was that wing damaged in the past? Did something happen to it, so that this part had to be replaced? Were other parts replaced as well? Are there other bad parts on the wing? Is there residual damage to the wing?”

“Not that you can see.”

Amos shook his head impatiently. “Forget what you can
see
, Casey. Look at the ship’s record and the maintenance records. Trace this part, and get a history of the wing. Because something else is wrong.”

“My guess is you’ll find more fake parts.” Amos stood, sighing. “More and more planes have fake parts, these days. I suppose it’s to be expected. These days, everybody seems to believe in Santa Claus.”

“How’s that?”

“Because they believe in something for nothing,” Amos said. “You know: government deregulates the airlines, and everybody cheers. We got cheaper fares: everybody cheers. But the carriers have to cut costs. So the food is awful. That’s okay. There are fewer direct flights, more hubs. That’s okay. The planes look grubby, because they redo the interiors less often. That’s okay. But still the carriers have to cut more costs.
So they run the planes longer, buy fewer new ones. The fleet ages. That’ll be okay—for a while. Eventually it won’t be. And meanwhile, cost pressures continue. So where else do they cut? Maintenance? Parts? What? It can’t go on indefinitely. Just can’t. Of course, now Congress is helping them out, by cutting appropriations for the FAA, so there’ll be less oversight. Carriers can ease up on maintenance because nobody’s watching. And the public doesn’t care, because for thirty years this country’s had the best aviation safety record in the world. But the thing is, we
paid
for it. We paid to have new, safe planes and we paid for the oversight to make sure they were well maintained. But those days are over. Now, everybody believes in something for nothing.”

“So where’s it going to end?” she said.

“I got a hundred bucks,” he said, “they’ll reregulate within ten years. There’ll be a string of crashes, and they’ll do it. The free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don’t provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have the SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them, too. Believe me, they will.”

“And on 545 …”

Amos shrugged. “Foreign carriers operate with much less stringent regulation. It’s pretty loosey-goosey out there. Look at the maintenance records—and look hard at the paper for any part you’re suspicious of.”

She started to leave.

“But Casey …”

She turned back. “Yes?”

“You understand the situation, don’t you? To check that part, you’ll have to start with the ship’s record.”

“I know.”

“That’s in Building 64. I wouldn’t go there, right now. At least not alone.”

“Come on, Amos,” she said. “I used to work on the floor. I’ll be okay.”

Amos was shaking his head. “Flight 545’s a hot potato. You know how the guys think. If they can mess up the investigation, they will—any way they can. Be careful.”

“I will.”

“Be very, very careful.”

Running down the center of Building 64 was a series of one-story chain-link cages that housed parts for the line, and terminal workstations. The workstations were placed inside small partitions, each containing a microfiche reader, a parts terminal, and a main system terminal.

In the parts cage, Casey bent over a microfiche reader, scrolling through photocopies of the ship’s record for Fuse 271, which was the original factory designation for the aircraft involved in the TPA accident.

Jerry Jenkins, the parts flow control manager on the floor, stood beside her nervously, tapping his pen on the table and saying, “Find it yet? Find it yet?”

“Jerry,” she said, “take it easy.”

“I’m easy,” he said, glancing around the floor. “I’m just thinking, you know, you could have done this between shifts.”

Between shifts would have drawn less attention.

“Jerry,” she said, “we’re in kind of a rush here.”

He tapped his pen. “Everybody’s pretty hot about the China sale. What do I tell the guys?”