Airframe (25 page)

“Let me see,” Norma said. “How about Ellen Fong, in Accounting? She used to work for the FAA, as a translator.”

“Isn’t her husband in Structure with Doherty?”

“Yeah, but Ellen’s discreet.”

“You sure?”

“I
know
,” Norma said, in a certain tone.

She went to the accounting department, in the basement of Building 102, arriving just before six. She found Ellen Fong getting ready to go home.

“Ellen,” she said, “I need a favor.”

“Sure.” Ellen was a perpetually cheerful woman of forty, a mother of three.

“Didn’t you used to work for the FAA as a translator?”

“A long time ago,” Ellen said.

“I need something translated.”

“Casey, you can get a much better translator—”

“I’d rather you do it,” she said. “This is confidential.”

She handed Ellen the tape. “I need the voices in the last nine minutes.”

“Okay …”

“And I’d prefer you not mention this to anybody.”

“Including Bill?” That was her husband.

Casey nodded. “Is that a problem?”

“Not at all.” She looked at the tape in her hand. “When?”

“Tomorrow? Friday at the latest?”

“Done,” Ellen Fong said.

Casey took the second copy of the tape to the Norton Audio Interpretation Lab, in the back of Building 24. NAIL was run by a former CIA guy from Omaha, a paranoid electronics genius named Jay Ziegler, who built his own audio filter boards and playback equipment because, he said, he didn’t trust anyone to do it for him.

Norton had constructed NAIL to help the government agencies interpret cockpit voice recorder tapes. After an accident, the government took CVRs and analyzed them in Washington. This was done to prevent them from being leaked to the press before an investigation was completed. But although the agencies had experienced staff to transcribe the tapes, they were less skilled at interpreting sounds inside the cockpit—the alarms and audio reminders that often went off. These sounds represented proprietary Norton systems, so Norton had built a facility to analyze them.

The heavy soundproof door, as always, was locked. Casey pounded on it, and after a while a voice on the speaker said, “Give the password.”

“It’s Casey Singleton, Jay.”

“Give the password.”

“Jay, for Christ’s sake. Open the door.”

There was a click, and silence. She waited. The thick door pushed open a crack. She saw Jay Ziegler, hair down to his shoulders, wearing dark sunglasses. He said, “Oh. All right. Come ahead, Singleton. You’re cleared for this station.”

He opened the door a fraction wider, and she squeezed past him into a darkened room. Ziegler immediately slammed the door shut, threw three bolts in succession.

“Better if you call first, Singleton. We have a secure line in. Four-level scramble encoded.”

“I’m sorry, Jay, but something’s come up.”

“Security’s everybody’s business.”

She handed him the spool of magnetic tape. He glanced at it. “This is one-inch mag, Singleton. We don’t often see this, at this station.”

“Can you read it?”

Ziegler nodded. “Can read anything, Singleton. Anything you throw at us.” He put the tape on a horizontal drum and threaded it. Then he glanced over his shoulder. “Are you cleared for the contents of this?”

“It’s my tape, Jay.”

“Just asking.”

She said, “I should tell you that this tape is—”

“Don’t tell me anything, Singleton. Better that way.”

On all the monitors in the room, she saw oscilloscope squiggles, green lines jumping against black, as the tape began to play. “Uh … okay,” Ziegler said. “We got high-eight audio track, Dolby D encoded, got to be a home video camera …” Over the speaker, she heard a rhythmic crunching sound.

Ziegler stared at his monitors. Some of them were now generating fancy data, building three-dimensional models of the sound, which looked like shimmering multicolored beads on a string. The programs were also generating slices at various hertz.

“Footsteps,” Ziegler announced. “Rubber-soled feet on grass or dirt. Countryside, no urban signature. Footsteps probably male. And, uh, slight dysrhythmic, he’s probably carrying something. Not too heavy. But consistently off-balance.”

Casey remembered the first image on the videotape: a man
walking up the path, away from a Chinese village, with the child on his shoulder.

“You’re right,” she said, impressed.

Now there was a tweeting sound—some sort of birdcall. “Hold on, hold on,” Ziegler said, punching buttons. The tweet replayed, again and again, the beads jumping on the string. “Huh,” Ziegler said finally. “Not in the database. Foreign locale?”

“China.”

“Oh well. I can’t do everything.”

The footsteps continued. There was the sound of wind. On the tape, a male voice said, “She’s fallen asleep …”

Ziegler said, “American, height five-nine to six-two, mid thirties.”

She nodded, impressed again.

He pushed a button, and one of the monitors showed the video image, the man walking up the path. The tape froze. “Okay,” Ziegler said. “So what am I doing here?”

Casey said, “The last nine minutes of tape were shot on Flight 545. This camera recorded the whole incident.”

“Really,” Ziegler said, rubbing his hands together. “That should be interesting.”

“I want to know what you can tell me about unusual sounds in the moments just prior to the event. I have a question about—”

“Don’t tell me,” he said, holding up his hand. “I don’t want to know. I want to take a clean look.”

“When can you have something?”

“Twenty hours.” Ziegler looked at his watch. “Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay. And Jay? I’d appreciate if you’d keep this tape to yourself.”

Ziegler looked at her blankly. “What tape?” he said.

Casey was back at her desk a little after 6
P.M.
There were more telexes waiting for her.

“Norma,” she called, “remind me to call Vancouver tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll make a note,” she said. “By the way, you got this.” She handed Casey a fax.

The single sheet appeared to be a page from an in-flight magazine. The top read: “Employee of the Month,” followed by an inky, unreadable photograph.

Underneath the photo was a caption: “Captain John Zhen Chang, Senior Pilot for TransPacific Airlines, is our employee of the month. Captain Chang’s father was a pilot, and John himself has flown for twenty years, seven of those with TransPacific. When not in the cockpit, Captain Chang enjoys
biking and golf. Here he relaxes on the beach at Lantan Island with his wife, Soon, and his children, Erica and Tom.”

Casey frowned. “What’s this?”

“Beats me,” Norma said.

“Where’d it come from?” There was a phone number at the top of the page, but no name.

“A copy shop on La Tijera,” Norma said.

“Near the airport,” Casey said.

“Yes. It’s a busy place, they had no idea who sent it.”

Casey stared at the photo. “It’s from an in-flight magazine?”

“TransPacific’s. But not this month. They pulled the contents of the seat pockets—you know, passenger announcements, safety cards, barf bags, monthly magazine—and sent it over. But that page isn’t in the magazine.”

“Can we get back copies?”

“I’m working on it,” she said.

“I’d like to get a better look at this picture,” Casey said.

“I figured,” Norma said.

She went back to the other papers on her desk.

This Virtual Heads-Up Display was part of Norton’s ongoing effort to help the customers improve maintenance. Airframe manufacturers had long recognized that the majority
of operational problems were caused by bad maintenance. In general, a properly maintained commercial aircraft would run for decades; some of the old Norton N-5s were sixty years old and still in service. On the other hand, an improperly maintained aircraft could get in trouble—or crash—within minutes.

Under financial pressure from deregulation, the airlines were cutting personnel, including maintenance personnel. And they were shortening the turnaround time between cycles; time on the ground had in some cases gone from two hours to less than twenty minutes. All this put intense pressure on maintenance crews. Norton, like Boeing and Douglas, saw it as in their interest to help crews work more effectively. That was why the Virtual Heads-Up Display, which projected the repair manuals on the inside of a set of glasses for maintenance people, was so important.

She went on.

Next she saw the weekly summary of parts failures, compiled to enable the FAA to track parts problems more carefully. None of the failures in the previous week was serious. An engine compressor stalled; an engine EGT indicator failed; an oil filter clog light illuminated incorrectly; a fuel heat indicator went on erroneously.

Then there were more IRT follow-up reports from past incidents. Product Support checked all incident aircraft every two weeks for the next six months, to make sure that the assessment of the Incident Review Team had been accurate, and that the aircraft was not experiencing further trouble. Then they issued a summary report, like the one she now saw on her desk:

AIRCRAFT INCIDENT REPORT

D
ESCRIPTION OF
E
VENT
:

It was reported that during takeoff roll the “Wheel Not Turning” alert came on and the flight crew aborted the takeoff. The nose landing gear (NLG) tires blew and there was a fire in the wheel well which was extinguished by fire trucks on the ground. Passengers and flight crew exited via evacuation slides. No reported injuries.

A
CTION
T
AKEN
:

Inspection of the aircraft revealed the following damage:

Review of human factors revealed the following:

The aircraft is in the process of being repaired. Internal procedures are being reviewed by the carrier.

David Levine

Technical Integration

Product Support

Norton Aircraft Company

Burbank, CA

Summary reports were always diplomatic; in this incident, she knew, ground maintenance had been so inept that the nose wheel locked on takeoff, blowing the tires, causing what was very nearly a serious incident. But the report didn’t say that; you had to read between the lines. The problem lay with the carrier, but the carrier was also the customer—and it was bad form to knock the customer.

Eventually, Casey knew, TransPacific Flight 545 would end up summarized in an equally diplomatic report. But there was much to do before then.