Airframe (19 page)

The telephone was ringing. She awoke, groggy, and rolled over, hearing the crunch of paper beneath her elbow. She looked down and saw the data sheets scattered all over the bed.

The phone continued to ring. She picked it up.

“Mom.” Solemn, close to tears.

“Hi, Allie.”

“
Mom
. Dad is making me wear the red dress, and I want to wear the blue one with the flowers.”

She sighed. “What did you wear yesterday?”

“The blue one. But it’s not dirty or
anything
!”

This was an ongoing battle. Allison liked to wear the clothes she had worn the day before. Some innate, seven-year-old conservatism at work. “Honey, you know I want you to wear clean clothes to school.”

“But it
is
clean, Mom. And I
hate
the red dress.”

Last month, the red dress had been her favorite. Allison had fought to wear it every day.

Casey sat up in bed, yawned, stared at the papers, the dense columns of data. She heard her daughter’s complaining voice on the phone and thought, Do I need this? She wondered why Jim didn’t handle it. Everything was so difficult, over the phone. Jim didn’t hold up his end—he wasn’t firm with her—and the kid’s natural tendency to play one parent against the other led to an interminable string of long-distance encounters like this.

Trivial problems, childish power plays.

“Allison,” she said, interrupting her daughter. “If your father says to wear the red dress, you do what he says.”

“But Mom—”

“He’s in charge now.”

“But Mom—”

“That’s it, Allison. No more discussion. The red dress.”

“Oh, Mom …” She started to cry. “I
hate
you.”

And she hung up.

Casey considered calling her daughter back, decided not to. She yawned, got out of bed, walked into the kitchen and turned on the coffeemaker. Her fax machine was buzzing in the corner of the living room. She went over to look at the paper coming out.

It was a copy of a press release issued by a public relations firm in Washington. Although the firm had a neutral name—the Institute for Aviation Research—she knew it was a PR firm representing the European consortium that made Airbus. The release was formatted to look like a breaking wire-service story, complete with headline at the top. It said:

JAA DELAYS CERTIFICATION OF N-22
WIDEBODY JET CITING CONTINUED
AIRWORTHINESS CONCERNS

She sighed.

It was going to be a hell of a day.

Casey climbed the metal stairs to the War Room. When she reached the catwalk John Marder was there, pacing back and forth, waiting for her.

“Casey.”

“Morning, John.”

“You’ve seen this JAA thing?” He held up the fax.

“Yes, I have.”

“It’s nonsense, of course, but Edgarton drilled a hole. He’s very upset. First, two N-22 incidents in two days, and now this. He’s worried we’re going to get creamed in the press. And he has no confidence that Benson’s Media Relations people will handle this right.”

Bill Benson was one of the old Norton hands; he had handled media relations since the days when the company lived on military contracts and didn’t tell the press a damned thing. Testy and blunt, Benson had never adjusted to the post-Watergate world, where journalists were celebrities who brought down governments. He was famous for feuding with reporters.

“This fax may generate press interest, Casey. Especially among reporters who don’t know how screwed up the JAA is. And let’s face it, they won’t want to talk to press flacks. They’ll want an executive in the company. So Hal wants all the inquiries on the JAA routed to you.”

“To me,” she said. She was thinking, Forget it. She already had a job. “Benson won’t be very happy if you do that—”

“Hal’s talked to him personally. Benson’s on board.”

“Are you sure?”

“I also think,” Marder said, “we ought to prepare a decent press package on the N-22. Something besides the usual PR crap. Hal suggested you compile a comprehensive package to refute the JAA stuff—you know, service hours, safety record, dispatch reliability data, SDRs, all of that.”

“Okay …” That was going to be a lot of work, and—

“I told Hal you were busy, and that this was an added burden,” Marder said. “He’s approved a two-grade bump in your IC.”

Incentive compensation, the company’s bonus package, was a large part of every executive’s income. A two-grade increase would mean a substantial amount of money for her.

“Okay,” she said.

“The point is,” Marder said, “we’ve got a good response to this fax—a substantive response. And Hal wants to make sure we get it out. Can I count on you to help us?”

“Sure,” Casey said.

“Good,” Marder said. And he walked up the stairs, into the room.

Richman was already in the room, looking preppy in a sport coat and tie. Casey slipped into a chair. Marder shifted into high gear, waving the JAA fax in the air, berating the engineers. “You’ve probably already seen that the JAA is playing games with us. Perfectly timed to jeopardize the China sale. But if you read the memo, you know that it’s all about the engine in Miami and nothing about TransPacific. At least not yet …”

Casey tried to pay attention, but she was distracted, calculating what the change in IC would mean. A two-grade bump was … she did the figures in her head … something like a twenty-percent raise. Jesus, she thought. Twenty percent! She could send Allison to private school. And they could vacation someplace nice, Hawaii or someplace like that. They’d stay in
a nice hotel. And next year, move to a bigger house, with a big yard so Allison could run around, and—

Everyone at the table was staring at her.

Marder said, “Casey? The DFDR? When can we expect the data?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I talked to Rob this morning. The calibration’s going slowly. He’ll know more tomorrow.”

“Okay. Structure?”

Doherty began in his unhappy monotone. “John it’s very difficult very difficult indeed. We found a bad locking pin on the number-two inboard slat. It’s a counterfeit part and—”

“We’ll verify it at Flight Test,” Marder said, interrupting him. “Hydraulics?”

“Still testing, but so far they check out. Cables rigged to spec.”

“You’ll finish when?”

“End of first shift today.”

“Electrical?”

Ron said, “We’ve checked the principal wiring pathways. Nothing yet. I think we should schedule a CET on the entire aircraft.”

“I agree. Can we run it overnight to save time?”

Ron shrugged. “Sure. It’s expensive, but—”

“The hell with expense. Anything else?”

“Well, there’s one funny thing, yes,” Ron said. “The DEU faults indicate there may have been a problem with proximity sensors in the wing. If the sensors failed, we might get a slats misread in the cockpit.”

This was what Casey had noticed the night before. She made a note to ask Ron about it later. And also the matter of the AUX readings on the printout.

Her mind drifted again, thinking of the raise. Allison could go to a real school, now. She saw her at a low desk, in a small classroom—

Marder said: “Powerplant?”

“We’re still not sure he deployed the thrust reversers,” Kenny Burne said. “It’ll be another day.”

“Go until you can rule it out. Avionics?”

Trung said, “Avionics check out so far.”

“This autopilot thing …”

“Haven’t gotten to autopilot yet. It’s the last thing in the sequence that we confirm. We’ll know by Flight Test.”

“All right,” Marder said. “So: new question regarding proximity sensors, check that today. Still waiting on flight recorder, powerplant, avionics. That cover it?”

Everyone nodded.

“Don’t let me keep you,” Marder said. “I need answers.” He held up the JAA fax. “This is the tip of the iceberg, people. I don’t have to remind you what happened to the DC-10. Most advanced aircraft of its time, a marvel of engineering. But it had a couple of incidents, and some bad visuals, and bang—the DC-10’s history.
History
. So get me those answers!”

Walking across the plant toward Hangar 5, Richman said, “Marder seemed pretty worked up, didn’t he? Does he believe all that?”

“About the DC-10? Yes. One crash finished the aircraft.”

“What crash?”

“It was an American Airlines flight from Chicago to LA,” Casey said. “May, 1979. Nice day, good weather. Right after takeoff the left engine fell off the wing. The plane stalled and crashed next to the airport, killing everybody on board. Very dramatic, it was all over in thirty seconds. A couple of people taped the flight, so the networks had film at eleven. The media went crazy, called the plane a winged coffin. Travel agents were flooded with calls canceling DC-10 bookings. Douglas never sold another one of them.”

“Why did the engine fall off?”

“Bad maintenance,” Casey said. “American hadn’t followed Douglas’s instructions on how to remove the engines from the plane. Douglas told them to first remove the engine, and then the pylon that holds the engine to the wing. But to save time, American took the whole engine—pylon assembly off at once. That’s seven tons of metal on a forklift. One forklift ran out of gas during the removal, and cracked the pylon. But the crack wasn’t noticed, and eventually the engine fell off the wing. So it was all because of maintenance.”

“Maybe so,” Richman said, “but isn’t an airplane still supposed to fly, even missing an engine?”

“Yes, it is,” Casey said. “The DC-10 was built to survive that kind of failure. The plane was perfectly airworthy. If the pilot had maintained airspeed, he’d have been fine. He could have landed the plane.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Because, as usual, there was an event cascade leading to the final accident,” Casey said. “In this case, electrical power to the captain’s cockpit controls came from the left engine. When the left engine fell off, the captain’s instruments were shut off, including the cockpit stall warning and the backup warning, called a stick shaker. That’s a device that shakes the stick to tell the pilot the plane is about to stall. The first officer still had power and instruments, so the first officer’s chair didn’t have a stick shaker. It’s a customer option for the first officer, and American hadn’t ordered it. And Douglas hadn’t built any redundancy into their cockpit-stall warning system. So when the DC-10 began to stall, the first officer didn’t realize he had to increase throttle.”

“Okay,” Richman said, “but the captain shouldn’t have lost his power in the first place.”

“No, that was a designed-in safety feature,” Casey said. “Douglas had designed and built the aircraft to survive those failures. When the left engine tore off, the aircraft deliberately shut down the captain’s power line, to prevent further shorts in the system. Remember, all aircraft systems are redundant. If one fails, the backup kicks in. And it was easy to get the captain’s instrumentation back again; all the flight engineer had to do was trip a relay, or turn on emergency power. But he didn’t do either one.”

“Why not?”

“No one knows,” Casey said. “And the first officer, lacking the necessary information on his display, intentionally reduced his airspeed, which caused the plane to stall and crash.”

They were silent for a moment, walking.

“Consider all the ways this might have been avoided,” Casey said. “The maintenance crews could have checked the
pylons for structural damage after servicing them improperly. But they didn’t. Continental had already cracked two pylons using forklifts, and they could have told American the procedure was dangerous. But they didn’t. Douglas had told American about Continental’s problems, but American didn’t pay any attention.”

Richman was shaking his head.

“And after the accident, Douglas couldn’t say it was a maintenance problem, because American was a valued customer. So Douglas wasn’t going to put the story out. In all these incidents, it’s always the same story—the story never gets out unless the media digs it out. But the story’s complicated, and that’s difficult for television … so they just run the tape. The tape of the accident which shows the left engine falling off, the plane veering left, and crashing. The visual implies the aircraft was poorly designed, that Douglas hadn’t anticipated a pylon failure and hadn’t built the plane to survive it. Which was completely inaccurate. But Douglas never sold another DC-10.”

“Well,” Richman said. “I don’t think you can blame the media for that. They don’t make the news. They just report it.”

“That’s my point,” Casey said. “They didn’t report it, they just ran the film. The Chicago crash was a kind of turning point in our industry. The first time a good aircraft was destroyed by bad press. The coup de grace was the NTSB report. It came out on December 21. Nobody paid any attention.

“So now, when Boeing introduces their new 777, they arrange a complete press campaign to coincide with the launch. They allow a TV company to film the years of development, and at the end there’s a six-part show on public television. There’s a book to go with it. They’ve done everything they can think of to create a good image for the plane in advance. Because the stakes are too high.”

Richman walked along beside her. “I can’t believe the media has that much power,” he said.

Casey shook her head. “Marder is right to be worried,” she said. “If anybody in the media gets onto Flight 545, then the N-22 will have had two incidents in two days. And we’re in big trouble.”

In midtown Manhattan, in the twenty-third-floor offices of the weekly news show
Newsline
, Jennifer Malone was in the editing bay, reviewing tape of an interview with Charles Manson. Her assistant Deborah walked in, dropped a fax on her desk, and said casually, “Pacino dumped.”

Jennifer hit her pause button. “What?”

“Al Pacino just dumped.”

“When?”

“Ten minutes ago. Blew Marty off, and walked.”