Airframe (4 page)

“Marder?”

“John Marder was the program manager for the widebody, before he became chief operating officer. So it’s probably an incident involving the N-22.”

She pulled over and parked in the shadow of Building 64.
The gray hangar loomed above them, eight stories high and nearly a mile long. The asphalt in front of the building was strewn with disposable earplugs, which the mechanics wore so they wouldn’t go deaf from the rivet guns.

They walked through the side doors and entered an interior corridor that ran around the perimeter of the building. The corridor was dotted with food dispensers, in clusters a quarter of a mile apart. Richman said, “We got time for a cup of coffee?”

She shook her head. “Coffee’s not allowed on the floor.”

“No coffee?” He groaned. “Why not? It’s made overseas?”

“Coffee’s corrosive. Aluminum doesn’t like it.”

Casey led Richman through another door, onto the production floor.

“Jesus,” Richman said.

The huge, partially assembled widebody jets gleamed under halogen lights. Fifteen aircraft in various stages of construction were arranged in two long rows under the vaulted roof. Directly ahead of them, she saw mechanics installing cargo doors in the fuselage sections. The barrels of the fuselage were surrounded by scaffolding. Beyond the fuselage stood a forest of assembly jigs—immense tools, painted bright blue. Richman walked under one of the jigs and looked up, open-mouthed. It was as wide as a house and six stories tall.

“Amazing,” he said. He pointed upward at a broad flat surface. “Is that the wing?”

“The vertical stabilizer,” Casey said.

“The what?”

“It’s the tail, Bob.”

“That’s the
tail
?” Richman said.

Casey nodded. “The wing is over there,” she said, pointing across the floor. “It’s two hundred feet long—almost as long as a football field.”

A Klaxon sounded. One of the overhead cranes began to move. Richman turned to look.

“This your first time on the floor?”

“Yeah …” Richman was turning around, looking in all directions. “Awesome,” he said.

“They’re big,” Casey said.

“Why are they all lime green?”

“We coat the structural elements with epoxy to prevent corrosion. And the aluminum skins are covered so they don’t get dinged during assembly. The skins are highly polished and very expensive. So we leave that coating on until Paint Shed.”

“Sure doesn’t look like GM,” Richman said, still turning and looking.

“That’s right,” Casey said. “Compared to these aircraft, cars are a joke.”

Richman turned to her, surprised. “A
joke
?”

“Think about it,” she said. “A Pontiac has five thousand parts, and you can build one in two shifts. Sixteen hours. That’s nothing. But these things”—she gestured to the aircraft looming high above them—“are a completely different animal. The widebody has one million parts and a span time of seventy-five days. No other manufactured product in the world has the complexity of a commercial aircraft. Nothing even comes close. And nothing is built to be as durable. You take a Pontiac and run it all day every day and see what happens. It’ll fall apart in a few months. But we design our jets to fly for twenty years of trouble-free service, and we build them to twice the service life.”

“Forty years?” Richman said, incredulous. “You build them to last forty years?”

Casey nodded. “We’ve still got lots of N-5s in service around the world—and we stopped building them in 1946. We’ve got planes that have accumulated four times their design life—the equivalent of eighty years of service. Norton planes will do that. Douglas planes will do that. But no one else’s birds will do that. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Wow,” Richman said, swallowing.

*  *  *

“We call this the bird farm,” Casey said. “The planes’re so big, it’s hard to get a sense of the scale.” She pointed to one aircraft to their right, where small clusters of people worked at various positions, with portable lights shining up on the metal. “Doesn’t look like many people, right?”

“No, not many.”

“There’s probably two hundred mechanics working on that plane—enough to run an entire automobile line. But this is just one position on our line—and we have fifteen positions in all. There’s five thousand people in this building, right now.”

The kid was shaking his head, amazed. “It looks sort of empty.”

“Unfortunately,” Casey said, “it
is
sort of empty. The widebody line’s running at sixty percent capacity—and three of those birds are white-tails.”

“White-tails?”

“Planes we’re building without customers. We build at a minimum rate to keep the line open, and we haven’t got all the orders we want. The Pacific Rim’s the growth sector but with Japan in recession, that market’s not placing orders. And everybody else is flying their planes longer. So business is very competitive. This way.”

She started up a flight of metal stairs, walking quickly. Richman followed her, footsteps clanging. They came to a landing, went up another flight. “I’m telling you this,” she said, “so you’ll understand the meeting we’re going into. We build the hell out of these planes. People here are proud of what they do. And they don’t like it when something goes wrong.”

They arrived at a catwalk high above the assembly floor, and walked toward a glass-walled room that seemed to be suspended from the roof. They came to the door. Casey opened it.

“And this,” she said, “is the War Room.”

She saw it freshly, through his eyes: a large conference room with gray indoor-outdoor carpeting, a round Formica table, tubular metal chairs. The walls were covered with bulletin boards, maps, and engineering charts. The far wall was glass, and overlooked the assembly line.

Five men in ties and shirtsleeves were there, a secretary with a notepad, and John Marder, wearing a blue suit. She was surprised he was here; the COO rarely chaired IRTs. In person, Marder was dark, intense, in his mid forties, with slicked-back hair. He looked like a cobra about to strike.

Casey said, “This is my new assistant, Bob Richman.”

Marder stood up and said, “Bob, welcome,” and shook the kid’s hand. He gave a rare smile. Apparently Marder, with his finely tuned sense of corporate politics, was ready to fawn over any Norton family member, even a nephew on loan. It made Casey wonder if this kid was more important than she thought he was.

Marder introduced Richman to the others at the table. “Doug Doherty, in charge of structure and mechanical …” He gestured to an overweight man of forty-five, with a potbelly, bad complexion, and thick glasses. Doherty lived in a state of perpetual gloom; he spoke in a mournful monotone, and could always be counted on to report that everything was bad, and getting worse. Today he wore a checked shirt and a striped tie; he must have gotten out of the house before his wife saw him. Doherty gave Richman a sad, thoughtful nod.

“Nguyen Van Trung, avionics …” Trung was thirty, trim and quiet, self-contained. Casey liked him. The Vietnamese were the hardest-working people at the plant. The avionics guys were MIS specialists, involved with the aircraft computer programs. They represented the new wave at Norton: younger, better educated, better manners.

“Ken Burne, powerplant …” Kenny was red haired and freckled; his chin thrust forward, ready to fight. Notoriously profane and abusive, he was known in the plant as Easy Burne because of his quick temper.

“Ron Smith, electrical …” Bald and timid, nervously fingering pens in his pocket. Ron was extremely competent; it often seemed he carried the schematics for the aircraft around in his head. But he was painfully shy. He lived with his invalid mother in Pasadena.

“Mike Lee, who represents the carrier …” A well dressed man of fifty, gray hair cropped short, in a blue blazer with a striped tie. Mike was a former Air Force pilot, a retired one-star general. He was TransPacific’s rep at the plant.

“And Barbara Ross, with the notepad.” The IRT secretary was in her forties, and overweight. She glared at Casey with open hostility. Casey ignored her.

Marder waved the kid to a seat, and Casey sat down beside him. “First item,” Marder said. “Casey is now liaising QA to the IRT. Considering the way she handled the RTO at DFW, she’ll be our press spokesman from now on. Any questions?”

Richman looked bewildered, shaking his head. Marder turned to him, and explained: “Singleton did a good job with the press on a rejected takeoff at Dallas–Fort Worth last month. So she’ll handle any press inquiries we get. Okay? We all on the same page? Let’s get started. Barbara?” The secretary handed around stapled packets of paper.

“TransPacific Flight 545,” Marder said. “An N-22, fuse number 271. Flight originated at Kaitak Hong Kong at 2200 hours yesterday. Uneventful takeoff, uneventful flight until
approximately 0500 hours this morning, when the aircraft encountered what the pilot described as severe turbulence—”

There were groans throughout the room. “Turbulence!” The engineers shook their heads.

“—severe turbulence, producing extreme pitch excursions in flight.”

“Ah, Christ,” Burne said.

“The aircraft,” Marder continued, “made an emergency landing at LAX, and medical units were on hand. Our preliminary report indicates fifty-six injured, and three dead.”

“Oh that’s very bad,” Doug Doherty said in a sad monotone, blinking behind his thick glasses. “I suppose this means we’ve got the NTSB on our backs,” he said.

Casey leaned over to Richman and whispered, “National Transportation Safety Board usually gets involved when there are fatalities.”

“Not in this case,” Marder said. “This is a foreign carrier, and the incident occurred in international airspace. NTSB has its hands full with the Colombia crash. We think they’re going to pass on this one.”

“Turbulence,” Kenny Burne said, snorting. “Is there any confirmation?”

“No,” Marder said. “The plane was at thirty-seven thousand feet when the incident took place. No other aircraft at that altitude and position reported weather problems.”

“Satellite weather maps?” Casey said.

“Coming.”

“What about the passengers?” she said. “Did the captain make an announcement? Was the seat-belt sign on?”

“Nobody’s interviewed the passengers yet. But our preliminary information suggests no announcement was made.”

Richman was looking bewildered again. Casey scribbled a note on her yellow pad, tilted it so he could read:
No Turbulence
.

Trung said, “Have we debriefed the pilot?”

“No,” Marder said. “The flight crew caught a connecting flight out, and left the country.”

“Oh great,” Kenny Burne said, throwing his pencil on the table. “Just great. We got a damn hit-and-run.”

“Hold on, now,” Mike Lee said, in a cool tone. “On behalf of the carrier, I think we have to recognize the flight crew acted responsibly. They have no liability here; but they face possible litigation from the civil aviation authorities in Hong Kong, and they went home to deal with it.”

Casey wrote:
Flight Crew Unavailable
.

“Do, uh, we know who the captain was?” Ron Smith asked timidly.

“We do,” Mike Lee said. He consulted a leather notebook. “His name is John Chang. Forty-five years old, resident of Hong Kong, six thousand hours’ experience. He’s TransPacific’s senior pilot for the N-22. Very skilled.”

“Oh yeah?” Burne said, leaning forward across the table. “And when was he last recertified?”

“Three months ago.”

“Where?”

“Right here,” Mike Lee said. “On Norton flight simulators, by Norton instructors.”

Burne sat back, snorting unhappily.

“Do we know how he was rated?” Casey asked.

“Outstanding,” Lee said. “You can check your records.”

Casey wrote:
Not Human Error (?)

Marder said to Lee, “Do you think we can get an interview with him, Mike? Will he talk to our service rep at Kaitak?”

“I’m sure the crew will cooperate,” Lee said. “Especially if you submit written questions … I’m sure I can get them answered within ten days.”

“Hmm,” Marder said, distressed. “That long …”

“Unless we get a pilot interview,” Van Trung said, “we may have a problem. The incident occurred one hour prior to landing. The cockpit voice recorder only stores the last
twenty-five minutes of conversation. So in this case the CVR is useless.”

“True. But you still have the FDR.”

Casey wrote:
Flight Data Recorder
.

“Yes, we have the FDR,” Trung said. But this clearly didn’t assuage his concerns, and Casey knew why. Flight recorders were notoriously unreliable. In the media, they were the mysterious black boxes that revealed all the secrets of a flight. But in reality, they often didn’t work.

“I’ll do what I can,” Mike Lee promised.

Casey said, “What do we know about the aircraft?”

“Aircraft’s brand-new,” Marder said. “Three years’ service. It’s got four thousand hours and nine hundred cycles.”

Casey wrote:
Cycles
=
Takeoffs and Landings
.

“What about inspections?” Doherty asked gloomily. “I suppose we’ll have to wait weeks for the records …”

“It had a C check in March.”

“Where?”

“LAX.”

“So maintenance was probably good,” Casey said.

“Correct,” Marder said. “As a first cut, we can’t attribute this to weather, human factors, or maintenance. So we’re in the trenches. Let’s run the fault tree. Did anything about this aircraft cause behavior that looks like turbulence? Structural?”

“Oh sure,” Doherty said miserably. “A slats deploy would do it. We’ll function hydraulics on all the control surfaces.”

“Avionics?”

Trung was scribbling notes. “Right now I’m wondering why the autopilot didn’t override the pilot. Soon as I get the FDR download, I’ll know more.”

“Electrical?”

“It’s possible we got a slats deploy from a sneak circuit,” Ron Smith said, shaking his head. “I mean, it’s
possible
 …”

“Powerplant?”

“Yeah, powerplant could be involved,” Burne said, running his hand through his red hair. “The thrust reversers could have
deployed in flight. That’d make the plane nose over and roll. But if the reversers deployed, there’ll be residual damage. We’ll check the sleeves.”