Impact (2 page)

Mommy?

Hang on, honey.

Mommy. I'm scared, Mommy.

Hang on to my hand, honey. It'll be okay.

Where is he? Did he hit us?

I don't know, I … it's not
responsive
. I can't get the damned thing—

What was that bump?

Cargo?

Cargo my ass. He clipped our stabilizer. If I can just—hey! I've got
stick shaker!
We're
stalling
, goddamnit. How the hell … what's our air speed?

One four oh and falling. like a fucking rock.

What's wrong?

Nothing, honey. A little turbulence. We just flew over the coastal range, and—

That's
not turbulence. We're out of control. My God. It's really happening.

Naw. They'll handle it. Probably a near miss and we're in a tight turn. Happens all the time.

We're crashing, Jack, you
idiot
.

Tower to 617. Are you in trouble? You should still be at three thousand.

Speed one twenty and falling.

We've got to get it
up
. Not the
nose
, damnit! The nose is too high already.

I
know
. I'm trying to force her down, but it's not—

Altitude fifteen hundred and falling
. We've got to get up or we'll hit that ridge.

I know. I
know
, for Christ's sake.

Kiko.

Lee.

Hold the boy's hand.

Yes.

I love you, Kiko.

And I you.

We will be together at the Buddha's knee.

I am praying for it, Lee. With all my heart.

Tower to 617. You're
off course
. Return to zero one zero. Increase altitude to three thousand.

Is that what I think it is?

Yeah, shit. Ground proximity warning. No way we make the ridge. Okay, guys, we're going in. I'll try to trim her up, but—

Tower, tell Mary I love her. Tell her I'm sorry I—

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

Sit down, Mr. Jastrow.
Please
. You have to
sit down
or you won't be able to—

Randy? Remember when the stewardess told us about the doors that led out to the wing? Now, listen to me. After we land, I want you to run to that door right over there. It may be dark, and people may be yelling and screaming, something may even be on fire, but you just ignore everyone else and run to the door and climb out on the wing and go to the end of it and jump off and then run as far away from the plane as you can. Understand? Just run and run till you can't run anymore.

Why, Mommy?

Don't wait for me, Randy. Do you hear?
Don't wait
. Just run and run and—

Mommy, why is that man crying?

Save
me, Carol. I don't want to die. Please? Don't let this
happen
to me.
I
really don't want to die
.

I don't think I can help you this time, Jack.

Laura? Honey? Can you hear me? I love you, Laura. I'm sorry for everything. I really, truly am. If I get out of this, I'll make it right again. You'll see. I'll—

You
bastard
. I hope you burn in hell.

Tower to Surf Air. Tower to SurfAir.
Goddamnit
. What the hell
happened?
I think they're down. Lord Jesus. Hey! Over here, Stan. I've
lost
them. How the hell? … How many seats in that new Hastings, anyway? Over a hundred, right? Good God Almighty. Hey. Don't
look
at me like that. It wasn't my
fault
. I don't even know what went
on
up there. Jesus. I knew something like this was going to happen. I fucking
knew
it.

PART I

ONE

At yet another banquet, Alec Hawthorne lolls beneath a glittering chandelier watching his food turn tepid and his wine go sour while he patiently awaits his cue. At least he is in Paris, the hotel the finest in the city, which means it is the finest in the world, so the room is therefore perfect: frescoed ceilings, gilded paneling, flatware cast from bullion, porcelain as luminous as pearls, livery worthy of an Antoinette or even a de Gaulle. But if the occasion and the trappings are familiar, the audience is not.

Normally, the faces that arrange themselves so they can see and hear and envy him belong to lawyers. Hawthorne is asked to speak to an assemblage of his colleagues at least fifty times a year, accepting only those invitations from his alma mater, the ABA, and the half-dozen trial-advocacy seminars that offer the most luxurious venues or the most exorbitant emoluments. On such occasions he hears himself described as a “superstar,” a “million-dollar lawyer,” and similar sobriquets designed to establish that he is someone who can teach the plodding practitioner how to make big bucks. And he can, oddly enough—although it is not what they want to hear, not the “secret” they assume he knows or the formula they assume he follows. He can teach them that the only certain way to riches in the legal profession is to work your ass off—nights, days, weekends; birthdays, anniversaries, holidays—until your eyes ache and your head pounds and your underlings exchange estimations of your madness. What he leaves them to discover for themselves is that the only thing you have time to do once the bucks roll in is watch some idiot investment adviser flush them down a speculative sewer. As for the pittance that manages to escape such clutches, well, even if the IRS doesn't invalidate your avoidance scheme and your former wives don't convert it all to alimony, you still won't find time to do anything with the money that's elevating, or even fun.

Work. It is the sponge of his time, the fulcrum of his life, what has gotten him where he is and also where he isn't, which is in the bosom of a happy family instead of sitting at a formal dais in the ballroom of a palace he has somehow come to consider his due. Still, although he is never unaware that getting where he is has involved some rather weighty trade-offs, at this point in his life Alec Hawthorne does not often regret the bargain.

Comforted by the well-worn rationale, Hawthorne sighs, then sips a nice Bordeaux. In the next moment, because his mind operates as often by Newtonian as by Freudian principles, his serenity is routed by a pang of fear. He is suddenly convinced he is an imposter, present at the dais under false pretenses, a con man who will momentarily be found to know nothing about the law or the world or even about himself.

A molten flow of insecurity descends from his throat to his abdomen. He closes his eyes and holds his breath. After a minute the specter of ineptitude disappears, leaving behind a burning belly and a skim of sweat. Wiping his brow with a magnificently woven napkin, Hawthorne turns his attention to the center of the dais, where proceedings are ready to begin.

A rotund man stands, dears his throat, passes a hand across his gleaming pate, and manages a sentence on the second try. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. Thank you. As program chairman of the Association of Commercial Airline Pilots' thirty-fifth annual convention, I have the privilege of introducing the keynote speaker of the evening. I say privilege, because our guest tonight is truly a bird of a different feather, as it were. He is not a pilot or aeronautical engineer or airline executive. Alec Hawthorne is a lawyer, and in the opinion of most, he is the heir apparent to the throne of the legendary Ed Haroldson, the foremost aviation attorney of our time.

“Alec is no stranger to the association. Most of you have heard of him; several of you have worked with him on a consulting basis in one of his many lawsuits; a few of you have been grilled by him on the witness stand or at a deposition, and it is no secret that more than one of our members has taken an early retirement after enduring that ordeal. Alec's accomplishments are many, but perhaps foremost is this: In the past twenty-five years, Alec Hawthorne has recovered more than half a billion dollars—that's right,
billion
—on behalf of the victims of air disasters, their families, and heirs. And in the process of collecting those sums, Alec has been a primary factor in pointing the finger of blame in such proceedings where it justifiably belongs.

“It was Alec Hawthorne who first made public that the cockpit instrumentation of the DC-8 was arranged so that a pilot could, entirely by accident, put the engines into reverse thrust while airborne; that the instruments in different models of the Caravelle were in different locations, leading to pilot confusion and passenger jeopardy; that the T-tail design of the early 727s caused a dangerously excessive sink rate, resulting in premature touchdown. Such revelations led not only to large verdicts for Mr. Hawthorne's clients but to the actions necessary to remedy the defects. In other words, our guest has been the leader in showing that pilot error—the so-called ‘Oh Christ' activity—that is all too often cited as the cause of an air disaster, is almost always design-induced, the result of engineering that fails to account for the human factors inevitably present in modern aviation.”

The chairman wipes his brow again, gulps some water, glances nervously to his side to see how it is going so far, then shuffles his notes and clears his throat. “Pilots, as the saying goes, are the first ones at the scene of an accident. Because Alec Hawthorne may be the world's foremost authority on why planes crash, we have asked him to speak to us tonight on the general subject of safety in the skies and on the international airline pilots' role in improving airline performance. Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to present Alec Hawthorne, Esquire, the best friend a commercial pilot ever had.”

The applause is hesitant, then swells, as if a collective decision has been reached that, on this evening at least, he is one of them. Smiling vaguely into the adulation, Hawthorne unfolds his six feet three inches and makes his way to the podium, which, draped in velvet and satin, reminds him of the lining of a coffin. He extracts his notes from his jacket. In the light from the chandelier, the jottings seem animate and surreal. To subdue a moment of vertigo he samples the tumbler to his left, then takes a deep breath and rids himself of all but the requisite sense that he is as supreme as the monarch who once held court in this very building. Still, as he looks into the mirror of a thousand eyes, he feels less a monarch than a badly frightened child.

“The aviation industry has come a long way since 1783,” he begins, “when a Frenchman in a smoke balloon made the first recorded flight. It took Magellan two years to circumnavigate the globe, but by 1980 you could fly around the world in forty-four hours and six minutes, not with Chuck Yeager in an experimental jet, but on regularly scheduled airlines. When Cal Rodgers became the first person to cross the United States by plane, it took him sixty-nine hops and forty-nine days and he crashed fifteen times along the way. Today, routes such as the redeye from LA to New York are both routine and essential to many industries, not the least the movies.

“From the beginning, safety was a major concern, of course, and even in the early days steps were taken to make the airways safer. In the 1920s, cross-country flights began to follow the rail lines for guidance. After a few head-on collisions in the fog, the pilots figured out that if they each agreed to fly on the right side of the tracks, they wouldn't run into each other anymore. Such primitive navigational aids seem ludicrous in this day of radar and transponders, yet airplanes still fly into each other, most recently the midair collision over Cerritos, California, involving an Aeromexico DC-9 and a Piper Archer. It's not as bad as it once was, when thirty-one of the first forty mail pilots lost their lives in crashes, but you and I both know it's still not as good as it should and could be. They used to say there were only three things important to a pilot—sex, seniority, and salary. I'm here tonight to tell you that you—
each
of you—had better add a fourth s to that list, and that s must stand for safety.

“You know all too well the pressures that engulf the industry today. Although the figures I'm going to mention apply to aviation in the United States, their message must be heard around the globe. Indeed, in a world where Singapore Air goes from the fifty-fourth largest air carrier in 1972 to the seventh largest ten years later, the American experience may be only the tip of the iceberg.

“In two important senses, the pressure on the industry is the result of actions of the federal government. In 1978, Congress deregulated commercial aviation. Airlines multiplied like rabbits, only to be gobbled up in merger mania, which often led to firings or wage cutbacks for ground personnel and two-tier wage structures for flight crews that saw one pilot earn three times what another pilot was paid to do the same job. Such developments fostered employee unrest and walkouts by pilots to protest wage and safety conditions—even to charges of sabotage by disgruntled workers.

“On the consumer side, fares on well-traveled routes plummeted, resulting in a fifty percent increase in air traffic since 1979, a crush that has led one commentator to call modern air travel the most constrained form of mass transport since the slave ships. Competition has become so intense that established carriers such as Braniff, Frontier, and Continental—even TWA and Eastern—fly high for a time, then fall into the bog of bankruptcy, reorganization, or hostile takeover. Meanwhile, the surviving carriers look for savings wherever they can find them, and too many find them in their maintenance and training programs. Airframe manufacturers feel the competitive crunch as well. Since 1952, twenty-two new aircraft have been designed, built, and made operational, yet only two of those planes have made money for the companies that built them.

“So much for deregulation. A second policy threatens the industry just as much, the policy that results from the notion that government is simply a burden upon us all, that it has no role to play in providing for the health and welfare of its citizens. At least as far as aviation is concerned, that proposition is both nonsensical and dangerous.