B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (22 page)

‘What was she doing there?’ Jenny said.

Michael shrugged.

There was only one more email in the inbox. It was dated Friday 7th and was sent at 18.35. Headed, ‘
Urgent change to your itinerary
’, it read:

Jenny said, ‘Amy Patterson was booked onto the Saturday flight, too.’

‘It happens,’ Michael said. ‘There’s no excuse, but it does.’

‘
Temporary leave of absence
– that doesn’t sound like the woman you’ve described.’

‘No.’

‘Sandy said she was off-colour, so why then would she have been flying to Washington? That’s no way to recover.’

Michael sat back in his chair and stared up at the huge oak beam that ran the length of the room, his pensive expression telling Jenny that he was battling with contradictory thoughts.

‘She wouldn’t have called in sick and then booked staff-discounted tickets,’ Jenny said. ‘The airline must have approved her leave. But it wasn’t holiday, it was
leave of absence
. It’s almost as if there was some sort of official reason.’

‘Yes,’ Michael said, keeping his warring thoughts to himself.

‘Could she have been going on a training course?’ Jenny asked.

‘Unlikely. We’ve got all the simulators you could need here.’

Jenny closed down the laptop. ‘It could all have been perfectly innocent, of course. A few days away. Crossing the Atlantic would be nothing to a professional pilot.’

Distracted by a private thought, Michael said, ‘Do you mind if we make one more stop on the way home?’

‘It’s late, Michael—’

‘Captain Dan Murray’s widow. I’ve met her a couple of times with Nuala. Nice lady.’ He took out his phone. ‘We’ll call it a social visit.’

It was eleven p.m. when they drew up on the driveway of the house outside the village of Wokefield, further west into the Berkshire countryside. Diane Murray came to the door as they were walking up the brick path. She was a handsome woman in her late forties, but her face had a hollow, washed-out appearance, the shock of her loss still printed in her dazed expression. Recognizing Michael, she greeted him by his first name.

She had heard about Nuala, and offered her sympathies. There was something ritualistic in their exchange, as if among airmen and their loved ones such encounters were conducted according to an unwritten code. The possibility of sudden death, it seemed to Jenny, was accepted as part of the deal.

Diane led them through to the homely, farmhouse-style kitchen where they sat at the family table surrounded by reminders of her late husband. His farmer’s jacket still hung on the peg at the back door; several pairs of his boots were lined up on the rack. She apologized for the mess; the kids hadn’t yet returned to school since the crash. It had been hard to stay on top of things.

Michael was about to pass Jenny off as a friend when she stepped in to pre-empt him. She tried to explain that she was a coroner, but not part of the official investigation into the causes of the crash. Mrs Murray said she had lost count of the number of people who had visited during the previous week. There had been detectives, air accident investigators, agents from the security services, air traffic control executives, airline managers and even Guy Ransome himself.

‘Everyone’s very sympathetic,’ she said, ‘but I know they’re all desperate for me to say that there was something wrong that made him take his eye off the ball. Human error would be the perfect explanation, wouldn’t it? It’s the one outcome that wouldn’t mean anyone else taking responsibility.’

‘It’s always the same,’ Michael said. ‘If in doubt, blame the man at the controls.’

Jenny said, ‘If it helps, we’ve seen the air traffic control data. The aircraft slowed down for a reason that’s not apparent at the moment. Michael doesn’t think it looks like pilot error.’

‘They showed it to me, too,’ Diane said. ‘Then asked me if he had been depressed.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘He loved flying. It was his life. God knows, he wasn’t doing it to get rich.’

‘He was fit and well the day of the crash?’ Michael asked.

‘I think so. He’d been having a few headaches, but that’s because he had been working so hard. He wasn’t sure he’d have many years left in the business, so it was a question of earning while he could . . .’ She paused, determined not to let herself give way to emotion. ‘He only took on this flight the day before. The pilot who was scheduled to captain it got the flu.’

Michael said, ‘Nuala was bumped from the Saturday flight. Just bad luck, I guess.’

Jenny’s felt her toes curl, but Diane seemed to find his directness reassuring and managed a ghost of a smile.

‘How long had he been on the 380?’ Michael asked.

‘About eight months. Half a dozen Ransome pilots trained. Dan scored the highest of all of them.’

‘He’d flown Boeings most of his career, hadn’t he?’

‘It was his choice to retrain. The Airbus took some getting used to, but he said that once you had learned to trust the computers it was far more relaxing.’

‘No problems he’d told you about?’

‘He only ever mentioned one. It was back in the summer, on one of his early flights – I think he said it was a problem with the thrust levers coming in to land. He thought it was some sort of computer glitch, but he booked in for some extra sim time to make sure.’

‘Did he tell you any more?’

‘Why? Was there something wrong with the plane?’

‘No idea, but it would be good to have all the information.’

Diane pushed her hands anxiously through her shoulder-length blonde hair as she tried to summon up the details. ‘It was something about how automatic thrust was meant to disengage when you pushed the levers forward a click, but for some reason it didn’t. The engines were still putting out power when they were meant to be idling. He had to switch to manual and throttle back. It meant they stopped too close to the end of the runway.’

Michael said, ‘I’ve heard of pilots forgetting to disengage autothrust, but not the switch failing to work. That’s a serious incident. Did he report it?’

‘To the airline, I think. He must have done.’

‘What about to the Civil Aviation Authority or AAIB?’

‘I’m not sure . . . I don’t remember him saying anything about that.’

Jenny and Michael exchanged a glance.

‘Any other scrapes he told you about?’ he asked Diane.

‘No. As far as I know it was a one-off.’ A note of alarm entered her voice. ‘You don’t think it was the same fault?’

‘I doubt it very much – it probably wasn’t even the same aircraft.’

Jenny said, ‘Mrs Murray, you wouldn’t happen to have a copy of your husband’s employment contract? We’ve learned that some airlines may be trying to stop their pilots reporting incidents as the law requires them to.’

‘I can look in his desk . . .’ She turned uncertainly to Michael. ‘You do think there was a fault, don’t you?’

‘I’m keeping an open mind,’ Michael said, ‘but that sounds a lot more likely than an experienced pilot having made a stupid mistake.’

He went with her along the passage to the alcove under the stairs where her husband had dealt with all his paperwork. Jenny heard them talking quietly as they went through the drawers of his desk. Michael was good with her, calm and reassuring, and able to confront her loss head on. Jenny cast her eyes around the kitchen and spotted mementos of Dan Murray’s career as an airman: a photograph of him as a young pilot posing on the steps of an airliner; another of him at the controls in mid-flight; a row of miniature planes lined up on the dresser.

Michael returned to the kitchen alone, closing the door quietly behind him. ‘She’s a bit upset. I told her she should go to bed – we’ll let ourselves out.’ He handed her a document – Dan Murray’s contract with Ransome. ‘He signed it five years ago, but have a look at the last page.’

Attached to the back with a paperclip was a side letter identical in form to the one which they had found at Nuala’s flat. Dan Murray had signed and dated it on 8 July the previous year.

‘We just checked his diary,’ Michael said. ‘His first flight as captain of a 380 was on 28 May. If the incident with the thrust lever was a month later, it looks as if the company gagged him straight away.’

Jenny said, ‘He can’t have reported it, or the aircraft would have been grounded.’

Michael nodded. ‘Like a shot.’

I
T HAD BEEN A VERY LATE NIGHT
. Stopping off at Michael’s for the coffee Jenny had needed to sustain her for the rest of the drive home had turned into several hours spent poring over the files they had retrieved from Nuala’s flat. She had been worried that there would be awkwardness between them after all that Michael had confessed to her earlier in the day, but their visit to Captain Murray’s widow had seemed to switch him into a different mode. He was a military pilot again: detached and purposeful, and determined to unearth any clue about what had gone wrong with Flight 189. Jenny hadn’t made it into her own bed in Melin Bach until nearly four a.m.

Their close examination of Nuala’s papers revealed that over the course of the previous six months she had printed out a vast number of documents relating to crashes and near-misses. Many makes of aircraft featured, but it was the Airbus in which she seemed to have the greatest interest. It might simply have been explained by professional curiosity – after all, it was the plane she flew – but both Jenny and Michael had sensed that she was searching for something in particular.

The incidents and accidents she had researched in detail fell into two broad categories: runway overruns and anomalous behaviour of aircraft systems while in the air. Michael had been of the opinion that the overrun incidents all seemed to have an explanation based in human error. A 320 that overran a runway in Portugal with no loss of life seemed simply to have landed too far along the runway. Another 320 that overran in Honduras the same year, killing the captain and a passenger, also seemed to have come to grief as a result of the pilot misjudging his final approach. Three years earlier a 340 landing at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport had skidded off the end of the runway and come to rest in a ravine. Miraculously there was no loss of life. Again, the plane seemed simply to have set down too late, probably due to poor visibility during a violent rainstorm.

More disturbing were the incidents without an immediate human explanation. Qantas Flight 72, a 330-300 flying from Perth to Singapore, made a pair of uncommanded pitch-down manoeuvres at 37,000 feet. So violent were they that passengers were flung around the cabin, many sustaining serious injuries. The subsequent investigation found that computer errors had given false stall and overspeed warnings, which in turn had caused flight control computers to command a sudden nose-down movement resulting in a dramatic plunge of 650 feet lasting twenty seconds. Fortunately, the pilots regained control and made an emergency landing at a nearby airport. A little over two months later, another Qantas Airbus travelling the same route, but in the reverse direction, suffered a spontaneous disengagement of the autopilot and the crew received a warning of a malfunction in the Air Data Inertial Reference System – the same system that had malfunctioned on Flight 72. The crew switched off the suspect instruments and returned to Perth to make a safe landing.

The incident which had engaged Nuala most deeply was the catastrophic loss six months afterwards of Air France Flight 447. A 330-200 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged into the Atlantic with the loss of all 216 passengers and 12 crew. The precise cause of the crash remained a subject of ongoing discussion, but a trail of evidence pointed to problems in the system responsible for determining the airspeed. Messages automatically transmitted by the aircraft’s computers in the minutes before the disaster suggested that one of the three airspeed indicators having been found faulty and switched off, the remaining two continued to give contradictory readings.

Investigators’ attention focused on the pitot tubes, the small hollow pipes positioned beneath the aircraft’s nose which measure airflow and thereby airspeed. If the tubes had frozen and become blocked with ice crystals, it was suggested, no accurate airspeed readings would have been possible. The flight data recorder, retrieved two years later from the deep ocean floor, revealed that the two co-pilots at the controls (the captain was on a rest break) appeared disorientated by the automated stall warning generated as a result of the false speed readings. It was an unexpected event at high altitude and they instinctively responded by pulling up the nose. The aircraft climbed rapidly out of the flight envelope, lost lift, and entered a disastrous stall – precisely the thing they were trying to avoid – from which they failed to recover.

Shortly after the crash Airbus operators were advised to update all pitot tubes to a modern heated version designed to prevent icing. On a copy of the US Federal Aviation Authority’s directive ordering the change, Nuala had written a note in her own hand: the two initials MD. Michael had no idea what they meant, except that it might have related to one of her many contacts on the Airbuzz forum; perhaps another pilot who had encountered similar problems.

Jenny switched on the radio as she crossed the bridge into England to catch the eight-thirty news. Flight 189 was once again the lead story. The BBC’s aviation correspondent excitedly reported that the AAIB had taken the unusual step of releasing a transcript of a portion of the cockpit voice recording. It had already been shown to the relatives of the dead and would be made available to the media later in the day. At the same time, a newspaper journalist had apparently got hold of the story that Flight 189’s ACARS transmissions had mysteriously stopped a little over three minutes before the aircraft started to fall from the sky. The source of the rumour was reported to be a French engineer close to the investigation. A pair of aviation experts drafted in to comment read this as a highly significant fact, but disagreed violently as to the reason why. As well as allowing communication between the aircraft and the airline, the ACARS system relayed essential flight data back to the airline’s computers. One of the experts saw the absence of this data as suspiciously convenient for Ransome Airways; the other saw it as further evidence to bolster the theory that there had been a sudden and disastrous failure of the aircraft’s electrical systems.