Final Approach (36 page)

“At this point, the elevator comes back to nose up, engine power increases steadily all the way to max power, the ailerons command a roll to the left back to a wings-level posture, and the aircraft finally stabilizes just above the surface on a heading directly for the 737. All that's from the flight recorder.” Joe had stopped the tape and now reached to restart it. Susan stopped him. “What did that mean? Priority right?”

Barbara answered and Susan looked in her direction. “This airplane's two side control sticks are not physically linked together, they're electrically linked. The last pilot to press the priority button—which is located on each stick—controls the airplane and disconnects the other pilot's control stick.”

“And that's what we heard on the tape?” Susan asked.

“Right. When you have to use a priority switch to gain control, the computer voice tells you ‘priority left,' meaning the captain has seized control, or ‘priority right,' meaning the copilot has seized control.”

“And in this case …”

“In this case the copilot seized control from the captain, and the captain's side stick was definitely not in the neutral position, which means”—Barbara glanced at Joe to make sure he wasn't disapproving of her narration—“which means that the captain was actively flying the airplane and operating the controls when the copilot took over.”

Susan looked amazed. “You can tell all of that just from the presence of that computer voice?”

“Absolutely.”

“And,” Joe said, “the flight recorder indicates that at that exact moment, when we hear ‘priority right,' the elevator began moving back to nose up.”

Joe looked around at the group as they absorbed what they had heard. “Let me restart this, now, within ten seconds of impact.”

Joe's eyes were glued to his stopwatch, but instead of speaking, he held up a final show of fingers counting down to the end. Five … four … three … two …

“GODDAMMIT!”
punctured the air as the muffled roar of colliding metal dropped to silence, marking the point where the cockpit voice recording had lost power as it was suddenly decelerated from 145 knots to zero and violently thrust into the baggage compartment of the disintegrating 737.

There was silence in the room again, this time for nearly a minute; it was broken first by Barbara Rawlson after an audible intake of air.

“Was that Timson's voice at the last?” The voice had been a significantly higher range than normal, but there was a gruffness to it that sounded like Timson, the word
goddamn
and its variations an overly familiar Timson usage by the end of the tape.

“Mr. Walters, what do you think?” Joe asked, but there was no response. He glanced at Susan and Barbara, then back at Walters. “Sir? Mr. Walters?”

John Walters looked up suddenly, an accusatory look on his face, as if rudely disturbed. “What?”

The reply was sharp and rude in and of itself, and Joe hesitated before asking, “Was that Timson at the last? The last word,
goddamn
, was that Timson?”

Walters nodded again. “I think so. It sounds like him … like his voice, I mean.”

For a second time John Walters shot a series of hunted looks around the room before seeming to regain his confidence, this time without the anger. “I'm sorry, everyone. I guess I'm stunned. Would you please excuse me?” Without waiting for a reply, Walters was on his feet, and just as quickly out the door, leaving the rest of the group in uneasy silence.

They played the last five minutes again, making notes and going over several times the last word Timson had uttered, before Joe Wallingford took the cassette out of the recorder, noting the dead silence in the room, several of them staring into the distance and a few heads shaking slowly, as if rejecting what they had heard. Joe felt ill. There was no key, only more questions—including the sinister radio noise as the flight controls began to change position, with or without pilot input. Once again, it had gone from impossibly complicated to totally Byzantine.

Nick Gardner spoke first. “Joe, uh, am I reading all this right? The copilot did take over, but too late to save them?”

Joe nodded. “That's the way it seems to me.”

“So the question, or one of them,” Nick continued, “is why did he have to take over? What happened to the captain? He asks, ‘Captain, what are you doing?' Could the captain have been flying them into the ground?”

Joe shook his head with a consternated expression and a sigh. “The captain says he was flying it properly. He says the airplane didn't do what he told it to do.”

Barbara nodded at that and shifted forward in her chair. “That makes sense, though, Joe. He would have been pulling his stick, the airplane's not responding, the copilot finally takes control, but recovers too late. But when the copilot seizes control, his stick
is
working. That tells me the problem was probably electromechanical and in the captain's control stick—or radar interference with that same left side.”

The implication of that sank in: a dreaded flight-control problem. Joe knew the FAA member would be telling Caldwell about it within a half hour, even though the associate administrator had already summarily dismissed flight-control problems as a potential cause because the political wind was blowing in the other direction. This should at least make the little bastard nervous, Joe thought to himself.

“Excuse me, could I add some ideas?” Kell Martinson had been studying the faces of each member, apparently trying to decide whether to jump in.

“Certainly,” Joe said.

“Logic would dictate, I would think, several consistent possibilities from what I've just heard, but I'm sure there's a lot I'm not seeing, so please blow these comments out of the tub at will. First, the captain's stick could have malfunctioned as mentioned. That would explain the sudden flight-control change when the copilot took over. Second—the possibility we don't really want to face—the captain's control inputs are overridden or cancelled by electromagnetic interference from outside, from the SDI radar, which our military people say could not have been turned on. Third, they could have been caught in a small microburst, or downdraft, and come out of it at the same instant the copilot took over, sort of coincidentally. And fourth, the captain may have, for some physical or psychological reason, pushed his stick forward at the wrong moment. Not with intent, you see, but a momentary lapse.” Kell sat back and waited, and Barbara spoke first.

“The third is probably not possible, Senator, because the flight recorder shows no airspeed variations or rates of descent not explained by the aircraft's attitude.”

“Okay.”

“But your fourth proposition …” She looked at Joe, who shrugged, and at several others in the room, who were equally unsure what to say. “I guess that just flies in the face of what we expect of a pilot, you know? What could cause an experienced captain like this one to make such a mistake?”

“I have no idea. I'm just following the logical implications that if the captain's control stick was the source of the nose-down input, then either a malfunction of the stick or a malfunction of the human controlling it must be present. That takes in, of course, a wide range of possible behaviors, but human failure would, it seems to me, be one of the possible mechanisms of failure.”

Joe was nodding. “Your logic is impeccable, Senator. Upsetting, but impeccable.”

“Of course, you have possibility number two and the fluctuation you mentioned, Joe,” Barbara added.

Susan had been leaning back, an elbow propped on the arm of the chair, her chin resting in the palm of her hand. She moved forward now and sighed, examining the table before looking at Joe across the wooden surface. “Joe, maybe it's just me, but I'm more confused now than ever. We're back to control failure, control interference, or pilot mistake. That's where we were when we came in the door forty-five minutes ago!”

Several were nodding as Joe answered, his right hand gesturing palm up. “I … I can tell you I'm somewhere between disappointed and stunned. I didn't expect the diatribe against the copilot, but having said that, I'm not sure it's material. The fact that the copilot eventually took control, though too late, indicates that the key to this entire crash is what happened at the left side control stick. Mistake or malfunction or accidental interdiction? It could be any one of them, especially with that curious noise on the tape. And with the hysteria out there about the radar unit, if we can't prove it wasn't on …”

One of Andy Wallace's staff members had raised a hand, or more precisely, an index finger. “Have you considered the possibility that if the copilot had taken over sooner, he might have saved them? There's quite a period of time between his asking, ‘Captain, what are you doing?' and seizing control.”

“I don't follow you,” Joe told him.

Susan was nodding, and cut in. “What I believe he means is if the copilot saw a problem, why didn't he act sooner? Did that broadside tongue-lashing from the captain intimidate him? Surely it isn't standard practice to treat copilots that way. Since this is the chief pilot, I'd say we've got some questions here concerning why he is intimidating his copilot, and whether that's accepted cockpit style for North America crews.”

“That is,
if
the copilot
was
intimidated,” Joe added. “There's one other inconsistency that's bothering me. Dick Timson, the captain, told Andy and me in our first interview with him in the hospital that he had been flying the airplane all the way down. Obviously that's not true.”

“When was that interview, Joe?” Susan asked.

“The Monday following the crash.”

“Oh. You probably shouldn't put any significance on that contradiction. With a head injury, he could easily be misinterpreting his memories. He could be telling you what he
tried
to do all the way to impact.”

He adjourned the meeting then and took Nick Gardner aside, telling him of Bill Caldwell's demand. “He wants that tape of the tower radio transmissions, Nick. Take it up there this afternoon, would you?”

Joe was startled to see a wide-eyed look of surprise on Nick's face, and he resisted putting a sinister interpretation on it. Gardner recovered quickly. “I'll go see if I can get it.”

“Don't you have it, Nick?”

“After … after that release, I wasn't terribly worried about its security. But I think I can lay my hands on it.”

Joe fixed him with a questioning gaze for perhaps ten seconds, but Nick did not look away. “Joe?”

“Nick, I'm sorry to say this, but if you're not being straight with me—if you haven't been up to now—this is the last chance to do so.”

“Are you accusing me of lying, Joe?”

“I'm telling you that in the hopefully unlikely event you are, beyond this point you'll get no help and no sympathy. They're going to find out where that leak came from, Nick, and right now all their evidence seems to point to you. I've taken your word without question. I'm not asking for reassurance, I'm asking for your reassessment. If there's anything you need to tell me, this is the last chance.”

“Only thing I need to tell you, Joe, is thanks for the faith. It's not misplaced.”

“Okay Nick,” Joe said slowly. “Just find the damn thing and get it up there, and … better make a copy of it before you do.”

Nick Gardner nodded and left, trying to do so casually. The effort did not go unnoticed by Joe Wallingford.

All but Kell and Susan had filed out the door, and Kell Martinson waited for Joe to turn back to the mostly empty room before speaking to him. “Where do you go with this now, Joe?” he asked, hands thrust deep in his pants pockets, leaning slightly against the table as Susan came around the other side beside Joe, who was scratching his head. “Senator, I think we're in a lot of trouble with this. Especially with the hubbub out there about the radar, and the blanket military denials.” He told Kell and Susan about the call from Andy Wallace, and the corresponding power glitch in the tower tapes.

“Joe,” Kell began, “I've had a three-star general assure me the thing was not operating. The White House, the Secretary of Defense, a dozen senators—everyone is saying for the record the thing was not operating.”

“Is that enough for you, Senator, given what you've heard?”

Joe watched Martinson's face as he thought over the question in stony silence for a few seconds. Susan was watching him as well.

“No. I see your point.”

“I've got the FAA upstairs ready to close the lid on even internal flight-control failure. Let me ask you, could the Air Force not have known the thing was on? Could somebody—a technician, for instance—have accidentally activated it?”

Kell's answer was very quiet, his eyes focused somewhere down the hall. “I don't know, Joe. But I agree we need to find out.”

“Well, you asked where we go from here,” Joe said. “We've got to do a massive amount of deep detective work from now until the hearing, and that sort of investigation costs a lot of money and strains our budget.”

Kell smiled at the not-so-subtle funding appeal. “Hearing?”

“Early December, in Kansas City. At least that's what I've tentatively recommended.” He turned to Susan, who was nodding.

“That probably is going to be approved by the other members, Joe.”

“I'd like to be there,” Kell said. “Unofficially, of course. I wouldn't expect to do anything but observe.”

Susan beat Joe to the punch. “We'd be honored, Senator.”

Kell left them alone in the briefing room, finally, the door closing behind him, and Susan told Joe about the appointment she had made with Mark Weiss in an hour.

“He's been sniffing around North America in Dallas.”