Final Approach (50 page)

Should he take all of it to Susan? She and the other Board members would be in a meeting with Farris by now. No, better leave her out of this for the moment.

Joe paused beneath the Mercury 7 capsule in which John Glenn had orbited the earth, the first American to do so, but the second human, beaten by Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union. It took a lot of courage to climb into that garbage-can-sized capsule on top of a marginally proven rocket full of explosive fuel. Glenn had gone on to become a U.S. senator. In fact, there were quite a few aviation-knowledgeable senators now, many of them pilots.

Kell Martinson came to mind, as did his exhortations to Joe to have enough courage to take a professional risk and help him. Martinson had warned he couldn't protect Joe with complete certainty. Helping might accomplish nothing and lose him the only job he cared about. Why on earth should he agree to such a gamble? What would it accomplish?

Yet how could he handle what was now in his lap. It was way beyond his level. Way above his pay grade, as military friends would describe it.

Joe sat down on a bench in the main hall, totally oblivious to the throng of people coming and going just in front of him. The lighthearted feeling which had enveloped him since Susan sailed out of a snowstorm and into his life—and his bedroom—had been replaced with fear. And on top of everything else, if he played this wrong and ended up fired, he might lose Susan as well.

The logical choices all began to converge on one course of action—the only course of action—and in response Joe left the museum and hailed a cab at the corner, giving the Hart Senate Office Building as the destination, showing up ten minutes later in Kell Martinson's outer office totally unannounced, which led to some negotiating before the senator's administrative assistant emerged.

“Mr. Wallingford? I'm Cynthia Collins. What can I do for you?”

“I need to see the senator as quickly as possible. He'll understand.”

“He's on the Senate floor at the moment in a vote. But I expect him momentarily. Unfortunately, his calendar is crammed.”

“Please, let's talk privately.”

She looked him over thoughtfully, then nodded, and Joe followed her to an inner conference room with traditional leather chairs and bookcases full of ancient, leather-bound tomes which no one there had probably ever read.

Joe explained his position at the NTSB and his investigation of the North America crash, leaving out for the moment Farris's dismissal of him as IIC.

Cindy Collins nodded. “I know that crash only too well, Mr. Wallingford.” She was sitting next to him, her legs crossed, a beautiful young lady in every way. “You had no way of knowing, but I was booked on that flight. Except for last-minute changes in my schedule, I would have died in that crash.” The statement startled Joe, but one thing was clear. This was the friend Kell Martinson had been waiting for the night of the accident.

“I'm certainly glad you missed it.”

“Me too!” she said with a laugh.

“Has the senator mentioned me, by any chance?”

“Absolutely. We try to keep track of where he is, and he's been spending an awful lot of time with you folks lately. Frankly, we need him back here on the job.”

She left Joe then to check on the progress of the vote, and returned in a few minutes with the senator in tow.

“Joe. A pleasant surprise, sir. Come into my office. You've met Cynthia then?”

“Yes. She told me your schedule was crammed, and I'm sorry to barge in, but it is urgent.”

Senator Martinson ushered Joe toward the couch in the sitting area of his office, indicating Cindy should close the door and join them, which she did.

He laid it all out. Mark Weiss's visit, John Phelps's information on Caldwell, the FBI report on Farris's stock holdings, and his dismissal from the North America investigation.

“I guess this is self-serving to a fault, Kell, but I promised you I'd think over your request for my help, and if you'll help me figure out what to do with all these scary pieces to the puzzle, I'm your man. What I've got in my lap is far above my ability to handle.”

“On the crash, and as a lawyer, Joe, I'd say North America's going to be hung out to dry on this. Gross negligence will not be too difficult to prove, I would think.”

“Of course, as an accident investigator, I have no interest in that aspect,” Joe replied.

“I understand. But the observation was begging to be made.”

Joe then launched into the Miami Air crash, Kell's eyes watching him intently as he told him everything, including John Phelps's name.

“So what it comes down to,” Joe told him at last, “is an out-of-control NTSB chairman who may have a massive conflict of interest or worse, a man appointed by the president, who is from your party, and the FAA's second-in-command is playing games with the rules for suspicious reasons. You see why I feel like a mouse at a cat convention?” Joe said.

“I can indeed.” Kell fell silent almost instantly, staring at the small glass coffee table in front of the sofa while obviously deep in thought. He looked up at Joe suddenly. “As you well know, this is a very serious situation. Part of what you've told me may involve federal criminal violations—the Miami Air stuff. As for your man Farris … good Lord, he's either horribly naïve or loves taking chances. Does anyone on the White House staff know any of this?”

“I doubt it, but I have no way of knowing. You don't think they'd tolerate it?”

“I would certainly hope not. Look, I think I've got an idea.” He sat on the edge of his chair with his hands folded under his chin, elbows on his knees, looking at Joe for a few seconds before speaking. “If I handed you a legislative paintbrush with which to paint a new NTSB, if you could rebuild it just the way you, with your experience, know it should be structured, how would you do it?”

“I don't understand.”

Kell's hands came down and he sat back. “What I mean is this: I could help get rid of Farris, but without a change in the way chairmen of the NTSB are picked, the next chairman could be worse. So, we need a more permanent fix. We need, in other words, to concentrate on how we could fix the
structure
of the NTSB so this sort of thing would be impossible, or at least much less likely, in the future.”

“All right. Yes. But how … you mean a bill of some sort?”

“That's the starting point, Joe. A bill to restructure the NTSB. That would be controversial in my party because we're in control of the White House, and why rock the boat? But, it gives us two major advantages. One, we get people up here on the Hill focused on what's wrong, even if they're not willing to vote to change it; and two, we get a license to hold hearings, through which all this nefarious skulking around can be hauled into the sunshine, perhaps on national TV.”

Joe looked at the senator with a mixture of admiration and concern. This had started out as a cry for help. Suddenly the man was talking about national television. Alarm bells were sounding in Joe's head.

Martinson chuckled and held up his hand. “Don't panic, Joe, I see the look on your face. Let me take this step by step.”

Kell explained what it would take politically to get the chairman of his Senate committee, which was above Kell's subcommittee, to approve expedited hearings on a bill to restructure the NTSB. “To a certain extent it could be the fishing expedition we would need to expose these immediate problems, but it could also do a lot of good in sending a warning to others that any future attempt to influence an investigation will blow up in their faces.” Kell turned slightly toward Cindy, watching for any cautionary reaction. There was none, and he continued. “We could even get the chief pilot here to testify, and perhaps pull the truth out of him. Sometimes it's far more difficult to lie to Congress than to a governmental agency such as yours. Now, if I can pull the right levers, so to speak, we could set this up just after the New Year, a little less than a month from now. Cynthia? What do you think?”

She thought about that for a moment while checking a notebook on her lap. “Difficult, but not impossible. I think we could do it.”

Kell turned back to Joe. “We'd give no warning to your chairman, of course. We'd let him walk into the crossfire thinking this was a routine matter. That would be far more effective than giving him time to prepare explanations and circle his wagons.”

“I don't follow you there,” Joe said.

“I mean we'll want to ask him on the record and in public just who he's been talking to about NTSB investigations, and how those conversations might have influenced those investigations. We'll also want to ask him about his stock ownership—provided, as you cautioned, that tip is accurate. But that follows naturally, don't you see, from our stated purpose of examining how well today's structure works in isolating the board politically, as we tried to do with the Independent Safety Board Act of 1974. You remember that bill, by the way?”

Joe nodded. “Sure do. A good friend of mine blew the whistle on the Nixon gang's efforts to influence the Board, and that led to passage of the bill. He was effectively forced off the NTSB staff as a result.”

“I just read a summary of the story, Joe.” Kell tapped the folder he had retrieved from his credenza. “You remember I told you just yesterday that I've been wanting to do this for quite a while. This is the ideal time. And for me, politically, this is an important issue.”

“Really? Why?”

“The inability of the field offices to do more than a two- or three-day investigation—without additional support, mind you—into general aviation crashes. I come from a general aviation manufacturing state, as you know, and some of the accidents the NTSB field people have ascribed to mechanical and structural failure have probably in truth been human failures. I've got manufacturers in my state who've literally been put out of the small-airplane business because of soaring liability costs, and poor-quality accident investigation only makes that problem worse.”

“I'm impressed,” Joe said.

“I saw one, firsthand, involving a Beech light twin which crashed for no apparent reason on an evening approach. Single pilot operation. Your man came out, did his best, couldn't find a cause, couldn't get Washington's authorization to probe further or do extensive lab tests or probe the pilot's life-style and background, and he just had to close the book. It took a safety consultant nearly six months to uncover the cause, which was chronic fatigue of the pilot.”

Now Joe was moving to the edge of the couch. “I do have some ideas.”

“I knew you would,” Kell told him. “And we've got quite a body of staff work around here which I helped to spark several years ago, Joe. As I mentioned, I do have a man who's done some work for me on this, and the reason I want to keep his name out of it for the moment is because he's still with the Board.”

Kell had a hand up, as much to stop himself as to trigger Joe's response. “You were going to tell me your ideas, Joe.”

“Well, we too are somewhat prepared, not just from bull sessions and scuttlebutt among the staff—though there's plenty of that—but because of a staff group formed by a number of us very quietly two years ago. We made it a semisocial sort of thing, get together and brainstorm what the ideal Board would be. Never produced a written report, but I know the proposals by heart.”

“Go ahead, please. Cynthia? Could you take some notes?”

“No problem.” She had already been scribbling incessantly, in a steno book.

“Okay,” Joe began, “for starters, we need to break it into two boards, one just devoted to aviation. The current work load in aviation is enough for two NTSBs. Bogging us down and diluting our aviation expertise with all these rail and pipeline and highway and ship accidents is idiotic. We try to do a professional job on the aviation accidents, but we don't have the time or the funds. We're supposed to monitor safety trends as well, but who has time? We're almost totally reactive. There should be a separate board, perhaps called the National Surface Transportation Safety Board, to handle all that. Separate staff, separate board members, separate funding, everything.” Joe felt himself getting enthusiastic.

“Let's look at that,” Kell replied. “What else?”

“Well, the chairman problem is because of two things. One, the current guy is a political hack without sufficient aviation experience. Yes, he was on the blue-ribbon panel, but he had no credentials for that, except being a loyal party man. Sorry, your party again, but the lesson would be the same whether Democrat or Republican. The chairmanship of the NTSB—and for that matter all the board positions that are appointed—should not be political patronage plums. I may be stepping on your toes saying that—”

“No. It so happens I agree. Go on.”

“It just creates trouble. The staff has to try to educate the Board members who want to be educated, and work around the ones who are just biding their time till they get a cabinet position or ambassadorship, or whatever they want out of the White House. The rules were changed several years back to require technical experience in two of the five Board members, but for the chairman in particular, there are no requirements for technical knowledge. I'm convinced that Farris is one of those just biding his time. He should never have been appointed.”

“So, we should change the appointment process? Or just the criteria for selection?”

“Both.” Joe nodded. “Make certain only highly knowledgeable aviation people are eligible, preferably people with a technological pedigree and substantial experience in aviation-accident investigation. And as for the appointment process, there should be a technically qualified board appointed to pick the NTSB members and the chairman, and a longer term for all involved so they'll outlast the president who picked the board that picked them, and therefore they won't feel the need to check which way the wind is blowing before watering down our findings.”