Impact (45 page)

“Yes.”

“And fifty percent of the exits is two exits?”

“Right In the version we flew.”

“So to comply with regulations, sixty passengers had to move through each of those exits in ninety seconds. If my math's correct, that's one and a half seconds per passenger.”

“Right.”

“So tell us. Did SurfAir pass the tests?”

Her mouth wrinkled. “They're still flying them, aren't they?”

Tollison waited for a titter from the audience to fade. “Can you tell us
how
SurfAir managed to pass those tests?”

Polly Janklow turned full front toward the panel. “The first test was run even before we had the planes.”

“How is it possible to test a plane you don't have?”

“They made a pattern on the floor in the maintenance hangar—laid out tape to show the cabin walls, put in folding chairs for seats, built little wood frames where the exits were, that kind of thing. See, they were trying to decide which model they were going to buy, and they were worried about the evacuation rules, so they—”

“Objection,” Chambers shouted.
“She
has no knowledge of what SurfAir was worried about or whether it was worried about anything at all. Move to strike as hearsay.”

“Sustained. The jury will disregard the statements about the company's concerns.”

Tollison waved away the irritant. “After they had acquired the aircraft, did they run a second test?”

“Yes. That was sometime in the fall of '85. This time they used a real airplane,” she added briskly.

“Tell me about the second test. Do you feel it was a fair test of the emergency evacuation?”

“Objection—speculation.”

“Sustained.”

“Your Honor, this woman has been trained in emergency procedures. She should have a good idea whether—”

“Continue, Mr. Tollison,” Powell instructed.

His fatigue fed by his defeat, Tollison rubbed his eyes again. “Tell us how the second test was done, Miss Janklow.”

“First of all, they used the best-trained crews in the system to play the passengers, including people who'd done these tests before.”

“Hardly the typical air traveler.”

“Not even close. And of course no one thought it was a
real
emergency—we all knew it was a test. The whole thing was a joke, basically. I mean—”

“Objection. Move to strike the word joke.”

“Sustained,” Judge Powell ruled. “The jury will disregard the characterization. Please confine your testimony to the facts, Ms. Janklow. Leave the editorializing to the lawyers—they're getting paid for it.”

The room chuckled above Polly Janklow's terse apology. “What I meant was, there wasn't any
effort
to make it an emergency condition. The lights were on the whole time. There was no smoke or fire or anything else that threatened anyone. It was more a party type of thing, to tell the truth about it.”

“Is there any reason a true emergency environment couldn't be created?”

“Only money. Japan Airlines uses a crash simulator in their tests and training both—it turns out smoke, fire, noise, the whole works.”

“Did anything else ease the difficulty of evacuating the aircraft rapidly?”

She nodded disgustedly. “The fifty-percent requirement is so you can assume two of the exits malfunction for some reason, right? But in a real crash, you won't know which exits aren't available until you
try
them. Then the people who find the door blocked have to turn around and go to another one, and there'd be a traffic jam and a lot of confusion that would use up a
lot
of those ninety seconds, it seems to me. But none of that could happen in the tests.”

“Why not?”

“Because we knew which exits were going to be blocked.”

“Before the test began?”

“Definitely. We knew the forward door and the starboard wing exit were the ones that didn't work.”

“How?”

“Because there were two video cameras in the plane and they were trained on the
other
exits, which meant those were obviously the ‘go' doors.”

Tollison crossed his arms. “Let me see if I have this right. A group of healthy young SurfAir employees is sitting around in a plane that's parked securely on the ground, the lights are on and the exits are marked, then someone blows a whistle and everyone runs for doors they've picked out ahead of time. The plane is empty in ninety seconds, and the company tells the FAA it passed the emergency test with flying colors. Is that the way it worked?”

Chambers's objection was a snarl. “The question is argumentative and counsel knows it.”

“Sustained. You know better, Mr. Tollison.”

Tollison grinned so only Laura and the jurors could see him. “Tell me, Miss Janklow. Based on the tests you have described, did you regard the exit configuration in the H-l1s flown by SurfAir as adequate in an emergency situation?”

Before she could respond, Chambers was on his feet. “There is no foundation for such testimony from this witness.”

“Sustained.”

Tollison shrugged. “Apparently the jury will have to decide how adequate they were; I have no more questions.”

“Mr. Chambers?”

Halfway to his seat, Tollison muttered to himself and shook his head, and Hawthorne knew the reason. Caught up in the wrangle over the tests, Tollison had forgotten to show that Polly Janklow was a biased witness. By bringing the details out himself, Tollison would suggest they were nothing that needed suppressing, no big deal, nothing for the jury to be concerned with. Now Chambers would make the revelation, which could cost them momentum and, worse, suggest to the jury that Tollison was not trying to produce the truth but to shield them from it.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Chambers was saying. “Miss Janklow, you were fired by SurfAir, weren't you?”

She arched her back. “I was terminated.”

“If you prefer the euphemism, fine. And you're suing SurfAir because of that dismissal, aren't you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You're suing in federal court for wrongful termination, you're alleging sexual harassment, and you're asking for a million dollars in damages, isn't that right?”

“If you knew what that bastard
said
to me, you'd know a million wasn't nearly enough to—”

“Objection,” Chambers shouted. “Nonresponsive.”

“Answer the question put to you and only the question put to you, Ms. Janklow. Please.”

“But—”

“
Do
it, Ms. Janklow.”

“I'm sorry, Your Honor.”

Chambers retreated to his table. “It's fair to say that you'd do
anything
to get back at SurfAir for firing you, isn't it?”

“I wouldn't lie. Not under oath.”

Chambers's smile was a stainless doubt. “By the way, you don't know for a fact that SurfAir didn't conduct evacuation tests that you had no part in, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Or conduct tests after you were terminated by the company for insubordination?”

“I don't know about that. And I wasn't insubordinate until my operations superintendent tried to get me to make it with him in the middle of the goddamn—”

“Move to
strike
, Your Honor.”

“Sustained. Behave yourself, Ms. Janklow. You can consider that a warning.”

Chambers regarded Polly Janklow the way he regarded the transients who loitered about the building. “That's all I have, Your Honor.”

“Rebuttal, Mr. Tollison?”

Under the guise of looking at the clock, Tollison glanced at Hawthorne, who turned his head an inch. “No, Your Honor,” Tollison said.

“The witness is excused. Next?”

Still shaken by his mistake, Tollison sounded hesitant. “Plaintiff calls Bryan Udall.”

The clerk disappeared in the direction of the witness room. A moment later a sunny, stocky man dressed in a camel blazer and tartan slacks took the stand and awaited a question with what looked very much like glee. “Please state your current employment, if any, Mr. Udall,” Tollison began.

“I have the pleasure to be retired.”

“Where did you work before you retired?”

“West Pacific Oil Company; Long Beach, California. For forty years.”

“What was your job at West Pacific at the time you left the company?”

“I was vice-president in charge of special fuels.”

“Was one of your projects the development of a safer aviation gasoline?”

The witness puffed with pride. “Yes, indeed. I nursed that baby on and off for more than a decade.”

“Tell us about it.”

Udall nodded briskly. “Well, in a plane crash one of the worst problems is fire. In fact, in survivable accidents fire kills twice as many passengers as the crash itself. Now, one of the factors that contributes to fire is the fuel tank—when it ruptures, chances of fire increases tenfold. At West Pacific we don't have anything to do with fuel tanks—Robertson Aviation and others make them, and we look them over from time to time, to keep current. The latest are made out of rubber. Indy cars use them and the army put them in its helicopters—cut deaths by fire back to almost nothing in the airmobile units. Problem is, no one at the
airlines
seems to want to buy them. I guess they figure—”

Chambers cut off the digression. “Move to strike the portion about the airlines not wanting the fuel tanks, Your Honor,” he grumbled “Hearsay.”

“Sustained. The jury will disregard the portion of the statement regarding the tanks. Proceed.”

“Tell us about your aviation fuel, Mr. Udall.”

Undeterred, the witness nodded happily. “Well, sir, what you usually get after a crash landing is a vapor in the cabin as a result of the rupture of the fuel tanks. Because of a high ratio of surface area to mass, gasoline vapor is highly flammable, much more so than the fuel in its liquid state.”

“What does it take to ignite that type of vapor, Mr. Udall?”

“Just a spark will do it.”

“Are sparks easy to come by in a plane crash?”

“You bet What with metal scraping along the ground and engines breaking apart, you get all
kinds
of sparks. The vapor could ignite in contact with a piece of hot metal—the combustion chambers, say—or even a heating element in the galley.”

“I take it at West Pacific you tried to improve the situation.”

“You bet your buttons we did. What we came up with was an additive we called Mistite—basically, it's a long-chain polymer I cooked up with the help of some work the British had done along those lines. It's an antimisting kerosene; when it's added to the tanks, it prevents jet fuel from vaporizing.”

“Doesn't jet fuel have to be vaporized for it to burn?”

“That's a fact; what you have to do with Mistite is add a degrader that converts the fuel back to a more volatile form just before it's squirted at the engines.”

“Did you run any tests on Mistite, Mr. Udall? To see if it worked to reduce the danger of a post-crash fire?”

“Hell, yes. We had excellent results in the lab and so did the FAA. They had studies that showed over a hundred lives a year might be saved if the carriers started using it. And I personally think that was on the low side.”

Tollison faced the jury. “When did the airlines start using your additive, Mr. Udall?”

For the first time since he took the stand, Udall's face grew dreary. “They never did.”

“Why not?”

“Because of this
test
they ran—one single solitary test—back in 1984.”

“Tell us about it.”

Udall shook his head, as though what he was about to say was too bizarre to be believed. “Basically, what they did was load Mistite in the tanks of a 720B and crash it out in the desert. Remote-controlled, of course.”

“What happened?”

Udall shook his head. “Sucker burned like she was built of balsa.”

Tollison shrugged. “So why
should
the airlines use Mistite? It didn't work, did it?”

“The
hell it didn't
. What happened was, they screwed up the crash. The remote-control operator got the plane off course and she smacked into these cutters that were supposed to rip open the wing tanks to generate a fuel spill that would create the vapor they were testing. But the plane hit them head-on, so the thing turned into a firebomb. This was supposed to be a
survivable
crash, but the way
that
airplane crashed the Lord Himself wouldn't have survived, Mistite or no Mistite.”

“What happened after that?”

Udall muttered an oath. “I tried to convince the FAA to run more tests, but they wouldn't. Claimed Mistite was a failure. But hell, even though there
was
a fire, the burn was cleaner and cooler than with ordinary fuel, which meant the fuselage wasn't penetrated, which is damn important if you're inside trying to get out. But they wouldn't listen to reason. When I got tired of boxing with them, I retired.”

“So SurfAir doesn't use an antifire additive in its jet fuel.”

“Nope. Neither does anyone else.”

“And the FAA doesn't require it.”

“No, sir. They don't even fund any research in the field.”

“Thank you, Mr. Udall. No further questions.”

“Mr. Chambers?”

Chambers remained seated. “Do you own stock in West Pacific Oil, Mr. Udall?”

“Sure do.”

“How much?”

“None of your business, is it?”

Judge Powell leaned to his right. “Please answer the question, Mr. Udall.”

Udall frowned. “Sorry, Judge. They didn't tell me I'd have to strip to my skivvies when I came down here. I got twenty thousand shares of my own and another thirty from the profit sharing.”

“So if West Pacific were able to peddle the additive to the airlines, you'd stand to make a lot of money, wouldn't you?”