LACKING VIRTUES (24 page)

“This can’t be, Tim. If you’re right, it means that
all four
mounting bolts were defective, does it not?”

“Go on. Let’s see if we’re thinking along the same lines.”

“Two sheared when they should not have, producing out of parameter vibrations from the engine. The other two, had their tensile strength been within specs, would have snapped at this point. But instead they resisted enormous forces. Look at them. Look at how they’re bent. Have you ever seen this type of a bolt bend but not break?” 

“Exactly, chief. I don’t get it. As I said earlier, in the thirteen years these Seven Fives and Seven Sixes have been flying, we’ve had zero trouble with any of the engine mounting components. On the 747, yes, but that’s a different bird with a different mounting system.”

“It’s not right, I agree. We’re going to have to look more closely into anything Boeing might have done to change the way these parts are manufactured.”

“Where’s that going to get us, Frank? You’re forgetting that these things are examined with the most reliable equipment in the world before they join the parts stream. We know the equipment functions because it has and does uncover an occasional defect. Besides, your Hawaii crash involved engine components that are supplied by Pratt and Whitney, not Boeing.”

“It could all be coincidence. In fact, it probably is.”

“Maybe, Frank. But it seems to me we should at least consider another possibility.

“Which is?”

“Tampering. The possibility that something is going on between the time the parts are manufactured and the time they’re installed. This 767 just had its engines removed and overhauled. It received new mounts and mounting bolts. In fact, of the three crashes we’ve had in the last five months, all three aircraft had just been in for maintenance. With the two Seven Six crashes, we know for a fact the parts that failed had been replaced. The same is probably true of the Seven Five crash. I’m sorry, Frank, but that just doesn’t sound like coincidence to me.”

Warner emitted a long frustrated groan. “It strikes me as highly irregular. But we’ve gone to great extremes to check and authenticate the serial numbers
and
the actual parts. I simply can’t conceive of a scenario in which tampering could happen.”

“Look, Frank, neither can I. But the circumstantial evidence is piling up. I don’t see how we can ignore it.”

“We can’t ignore it. But we can’t embrace it either – can’t embrace it until we find some hard evidence. Go to work. I’ll pay Larsen a visit. Maybe it’s time we started listening to him. And one more thing, Simmons.” – ”

“Yes, sir?”

“I don’t want the others to know about this. We’re not cops. Conspiracy theories can be distracting. Go on, get distracted. But don’t corrupt the team. There are still a lot of unanswered questions that fall within the normal scope of an investigation.”

“Got it, Frank. I think we’re moving in the right direction.”

“I hope so.”

For a long time after Simmons left, Warner sat there with the mounting bolts, turning them over in his hands.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ray Sels took off his headset, stood and stretched. Twelve hours in the frenetic O’Hare control tower was about six hours too many, he thought, staring at the Italian sub he hadn’t had time to eat. He pitched it into the trash, still in its wrapper, and wondered if he’d be able to sleep when he got home. Not likely. That was the unspoken hell of an air traffic controller: you got drowsy when dozens of big jets and thousands of passengers were depending for their lives on your alertness; and awoke to a state of hyper vigilance the instant you found yourself in a soothing environment. 

He glanced at his watch: 10:35 a.m.  Maybe he’d wait a few minutes for Ginny Miller, a major league looker on his shift who sometimes went out with him afterwards for a “daycap.” He told himself she would be the non-prescription relaxant he needed if he could get her between the sheets. So far, nothing, but lately she had been warming up.

Glass in all directions, you couldn’t help glancing at the maze of runways and masses of arriving and departing airliners no matter how long you had been staring out.

Half asleep, he watched an American Airlines 757 lift off like the ten thousand aircraft before it and ten thousand to come, climbing steeply and beginning its gentle turn to the right. Suddenly he snapped out of his daze. Something was wrong. The jet shuddered like a game bird hit by buckshot, yawed violently to the left and started to roll. Seconds later it slammed into the earth. The explosion, its thunderous boom lagging eerily behind the flash, was audible even in the soundproof control tower.  

***

Hal Larsen sat on deck, gazing across several miles of slate gray water at the crisp clean skyline of Seattle. There had been times these last few months when he felt like sailing the company yacht toward the South Seas and never coming back. But he knew he would never run away from disaster. He wasn’t that kind of a man.

While he waited for Delta CEO Reid Allworth to come up on deck, his mind drifted back to his early years at Boeing. He had gone to work for the company in the fifties, his first job out of Stanford Graduate School. He was an idealistic young engineer with a fervent belief that the time for introducing commercial jets was now. The company had staked its survival on the same belief, which was why Larsen picked Boeing over Convair and Douglas, each of whom had offered him more money.

His vision, like that of his company, seemed for one fateful moment in 1954 above Lake Washington destined to suffer a terrible blow. It was the day the prototype of the 707, Boeing’s big gamble, was to be flown in full view of the public the first time.

For the occasion, over 300,000 spectators – among them media people, airline executives and legions of nervous Boeing employees – lined the banks of the lake, hoping to catch a glimpse of what Boeing touted as the future of air travel.

The plane, enormous by the day’s standards, came roaring in just above the water at 450 miles an hour, climbed at an angle so steep it would have caused a prop-driven aircraft to stall, then spun into a 360 degree barrel roll.

Larsen felt his heart stop. It seemed certain that something had gone wrong with the jet and that its maiden voyage would end, like the Titanic’s, as a tragic legend.

But nothing was wrong with the plane. It had not stalled or come apart in the air but had flown to the far end of the lake and returned like a fighter on a strafing mission. Incredibly, it had repeated the same steep climb and breathtaking barrel roll.

On that day the age of the passenger jet began in earnest and, with it, the rise of Boeing to the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial aircraft.

Larsen believed his predecessor, Bill Allen, had ordered the daring show to demonstrate the structural integrity of the new aircraft. He did not learn until later that Allen had been furious about the maneuver, which had been done on impulse by the company’s freewheeling test pilot, Tex Boullioun.

Structural integrity. That had been Boeing’s reputation in the Second World War, when Flying Fortresses returned from raids over Germany missing great chunks of wing, tail and fuselage; and it was Boeing’s well-earned reputation in the jet age. It hadn’t been easy to bring down a B-17 with .50 calibre canon and 88 millimeter flak, and it wasn’t easy to bring down a 767 today.

So why the hell were they crashing as if they had been designed and built by a bunch of careless drunks?

  He would find out, the world would find out, but the important question was when. Right now he had his hands full just holding the company together. If he lost the support of increasingly skittish airline executives such as Allworth, he feared Boeing could go into a financial tailspin from which it would not recover – at least not in his lifetime. He had to be as strong as those wounded B-17s limping home from Stuttgart with two engines and half a wing blown off. He hadn’t led Boeing to the top to preside over its decline in his last year as chairman and chief executive officer.

Allworth had flown in from Atlanta today for the meeting. He had insisted that no attorneys or witnesses be present, just the two chairmen, face-to-face.

Larsen had agreed but had extracted a minor concession: that the meeting be held on the company yacht rather than at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel, as Allworth had wanted. He did not divulge his reason for wanting to meet the Delta chief on the yacht because it was symbolic rather than substantive. It was on a similar boat that Delta and Boeing officials had broken the ice in the early seventies, a warming that led to billions of dollars of aircraft sales that would otherwise have gone to Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas.

Allworth had called from Atlanta to ask what kind of clothes he should bring. Larsen laughed to himself. Don’t worry, Reid, he’d told him. You probably can’t get a wool sweater in Atlanta. But you and I are the same size and I’ve got enough to fill a 747.

When Allworth joined him on deck, he was wearing his own wool sweater, not one of the two dozen Larsen had had sent to his hotel room. This was Larsen’s first sign that his friend of two decades, the man whose confidence he desperately needed to shore up the crumbling dikes, might have slipped beyond his grasp.

A server, a pretty girl with a British accent, brought out a superb bottle of champagne and a platter of Beluga caviar, standard fare for the airline executives being wined and dined on the yacht. Allworth, a bon vivant of some repute, ignored both.

This, thought Larsen, was the second bad sign.

“Are you feeling all right?” he asked.

“I’m all right, Hal. Thanks for meeting me alone. One does tire of all the lawyers and accountants.”

“I should say so. Reid, before you get going with what you’ve come here to discuss, I hope you’ll let me have a few words.”

“Of course,” said Allworth, the consummate southern gentleman when he wished to be.

“Thank you. First, I want to repeat what I’ve been saying from the beginning. This debacle with our planes is the work of an outside element. Our only failure, if you wish to view it as such, has been our inability to convince the authorities of this fact. I think they’re coming around now. Warner called me this morning. I assure you we’re going to get to the bottom of this thing very soon. When we do, and when the responsible parties are put out of commission, the stigma the flying public has started to attach to our aircraft will vanish.

“Second, Reid, we’ve had options for new aircraft canceled to the tune of forty-seven billion dollars. We’re suddenly finding ourselves in a position I thought impossible. The banks won’t lend us money. We’re on the verge of financial collapse.

“I need my friends to stand behind me, Reid. Specifically, I need the support of men like yourself, the CEOs of the big domestic carriers. Together we’ve made jet air travel a way of life. Together we can overcome this crisis and move toward a bright future. Don’t cancel your options with us, Reid. Over the long haul, it would not be in Delta’s best interest. And over the short haul it would deal me and my company a terrible blow.”

Allworth had been looking out over the water during the entire monologue, unwilling to meet Larsen’s eyes. Now he poured himself a glass of champagne and spread some Beluga on a cracker. “I hear you, Hal, but I’m afraid I can’t help you. If we were talking about my personal resources, it would be different. But we’re not, are we? We’re talking about my stockholders and employees. I’m their chairman. I have a fiduciary duty to them and owe them a special debt of gratitude for making Delta the fine organization it is. I cannot and will not let my airline sink because your aircraft have suddenly become unreliable.”

“But, Reid, Boeing is not the cause of these crashes.”