LACKING VIRTUES

by Thomas Kirkwood

  “Yes, Susan, what is it?”

  “A few of us have been talking, Frank. Why don’t you let us take you out tonight for a leisurely dinner, some easy music. You know, get your mind off this whole frustrating affair for at least a few hours. You’re looking very exhausted.”

  “That’s kind of you, Susan. I appreciate it.”

  “Which means you won’t join us?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just not up to it. Thank the others for me. It was a nice thought.”

  “Take care of yourself, Frank. Sometimes I worry you feel responsible for these crashes. You shouldn’t.”

  “Good night, Susan. Enjoy your dinner.”

  Warner hung up and paced. Should he pore over the same mountains of paperwork on the United crash again? No. He knew the material backwards and forwards.

  Should he have dinner sent up and watch TV? He wasn’t hungry and couldn’t have cared less about anything on the tube.

  Should he try to sleep? That brought a smile to his lips.

  He picked up the phone and dialed United Airlines reservations. Yes, he could still get to Pittsburgh by morning if he didn’t mind changing planes in Chicago and airlines in Columbus.

  He next telephoned Yellow Cab, already packing with one hand while he waited for an answer. It was a relief to be moving. Whatever he did tonight, he was going to be miserable and unproductive. He might as well use the down time to haul himself to the next crash site.

  ***

  By the fourth day of the Pittsburgh investigation even the purists had given up eating cereal and grapefruit in the morning. The long white-clothed table in the Airport Sheraton conference room was strewn with half-eaten doughnuts, nibbled bear claws and dirty ashtrays. Used Styrofoam and porcelain coffee cups stood around in clusters containing liquid of varying depths and hues. Tired men and women shuffled through the charts, transcripts, and computer printouts they had been studying half the night.

  Tim Simmons came it at eight a.m. sharp, a light sweat from his morning workout still on his forehead. His tan suit fit to perfection, his shirt and tie looked new.

  Simmons pushed the platter of doughnuts aside, poured himself a glass of orange juice and stepped to the podium. “Good morning. You’re a gray looking bunch. Roth, Kendall, one of you please update the inventory of wreckage brought in yesterday.”

  There was grunting and more shuffling, a silent yawn and a noisy one. Simmons waited for someone to begin . . .

  ***

  The biggest problem of the Pittsburgh investigation was the manner in which the 767 had come apart. The violent explosion at 900 feet had hurled debris a great distance in all directions and disfigured a lot of the wreckage. The crash had taken place over an unpopulated area, which was fortunate. But the forests and undergrowth were dense, the days rainy, and some of the fragments so small they were nearly impossible to spot.

  After the second day Simmons had sent them all into the woods to help the hired hands – Ph.D.s in math, computer programmers, even Barb Lacey, who insisted on wearing high heels and stockings whenever she was on government time.

  “Hey,” Simmons said into the continuing silence, “we didn’t come here to meditate. One of you get this show on the road.”

  Roth, Kendall and the others did not respond. They were all staring past Simmons at some spot on the wall.

  “Come on, dammit,” Simmons said. “Frank’s gonna shit if he gets here and finds a bunch of hotshot specialists with nothing but muddy boots to show.”

  “This is true.”

  Simmons turned at the sound of that inimitable voice. Warner was standing just inside the doorway, red-eyed, rumpled and unshaven. He looked as if he were trying to decide whose head to bite off first.

  Simmons said, “Frank! Welcome. When did you arrive?”

  “Seven-forty, U.S. Air out of Columbus.”

  “You’ve been flying all night?”

  “And thinking.”

  “Well come on in. Have some breakfast. We’ll bring you up to date and then you can get some sleep.”

  “I’ll sleep when we figure out what happened. In case you haven’t heard, the pressure’s on in Washington. You can count on it getting a lot worse if we don’t have some answers for this crash soon. I’m sorry to say we’ve gotten nowhere on the United crash. Finish your briefing and meet me at the work site, Tim. I’m going over there now.”

  ***

  In the brightly lit hangar Warner surveyed the reconstruction, which still had a ways to go. Enough of the main body of the aircraft had been found and assembled to reveal a gaping, charred hole in right side of the fuselage. An untrained eye might have taken the wound as evidence of a bomb blast inside the plane, but the inward bend of the surrounding metal made it obvious to Warner that the explosion had not originated in the fuselage.

  An enormous patch of the right wing, from its point of contact with the body of the aircraft to well out past the attachment point of the engine pylon, was missing. Here the lacerated edges of the wing bordering the hole were bent outward, indicating an explosion of the wing tank, the cause of the mutilated fuselage.

  Warner knew from the CVR that the pilot had experienced severe vibrations shortly after take-off, and several dozen spectators had seen the right engine develop a shake and wobble that quickly grew worse. The home video film of a man who had recorded the accident, a copy of which Warner had received in San Francisco, left little doubt as to what had caused the explosion. Examining the film one frame at a time, he could see the engine under full thrust tearing loose from its pylon, swinging on an upward trajectory and slamming into the leading edge of the wing.

  Since this much was already known, the primary objective of the Pittsburgh investigation was to find out what had caused the engine to separate from the aircraft. The similar accident in Atlanta, also involving a 767 300 ER, made it tempting to assume that the aft engine mount had failed again. Warner hoped this was the case. If it was, it might reveal an inherent defect in the mounts that the Atlanta investigation had not turned up. But he knew he must heed the warning he never tired of giving his staff: assume nothing.

  Tim Simmons came in a few minutes later. He gave instructions to several men sorting the wreckage that had arrived yesterday afternoon on a flatbed truck, then walked over to Warner and looked him in the eye. “Are you ready for the bad news?”

  “No, but give it to me.”

  “It’s easier to explain when you’re staring the shit in the face. I kept the parts I knew you’d want to examine off to the side. They’ve only been here since noon yesterday. I didn’t get to study them closely until after dinner. When I called you at your hotel, you’d already left. This way, Frank.”

  Warner walked with Simmons to a corner of the hangar where big pieces of wreckage were still being numbered, catalogued and photographed before making their journey to the reconstruction site. He passed a twisted piece of the main landing gear, its great tires reduced to a few pounds of incinerated black gook; a fractured turbine blade bent like a scythe; a battered nacelle that must have been blown free of the engine when it hit the wing.

  Arriving late had one advantage, he thought: you didn’t see the bodies that had been shredded, pummeled, torn and burned by these same horrendous forces. You didn’t see them, but you never forgot they had been there.

  On a steel table beneath fluorescent lights, Simmons had laid out the front and aft engine mounts to the engine that had come off the plane, as well as two bent engine mounting bolts and remnants of two others that had sheered.

  The mounts were both still attached to surviving chunks of badly burned engine pylon. It was immediately evident to Warner that the bends and nicks they exhibited were the result of impact with the ground. They had not failed; the cause of the Atlanta crash had not been duplicated here.

  He experienced a sinking feeling. What the hell was going on? Why couldn’t he figure it out? Boeing jets were beginning to drop like pheasants in hunting season, yet none of the
crashes seemed to have anything in common. At what point did you conclude that this succession of disasters could not be coincidence? After three crashes? Five? Ten?

  He examined the mounting bolts one at a time. He could feel Simmons watching him. “Well, Frank? Do you notice anything odd?”

  “Yes. Two of these things evidently sheared off the way they’re supposed to when there is severe engine vibration. You were lucky to find these, Simmons. Nice job. The other two bent but did not break – the front two, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “That’s right, Frank, the front two didn’t break.”

  “This apparently caused the engine to swing upward and strike the wing instead of dropping away harmlessly.”

  “You can see just that in the video.”

  “Yes. What do we know about the engine? Why did it produce such powerful vibrations in the first place?”

  Simmons said, “This is where it gets bizarre. We’ve found all the moving components. The Pratt and Whitney people have been here, as well as two independent experts. They’ve examined the shafts, bearings, turbines, everything. They all agree nothing was wrong with the power plant. There was no catastrophic engine failure. The black box bears this out.”

  “Do you mean to tell me those two rear mounting bolts snapped under the normal stress of take-off?”

  “Yes, Frank. We’ll have them sent out and stress-tested properly in the next few days, but Johnson, the metallurgy guy, has already taken a look at them. He says evidence of metal fatigue is written all over them – pre-crash metal fatigue.”

  “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.