Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  I tried to reach him as one pilot to another. I said, ‘Come on, I think of that as being a normal operation, don’t you?’

  He said, ‘Well, if it is, I don’t want to fly in the New York area!’

  It was nonsense. And in aviation terms, a lot of what he said to me was equally unconvincing. Eventually I stopped taking notes. Even when he was being reasonable, the party line kept showing through. He said, ‘I cannot say it’s a mechanical failure. I don’t have enough evidence, but I cannot dismiss the possibility of a mechanical failure… if I want to be careful.’

  I said, ‘On the other hand, you do have enough evidence to dismiss the human factor?’

  He said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘To dismiss the intentional act?’

  ‘Yes.’ He paused. He said, ‘We search for the truth.’

  It was late in the day. Kelada sat behind his desk – a man in a big office with jets outside, a smart man, a careful man. I thought of the question that had plagued me all along: not whether the Egyptians were right or wrong but whether they really believed their own words. Loeb had said to me, ‘Do they believe it? I believe they believe in fear.’

  I went downtown, to an old coffeehouse near the Nile, and spent a few hours with Hani Shukrallah, a columnist and one of the more thoughtful observers of the Egyptian scene. Shukrallah is a small, nervous man, and a heavy smoker. He said, ‘I know that as far as the Egyptian government was concerned, the point that this was not pilot error, and that the Egyptian pilot did not bring it down – this was decided before the investigation began. It had to do with Egypt’s image in the outside world… The government would have viewed this exactly as it would, for example, an Islamic terrorist act in Luxor – something that we should cover up. So it got politicized immediately. And this became an official line: You are out there to prove that EgyptAir is not responsible. It became a national duty. It was us versus the West. And all the history played into it, from Bonaparte’s campaign until now.’ In the minds even of people on the street, Shukrallah said, it became ‘an all-out war.’

  If so, the United States was in such a strong position that it could lose the struggle only by defeating itself. This is why from the very start of the difficult process it was all the more important for the NTSB to consider the evidence fairly and keep an open mind. The problem was that so many of the scenarios the Egyptians posited were patently absurd – stray missiles, ghost airplanes, strange weather, and the like. Yet that didn’t mean that everything they said was wrong. As long as Batouti’s motive could not be conclusively shown, the possibility remained that the dive of Flight 990 was unintentional, just as Kelada maintained. And in the background the Egyptians had some very smart engineers looking into the various theories.

  The 767’s elevator movements are powered by three redundant hydraulic circuits, driving a total of six control mechanisms called ‘actuators,’ which normally operate in unison. Given the various linkages and cross-connections, the system is complex. The Egyptians thought it through and realized that if two of the six actuators were to fail on the same side of the airplane, they would drive both elevators down, forcing the 767 to pitch into a dive that might match the profile that had emerged from EgyptAir 990’s flight-data recorder. Furthermore, if such a failure happened and either pilot tried to right it, that could conceivably explain the ‘splitting’ of the elevators that occurred during 990’s attempted recovery.

  As might be expected, the discussion about dual actuator failures grew complicated. It also grew political. The NTSB had salvaged most of the actuators from the ocean floor and had found no clear evidence of failure, but with perceptions of public safety at stake, the agency asked Boeing for further information. Boeing engineers calculated that a dual actuator failure would not have deflected the elevators far enough down to equal the known elevator deflections of Flight 990, and that such a failure therefore would not have caused as steep a dive. To explore the question they performed a series of ground tests of a 767 elevator, inducing dual actuator failures and ‘splits’ on a parked airplane in Seattle. After adjusting the measured effects for the theoretical aerodynamic pressures of flight, they found – as they had expected – poor correlation with the known record of Flight 990 elevator positions. They believed in any case that either pilot could quickly have recovered from a dual actuator failure by doing what comes naturally at such moments – pulling back hard on the controls.

  The NTSB was satisfied; the Egyptians were not. They poked holes in the conclusions and requested basic and costly aerodynamic research, at speeds well beyond the 767’s limits, toward Mach 1. The question was, of course, To what end? But for Boeing this was a delicate thing, because Egypt kept buying expensive airplanes and was influential in the Arab world. A bit of additional research would perhaps be in order.

  Meanwhile, the company’s engineers had moved on to flight simulations of the accident, a series of dives set up to be flown in Boeing’s highly programmable 767 engineering simulator – a ‘fixed cab’ without motion, capable of handling extremes. These were the profiles that I flew when I went to Seattle last summer. On that same trip I went to Everett, Washington, where the airplanes are made, and in a cockpit with a company test pilot split the elevators in a powered-up 767, as the Egyptian crew presumably had. In order to do this we needed to break the connection between the left and right control yokes, which are mechanically joined under the floorboards, and usually move together. He pushed on his, I pulled on mine, and at fifty pounds of pressure between us the controls were suddenly no longer working in tandem. Far behind us, at the tail, the elevators separated smoothly. On a cockpit display we watched each elevator go its own way. The airplane shuddered from the movement of the heavy control surfaces. We played with variations. Toward the end the pilot laughed and said I was compressing his bones.

  But when I got to the simulations, they felt too real to be a game. The simulator was a surrogate cockpit already in flight – humming and warm, with all the controls and familiar displays, and a view outside of an indistinct twilight. It was headed east at 33,000 feet and .79 Mach – just as Flight 990 had been. The first set of profiles were ‘back-driven’ duplications of the fatal dive, generated directly from Flight 990’s flight-data recorder. Another Boeing test pilot sat in Batouti’s seat, and the engineers clustered around behind. I let the simulation run on automatic the first few times, resting one hand on the controls to feel the beast die – the sudden pitch and shockingly fast dive, the clicking of a wildly unwinding altimeter, the warbling alarm, the loss of most displays at the bottom after the engines were gone, and the dark, steep, soaring climb up to 24,000 feet, the control yoke rattling its warning of an aerodynamic stall, the airplane rolling southeast to its end. I watched this several times and then flew the same thing by hand, matching the pressure I put on the control yoke to a specially rigged indicator, which, after the elevators’ split had occurred, allowed me to match the force required to achieve Habashi’s ‘pull’ and Batouti’s ‘push’ as captured by the flight-data recorder. First I stood and flew Habashi’s ‘Pull with me!’ from behind the seat – up to ninety pounds of force, which under those conditions seemed like not very much. It was the other intention, the pushing, that was dramatic. What was required was not only pushing but then pushing harder. The idea that someone would do that in an airplane full of passengers shocked me as a pilot. If that’s what Batouti did, I will never understand what was going on in his mind.

  The second set of simulations were easier to fly. These were the dual actuator failures, which EgyptAir proposed might have overcome Batouti when he was alone in the cockpit. The purpose was to test the difficulty or ease of recovery from such an upset. Again the simulations began at 33,000 feet and .79 Mach. I flew by hand from the start. The airplane pitched down strongly and without warning. I hauled back on the controls and lost 800 feet. It was an easy recovery, but not fair – I had been ready. The engineers then made me wait before reacting, as they had made other pil
ots – requiring delays of five, ten, and finally fifteen seconds before I began the recovery. Fifteen seconds seems like an eternity in a 767 going out of control. Even so, by hauling hard on the yoke and throttling back, I managed to pull out after losing only 12,000 feet; and though I went to the maximum allowable dive speed, the airplane survived. This was not unusual. Airplanes are meant to be flown. During the original simulation sessions done for the NTSB every pilot with a dual actuator failure was able to recover, and probably better than I. So what was wrong with Batouti? The simplest explanation is that he was trying to crash the airplane. But if he wasn’t, if the Egyptians were right that he couldn’t recover from a dual actuator failure, what was wrong with him as an aviator?

  I posed the question to Jim Walters, the airline pilot who despite his disappointment remained sympathetic to the Egyptians’ position. He had a ready answer. He called Batouti ‘the world’s worst airline pilot.’

  But how good do you have to be?

  Bernard Loeb would have none of it. He said, ‘Sure. In the end they were willing to sell him down the river. They said, “He panicked!” Bottom line is, if the actuator drops the nose, you can pull it up. They know that. They admit it. Pulling the nose up is the most intuitive, reflexive thing you can do in an airplane. So when you start hearing arguments like that, you know people are blowing smoke.

  ‘Look, first we sit through this cockpit voice recording in which…’ He shook his head. ‘How many cockpit voice recordings have I heard? Hundreds? Thousands? When someone has a problem with an airplane, you know it. One of our investigators used to say to me, “These damned pilots, they don’t tell us what’s happening. Why don’t they say, ‘It’s the rudder!’” They don’t do that. But I’ll tell you what they do say. They make it clear as hell that there’s something really wrong. “What the hell’s going on? What is that?” Every single one of them. When there’s a control problem of some sort, it is so crystal clear that they are trying desperately to diagnose what is going on. Right to when the recorder quits. They are fighting for their lives.

  ‘But this guy is sitting there saying the same thing in a slow, measured way, indicating no stress. The captain comes in and asks what’s going on, and he doesn’t answer! That’s what you start with. Now you take the dual actuator failure that doesn’t match the flight profile, and is also fully recoverable. Where do you want to go after that?’

  The NTSB’s final report on Flight 990 was expected for the fall of 2001, and it was widely presumed in aviation circles that the report would find no mechanical failure or external cause for the crash. It also seemed likely that the report would at least implicitly blame Batouti for the disaster – a conclusion that would, of course, be unacceptable within Egypt. Nonetheless, when I met him in Cairo, Shaker Kelada was looking pleased, and I later found out why. His engineers had gotten busy again, and had come up with new concerns – certain combinations of tail-control failures that might require further testing. Now Boeing had come to town for a quiet talk with its customers, and had agreed to do the tests. Boeing was going to inform the NTSB of the new work, and the end would again be delayed.

  Sitting in his office, Kelada could not help gloating. He said, ‘Jim Hall told me, “I’ve learned a very good lesson. When you deal with a foreign carrier in an investigation, before you go anywhere with it, you have to study the history and culture of the country.” These were his own words to me! He said, “I knew nothing about Egypt or its culture before we got into EgyptAir 990.”’

  I said, ‘What would he have learned?’

  ‘Not to underestimate people. To think that he’s way up there, and everybody’s way down here.’

  Fair enough. But in the end there was the question of the objective truth – and there was the inclination not to seek real answers for even such a simple event as a single accident nearly two years before.

  I knew that at the start of the investigation the Egyptian delegation had included a man named Mamdouh Heshmat, a high official in civil aviation. When the cockpit voice recording first arrived at L’Enfant Plaza, Heshmat was there, and he heard it through with a headset on. According to several investigators who listened alongside him, he came out of the room looking badly shaken, and made it clear he knew that Batouti had done something wrong. He may have called Cairo with that news. The next day he flew home, never to reappear in Washington. When NTSB investigators went to Cairo, they could not find him, though it was said that he was still working for the government. I knew I wouldn’t find him either, but I wanted to see how Kelada would react to the mention of him. Kelada and I had come to the end. I said I had heard about a man who had been one of the first to listen to the tape – who could it have been? Kelada looked straight at me and said, ‘I don’t recall his name.’ There was no reason to continue, from his perspective or mine.

  8

  Columbia’s Last Flight

  Space flight is known to be a risky business, but during the minutes before dawn on February 1, 2003, as the doomed shuttle Columbia began to descend into the upper atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, only a handful of people – a few engineers deep inside of NASA – worried that the vehicle and its seven souls might actually come to grief. It was the responsibility of NASA’s managers to hear those suspicions, and from top to bottom they failed. After the fact, that’s easy to see. But in fairness to those whose reputations have now been sacrificed, seventeen years and eighty-nine shuttle flights had passed since the Challenger explosion, and within the agency a new generation had risen that was smart, perhaps, but also unwise – confined by NASA’s walls and routines, and vulnerable to the self-satisfaction that inevitably had set in.

  Moreover, this mission was a yawn – a low-priority ‘science’ flight forced onto NASA by Congress and postponed for two years because of a more pressing schedule of construction deliveries to the International Space Station. The truth is, it had finally been launched as much to clear the books as to add to human knowledge, and it had gone nowhere except into low Earth orbit, around the globe every ninety minutes for sixteen days, carrying the first Israeli astronaut, and performing a string of experiments, many of which, like the shuttle program itself, seemed to suffer from something of a make-work character – the examination of dust in the Middle East (by the Israeli, of course); the ever popular ozone study; experiments designed by schoolchildren in six countries to observe the effect of weightlessness on spiders, silkworms, and other creatures; an exercise in ‘astroculture’ involving the extraction of essential oils from rose and rice flowers, which was said to hold promise for new perfumes; and so forth. No doubt some good science was done too – particularly pertaining to space flight itself – though none of it was so urgent that it could not have been performed later, under better circumstances, in the under-booked International Space Station. The astronauts aboard the shuttle were smart and accomplished people, and they were deeply committed to human space flight and exploration. They were also team players, by intense selection, and nothing if not wise to the game. From orbit one of them had radioed, ‘The science we’re doing here is great, and it’s fantastic. It’s leading-edge.’ Others had dutifully reported that the planet seems beautiful, fragile, and borderless when seen from such altitudes, and they had expressed their hopes in English and Hebrew for world peace. It was Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread, standard NASA fare. On the ground so little attention was being paid that even the radars that could have been directed upward to track the Columbia’s re-entry into the atmosphere – from Vandenberg Air Force Base, or White Sands Missile Range – were sleeping. As a result, no radar record of the breakup exists – only of the metal rain that drifted down over East Texas, and eventually came into the view of air-traffic control.

  Along the route, however, stood small numbers of shuttle enthusiasts, who had gotten up early with their video cameras and had arrayed themselves on hills or away from city lights to record the spectacle of what promised to be a beautiful display. The shuttle came into view, on
track and on schedule, just after 5:53 Pacific time, crossing the California coast at about 15,000 mph in the super-thin air 230,000 feet above the Russian River, northwest of San Francisco. It was first picked up on video by a Lockheed engineer in suburban Fairfield, who recorded a bright meteor passing almost directly overhead, not the shuttle itself but the sheath of hot gases around it, and the long, luminous tail of ionized air known as plasma. Only later, after the engineer heard about the accident on television, did he check his tape and realize that he had recorded what appeared to be two pieces coming off the Columbia in quick succession, like little flares in its wake. Those pieces were recorded by others as well, along with the third, fourth, and fifth ‘debris events’ that are known to have occurred during the sixty seconds that it took the shuttle to cross California. From the top of Mount Hamilton, southeast of San Francisco, another engineer, the former president of the Peninsula Astronomical Society, caught all five events on tape but, again, did not realize it until afterward. He later said, ‘I’d seen four re-entries before this one. When we saw it, we did note that it was a little brighter and a little bit whiter in color than it normally is. It’s normally a pink-magenta color. But you know, it wasn’t so different that it really flagged us as something wrong. With the naked eye we didn’t see the particles coming off.’

  One minute after the Columbia left California, as it neared southwestern Utah, the trouble was becoming more obvious to observers on the ground. There had been a bright flash earlier over Nevada, and now debris came off that was large enough to cause multiple secondary plasma trails. North of the Grand Canyon, in Saint George, Utah, a man and his grown son climbed onto a ridge above the county hospital, hoping for the sort of view they had seen several years before, of a fireball going by. It was a sight they remembered as ‘really neat.’ This time was different, though. The son, who was videotaping, started yelling, ‘Jesus, Dad, there’s stuff falling off!’ and the father saw it too, with his naked eyes.