Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  From the cockpit none of this damage was in view, but the pilots knew that the airplane was badly wounded and might at any moment die. They needed to land as soon as possible, but to do that they had to descend to low altitudes, where if they were not careful with airspeeds the thicker air might tear the plane apart. Paladino said, ‘Want to keep the speeds low.’ But he also knew that if he got too slow he might lose the ability to control the roll. Someone whispered ‘Fuck it!’ into a microphone. At that very moment the Boeing hit the ground unseen somewhere behind and below. Paladino pushed a button on the Flight Management System and found that the nearest airport lay one hundred miles ahead. The airport was identified by its four-letter code, SBCC, whatever that meant. For all they knew it was a jungle strip of the sort that missionaries use, and completely inadequate for a Legacy. They needed more information, like field elevation and runway length. Paladino said, ‘I got the nearest airport right there. Look that up if you want.’ Looking it up might have been possible electronically, but they did not know how. Somewhere they had paper charts that might contain the information. Breathing hard, Lepore asked, ‘It was books on your side?’ Paladino said, ‘Yeah, no, yeah, I got it.’ Lepore reached again for the controls, saying, ‘I got the…’ Paladino wouldn’t have it. He said, ‘Let me just fly the thing, dude, ’cause I just think…’

  Lepore said, ‘Where the FUCK did he come from?’

  Paladino said, ‘Did we hit somebody? Did you see that? Did you see something?’

  Lepore was hesitant. ‘I thought I saw… I looked up…’ He made another Mayday call, but remained behind the game. Struggling to look up information about the nearest airport, he said, ‘What is it… S?’

  Paladino answered, ‘S-B-C-C. We’ll just go direct to it.’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s big enough.’

  Paladino said, ‘I know. We’ll just fly. We’ll find out. Trying to contact these fuckers. They won’t answer the radio.’

  Lepore said, ‘S… B… C… C?’

  Paladino said, ‘Yeah.’ Somebody gasped. Apparently Paladino had scanned the displays. He said, ‘Dude! [Do] you have the TCAS on?’

  Lepore said, ‘Yes, the TCAS is off.’ There are two ways to understand the reversal in his answer – either that he was fumbling his words or that right after ‘Yes’ he finally noticed the warnings on the cockpit displays, showing that the TCAS was off and the transponder was on standby. From his intonation on the recordings it is impossible to tell. But far away on air traffic control screens, at that moment, the airplane’s transponder suddenly reappeared.

  In the cockpit, the implications of an inoperative TCAS would have been obvious: the airplane would have been electronically invisible to other airplanes in flight, and would itself have been blind. For ten seconds neither pilot spoke. Then Paladino said, ‘All right, just keep an eye out for traffic. I’ll do that, I’ll do that, I’ll do that. I got that.’

  The descent was a one-man show. It lasted about twenty minutes. While Paladino flew the airplane, Lepore struggled with the charts, trying to find information about the airport ahead. He never came up with much, except that SBCC is the identifying code for an airport called Cachimbo. He said, ‘I wish I had a fucking thing that I knew.’ He was frustrated and probably embarrassed. He had ceded a command which could not now be reclaimed. He continued to participate, but Paladino for his part kept taking over tasks that Lepore could have done. There was something overreaching about this behavior, as if Paladino had been waiting years to show his mettle, and would not now be denied. He was worried about dying – as much as anyone aboard. But he was a soldier with a battlefield promotion, and engaged in the fight of his life. On the recordings his exhilaration is clear.

  A dangerous landing lay ahead. There was no telling what the extension of flaps and wheels would do. The control forces already were high, and Paladino was afraid to relieve them with trim. When he tried to slow below 230 miles an hour, he had a harder time maintaining wings-level flight, and had to accelerate again. This was bad. They descended through 10,000 feet. The salesman Henry Yandle came forward and stood by to help. At high altitude a passing Boeing 747 cargo flight had answered the Mayday call and was talking to air traffic control on the Legacy’s behalf, trying to extract information about Cachimbo. Paladino felt the control forces getting heavier. He sent Yandle back to see if the wing was coming apart.

  Lepore said, ‘We may just need to get on the ground.’ He meant, no matter what kind of runway they found, or if they found none. A forest landing would likely kill the pilots, but might allow some passengers to survive. He said, ‘I hate to say this.’

  Paladino answered with a clipped, soldierly ‘I understand that.’

  Cachimbo lay twenty-one miles ahead. Paladino had accelerated to 275 miles an hour and was trying to slow. Speed control was difficult, perhaps because of damage to the tail. The air below 10,000 was Amazonish – thick with smoke from forests being fired to clear the land. Paladino was fighting to raise the nose. ‘I’m not sure if I can get this thing slow, I have to be honest with you. So I’m gonna have to come in fast.’ Lepore said. ‘Come in fast, and we’ll just do what we can.’ He seemed to be better now. Yandle returned with news that the damage did not seem to be spreading.

  They spotted the airport ahead, a slash in the landscape, discernible to the practiced eye. As they approached they saw that it was a single paved runway and apparently long, oriented at a sharp angle to their direction of flight. The question of why such a runway exists in the middle of the jungle did not arise. But it is a military field, built by the Air Force for its own reasons and maintained complete with a control tower, however rarely it is used.

  The stricken Legacy overflew Cachimbo high and fast just as the 747 provided it with a frequency with which to contact distant Manaus. This led Lepore into a wasteful exchange with an irrelevant controller, who at least finally provided the frequency for the Cachimbo control tower. Sitting in his glass booth, presiding over a dormant field with no other airplanes in motion, the tower controller then occupied Lepore with his own confusions. Eventually he cleared the airplane to land, as if he had a choice in the matter. Those pilots were going to put the airplane on the ground regardless. That turned out to be quite difficult to do – a piece of flying that pushed Paladino and Lepore to their limits, and probably the Legacy as well. The problem was the damaged airplane’s inability to slow and its limited ability to bank to the left, a condition compounded by poor visibility aft from the cockpit, and burdened by the controller’s chatter as well as a chorus of automated alarms triggered by the airplane’s necessarily unusual configuration. But Paladino flew well, and Lepore took up the slack, and in the end they landed safely at Cachimbo, doing more than 200 miles an hour over the runway threshold, touching down firmly, then braking hard to bring the airplane to a stop. In the cabin the passengers cheered and clapped.

  Lepore said, ‘Good job, good job, funny, good, we’re good.’

  Paladino said, ‘Fucking we’re alive!! FUCK YOU!!!’ It was a victory cry, a shout of exuberance and relief. He laughed ferociously.

  Lepore laughed less strongly. ‘Fuck you!’ he agreed. ‘Good job, good job.’

  The controller instructed the Legacy to taxi to the ramp for parking. Paladino gave the controls to Lepore. He said, ‘I’m sorry, dude. I didn’t mean to do that to you.’ Briefly they talked over each other. Lepore escaped by radioing thanks to the 747. But as they slowly taxied in, Paladino got back to his apology. ‘Hey, I’m really sorry.’

  Lepore said, ‘Nothing to be sorry about, man.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to…’

  ‘Don’t…’

  ‘I know the speeds, I know everything about…’

  ‘Don’t you worry about anything. I’m not…’

  ‘I just want you to understand, you’re the captain.’

  ‘I don’t have… Don’t… Believe me, I’m the last person you need to talk to about shit. I mean, it doesn’t ma
tter to me. It was perfectly…’

  ‘I didn’t mean to come across like that. I was just trying to think of what to do.’

  Lepore said, ‘I’m more worried about my friggin’…’

  Paladino finished for him.… life.’

  It was an awkward exchange. But the greater problem, now sinking in, was the reality of a collision at 37,000 feet. Lepore especially was disturbed. He kept coming back to the consequences. When one of the ExcelAire executives, Ralph Michielli, came forward, he said, ‘Fuckin’ A, Ralph! What the fuck?’

  Michielli said, ‘What if we hit something else? I mean, we were at the proper altitude…’

  Paladino summarized the situation just prior to the impact. He did not mention the transponder or TCAS. Accurately enough he said, ‘The guys forgot about us. Previous frequency had completely forgotten about us. And I started querying them. “This is not right. I haven’t talked to anybody in a long time.”’ He did a verbal shrug. ‘We’re alive.’

  Lepore said, ‘Yeah, but I’m worried about the other airplane. If we hit another airplane. I mean, what else could it have been?’

  Paladino agreed. ‘At 37,000 feet? Yeah, it was a hard hit, though, whatever it was.’

  That evening at dinner on the air base they got word that a Boeing had disappeared. A search was under way. An English-speaking official from Manaus called the base for a preliminary interview with the Legacy’s captain. Lepore took the call. Brazilian investigators have told me that Paladino was standing beside him as he spoke. The call was taped by the Brazilians. On the phone Lepore confirmed that the collision had occurred about one hundred miles from Cachimbo, when the airplane was level at 37,000 feet.

  The official asked, ‘Level at 370?’

  ‘Level at 370.’

  The official said, ‘O.K.! And the TCAS system was on?’

  Lepore said, ‘No.’

  The official said, ‘What?… Hello?’

  Lepore said, ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘No TCAS.’

  If Paladino was there, one can only imagine his reaction. A voice can be heard insisting that the TCAS was on. Replying again to the official Lepore said, ‘The TCAS was on.’

  ‘O.K., was on? But no signal was reported.’

  ‘No, no, we didn’t get any, uh… any warning, no.’

  With that conversation, the Brazilian government took the first step in a process of bringing criminal charges against Lepore and Paladino, essentially for reckless flying. Though safety experts deplore it, the criminalization of airplane accidents is a growing trend worldwide. It led in this case to Lepore and Paladino being detained in Brazil for two months, after which they returned to New York, where they now fight the charges from a stubborn distance, still flying for ExcelAire, but only within the United States, lest Brazil try to grab them abroad. Big law firms represent the victims, the operators, and the manufacturers in civil lawsuits, and as with every air disaster the fighting among them will go on for years.

  ExcelAire and the pilots have hunkered down into a defensive position, whose general outlines can be anticipated: the pilots did nothing improper or illegal, and despite all the circumstantial evidence to the contrary, the Legacy’s transponder and TCAS functioned correctly throughout the flight. According to this argument, the failures lay entirely within the Brazilian air traffic control system. Such a position would require an explanation of why the 737 did not show up on the Legacy’s TCAS, and why just after the impact, when Paladino questioned Lepore about the unit, the Legacy’s transponder suddenly reappeared on air traffic control screens. Competent lawyers will probably come up with reasons.

  In any case, on the evening of the accident the pilots did not suspect the nightmare that lay ahead. They were relieved about their survival. Perhaps they toasted it. But they were not callous about the fate of the dead, as is claimed by some of the victims’ families. They are decent guys, ordinary workaday pilots. Like the people on the ground within earshot of the impact thunder, they did not sleep easily that night.

  Several days later, when Megaron and his band of Caiapó warriors launched their aluminum boats into the Jarinã River, they carried no radio, no GPS, no electronics of any kind. They had gasoline for the outboard motors, some pots and pans, and a few machetes and axes. They did not ask permission. They were not assigned a route. They chose the Jarinã River because it runs in the right direction. They were confident navigators. They understood the importance of common sense.

  The river carried them eastward. Eventually it brought them to the vicinity of the crash. They realized they were near when they saw an Air Force helicopter hovering downsun ahead. They did not think that the helicopter was an iron bug. They knew that it was bringing in soldiers and carrying away the dead. There was no need to code the location or punch up displays, no need to submit their minds. They simply stayed in their boats until the river could take them no closer. There they made camp on the riverbank and spent the night. In the morning they set out to cut a trail to the crash site, a distance of about two miles. The jungle was especially dense, but with twenty-three men to swing machetes, in the afternoon they arrived. They had slopped around along the way, but in the end their accuracy was fine.

  The site smelled of jet fuel, which had soaked into the soil and spilled into two small streams that flowed through the forest there. It also smelled of death, or more accurately of organic decomposition, which in the heat was well advanced. Perhaps a hundred soldiers were at work, expanding a helicopter landing zone, and collecting and bagging the victims. They had built a camp out beyond a cluster of wreckage from the Boeing’s wings, where the landing gear could be seen still desperately extended. The main wreckage lay just to the north in a dispersed chaos of torn and twisted metal, shattered machinery, bent hydraulic lines, tubes, wiring harnesses, cockpit displays, cabin seats, and all the transported contents of the airplane – a sad spillage of luggage, purses, briefcases, clothes, medicines, cosmetics, photographs, trophy fish that sportfishermen had been hauling home from Manaus, and thousands of computer parts that the Boeing had been carrying in its cargo hold and that now littered the forest and slumped into a stream. The debris had dug into the earth on impact, and had drawn trees and branches into the tangle. The condition of the dead should be left unsaid, except to note the mercilessness of the slaughter, and the fact that after Gol Flight 1907 hit the ground hardly any corpse remained intact. Carnivorous tiger-fish had braved the poisoned streams and were feeding on flesh that had fallen into the water. This is what happens when a wing is severed in flight. The Caiapós are warriors, perhaps, but they were deeply disturbed by the scene.

  They did what they could, mostly by swinging axes to expand the landing zone. For the main work of collecting and tagging the human remains, they lacked the necessary skills and equipment. After a few days the Air Force asked them to leave. They understood – or later claimed to me that they had – but rather than fully comply, they withdrew to their camp by the river, where they built shelters and settled in for an indeterminate stay. As they saw it, this was their forest, and they were its guardians. Their stewardship didn’t amount to much by Christian standards. The recovery effort lasted two months, while the soldiers struggled to reclaim and identify every last occupant of the Boeing, probing the ruins under difficult conditions, heavily garbed against disease and aggressive bees. During all that time the Caiapós stood by, visiting the site each day, but staying out of the way. One afternoon at the river camp three settlers appeared in a dugout canoe, drawn by the universal impulse to gawk at disaster. The Caiapós protected the site by sending them away. They did nothing about another impulse at play, which led some soldiers to pocket the watches, jewelry, and other valuables that they found. Perhaps the Caiapós didn’t know, or perhaps they didn’t care. Internally their agenda had more to do with souls than possessions. After the Air Force finally left, the Caiapós danced among the Boeing’s remains, and with their shaman’s guidance began the long, gentle process
of reaching out to the dead.

  When I met the men who had done this work – Megaron, the shaman, and several others – more than a year had gone by. They were angry that the Boeing still lay in their forest, and apparently would never be removed. Sitting in their council space in the shade of trees, I asked them why they cared. They said it was because of the damage being done to the environment. This was the message I was supposed to convey. I answered, however, that airplane wreckage is largely inert, and that operations to remove the Boeing would make things worse. Megaron was not convinced. He wanted a full-blown environmental-impact study performed. He and the shaman seemed to have an employment program in mind.

  We spoke about the collision itself. They knew that American pilots were involved, and they assumed that I would take their side. I answered that it is pointless to use this accident for nationalisms of any kind. Certainly blame should be assigned, some to individuals directly involved, some to cultures in aviation and beyond. You can include the Brazilian generals who insist on militarizing air traffic control, and the sort of software engineers who make even digital cameras tedious to figure out. You can include the corrupted tax structures that allow airplanes as questionable as the Legacy to be built, sold, and flown. You can even include Business Jet Traveler for wanting to ride along. But assigning blame can only go so far. Ultimately the accident leaves you to ponder a paradox associated with progress and modern times. I asked the Caiapós to consider that in all the sky above the forest only these two airplanes had been in flight. It was as if in a space the size of the Caiapó village – no, all the way out to the road – you had shot two arrows in opposing directions, and they had collided. What were the odds? In the past it never would have happened. Even if you had assigned them identical flight paths, the arrows would have passed some distance apart because of the inherent inaccuracies of flight. But now better feathers have been invented, and have become required equipment for the high-speed designs. As a result, the new arrows are extraordinarily accurate, which allows more of them to be shot around, but with increasing reliance on tightly coupled systems of control. The sky is just as big as it ever was, but the margin for error has shrunk. And when the systems fail? That is what happened over the Caiapós’ land. The paradox was precision. Mistakes were made, the Devil played, and two arrows touched nose to nose.