B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm

by M. R. Hall

  They passed through a short corridor that opened into a vast, barn-like space lit by dim fluorescent light. Two simulators were mounted fifteen feet above the ground on telescopic hydraulic legs. From the outside they closely resembled the rides erected in museums and town squares at holiday times.

  Glen led the way up the metal staircase to the gantry via which the simulators were accessed. He explained that for a commercial airline or a pilot paying his own way one hour of simulator time would cost over six hundred pounds. Each was loaded with genuine A380 avionics and handled exactly like the real aircraft. Both were certified by the Civil Aviation Authority to Level D, meaning they were so realistic that they could be used for zero-flight-time training. In theory, a pilot already qualified to fly other aircraft could embark on his first commercial flight in an A380 having learned only in this facility – although it wasn’t something Glen would personally recommend.

  Jenny and Michael followed Glen through the doors of the larger of the two sims into an exact replica of the 380’s cockpit. Here the resemblance to a fairground ride ended. Every detail was exactly reproduced, Glen explained, even down to cup holders.

  ‘Who’s coming to sit up front with me?’ he asked.

  ‘That had better be you,’ Michael said, and motioned Jenny forward.

  She buckled into the left hand of the two pilots’ seats. Glen sat to her right; Michael clipped into the observation seat behind them.

  ‘A quick tour,’ Glen said. ‘Overhead are the control switches for engines, cabin pressure, electrical and fuel systems. In front of us we have identical sets of controls and three identical screens. Moving from the outside towards the centre, the first is the onboard information terminal. We use it to access a vast technical operating manual if you like, and also to communicate with the airline. Right in front of us is the primary flight display with the artificial horizon, airspeed, altitude and flight mode, and closest to the centre the navigation display. Bang in the middle is the engine or warning display – it tells us what’s going on with all four engines at any given moment. That leaves the three screens between us on the lower console. The centre one we share: it’s the system display. Using the buttons down here beneath the thrust levers, we can access the electronic centralized aircraft monitoring system and call up a schematic of any of the aircraft’s systems to see how they’re functioning. Either side, we each have our own multi-function display. These are our interfaces with all the aircraft’s on-board computers. We each interact with them using our own keypad and tracker-ball mouse.

  ‘If it looks complicated, that’s because it is. We’re not just flying the craft, we’re monitoring every system and making adjustments where necessary. Right in the middle of the central console we have the four thrust levers. Each controls one of the engines. The red button on the outside disengages autothrust and hands us back manual control. You’ll see they have four settings or detents. Fully forward is take-off go-around, giving you maximum thrust; one click behind is flexible maximum continuous thrust, a setting used in takeoff; behind that is “climb”, which is also the switch for autothrust. Autothrust is the mode in which you’ll spend 90 per cent of the flight, the computers taking care of everything. And right at the bottom is zero, for minimum idle. It may be a little hard to get your head around, but the basic point is that even when you’re taking off and landing one of these things it’s the computers, not you, determining the level of thrust.’

  ‘There’s no manual control?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Only if you disengage autothrust, and then only within certain parameters – the computers shouldn’t let you stall by going too fast or too slowly. They know exactly how much power is needed to maintain a constant speed, and they’re extremely good at it.’ He pointed into the footwell. ‘Down here you’ve got the rudder pedals, and to my right and your left we each have a joystick. This is how we control our attitude in the air, except that on this aircraft we have six computers monitoring every flying surface and making adjustments as we go. In normal flight this stick only allows us a safe degree of movement – I couldn’t pitch the nose too far up or too far down even if I wanted to. The whole point of Airbus technology is that pilots are fallible. The computers don’t miss things or take risks.’ He smiled, realizing that Jenny was barely keeping up. ‘I’d told my boss we’d be out of here by nine. We’d better get going.’

  Glen flicked some switches and the windshield, which until now had been a blank screen, flickered into life. They were looking out at the Heathrow runway.

  ‘I took the liberty of taxiing this far,’ Glen said. ‘No point simulating the take-off queue.’ With his left hand he pointed to his multi-function display. ‘You’ll see the waypoints already programmed in all the way to New York. These radio beacons take us up to the Bristol Channel.’

  Jenny looked at the list of odd-sounding names – VAPID, NORRY, INLAK.

  ‘All right, we’re cleared for take-off.’

  Glen pushed the thrust levers forward to the take-off-go-around detent and Jenny heard the sound of roaring engines as they started to pick up speed along the runway. The sensation was uncanny: the cockpit vibrated just as a real one would; the simulator mimicked every bump in the tarmac. Jenny instinctively shrank back into her seat.

  ‘Relax,’ Michael said, touching her shoulder. ‘It’s only pretend.’

  Glen eased back on the joystick and they were airborne. ‘Here we go . . . and gear up. That’s the first officer’s job.’ He pointed to the lever next to Jenny’s seat. She pulled it towards her and heard the familiar whine of the landing-gear servos followed by a thump as virtual doors closed over them.

  The aircraft rolled gently to the left and Jenny found herself looking through the side window at the M4 motorway heading west. There even appeared to be traffic moving along the carriageway. But within moments wisps of cloud streaked past the windshield and they were bumping through mild turbulence.

  ‘We can mimic the weather conditions, but not replicate them exactly of course,’ Glen said. ‘All right, we’re at 1,500 feet. I’m shifting the thrust levers back into climb mode with the autothrust engaged. Now I’m engaging autopilot one. It’s going to take us all the way up to 31,000, then it’ll level off until we’re over the Irish Sea, when we’d climb up to a cruise altitude of 39,000. In theory, this will take us all the way to our destination without me touching the controls.’

  ‘We’re sure Dan Murray engaged the autopilot?’

  ‘I can’t conceive of any reason why he wouldn’t have.’

  ‘How did you rate him?’

  ‘Very highly. Some pilots fit together with the Airbus naturally, others want to be the Red Baron and no amount of training will shake them out of it it. Dan Murray was one of the easiest students I’ve taught; Ed Stevens, too.’

  ‘And Nuala Casey?’

  ‘She was good. A little too much imagination for my taste, but that’s a personal opinion.’

  ‘What do you mean by imagination?’

  ‘A pilot should think ahead, but only within reason. It’s possible to spend so much time thinking about what might happen that you miss what’s going on in front of you. That was my only concern. But she wasn’t the one flying 189, was she?’

  ‘No.’

  There was not much to see apart from one dense bank of cloud after another rushing up to meet them. There was neither ground beneath them, nor sky above. The only indication that they were flying level were the artificial horizons on the two primary flight displays. Even to Jenny’s untrained eye, they looked vulnerable compared with the analogue instruments and dials in Michael’s little Cessna.

  ‘What happens if these instruments go down?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘The idea is they don’t,’ Glen said. ‘With multiple computers and generators there’s no reason for them to fail short of a bomb going off.’

  ‘Are you sure you’d know about it, if it did?’

  ‘The avionics bays sit right beneath these seats,’ Gle
n said. ‘All that separates us from them is a floor a few inches thick. If the hull was breached, I don’t think we’d last very long, not at 31,000 feet.’

  Jenny put Mrs Patterson’s crazy speculation out of her mind. She wanted to hear the rational explanation.

  The climb from 1,500 to 14,000 and through on up towards 30,000 feet was, apart from the odd jolt of turbulence, largely uneventful. Glen explained that the aircraft was more than capable of coping with all but the most extreme of thunderstorms. For the most part, lightning was discharged harmlessly along the hull. The only real threat was from the intense heat in the fraction of a second that it struck, but this wasn’t sustained enough to melt the composite hull. The avionics themselves were fully insulated and tested to withstand electro-magnetic discharges way in excess of anything a lighting strike would generate.

  ‘You seem to have convinced yourself lightning wasn’t the reason,’ Michael said.

  ‘We don’t know everything about lightning,’ Glen replied. ‘But we do know how to protect aircraft from it, and we also know that the conditions that morning were nothing like the tropical storms these things are built to withstand. If you want my honest opinion, I think it was more likely to have been zapped by a UFO.

  ‘One to go,’ he went on. ‘That means we’ve 1,000 feet to level off.’

  Jenny heard the engines slowly wind down as they neared the top of their climb. They were still encountering angry-looking clouds.

  ‘Don’t we get above the weather at this height?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Perhaps if we were to climb another 5,000 feet,’ Glen said. ‘But you can get cloud and storms at 40,000. OK, look at your primary flight display.’ He pointed to his own. ‘We’re at 31,000 feet, autopilot one is engaged, the thrust levers are in the climb detent and altitude cruise mode. Look across to your navigation screen and you’ll see true airspeed is 479 knots, exactly as Stevens called it on the cockpit voice recording. I’ve no reason to doubt this isn’t what they were seeing. But fifty seconds later they had a speed warning, and Stevens called out nose down, meaning they needed to lower the nose to avoid a stall. I don’t know exactly how Murray responded, but the next thing we know there was a stall warning and we hear Stevens being thrown around the cockpit.’

  Jenny found it more than a little unnerving to hear Glen talk so dispassionately about men he had known and trained, but sitting behind the controls, even though she had only the sketchiest understanding of them, she sensed the pilot’s awesome responsibility, and appreciated how the mind would narrow its focus to the few significant instruments upon which so many lives depended.

  Michael said, ‘Either the airspeed indication or the speed warning was wrong. It can’t have been both.’

  ‘I agree,’ Glen said. ‘We’ve seen anomalies on the Airbus and we have protocols to deal with them, but if I’m honest a false speed alert isn’t something I’ve come across. Normally I would say the pilot’s first instinct would be to trust his instruments. If he’s keeping level, not losing height and his airspeed indicator is telling him he’s at 479 knots, there’s no reason to push the nose down – it’s simply a case of three lots of data versus one.’

  Jenny sensed a ‘but’ coming.

  ‘But since the Air France and Qantas incidents, I’ve noticed a tendency among some pilots to doubt what their instruments are telling them, especially in a stressful situation. And once the mind has disengaged from the protocols you’re into the realm of emotional, irrational reactions. Instead of a man working with a machine, you’re suddenly dealing with a man fighting one.’ Glen started flicking switches.

  ‘What we can definitely ascertain from the speed warning is that there was some sort of computer failure. From the cockpit voice recording we can tell that the aircraft switched from normal law to alternate law to direct law, giving the pilot mostly manual control of the flying surfaces. That could be caused by a generator problem or even a temporary computer fault. The proper reaction would have been to check the ECAM actions and to keep the plane straight and level while the first officer worked through them on the multi-function display. If all three primary flight computers fail, it’s a case of managing the transition to the secondary ones.

  ‘But let’s imagine Dan Murray panicked. Let’s say he wasn’t content to work through the protocols and skipped to the assumption that this was an Air France type incident, that something was wrong with his airspeed indicator, and that the aircraft’s computers were about to carry out a pitch-down of their own accord in order to avoid a stall. According to the CVR transcript he was in alternate, then direct law, so he more or less had full manual control of the aircraft. To a certain extent he could do things with it that the Airbus systems won’t normally allow. Not trusting his instruments, he pulls up the nose even though his first officer was sticking closer to the protocols and suggesting nose down . . .’

  Jenny and Michael were thrown back in their seats as the nose pitched violently upwards, the engines rising to a deafening roar.

  ‘He thinks he’s taken control,’ Glen called out above the noise, ‘except he could easily have flown straight out of the flight envelope. He’s pulled up so hard the centre of lift has shifted below the centre of gravity, meaning the more thrust we put on, the more the laws of physics rock him back into a vertical position until we’re virtually at ninety degrees to the ground—’

  They were looking vertically upwards.

  ‘Look at the airspeed – it’s slowing right down to nothing. Ed Stevens has been thrown off his feet and knocked out cold, so it’s just down to Dan Murray. He can’t carry out complicated manoeuvres and reset the computers at the same time. It’s simply not possible.’

  Jenny could barely force open her eyes, let alone contemplate trying to operate the computer on her console.

  ‘Here we go—’

  Jenny experienced a brief sensation of weightlessness as the aircraft clawed emptily at the air before gravity started to suck it back towards earth. Artificial as it was, the sensation was every bit as dreadful as it had been in the Cessna. Her stomach rushed up towards her throat. Closing her eyes only made the nausea worse.

  Glen wrestled with the joystick and pumped on the rudder pedals. ‘In direct law I haven’t got the plane’s systems to help me; all that computing power is useless. It’s just me trying to wrest control of the world’s largest commercial airliner. Perfect for level flight, but an absolute pig in a stall . . .’

  They jolted violently to the left as the aircraft tumbled over onto its right side. Glen fought simultaneously with the thrust levers and joystick, and seemed for a moment to regain control, only for the nose to dip violently and once again they were pinned to the back of their seats, scything vertically downwards through the clouds.

  Glen pulled the joystick back as far as it would go, but the nose refused to lift.

  ‘Dan did better fighting gravity than I did,’ Glen said. ‘We’re not pulling out of this.’

  Jenny watched the figures on the altimeter hurtle downwards . . . 15,000, 10,000, 5,000, 2,000.

  ‘It’s no good!’ Glen said.

  Jenny instinctively brought her hands over her face, bracing for impact, but as the altimeter slid past 1,000 and she caught a glimpse of the River Severn between the clouds, the lights went up, the screens clicked off, and the simulator slowly reorientated itself to the horizontal.

  There was a moment of silence as all three of them seemed to turn their minds simultaneously to those who had experienced it for real.

  ‘I’m afraid I didn’t manage to pull off your landing,’ Glen said. ‘I’ll hazard a guess and say that he must have had some power in the engines to get anything like level – I hear it landed belly down.’

  ‘That’s what the passenger injuries suggest.’

  ‘We could try again. We’ve time.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jenny said, unbuckling her seat belt. ‘I think I’ve seen enough.’

  Michael said, ‘So your best guess i
s that Murray responded incorrectly to a computer or an electrical error?’

  Glen said, ‘On the voice recording you’ve got Stevens reacting to what sounds like a jolt of turbulence three minutes before the level-off. It could be that was a lightning strike. It’s even possible that tripped something in the electrical system and caused a fault that triggered the speed warning. That, in my opinion, was the real bit of bad luck. A false speed warning would have brought all the Air France and Qantas incidents flooding back. But the fact is the 380 has state-of-the-art pitot tubes. Post-Air France, the Airbus has probably got the most reliable airspeed indicators in the world.’

  ‘A mismatch between man and machine,’ Jenny said. ‘A machine copes with crisis through brutal logic; the human mind reverts to intuition.’

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better,’ Glen said.

  ‘Which is what you meant by Nuala having too much imagination. She wasn’t robotic enough to work hand in glove with the computers.’

  Glen glanced at Michael. ‘If the pilot of a modern passenger plane isn’t prepared to trust his equipment absolutely, he’s no business strapping into the cockpit. I’m not saying Dan Murray would definitely have landed that craft if he’d stuck to the protocols, but he would have stood a much better chance. And so would all the people in the back. The Airbus doesn’t just prevent crises, it knows how to deal with them – and in my long experience, better than most pilots do.’

  ‘You seem disappointed,’ Jenny said, as she and Michael walked out of the building into the cold, damp night.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m biased – one pilot not wanting to believe another would screw up like that.’

  ‘What about Glen – are you sure he doesn’t have an agenda?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘You won’t find a straighter guy in the business.’

  Jenny was still struggling to fit what she had just experienced together with all the many questions in her mind which still remained unanswered. ‘Say it was pilot error, we still don’t know what Nuala was doing on the flight, or why Brogan had traces of plastic explosive on his lifejacket.’