‘No.’
‘I just wondered,’ said the Ministry man politely, ‘what you were doing on the floor.’
Fleming didn’t explain that he’d just fallen down on the tarmac, that Truman had walked away to file a fake report, and that his wrists still felt bruised from the terrified hands that had clutched them.
He didn’t feel it would be fair to confuse Scrivens any more than he was already. So he said: ‘It’s a perfectly good floor. What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Scrivens hastily. He wished to give the impression that nearly everybody was on the floor whenever he came into a room. But he said: ‘Can you come at once? I think they might listen to your ideas, now.’
‘Why?’
Scrivens led the way out. ‘That would be hard to answer.’
‘I thought you were dead against me.’
Scrivens raised a pair of very responsible eyebrows. ‘Somebody should have warned me about you, Captain Fleming. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that you cut off your nose to spite your face?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’
They took the elevator. ‘Not that I’m sold. I’m just prepared to listen. I must warn you though—Mr Dawlish isn’t going to be very easy to convince.’
‘What’s his trouble? Does he want to write-off one of his aeroplanes against insurance?’
Mr Scrivens was severely shocked. ‘You pilots sometimes display a most unfortunate sense of humour,’ he said, as they arrived at the required floor. ‘Let’s go in.’
Chapter Eleven
From the moment when Fleming and Scrivens entered the room, the voltage of anxiety shot up to the upper extreme of the dial.
Scrivens, having let drop a small fragment of unofficial sympathy toward Fleming, now resumed his former attitude of cold impartiality and conveyed the impression, if anything, that a word of encouragement expressed out of school had been designed to take the sting out of all that applied now. Looking at him, it was impossible to gauge what his true feelings were.
He shut the door behind Fleming, whom he introduced formally to Dawlish. Gregg sat, motionless and inscrutable, as if he were now the one who would be hardest to convince. As an act of diplomacy it was a sound one; but it was unnervingly convincing at a time when Fleming felt so very much alone. Fleming looked briefly at the three men; and during the noncommittal preliminaries of the conversation he concentrated on Dawlish in an effort to assess him.
To Fleming, Stuart ‘Sandy’ Dawlish appeared the typecast of a company director. He had, one would have thought, been prised from some mould labelled Men Of Stature in a foundry where citizens were manufactured with all the reliable knowhow of much experience. The compositors who had assembled his personality had made no slip in their faultless application of well-tried principles of letterpress; there were no incongruous mismatches of fount, and the layout was as conservative as it was uninspired. One was only left wondering whether this obsessional caution in choice of type-face stemmed from the unrevealing nature of the text. It was apparently so predictable that it gave no guide whereby its personality could be expressed in the smallest deviation from classical rules.
Mr Dawlish had been to one of the right schools—though his parents had studiously avoided what they considered to be the snob factories which called themselves Stowe and Eton and the rest. Nevertheless, in the school Dawlish had attended there prevailed a rough-hewn path, defined in its boundaries by the conventions of the young gentry, who were allowed to bully the weaker ones so that the strong might emerge in bowler hats and umbrellas, fit for the challenging perils of the stock-market.
The use of the word ‘gentry’ was a necessary password among Mr Dawlish and his fellow products, who inherited automatic security through pronouncing certain words properly and avoiding others. If you met a bowler-hatted questionmark in the precincts of Pall Mall after office hours, if you weren’t quite sure that he qualified to be taken into your club, there were certain simple tests you could set him which would reveal at once his eligibility or otherwise for a drink among your proven friends. Be he too effusive or contrariwise too shy; should he not know exactly how to address the man at the door, or else tip the taxi driver beyond the accepted shilling piece, well . . . the chap was not quite . . .
You couldn’t catch Dawlish out on any of these vital attributes of the gentleman. He hadn’t had to read them up; they’d been thrashed into him from the age of twelve upwards; so that even under an anaesthetic he would not have let down the proud tradition of his school.
Nor now, as he stood in the rough dress of a gentleman caught unawares—tweed jacket and grey flannel slacks—unquestioned in his position of leadership as he had been in the perfectly reputable line regiment during the war as a major; at which time, though he had been reluctantly willing to accept the hospitality of the Brigade of Guards, he forthrightly agreed in his own mess that they were pretentious buggers who never went east of Suez.
To him it was immediately evident that Gregg was the only gent present; and though this crippled fellow had spent far too much time hobnobbing with grammar school types and possibly worse, you could not mistake the innate breeding of the man. Dawlish felt safe with him . . . he knew that there was a kind of unspoken understanding between the two of them who were both paramountly one of us.
Scrivens he dismissed at once as an upstart who certainly didn’t know the form.
And now there was this chap Fleming, whose background was hard to assess. For one thing the man had been educated in Canada, which confused the issue because Fleming did not have a Canadian accent.
Sandy Dawlish couldn’t stand those to whom no definite label could be attached. How could you possibly know what you were dealing with? Then there was this nervous breakdown thing. Mr Dawlish knew enough about man-management to avoid this type like the plague. If a fellow couldn’t look you straight in the eye there was something shifty about him, you mark his words! Well, you could see at once that Fleming’s eyes were darting around the room . . . anything but engage his own, so that you could have a chance to see what made the fellow tick. Mr Dawlish didn’t care much for his clothes either. A zip jacket and canvas slacks . . . and very likely a Morris Minor parked somewhere outside and not—one hoped—too near the glistening Rover Three-litre saloon; a restrained, capable motor car eminently suitable for a man of director status.
Sandy Dawlish looked back on his career and compared the likely factors common to Fleming and himself. Only by this method had you any reliable means of knowing where you stood.
Well, there was the flying; and though Mr Dawlish did not actually hold a licence, he had frequently taken over the controls during unofficial flights and there was quite obviously nothing mystic about this aviation business. If a chap could drive a car with confidence, and provided he wasn’t a nervous wreck, it only took a bit of experience to qualify as a commercial pilot. The swagger some of these people displayed about their flying jobs annoyed him. Put some of them in his shoes for a few days, to take decisions (along with the other directors) which could involve five figures at a time, and they would realise that there were some jobs in life for which you required more than years of training. You were either born to it, and brought up to it, or you just couldn’t carry it off. Anyway, as far as Fleming’s own flying record was concerned, the thing spoke for itself. He had been grounded.
Mr Dawlish considered other matters: how would Fleming fare in a scrap? Why couldn’t the fellow get married, instead—as far as he could gather—of drifting from one affair to another as if he couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted? You’ve got to be careful with people like that; if all is not well at home, then before long (and time after time he had been proved right) it would show up at the office.
Mr Dawlish’s own marriage was a very well organised and solid mosaic into which everything fitted properly into place. The children had decent manners, his wife was amiable enough for any man, and the meals were served on time. Pauline,
whom he had met and married during the war, had quickly learned the kind of routine which suited a business man. She never interfered in matters which did not concern her; and the perfectly sensible arrangement of having separate bedrooms (which left him free to work on the contents of a well-laden briefcase late in the evening) had been her own suggestion. Furthermore she didn’t make a fuss—as so many women seemed to do—if for some reason he was kept late at the office or the club, in conference with colleagues in his own business, or opposite numbers in those companies with whom Statelines dealt. And if she was, at times, inexplicably jumpy or irritable, at least she kept it to herself. It was, in fact, a most companionable marriage which left nothing to be desired.
So, once again, Fleming’s emotional life hardly gave one confidence when, as now, assessing his judgement became a vital factor in an emergency.
Since Mr Dawlish knew nothing whatever about engineering, and didn’t pretend to, this factor had to be left out. However, even Scrivens had remarked, shortly before Gregg’s arrival, that the licensed engineers who serviced and maintained the aircraft had already concluded that the flight concerned was committed to a belly landing, unless Fleming could work some miracle. And, upon Dawlish’s own assessment, it seemed unlikely that Fleming was the man to provide the answer to reverse Captain Crooke’s decision.
In any case, Dawlish couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. A belly landing, though risky, usually came off. The weight of argument seemed very much in its favour, because anyone could see that to lower wheels that would all face sideways unless Fleming’s plan succeeded, and which couldn’t be got out of the way if it didn’t, would make the situation not merely dangerous but probably disastrous. Mr Dawlish felt that the more obvious course was the wisest, and congratulated himself upon his own calmness in the emergency. Aware as he was that the safety record of the company, for so long unblemished, was in for a possible jolt, the matter was really one of pure statistics. To become emotional about the lives of passengers and crew would not materially help; and if anything it would be more damaging to their chances to involve oneself too deeply in thinking of them as human beings. The best chance lay in remaining sufficiently removed from the possibly tragic implications of the matter to be able to use cold judgement. On this count he felt that Fleming—and even this chap Woodford whom he had met before the aircraft had been purchased—was acting somewhat hysterically.
Fleming, during the tense five minutes before the presses came off the rackets, did not see Mr Dawlish as his principal opponent. Forewarned, as he had been by Gregg, that Dawlish was weak and therefore probably open to persuasion from whichever direction seemed the strongest, Fleming still saw in Scrivens the staunchest forehand against which he would have to compete. Scrivens had seen him, earlier in the evening, stripped of self-control and virtually impotent when it came to coping with an urgent situation. This being so, it would require the utmost power of the forearm to swing these tense doubles, played in a small room at London Airport Tower, against the seeded players.
But to do so was, in Fleming’s view, imperative; for a reason which dated from the only heated discussion he had ever had with Ken Woodford.
*
Woodford stared tight-lipped at the sheets of paper in front of him and said: ‘You gave this stuff to Clare to type, I understand.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you think it a little indiscreet to hand bumf of this sort around?’
‘Clare is not indiscreet.’
‘I agree. And it’s fortunate you gave it to her. I’ve told her to destroy the carbon.’
Fleming looked across the drawing board and said: ‘I don’t see why. It’s not like you to block a free expression of opinion.’
‘Yes . . . but this!’ Woodford looked at him coldly. ‘If you really believe it, don’t you think it would have been better to have a chat with me about it?’
‘You were away. I wanted to express my views on paper while they were fresh in my mind.’
Woodford said nothing to this, but opened the document at the second page. ‘You say here: “In view of the curvature of the underbelly between frames 300 and 600, a landing, in the event of undercarriage failure, would be impractical if not actually impossible. The aircraft would adopt a fore-and-aft rocking motion which would rapidly increase until it buried its nose.”’ Woodford looked up again. ‘Why didn’t you say that earlier?’
‘Because it didn’t occur to me.’
‘Upon what calculations is your assumption based?’
‘No calculations. Instinct.’
‘Robert, what’s the matter with you? We’ve worked together, under various circumstances, for years. You have enough knowledge of engineering—more than enough—to know the sort of detailed work I put into a design. Yet you place instinct above everything else. Why, in this case?’
‘Because my chief reason for being hired by this company and by you, so far as I know, is because of my specialised practical knowledge in the matter of landing configurations.’
‘You make that sound unnecessarily pompous. I know your value. It appears that you’re not sure of mine.’
‘Please don’t deliberately misunderstand, Ken.’
‘I’m doing my best to understand what led to your coming out with a rash and unsubstantiated statement like that. And others. I’ll read on: “In this connection it might be relevant to comment that the locking gear of the undercarriage might well be of heavier duty. I accept that it takes the stresses as calculated, but upon inspection it appears to me to be of minimum strength for the job, and in unforeseen circumstances might fail altogether. In view of the fact that the wheels can only be in the line-of-flight if the lock is secured in the ‘down’ position, and of the fact that the lock does not serve one purpose but three, I consider that the jaws should be strengthened, and the mounting be made more solid.”’ Woodford put the report down and observed Fleming thoughtfully. ‘Why are you suddenly setting yourself up as a design critic? The test reports I am interested in are the ones you base on what happens to the aircraft while you are taking off, flying it, and landing it. Has any such failure occurred during your practical testing of the aeroplane?’
‘No.’
‘Then why this?’
Fleming hesitated and then said: ‘Would you agree with me, Ken, that your first consideration when designing an aeroplane is not what would happen if somebody had to land it without wheels?’
‘That’s quite true. But it is not one which is, by any means, left out.’
‘No. But such an eventuality can only be considered as a sort of compromise between the ideal shape of the aircraft for flying and taking its load, and what may happen if something goes wrong with the undercarriage?’
‘True. But why this obsession with the undercarriage? If you’re so dissatisfied with that part, what about the wings, or the engines, or for that matter the ashtrays?’
‘Because I think as an aeroplane she is damn near perfect.’
‘Thank you for that, Mr Nevil Shute Norway! And don’t you therefore consider that if it’s all that good as an aeroplane, don’t you think that the shape of the underbelly is a contributory factor.’
‘So far as airflow is concerned, yes. But if you’re prepared to instruct me to land a Jet-Four on its belly I’ll gladly do so.’
‘You know perfectly well, Robert, that no company can afford to wilfully set out to damage an aircraft to that extent. The repairs would take months.’
‘What I’m saying is that you probably wouldn’t be able to repair it at all . . . or me, for that matter. But I think it should be tried. What about the one scheduled for being tested to destruction?’
‘I can’t possibly interrupt fatigue tests and when they’re completed it won’t be an aeroplane any more . . . You really believe this, don’t you? Who else have you spoken to?—Truman, did you mention it to him?’
‘No.’
‘I see. And what about Andrews?’
‘Th
e chief test pilot and I,’ said Fleming stiffly, ‘do not exchange views on matters which could confirm him in his view that I am a crackpot.’
This made Woodford grin. ‘You are on your dignity, aren’t you! . . . Well, I’ll have the business of the undercarriage locks looked into. If there’s a case for strengthening them then it will be done. I cannot possibly reconsider the basic design of the hull; and unless you can substantiate your views with figures I must ask you to refrain from circulating bits of paper which would be sheer dynamite if they got in the wrong hands. Relax, Robert! Take a few days off . . . Bring Clare down to Bresham, if you like. There’s riding and excellent sailing too. Only for heaven’s sake don’t let’s have any more of this. A deal?’
Fleming smiled uneasily. ‘Well, I’m not turning down your hospitality, in any event.’
‘Fine. Make it this week-end.’
The matter had rested there.
No modifications were made to the undercarriage locks . . .
*
Bill Scrivens sat perfectly still and watched the three men.
Scrivens knew his own worth, just as Gregg knew his. You do not work for over twenty years in Air Traffic Control without knowing the opinions—either expressed to you or behind your back—of your colleagues and subordinates. Scrivens knew his job and he knew that both the controllers and staff under his command and the men further up in the hierarchy of the Ministry trusted him implicitly. Faced with any problem that concerned, purely and simply, the highly complex art of assuring airline captains of an intrinsically safe path to, from, and on the runways of one of the largest airports in the world, Scrivens would not have considered outside opinion; and were it forced upon him by any outsider who presumed upon his premises and challenged his ability and experience, he would have been both secure in his own judgement and quick to show the intruder the other side of a very private door. Had that been the issue, there would have been no alien occupants of the Tower on this or any other occasion.
The Higher They Fly Page 14
