Final Approach

by John J. Nance

  “Do you recall anything?”

  “No.” He lied to her on purpose, wanting desperately to know what she knew first. His memories were unreliable.

  Louise Timson wiped her eyes and stroked his forehead, being careful not to disturb the white turban of bandages.

  “The doctor says you’ll be all right. Your hand was hurt, and you have a skull fracture, but you’ll be okay.”

  That explains the headache, he thought, realizing suddenly that his right hand was sheathed in gauze and hurting too.

  “But what happened?”

  Louise Timson stopped stroking him, her hand dropping, her gaze averted downward. God, he thought, was it that bad?

  “You crashed while trying to land in a storm at Kansas City Friday night, Dick. I don’t know why. Your plane hit another plane on the ground.” The words left a cold, empty feeling in his middle. Crashed. Hit another plane. How on earth …? Oh Lord, and I was captain … chief pilot. How on earth did this happen?

  He noticed her delivery, then. Her words were slow and metered, as if painful to pronounce, her eyes fixed on her hands as she held them tightly together in her lap, sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the bed. Dick could see she had been at loose ends for some time. Her hair was a stringy mess, she wore no makeup, and the deep bags under her eyes looked awful. She looked like hell warmed over, he concluded.

  “A storm?” he managed.

  “I was told it was a windshear storm, or something like that,” she said slowly.

  He remembered the microburst. But that had been their initial approach, hadn’t it? Could he have dreamed a second approach?

  “How … how many were hurt?”

  She swallowed again, nodding and shaking her head alternately. “At least a hundred dead. Terrible injuries. Terrible. A little girl …” Her hand gestured to one side as she closed her eyes and shook her head slightly before looking at him again. “Oh Dick …” Louise sat quietly for a few seconds and he let her alone, confusion filling his drug-numbed mind.

  “Are they sure it was windshear? Louise, do you know for sure?” His voice was low and strained. He could manage no more volume, but he had to know what he had done.

  She looked up at him then. “No, I’m not sure.”

  “Why? Wasn’t I captain?” Now his voice was tremulous, the enormity of the nightmare he had awakened to beginning to overwhelm him.

  Dick saw his wife clenching her teeth, her chin trembling. But he had to know.

  “You just weren’t … at fault. I’m sure.” She looked at him again then as a soft knock sounded on the door and a nurse stuck her head inside.

  “You’re awake! Mr. Timson, do you feel up to a visitor for a few moments? He’s insisting, and the doctor said it was okay if you agreed.”

  Dick looked at her in confusion. The nurse had said “mister,” not “captain.” Had he already been fired? That would be unbearable, the worst blow of all. He was panicking, though. They wouldn’t do such a thing. Stop panicking! He issued the order to himself without moving, staring quietly at the nurse as she stood in the doorway.

  “Sir? You want to wait?”

  Dick recovered some composure finally and shook his head. “It’s okay. Send him in.”

  Louise had already left the bedside, moving behind him, probably sitting in the corner, he figured, his head hurting too bad to risk looking around to be sure. At first Dick didn’t recognize the man in a hospital gown who walked slowly into the room, his sad eyes surveying the room with great distrust, as if he were ready to run at the slightest indication the welcome had been withdrawn. He looked familiar, and from somewhere in Dick’s mind the image of the big man and the name Pete Kaminsky, one of his pilots and an old acquaintance, came together.

  “Pete?”

  “Yes. I came to … see how you were doing.”

  “What are you doing here?” There was no rancor behind the question, just puzzlement, but it struck Pete like a challenge, for which he must have a defense.

  “Uh, I’m … down the hall. My room.” He gestured awkwardly over his left shoulder.

  “Were you aboard my airplane?” Dick asked quietly.

  “No. Uh, the 737 your flight hit? That was mine.”

  The two men stared at each other for a few seconds while that sank in. “Oh, Lord. You were in a 737? We hit you?”

  Pete nodded, slowly, watching his reaction carefully. “You remember I called you on the radio on your first approach?”

  So there had been a first approach, Dick thought, his mind trying to come up to speed. He raised up slightly from the pillow, a wave of pain in his head limiting the process, his view of Pete wavering for a second as if a TV picture had been disturbed.

  “It’s all very hazy, Pete,” he began. “Could you … tell me what happened? Please. I need to fill in the gaps.”

  Pete Kaminsky pulled up a small, gray metal chair and sat down a foot away from Dick’s bedside, saying nothing for awhile as he thought back over the crash sequence and tried to choose his words carefully. Dick Timson listened in horror, remembering almost everything up to his turn to final approach on the second landing attempt. Somewhere in there the memory was erased … gone. It had to be the concussion, but it panicked him.

  “Pete, you say we stopped turning and started sinking?”

  “Yeah.” In a halting voice, Pete Kaminsky filled in the details for Timson, looking up finally at the battered chief pilot. “I killed a lot of people trying to move, Dick. I saved myself, but you hit us in the middle. If I’d stayed put, more of my people …” He stopped, unable to continue, and Dick Timson wanted to reach out and reassure him, but knew he couldn’t do it physically. Every time he moved, his head swam with unbelievable pain. His stomach was a cold block of ice now, hearing the details. Something had happened as they turned the last few degrees. Was it windshear? Had the controls malfunctioned? Something had pitched them down, and he couldn’t remember what it had been … what it might have been. That wasn’t unusual, was it? Loss of memory with a head injury?

  “Pete … I … I don’t know what to say. I’m still very fuzzy on the details. But you can’t blame yourself. You did what you thought you had to.”

  Kaminsky just nodded, but he didn’t look up.

  “Pete, my copilot. Don Leyhe. Did he …”

  “He’s alive, but in a coma. Bad head injuries. You both must have been slammed around horribly in the cockpit when the plane broke up. He had part of the windscreen embedded in his head.” Pete had looked up at last, and Dick was startled to see only a vortex of pain and grief in those eyes, which seemed to be looking right through him.

  The two pilots stared at each other in silence for a minute before realizing there was nothing left to say. Pete got up as if lifting a block of lead, fatigue, and despair intertwining—an inescapable weight pulling him down.

  Dick Timson’s eyes were misting with tears. He remembered raging at his son that men don’t cry, and he tried to turn away, but the movement hurt too much. His carefully structured life, his executive position, his ability to fly as a pilot, his self-respect—everything, gone in a split second he couldn’t even remember. And people had lost their lives in his airplane, as well as in Pete’s. Why? Not even the NTSB needed to know what had happened as much as Richard Timson needed to know.

  Barbara Rawlson’s worried expression mirrored Joe Wallingford’s as the two of them stood in the Sunday morning sunlight and tried to imagine what could have become of the cockpit voice recorder for Flight 255.

  “Joe, we’ve looked everywhere in and around the tail section. I can’t understand it. Is there any chance, do you suppose, someone could have removed it before we got here?”

  “Not possible, Barbara.” Joe was shaking his head. “Show me where it was mounted,” he said, pulling on heavy gloves, a hard hat with the NTSB crest already on his head. Barbara led the way gingerly through a jagged break in the tail section of the Airbus 320 and Joe followed, both of them carefully inchi
ng along to a point where the jumble of torn wires and metal bulkheads held a single twisted rectangular bracket partially dislodged from its principal brace. Barbara immersed it in the beam of her flashlight. “There. See that, Joe? That’s the digital flight recorder rack. We were able to just pull back the locking arms and pull it out. Now … where …” She moved the light a foot to the left where nothing but open space and a confused array of broken metal stringers dangled. “… here is where the CVR box should be. But there’s no box, no bracket, no support brace, no anything. We can’t even find the wiring harness. Now, we figured, with the dynamics of the impact, it might have been pulled downward, and that does look to be the case with some of these scratches and gouges along the side. But where the bloody hell is the thing?”

  “You’ve …”

  “Before you ask, yes, we’ve poked through every scrap of this tail section, and gone back down the taxiway. All I can figure now …” She slowly disentangled herself as Joe backed out the opening, helping her down. “All I can figure now is to go through the main section wreckage on the theory that it was flung into there before the empennage broke away.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “I know. I know. That could take a day or two. But I’m stumped otherwise.”

  “That’s all we can do, Barb. We’ve got to find that CVR and fast. The speculation is heating up and I’m gambling we can defuse some of it when we know what they said.”

  “How is the captain? Can you talk to him yet?”

  “He’s coming around, but Andy was told he didn’t want to talk to us before Monday.”

  “We’ll have the flight-recorder data by then, won’t we?”

  “Maybe. That went back to the lab an hour ago. But we need that CVR. It could conceivably be the key.”

  “I’ve got your permission to move the tail now?”

  Joe nodded, and Barbara motioned a thumbs-up to the other members of the systems group who were giving orders to a crane operator with a sling already in place. The cable began tensing immediately as they stepped back, watching the section lift clear of the concrete with great protesting sounds of scraping and bending metal, a cascade of small items clanging to the ground.

  The contrast was startling, Joe thought. The ugliness of the shattered tail in the grip of a huge crane framed by the beauty of a crisp blue autumn sky. Bit by bit his team was authorizing removal of the wreckage, but days of work remained before they could return to Washington. Joe watched Barbara Rawlson give additional orders to the crane operator as they began swinging the fragmented structure toward a waiting flatbed truck, more pieces of metal and cloth, plastic panels and wiring harnesses dangling and occasionally dropping as they moved it gingerly, a few feet at a time.

  Joe knew he was pushing her too hard. Barbara was chairman of the systems investigation, and it had been a trial for her, with the men from Airbus Industries—the builders of the Airbus 320—hovering over her, hoping their airplane was not at fault.

  The crane stopped its movement for a second, the tail section swaying slightly at the end of the thick, steel cable, the sound of diesel engines and a distant jet engine competing with a 10-knot wind blowing past his ears. The smell of burned aircraft material still hung in the air, clinging to the broken airframe and the very concrete on which he was standing. His memory of a very similar scene in Washington after the Air Florida crash of 1982 was equally sharp in his mind, as the shattered blue and white and green tail of that airplane had been lifted from the water of the Potomac River onto an identical flatbed. Ironic, that transition. Like the dust-to-dust incantation humans use for each other at death. A jetliner begins as thousands of parts, many shipped in by truck. And some go out the same way—not many, of course, but for the few that slip through the cracks in the safety system, the flatbed truck becomes their pallbearer.

  “Joe, can I see you a minute?”

  He hadn’t noticed the man’s approach, but Gary Seal, heading up the operations group, was standing beside him with a videotape in hand.

  “Sure Gary. What’ve you got?”

  “I’m not sure. You remember our mystery car?”

  “The one in the cargo area, right?”

  “That’s right. We got him on tape. A security camera by the gate.”

  “Wonderful!” Joe brightened. Perhaps they could get to the bottom of this and either get rid of the issue or validate it as a problem.

  “Not wonderful. We can’t read the license plate.”

  “Not even close?”

  “That’s where I had an idea. I ran the master tape back and forth, then recorded this dub, which is even poorer quality. The airport police will lend us the master tape, though, and I was thinking that if we could get that one shot of the rear of the car computer enhanced, it might bring out the license plate number.”

  “That’s a good idea, Gary. I’ll call a friend of mine at the bureau tomorrow. Meanwhile, let’s get that master tape off to Washington.”

  “You want this one? It’s on VHS.”

  “Yeah. I’ll look at it later. Thanks.”

  “Uh, Joe? Susan Kelly is looking for you. Is your phone on?” Seal was trying to be discreet about it, but Joe had violated his own maxim to the team: if you’ve got them, use them. Portable phones on at all times. His was off, bigger than life.

  “Damn!”

  “She’s back at the hotel and wants to see you.”

  Joe punched the on button on the telephone, listening to the beep that signaled its operation, and shook his head in disgust as he and Seal began walking toward the car he’d left at the edge of the taxiway. Barbara had to run to catch him.

  “Joe, one other thing.” She was panting, and Joe suppressed a smile. Barbara was always harping on him to keep in shape and work out. She had tried to get him to join her health club—for ulterior motives, Joe had decided. She was divorced and on the prowl, but he wasn’t interested in her. Barbara was wiry and small and cute, her dark hair worn short. She was fun to be with but frighteningly aggressive.

  “What?”

  “If we don’t find the CVR quickly in the main wreckage, we’ll have to lift the bigger pieces before going deeper, and that may take days.”

  “Which means keeping the taxiway closed.”

  “Yeah. After the C-5 bullied its way out of here last night, the airport manager reopened the runway as a taxiway so they can get in and out of the air cargo ramp now. That takes some of the pressure off.”

  “We’re desperate for that CVR, Barbara. Do whatever’s necessary, and take however much time you need. And if there’s anything near those flight controls that shouldn’t be there, you’ve got to find it.”

  “Okay.” She smiled and departed, dashing back toward the wreckage as Joe made his way to the hotel.

  Susan Kelly was waiting for him outside the headquarters room when he walked in, a scowl on her face. Joe approached her with hands out to the side, palms up, and a shy smile.

  “I’m sorry, Susan, I screwed up.”

  “Human factors and human performance, Joe. You’re learning.”

  “Yeah. But you see the strange thing is, I never make mistakes.”

  She pointed the way to an adjacent meeting room and matched his stride without responding to his attempt at humor.

  “We need to talk.”

  “I gathered that. Something more than a dead phone, I take it?”

  “Yes.” Her reply was terse as she pushed the door open for him, following him inside and then leaning back against the closed door with her head cocked.

  “Joe, we’ve got a big problem. Or maybe I should say a tall problem.”

  “We’ve got a chairman problem, in other words. He called after the interview?”

  She looked at him for a moment without blinking. “Within minutes.” She walked over and sat down in one of the chairs next to Joe. “He griped and bitched at me that you were not following orders. Let’s see…‘out of control’ and ‘an insufferable technocrat,’ I believe are
the terms he used. And I’m not supposed to tell you any of this other than to say you’d better shape up or he’ll ship you out.”

  “Well, I …”

  “Now wait a minute.” Her hand was up for silence, which he provided. “Joe, we’ve already had it out about the news conference yesterday. That’s between you and me and it’s a closed issue as far as I’m concerned. But I did warn you what might happen, and it has. Dean is getting pressure from the Hill, and, as I have already learned to expect with him, he’s not shy in passing it right back through to us.”

  Joe nodded thoughtfully and bit his lip, wondering if he was going to reach the end of his endurance of her browbeating as well. She was getting awfully pushy; Board member or not, he was still in charge of the investigation.

  “Susan, I’d rather just stay the hell out of the limelight and away from the cameras.”

  She was chuckling. “You know what you did, Joe. You gave Dean his retraction and then went right back to the truth. In some ways I admire you for that. But if we let you do it again, I’ll be working this investigation alone. So yes, let’s keep you away from the cameras and keep ourselves quietly in lockstep, okay?”

  Joe nodded as Susan Kelly got to her feet, glancing at her watch and motioning to the adjacent room. “We’d better get over there, Joe. But if we see any cameras, you run for your life, and I’ll throw myself on the nearest one.” Susan watched Joe’s response with pleasure as he leaned back slightly and laughed, the tension of the past few hours abating somewhat. “I thank you, noble lady, but I wouldn’t hear of such a sacrifice.”

  She let him open the door for her on the way out, fully realizing that a man like Joe might not recognize it as a concession.

  Walter Calley looked behind him once again, convinced he was being followed. It was 2 P.M. Sunday, a perfect time to do what he had to do—which was run. There were two more tasks to perform before he could head south. He was starving, but there was no time to eat, just as there had been no time to sleep in the agonized hours since Friday’s crash.

  Calley wheeled his cream-colored Camaro into a nondescript shopping center in North Kansas City, scanning in all directions. There was a cash machine at one end of the strip mall, and with only a few cars in the parking lot this Sunday, he could use it in reasonable anonymity, withdrawing five hundred dollars. It would be late Monday before anyone could trace the transaction, and he would be long gone by then.