Final Approach

by John J. Nance

  The North America vice-president, John Walters, grabbed his microphone then, moving the small sliding on-off switch to the on position and causing an audible “pop” in the overhead speakers. He asked for the floor, which Joe granted. “Captain Rohr,” Walters began, “isn’t it possible that it was Captain Timson who took control from the copilot after the copilot took control from him?”

  Rohr looked at Walters impassively, trying to find a diplomatic way of telling the man he didn’t know what he was talking about. “I don’t understand the question.”

  “Well, you said the tape contained this voice message saying ‘Priority right.’ Couldn’t the captain have regained control by pushing his priority switch after the copilot pushed his?”

  “Yes … yes he could, but he didn’t.”

  “Well, Captain, you don’t know that for certain, do you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Walters, I do know that for certain. We know the system was working because we have heard the ‘Priority right’ message. Therefore, if the captain seized control back, we would hear ‘Priority left’ on the tape. There was no such message. And in any event, that’s immaterial for our simulator tests. Whichever control stick was used, if the recovery attempt had been made seven-tenths of a second earlier, none of us would be sitting here now, because there would not have been an accident.”

  “Well, you’re just assuming, are you not, that the captain was doing something dangerous. Perhaps he was taking legitimate evasive action and the copilot’s seizing of the aircraft interfered with his plan and caused the crash.”

  Captain Dick Rohr stared at the airline executive in horror. The senior vice-president of operations was Ron Putnam, but the real day-to-day head of North America’s flight operations—and Dick Timson’s immediate superior—was John Walters, the man asking the question. Although there was no necessity for Walters to be a pilot, he should at least know the basics, Rohr figured, especially if he was going to sit there and ask questions of an A320 captain in an NTSB hearing.

  “Sir, the flight path the captain was following would have impacted the aircraft into the ground about three hundred to five hundred yards short of the hammerhead where the 737, Flight 170, was sitting. If that had occurred, based on the distribution of wreckage that did subsequently occur, the remains of Flight 255 would have impacted the 737 broadside, at ground level rather than 10 feet in the air, and in flames. It is unlikely that anyone would have escaped from either aircraft. Therefore, the copilot’s actions were, by our tests, a reasonable effort to salvage the situation the captain or the airplane had created. The only question in my mind is why did he wait so long to act?”

  Walters and Rohr continued niggling the point and Joe let them go on for a few minutes. Walters was confused, but he felt he had to cast doubt on the theory that North America’s captain and chief pilot had made no attempt to recover. If there was a possibility that Timson himself had begun the recovery, it could blunt the airline’s image of negligence. The men at the North America table were well aware that the legal liability would be fought out in the courts, but they had to be consistent. It really didn’t matter what the NTSB said about neutrality and nonjudgmental testimony. This was part of the overall fight to avoid liability, and one false move would bring millions in company damages—as well as David Bayne—down on their heads. They were, in effect, desperate men.

  Dick Rohr remained on the stand for nearly an hour more as the NTSB technical panel and then the FAA, ALPA, and Airbus representatives picked through the findings.

  Barbara Rawlson, the systems group chairman, was called to the stand then. Joe and Susan had agreed with the staff that there were loose ends in the public’s perception of what had happened, and what had not—misconceptions and misunderstandings which needed a public burial.

  “Ms. Rawlson,” Joe began, “your systems group’s factual report, which all parties have in the overall file of the investigation, mentions on page 7A-7 that no evidence of sabotage to the flight-control systems or anything else was found. Would you give us a verbal summary of that?”

  “Sure.” Barbara shifted in the chair, her fingers drumming the tablecloth lightly. “There was no bomb, or we would have found some evidence of outward tearing and ripping of metal structures along with explosive residue. Second, as to possible tampering with the flight-control computers, no foreign boxes or devices were found on or near the wreckage, and nothing was found in or around any flight-control system which was not factory installed. The only other established possibility of sabotage would be tampering with the factory-installed flight-control computers themselves, but other than the crash damage, the computers were in perfect condition.”

  “Could radio waves directed from the ground, with or without criminal intent, have caused fluctuations in the flight controls?”

  “It is possible. Whether it’s probable depends on whether or not the only sufficiently powerful radar anywhere near the airport that night was operating.” Barbara briefly outlined what they all knew, the ominous presence of the so-called Star Wars radar. “The FAA’s experts have been very cautious about the possibility of radio interference, and have set minimum distances to safeguard against military ship radars bothering the 320 with what’s known as EMI, or electromagnetic interference. We have to admit that it is remotely possible for the A320’s flight-control system to be subject to EMI influence if the FAA-prescribed minimum distances are not maintained.”

  The Airbus table came alive again, and Joe indicated that they would have their turn when he had finished.

  “Ms. Rawlson, would you, for clarity and the record, explain the fly-by-wire system for us?”

  “In brief, most modern transport-category aircraft use a system of metal cables which connect the control yoke and the rudder pedals in the cockpit with hydraulic control units out on the wings and in the tail. To climb, you pull back on the control yoke, and that motion is physically transmitted by the cable all the way to the tail, where it operates a system of valves on a hydraulic control unit, which in turn powers the hydraulic pistons which move the elevator surface. If there were no hydraulics it would be difficult to move those control surfaces because they’re so big, and they would require a lot of brute force to move against the airflow. Now, all those cables create a lot of weight, so if you could use electrical wires instead of the traditional cables and pulleys—if you could electrically transmit the movements of the flight controls in the cockpit to the hydraulic valves in the wings and tail—you could save an enormous amount of weight, and maintenance over the years. In other words, you have fly-by-steel-cable, and fly-by-electrical-wire. The Airbus 320 uses the latter system—with computers making the decisions on how to translate the physical movement of the control yoke into physical movement of the control surfaces. You might say in the A320, the pilots are flying the computers rather than the airplane itself.”

  “One more question, Ms. Rawlson,” Joe promised. “Did you investigate the possibility that the flight-control computers malfunctioned, sending a false nose-down command to the flight-control surfaces?”

  “Very extensively, we looked at that. The best evidence that there was no malfunction is this: the second the copilot took control with the priority switch, the flight-control surfaces instantly changed position to reflect a nose-up recovery attempt. If there had been a malfunction—even one not caught by the various flight-control computers running in parallel and constantly checking each other—the copilot’s taking control would probably have had no effect.”

  The details were Byzantine, but the end result was the same. There was no evidence of an internal flight-control malfunction—though an externally induced EMI malfunction was possible.

  Joe turned it over to Airbus then, letting their engineers take Barbara through nearly an hour of record-preserving testimony about the reliability of the 320’s systems. As she spoke, Joe caught several indications from his right, from Susan Kelly, that they needed to talk, and of that he was already certain. It wa
s during the lunch break that they finally slipped away, retreating to a far corner of the mezzanine, out of sight of the lobby and hopefully of Farris.

  “Joe, after you left …” She looked at him in silence for a second before continuing. “Well, as I see it, Dean is about to commit professional suicide. He has absolutely no right to protect North America’s doctor. I could not believe, I mean I really could not believe what I was hearing in there. Have you ever experienced anything like this? Has there ever been an NTSB chairman who tried to protect an airline to this extent?”

  Joe sighed audibly. “In a word, no. Not in my experience. Susan, there may be no significance to the discrepancies in those reports that company doctor has given us, but we’ve got to find out. After all, the records involved are of the accident captain. The chairman is trying to prevent us from investigating the accident captain because North America is chewing on him.”

  “What are you going to do? He threatened your job. I can get the other members to intervene, but he has the power to do what he threatens, I think. I mean, I’m not a lawyer …”

  “Neither am I. I don’t know. I don’t want to provoke him into throwing me off this case, or worse. I just want to get through this hearing. The doctor’s gone to Canada right now anyway. We can’t do anything about it until he gets back.”

  “I’m upset enough to resign, Joe, but that would leave you with even less help and it wouldn’t solve anything.” She reached out and placed a hand on his arm, but at first he didn’t notice. The gesture was very much in character for Susan, not overly familiar, not improper, neither forward nor intimate, just a reinforcement of sincere interest. Yet it suddenly sent chills down his back as he looked in her beautiful eyes, then yanked himself away from such thoughts. “What if?” did not apply to professional colleagues who happened to be women. If he had learned nothing else from the loss of Brenda to a career, he certainly should have learned that.

  “Please don’t resign on my account. We’ll figure a way to handle him without destroying the investigation, the Board, or me, I hope.”

  “Well, I’m about ready to go outside the family.”

  He tried not to look startled, but he was exactly that. “I don’t understand …”

  “Joe, I didn’t get this position by running the Junior League. I have been quite active in the political world. I do know a few people on the Hill.”

  “I never thought of you as political, I guess. I … not yet, Susan. We don’t need to consider drastic action yet.”

  The sight of a newsman approaching with notepad in hand put an end to the exchange, and Susan turned to talk to him while Joe slipped away and headed back to the hearing room. Lunch would have to wait for dinnertime. There was much to coordinate before gaveling the hearing back into session.

  Barbara Rawlson was waiting for him. “How’d I do, Joe? Are you happy?”

  “With you, yes. Did you hear that Mrs. Wilkins was here?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah. She just got through putting on quite a show for the media out in the lobby. Apparently we’re all communist dupes working within a grand conspiracy with the military to rid this nation of its only true guardians of freedom and kill Star Wars in the process.”

  “Lord!” Barbara shook her head and smiled.

  “I know.”

  The cameramen and print reporters were already in place when Joe and Susan resumed their seats at the head table, waiting for the name of Dick Timson to be called.

  The chief pilot still looked wan and fragile. He had not returned to work as yet, but there had also been no known attempt to remove him as chief pilot or as a staff vice-president. To do so at this stage, Joe knew, would look like an admission of guilt on the part of the airline.

  Joe walked Timson through the routine questions of name and residence and experience and qualification, then opened his notebook to the list of questions that would form the heart of the testimony.

  Yes, Timson said, he had been forced to fly the October 12 flight because he had suspended the captain originally scheduled for it, and scheduling couldn’t get a last-minute replacement. No, he was not excessively tired, nor on medication, nor had he had anything alcoholic to drink. He was perfectly capable of serving as captain on that flight. Yes, he had snapped at Don Leyhe, and he had flown blindly into windshear, thanks, he said, to the control tower’s failure to warn him of its presence.

  “Captain Timson,” Joe asked, “tell us in your own words, having seen the flight recorder readouts and read the cockpit voice recorder transcript, and having been there as no one else in this room, what happened on that final turn?”

  Timson had his hands clasped together on the table. He looked down for a second before beginning, his voice steady but slow. “Everything was normal as we came around, descending on airspeed, looking to roll out right over the end of the runway and land. Somewhere in there, even though I was holding the same amount of back pressure on the control stick as before, somewhere in there the airplane suddenly pitched down. Don, my copilot, yelled something—I see from the transcript he asked what I was doing—and I was too busy pulling on that stick to answer him. It didn’t respond for what seemed like an eternity, the nose stayed down and we were dropping, and we were no longer turning toward the runway. In other words, it was as if I had pushed the stick forward, and I was doing the opposite. I thought I had told Don to take it, but I guess I never got the words out. They were in my mind, though, but somewhere during that time Don did hit the priority switch and assume control, and the plane responded … only …”—Timson looked back down and dropped his voice to little more than a whisper—“… only, too late.”

  “Captain, when you were first interviewed in the hospital by NTSB investigators, you said that you had maintained control all the way to impact. When you were next interviewed, also in the hospital, this time on October twenty-second, you stated that you said, and I quote, ‘My stick’s not responding, take it Don, take it.’ In a third interview, after reading the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, you said that you had meant to say those words, but apparently had not. Is all that correct?”

  “Yes sir. I was quite mentally confused for many days after the accident. As you know, I had a skull fracture, and at the first interview, I was under medication. I don’t even remember you people being there. The second interview, I told you what I thought I had said. That’s what was in my head. I thought I had said it. The tape proved me wrong.”

  In the audience, Dr. Mark Weiss made careful note of Timson’s words, a thin smile and a shallow nod the only outward indications that something of special significance had reached his ears.

  “But you never pushed that stick forward or let it go?” Joe continued.

  “Of course not. Why would I do something … something suicidal like that?”

  Joe concentrated on the notebook for a few seconds, his brow deeply furrowed. The statement Dick Timson said he had made to Don Leyhe, but hadn’t, really puzzled Joe. He had repeated the words to Andy during that second interview with so much force and assurance, as if he’d heard it on a tape recording. Then he’d seemed perplexed and even angry when they showed him the transcript weeks later, convincing him finally that in fact those words were not on the tape. The discrepancy probably was exactly as Timson claimed, the result of his head injury. But it still bothered Joe. The man had seemed so sure.

  “Captain, you say you did not push the stick forward, but the airplane’s nose dropped. How do you explain that?”

  “There’s only one explanation I can think of, Mr. Wallingford. The side-stick controller or the flight computers malfunctioned, or were influenced somehow from the ground.”

  “But, sir, you’ve heard testimony from NTSB staff investigators here this morning that there is no evidence of that happening.”

  Timson looked Joe in the eye and nodded evenly. “I know, but I also heard your people say that electromagnetic interference is still a possibility. Look, I was there, and I
didn’t command nose down. Therefore, the airplane did it for me. What made the airplane disobey me, I don’t know. That’s your question to answer, not mine.” Timson shifted in his chair and studied his hands, his mouth open, on the verge of adding something. “I … I’ve flown airplanes for a lot of years, Mr. Wallingford, and I’ve heard airplane manufacturers and engineers and instructors tell me for years that it was impossible for a particular piece of equipment to fail. Yet that very item would later do just that—fail—and only then would we find their faith in mechanical perfection had been … misplaced. I was there, sir. My life, and that of many others, has been completely altered by this horror, which happened in spite of my best efforts as a pilot. It may be hard for you to accept, but the control system malfunctioned. Plain and simple.”

  “There is, then, no chance you pushed it over even for a second to correct your flight path, or some other reason?”

  “No sir. I did not.”

  An idea flashed through Joe’s head, from where he wasn’t sure, but the question just seemed appropriate all of a sudden. “Captain, were you fully conscious all the way down?”

  Timson’s eyes widened slightly at that, but there was no other visible response. The same flat, controlled vocal tones carried his answer. “Of course I was. I wouldn’t remember any of this otherwise.”

  He had a point, Joe conceded. Plus there was the final word. “There is an epithet on the voice tape just before impact. Someone said, ‘Goddamn it!’ Is that your voice?”

  “Yes it is.”

  To the media it looked like a dramatic pause, but Joe was trying to shift gears, pawing through the list of questions, steeling himself to probe into the foreign areas of human factors he had accepted so reluctantly.