LACKING VIRTUES (23 page)

It was seven o’clock this fine September evening. He would work on his memoirs until ten o’clock, as he did most nights, then devote the hours before midnight to his watercolors. Life had never been more pleasant.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Frank Warner threw in the towel at nine o’clock in the evening. Calling his small contingent of investigators to his suite, he thanked them for their work in San Francisco and dismissed them. He was not accustomed to leaving the initial phase of an investigation so soon, and he was plagued by a persistent ugly doubt that he had missed something.

But he had no choice. He and his people had tested every conceivable hypothesis that might explain why the United Airlines 757 en route to Hawaii had lost oil and plunged into the Pacific. They had meticulously researched Captain Hutchinson’s theory of hydraulic fluid in the oil, which sounded promising but had been soundly disproved. They had even located O-rings made from the same batch of compound as those installed on the ill-fated plane and had analyzed the compound for the slightest irregularities. There were none.

Given the point in the flight at which the leak had begun and the rate at which it had stabilized, Warner could not help clinging to the hunch that degradation of the O-rings was in some mysterious way to blame. But since he could find no supporting evidence, his own strict rules of investigation forced him to toss his hunch on the junk heap of dead-end suppositions accumulated by his staff. The investigation would have to be continued in labs and offices all over the country. His hands-on first assault had failed.

He telephoned Claire, whom he hadn’t been able to reach for the last three days. It was after midnight on the East Coast and she still wasn’t home. She had left him, he couldn’t deceive himself any longer. Probably inevitable, he thought, but he wished she had picked another time. This was shaping up as the worst week of his life.

No sooner had he hung up than Susan Waters from the New York office, who had been working with the team in San Francisco day and night, telephoned from the room down the hall.

“Yes, Susan, what is it?”

“A few of us have been talking, Frank. Why don’t you let us take you out tonight for a leisurely dinner, some easy music. You know, get your mind off this whole frustrating affair for at least a few hours. You’re looking very exhausted.”

“That’s kind of you, Susan. I appreciate it.”

“Which means you won’t join us?”

“I’m sorry, I’m just not up to it. Thank the others for me. It was a nice thought.”

“Take care of yourself, Frank. Sometimes I worry you feel responsible for these crashes. You shouldn’t.”

“Good night, Susan. Enjoy your dinner.”

Warner hung up and paced. Should he pore over the same mountains of paperwork on the United crash again? No. He knew the material backwards and forwards.  

Should he have dinner sent up and watch TV? He wasn’t hungry and couldn’t have cared less about anything on the tube.

Should he try to sleep? That brought a smile to his lips.

He picked up the phone and dialed United Airlines reservations. Yes, he could still get to Pittsburgh by morning if he didn’t mind changing planes in Chicago and airlines in Columbus.

He next telephoned Yellow Cab, already packing with one hand while he waited for an answer. It was a relief to be moving. Whatever he did tonight, he was going to be miserable and unproductive. He might as well use the down time to haul himself to the next crash site.

***

By the fourth day of the Pittsburgh investigation even the purists had given up eating cereal and grapefruit in the morning. The long white-clothed table in the Airport Sheraton conference room was strewn with half-eaten doughnuts, nibbled bear claws and dirty ashtrays. Used Styrofoam and porcelain coffee cups stood around in clusters containing liquid of varying depths and hues. Tired men and women shuffled through the charts, transcripts, and computer printouts they had been studying half the night.

Tim Simmons came it at eight a.m. sharp, a light sweat from his morning workout still on his forehead. His tan suit fit to perfection, his shirt and tie looked new.

Simmons pushed the platter of doughnuts aside, poured himself a glass of orange juice and stepped to the podium. “Good morning. You’re a gray looking bunch. Roth, Kendall, one of you please update the inventory of wreckage brought in yesterday.”

There was grunting and more shuffling, a silent yawn and a noisy one. Simmons waited for someone to begin . . .

***

The biggest problem of the Pittsburgh investigation was the manner in which the 767 had come apart. The violent explosion at 900 feet had hurled debris a great distance in all directions and disfigured a lot of the wreckage. The crash had taken place over an unpopulated area, which was fortunate. But the forests and undergrowth were dense, the days rainy, and some of the fragments so small they were nearly impossible to spot.

After the second day Simmons had sent them all into the woods to help the hired hands – Ph.D.s in math, computer programmers, even Barb Lacey, who insisted on wearing high heels and stockings whenever she was on government time.

“Hey,” Simmons said into the continuing silence, “we didn’t come here to meditate. One of you get this show on the road.”

Roth, Kendall and the others did not respond. They were all staring past Simmons at some spot on the wall.

“Come on, dammit,” Simmons said. “Frank’s gonna shit if he gets here and finds a bunch of hotshot specialists with nothing but muddy boots to show.”

“This is true.”

Simmons turned at the sound of that inimitable voice. Warner was standing just inside the doorway, red-eyed, rumpled and unshaven. He looked as if he were trying to decide whose head to bite off first.

Simmons said, “Frank! Welcome. When did you arrive?”

“Seven-forty, U.S. Air out of Columbus.”

“You’ve been flying all night?”

“And thinking.”

“Well come on in. Have some breakfast. We’ll bring you up to date and then you can get some sleep.”

“I’ll sleep when we figure out what happened. In case you haven’t heard, the pressure’s on in Washington. You can count on it getting a lot worse if we don’t have some answers for this crash soon. I’m sorry to say we’ve gotten nowhere on the United crash. Finish your briefing and meet me at the work site, Tim. I’m going over there now.”

***

In the brightly lit hangar Warner surveyed the reconstruction, which still had a ways to go. Enough of the main body of the aircraft had been found and assembled to reveal a gaping, charred hole in right side of the fuselage. An untrained eye might have taken the wound as evidence of a bomb blast inside the plane, but the inward bend of the surrounding metal made it obvious to Warner that the explosion had not originated in the fuselage.

An enormous patch of the right wing, from its point of contact with the body of the aircraft to well out past the attachment point of the engine pylon, was missing. Here the lacerated edges of the wing bordering the hole were bent outward, indicating an explosion of the wing tank, the cause of the mutilated fuselage.

Warner knew from the CVR that the pilot had experienced severe vibrations shortly after take-off, and several dozen spectators had seen the right engine develop a shake and wobble that quickly grew worse. The home video film of a man who had recorded the accident, a copy of which Warner had received in San Francisco, left little doubt as to what had caused the explosion. Examining the film one frame at a time, he could see the engine under full thrust tearing loose from its pylon, swinging on an upward trajectory and slamming into the leading edge of the wing.

Since this much was already known, the primary objective of the Pittsburgh investigation was to find out what had caused the engine to separate from the aircraft. The similar accident in Atlanta, also involving a 767 300 ER, made it tempting to assume that the aft engine mount had failed again. Warner hoped this was the case. If it was, it might reveal an inherent defect in the mounts that the Atlanta investigation had not turned up. But he knew he must heed the warning he never tired of giving his staff: assume nothing.

Tim Simmons came in a few minutes later. He gave instructions to several men sorting the wreckage that had arrived yesterday afternoon on a flatbed truck, then walked over to Warner and looked him in the eye. “Are you ready for the bad news?”

“No, but give it to me.”

“It’s easier to explain when you’re staring the shit in the face. I kept the parts I knew you’d want to examine off to the side. They’ve only been here since noon yesterday. I didn’t get to study them closely until after dinner. When I called you at your hotel, you’d already left. This way, Frank.”

Warner walked with Simmons to a corner of the hangar where big pieces of wreckage were still being numbered, catalogued and photographed before making their journey to the reconstruction site. He passed a twisted piece of the main landing gear, its great tires reduced to a few pounds of incinerated black gook; a fractured turbine blade bent like a scythe; a battered nacelle that must have been blown free of the engine when it hit the wing.

Arriving late had one advantage, he thought: you didn’t see the bodies that had been shredded, pummeled, torn and burned by these same horrendous forces. You didn’t see them, but you never forgot they had been there.

On a steel table beneath fluorescent lights, Simmons had laid out the front and aft engine mounts to the engine that had come off the plane, as well as two bent engine mounting bolts and remnants of two others that had sheered.

The mounts were both still attached to surviving chunks of badly burned engine pylon. It was immediately evident to Warner that the bends and nicks they exhibited were the result of impact with the ground. They had not failed; the cause of the Atlanta crash had not been duplicated here.

He experienced a sinking feeling. What the hell was going on? Why couldn’t he figure it out? Boeing jets were beginning to drop like pheasants in hunting season, yet none of the crashes seemed to have anything in common. At what point did you conclude that this succession of disasters could not be coincidence? After three crashes? Five? Ten?

He examined the mounting bolts one at a time. He could feel Simmons watching him. “Well, Frank? Do you notice anything odd?”

“Yes. Two of these things evidently sheared off the way they’re supposed to when there is severe engine vibration. You were lucky to find these, Simmons. Nice job. The other two bent but did not break – the front two, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s right, Frank, the front two didn’t break.”

“This apparently caused the engine to swing upward and strike the wing instead of dropping away harmlessly.”

“You can see just that in the video.”

“Yes. What do we know about the engine? Why did it produce such powerful vibrations in the first place?”

Simmons said, “This is where it gets bizarre. We’ve found all the moving components. The Pratt and Whitney people have been here, as well as two independent experts. They’ve examined the shafts, bearings, turbines, everything. They all agree nothing was wrong with the power plant. There was no catastrophic engine failure. The black box bears this out.”

“Do you mean to tell me those two rear mounting bolts snapped under the normal stress of take-off?”

“Yes, Frank. We’ll have them sent out and stress-tested properly in the next few days, but Johnson, the metallurgy guy, has already taken a look at them. He says evidence of metal fatigue is written all over them – pre-crash metal fatigue.”