Millennium

9 The Shadow Girl

Testimony of Bill Smith

There was one of those stand-up places not too far away from our conference room. We went in there because we didn't think we'd have time for much more than that. I've seen those places in airports from LAX to Orly, and I've always wondered why people would want to stand up to eat their stale hot dogs. I guess the answer was obvious: they were in a hurry, like us.

I got something they claimed was roast beef, then I spent a lot of time tearing open and squeezing those little packets of mustard and ketchup and some unidentifiable white sauce to kill the gluey taste of the meat. Tom got a chili dog he had to eat with a plastic fork.

"Have you heard that story before?" I asked him.

"Some of it. I had some idea that's what he'd say."

"What'd you think of it?"

Tom took some time with his answer. I was interested, because ground control and operations was his specialty, and he knows a lot about electronics in general -- an area I'll admit isn't my strongest. He was an M.I.T. graduate in computer science, whereas I was a member of the last generation who still knew what a slide rule looked like. You have to know something about computers in my line of work, and I did, but I'd never grown to love them.

"It could happen," he said, at last.

"Do you think it did?"

"I believed him, if that's what you're asking. We may even get corroboration out of the computer. It'll take some work."

I chewed that over. -- "Okay. Assuming it's true. Who do you think we hang for it?"

"What, are you asking for a guess?"

"Why not?"

"Hell, I don't know if we can hang anybody at all. It's early, you understand. There may be something we can turn up that'll -- "

"Off the record, Tom."

He nodded. "Right. We still might not find anybody to blame."

"Listen, Tom. If a tornado springs out of a clear blue sky and wrecks a plane, I'll concede it wasn't anybody's fault. If a meteor falls on a plane, we probably couldn't have done anything about it. If -- "

"Spare me the speech," he said. "I've heard it. What if it turns out that the people to blame are us? You and me and the Board."

"It's been me. It'll be me again." I didn't go on, because he knew what I was talking about.

Sometimes we can't find out exactly what went wrong and you never know if it's just because you didn't look hard enough. Then again, sometimes you find the cause, put it in the report, tell the folks who are supposed to fix it, and they don't fix it. You keep after them to do something about it, but you'll never know if you pushed them hard enough. Did you really go to the wall over it, and was it worth risking your job for ... and so forth. So far there'd never been a dear-cut case where a plane had crashed because I'd overlooked something, let something go that I should have done. But there were any number of crashes that left me wondering if I'd pushed just a little bit harder ...

"Eli said he's seen this before," Tom said.

"Did he report it?" I mean, Eli was a friend, but there are limits.

"He says he did. He's only seen it once, but he's heard of two or three more times it's happened. It's just been such a small problem that nobody's gotten around to doing anything.

You know, the problem of the old computers in general outweighs this glitch in particular.

There's a file on it back in Washington."

"You've seen it?"

"Yeah. I've even fiddled with a solution, but I don't know if it'd work. Short of getting new hardware."

"What does that mean?"

"It's a one-in-a-million thing. It can happen when two planes are in the same section of the sky and the same distance from the radar dish. The ground station queries the on-board transponders, and they respond, and the signals get to the ground at the same time. It's got to be real close; thousandths of a second. And then, sometimes, the computer can't handle it.

They mistake the signals and put the wrong numbers up on the screen. It's garbage in, garbage out."

I knew what he was talking about, but I wasn't sure he was right. Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart. They're just fast. They can be programmed to act smart, but then it's the programmer who's actually smart and not the computer. If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it. And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart.

"Okay," I said. "So the information the computer got was garbage, or at least misleading.

An ATC computer shouldn't accept information that's obvious garbage."

"But how obvious was it? And don't forget it was just shut down. Maybe it didn't have anything to work from. Maybe it was starting from scratch, and it seemed perfectly reasonable that two planes had changed positions."

"It should have been obvious."

"Well," he said, with a sigh, "it would have been obvious to the new computers, which wouldn't have gone down in the first place."

I looked at him for a while, and for a while he kept chewing on his hot dog, which seemed tougher than any hot dog had a right to be.

"You're saying the new computers could have handled this?"

"Damn right they could have. They do it every day. The ones we've got in place. Hell, there were computers around seven or eight years ago that wouldn't have got into the bind this one did."

"We should have pushed harder."

"How much harder can you push?"

He was talking about a meeting six months before. Because of a computer overload in the Boston area there had been a situation that had been brought to our attention. In this case the planes didn't hit, they just sort of played chicken with each other until one pilot pulled up in time. So once again we brought up the subject of computer replacement.

Most of the FAA computers were bought and installed in 1968. Somebody had what must have seemed like a good idea at the time, which was to buy the hardware instead of lease it.

So the U.S. Government soon owned many millions of dollars worth of computers, which they operated and maintained themselves.

Years went by.

If you know anything about the computer field, you know that a computer built ten years ago might as well come from the stone age. It doesn't matter that the thing has been well maintained, that it works wonderfully at what it was designed to do: it's worth nothing at all.

If you can sell it for scrap metal you're lucky, because who wants to buy a big mainframe computer that can't do half the stuff that can be done better nowadays by a machine a hundredth the size? The FAA computers were now white elephants. They worked -- though they were approaching the limits of their design load and as a result suffering a lot of downtime. We were in the process of replacing them, but it's expensive and budgets are tight It would take a while.

And what the hell? In that business, about the time you take the dust-covers off and plug them in, somebody's got something twice as good on the market at half the price. We find ourselves always looking down the road at what'll be available next year and wondering if it might not make more sense to wait just a little longer.

I'd been opposed to the slow schedule. I wanted to get them all replaced within a year, and the hell with next year's models. But it wasn't something worth losing my job over.

If you look hard enough, you'll find the person responsible.

When we got back they were ready to play the copy of the tape from the 747 CVR.

We all gathered around again -- more people this time; I don't know how it happens but an investigation accumulates people like a dog picks up fleas -- and the tape was started.

There was a bad hiss that came and went, but we were able to hear most of it.

There were four people in this cockpit. They were having a good time, chattering back and forth, telling jokes.

Gil Crain, the pilot, was the easiest voice for me to place. I'd known him, and besides, he had a strong Southern accent. A legitimate accent, by the way. Half the commercial airline pilots in the sky affect a West Virginia drawl over the radio, pretending they're Chuck Yeager, who staffed the whole thing back in the "50s. The rest of them use a bored sing-song patois I've started to call Viet-Nam jet jockey. Sometimes you'd think you were listening to a lot of interstate truckers on the CB's. But Gil Crain was born and raised on Dixie soil. He'd soon be buried in it He spent a lot of his time talking about his kids. That wasn't easy to listen to, considering what was about to happen to him. I recall the cockpit tape from the San Diego crash. They were discussing life insurance, little knowing how badly they'd need it in a few minutes.

The guy with the giggle was Lloyd Whitmore, the engineer. John Sianis, the co-pilot, had a faint foreign accent -- something middle-eastern, I thought -- and a crisp, precise way of talking.

The last guy up there was Wayne DeLisle. He was listed as an observer, but it would be more accurate to call him a deadhead. He was a Pan Am pilot hitching a ride in the cockpit jumpseat. He'd been due to take a flight out of San Francisco the next day, bound for Hong Kong. He hadn't been too close to the mike and his voice wasn't very distinctive, but he talked so much I soon had no trouble picking him out from the rest.

The trouble started in pretty much the same way. Captain Crain tried to protest Janz's order, since it didn't make any sense to him, but I knew he wouldn't have hesitated long. He had to assume the ground controller looking at his radar display knew a lot more about the situation than he, Crain, flying through a cloud layer with nothing but fog outside his windshield.

The cockpit got quiet and businesslike instantly.

Crain said, "I wonder what he's got in mind?" He started to say something else, and stopped. It got noisy as the planes hit. Apparently the cockpit crew never even got a glimpse of the other plane, or at least they never mentioned seeing it.

Somebody shouted something, then they got down to the business of flying the disabled plane.

We listened to the activity as three of them went to work. It was by the book. Crain was testing to see what he had left, reporting everything he did, and gradually began to sound optimistic. The aircraft was still going down but he was wrestling the nose up and thought he still had enough control to get it level. I agreed with him, from what I knew, but also knew something he didn't, which was that he didn't have any rudder left at all and that there was a mountain down there waiting for him that he couldn't turn away from. Then I heard DeLisle.

"Back it up a minute," I said. "What did he say?"

"Sounded like 'see the passengers,'" somebody suggested. The tape started again, and we heard Gil talking about rudder function. I was leaning forward to catch the next line, which would be DeLisle's, when a voice spoke close to my ear.

"Would you like some coffee, Mr Smith?"

I had missed it again. I turned, furious, ready to shout something about getting this bitch out of here ... and found myself looking into the face of my movie star/stewardess from the hangar. She had a beautiful smile, and it was as guileless and innocent as a saint's. I thought it a little odd for somebody who'd run like a thief the last time I saw her, no more than a few hours ago.

"What are you doing over -- "

"He said 'I'm going to see to the passengers,'" Jerry said at my other side. "Why would he ... Bill? Are you listening?"

Part of me had been, but the rest had been wrapped up in the woman. I was torn two ways. I looked at Jerry, then back to the woman and she was already walking away with her tray of coffee.

"Why do you think he'd say that?" Jerry repeated. "Things must have been pretty grim in there."

"You'd think he'd be afraid to unstrap," somebody else contributed.

My attention was back on the problem.

"There's not much point in asking why he'd leave," I said. "He didn't have any duties in the cockpit, so we can't fault him for it. He was dead weight, but maybe he thought he could help out the flight attendants in the cabin."

"I'm just surprised he thought of it so soon," Craig said.

"I'm not," said Carole. "Think about it. He's a pilot in a cockpit and he's useless.

Everything in his training is telling him to do something, but that's the Captain's job. So he's been trained to save the passengers, so he gets out of the cockpit where he can't do anything to help and goes back into the cabin where maybe he can."

I nodded at her. It made sense. Tom thought so, too.

"That would do it," he said. "But from an Operations standpoint, he's not part of the crew and his impulse should have been to do what the crew told him to do, not take off on his own initiative. He should have waited for orders from Crain."

"Crain was pretty busy to be bothered with suggestions."

It was batted around some more, until I called it off.

"Turn it back on."

This one went on a little longer than the other had. It was worse, in a way. You could tell that Gil really thought he had it. He reported his altimeter readings and they were looking better. His angle of attack was improving. He had his co-pilot calling around, asking about places they might ditch, wondering if they could reach the shallows of the Bay or the Sacramento River or something, they were talking about fields and country roads ... and suddenly his ground avoidance alarm started to shout at him. And there was the mountain.

It would have been hard to miss even with a rudder. He tried everything he had, all his control surfaces, spoilers, ailerons, flaps, elevators, trying to wrestle the big beast into a turn.

The talk in the cockpit became even more rapid, but still ordered, as Grain and his crew worked on it.

He decided to get the nose up, flaps down, pull back on the engines, and try to stall into the ground, pancake it on that hillside and hope it wouldn't slide too far. By then he was out of good options and seemed to be thinking in terms of minimizing the violence.

Then we heard a most surprising sound. Someone was screaming in the cockpit. I was pretty sure it was a man, and he sounded hysterical.

The words were tumbling out almost too fast to be understood. I found myself on the edge of my seat, my eyes squeezed shut, in an effort to hear what the voice was saying. I had by then identified it as DeLisle. He'd come back.

But why? And what was he saying? That's when the tape stopped abruptly and something heavy bumped into my side. I jerked in surprise and opened my eyes and looked down at my lap. There was a Styrofoam coffee cup there, on its side. "Warm brown liquid was soaking into my pants.

"I'm so sorry, oh my goodness, here, let me help you with that. I'm such a klutz, no wonder they didn't want me for a stewardess."

She went on like that for a while, crouching at my side and dabbing my lap with a tiny handkerchief.

For a while there I was at a loss. I had been jerked away from total concentration on those dead guys in the cockpit, and then all this fell, literally, into my lap: She was inches away from me, looking up at my face with a strange expression, and she was stroking my thighs with a wet handkerchief. All I could do was stare at her.

"It's okay," I said, finally. "Accidents will happen."

"But always to me," she said, plaintively.

It had been quite an accident, really.

She had tripped over the power cord on the floor, which is why the tape machine went off. Her tray of coffee cups went one way and she, holding a cup in her hand, had gone the other. She'd ended up on the floor beside me, and the tray had ended up all over the tape machine.

I went over to assess the damage.

"I'll have to get another machine," the operator said. "Goddam stupid bitch. This is a five-

thousand-dollar set-up here, and coffee's not going to -- "

"How about the tape?" I'd had a chilling thought. Once, I played the original CVR tape before sending it on to the Washington lab. I was damn lucky this was only a copy. Nobody at the Board would be too amused if a tape came through a crash and then got ruined by spilled coffee.

"It ought to be okay. I'll put it on a reel and dry it by hand: He glanced at his watch. "Give me half an hour."

I nodded at him and turned to go find the girl, but she was gone.