Fly by Wire

Chapter SEVEN

The weather was hard winter, a gunmetal gray sky blurred by darker veils of rain in the distance. Light drizzle swirled on an arbitrary breeze that blustered back and forth, never seeming to settle on a direction. A French breeze, Davis mused.

He knew he wasn't going by the book. He should have checked in first at the investigation's headquarters. Signed off paperwork, gotten somebody's approval. But he always liked one initial look at a crash without distraction, without people pulling him by the elbow to places he didn't want to go.

The cab was at least a half mile from the crash site when an array of barricades and police cordoned off the road. A fleet of forklifts and sturdy flatbed trucks were parked nearby, lying in wait for the awkward task of moving the wreckage to a secure location. It was a difficult undertaking, as the pieces were often huge, some weighing tons. Through all the shifting and manhandling, evidence was invariably lost, damaged, and altered. There should have been a more delicate, clinical way to do it. There wasn't.

A helicopter was hovering beneath the overcast clouds. The craft was almost stationary, side slipping now and again to give the men inside new lines of sight. The aerial photographers had likely been shooting since first light. There would be more photographers on the ground, and nothing on the site would be moved until every angle had been recorded, documented. Davis noticed a line of reporters and civilians standing at the best vantage point, the top of a nearby ridge.

They were all pointing and exchanging comments. Vulture's row. Something like it materialized at all aircraft crashes, onlookers drawn by the same morbid allure, Davis supposed, that made automobile wrecks so interesting.

He paid the cab and sent it away, figuring he wouldn't have any trouble getting a ride later — there had to be a constant flow of vehicles between the crash site and the center of operations. Following a rise in the road, Davis reached a perimeter that was marked with police tape. Probably four miles of it. Five men and two women, all wearing yellow vests marked policier stood firm at the entry point. When they saw him coming, two of the men moved to stand in his path. That's how things worked when you were a wide six foot four.

One of the policemen held up an arm.

Davis came to a halt.

"This area is closed to the public," the gatekeeper said in French.

Davis pulled out his NTSB identification, said nothing.

The lead man eyed him critically, but stepped away to reference a clipboard. Next he got out his mobile phone. It took two minutes. When he spoke again it was in English. "Very well, monsieur. But you must soon find your proper credentials."

Davis nodded. "Merci beaucoupy."

He started walking again. Fifty steps later he crested the hill.

And there it was.

Davis stood still.

It always hit him this way. The first time he saw any accident site he could only stare. Even now, two days after the crash, a few thin currents of smoke drifted up from the charred earth, like the last wisps of steam escaping a once-boiling pot. Everywhere he looked, the colors and textures were those of death. Brown earth, slick and damp from the rain. Blackened, jagged clumps of wreckage strewn in a seemingly random pattern. He had seen the aerial photos, but from ground level the crash site looked different. It always did. The individual pieces of debris seemed incredibly still, an impression at odds with what the sum implied to the contrary — noise, fire, turmoil.

He shifted his gaze to the horizon. In the midwinter distance, dormant grass and leafless trees gave a dismal frame to the apocalyptic scene. A few broken clumps of mist hovered in the valleys, soft pools to cradle the chaos. Davis began walking again, steering toward the main debris field. A large downed tree was lying prone amid the wreckage, testament to the physical forces that had engaged in one cataclysmic moment. He navigated through a minefield of metal, composite, wire, glass, and fabric. Most was from World Express 801, but a few things had probably already been lying around. An old car tire, beer bottles, a discarded compact disc. That much more for the investigators to sift through.

It was the smell that hit him next, the stinging odor of jet fuel and soot grating on his respiratory tract. At least it wasn't mixed with that other smell, he thought. If there was any good news here, it was that the human element of the tragedy had been minimal. Two pilots. No passengers.

He stopped first at the largest section of wreckage — just like everyone would — and tried to place it. It was a central section, an arrangement of thick beams and bulkheads. Probably rectangular to begin with, it was now slightly askew. The attached skin and fittings were a mix — some clean with jagged edges, other parts drooping and charred where the heat had done its work. Davis scanned all around and saw it everywhere — fire. World Express 801 had probably been carrying a hundred tons of Jet A fuel. A lot of potential energy.

He began walking again. The ground was crisscrossed with deep ruts. These were not a direct result of the crash, Davis knew. Emergency vehicles always dominated the first few hours, and they did a lot of damage, running over debris, indiscriminately spraying water and fire retardant on the whole mess. Nobody could blame them. It was a tough job, and sometimes lives were at stake. But it only added to the forensic nightmare, made the investigators job that much harder.

Davis stepped over a large metal tube that had one end ripped apart in three sections — it formed a perfect fleur-de-lis. He found a cockpit instrument panel, a twelve-inch square liquid-crystal display.

The glass screen was intact in its frame, black and empty, and a cable covered in melted insulation snaked out from the back. In years past, flight instruments were round dials with needles, "steam gauges" in the parlance. In those days, you could tell how fast an airplane was going when it hit by finding the indentation the airspeed pointer made on its glass cover plate. Now things were different. The actual instruments were void, black masks that hid whatever had existed at the moment of impact. The only way to tell was to mine chip sets, dig into memory cards, read bits of data. Clinical and secretive.

Davis drew to a stop and put his hands on his hips. He took one last look at the scene, taking a mental picture as he had done many times before. Not for the official record. It was just for his own sake.

By chance, airplanes could crash anywhere. By design, crash investigations were almost always based at airfields. The reasons were many. Airports were publicly owned, had communications gear, buildings to support meetings, trucks and tugs to haul things around. And they had hangars to hold wreckage. Sometimes there were only a few massive pieces involved. Sometimes there were millions. But a vacant hangar was always the way to go.

Davis hitched a ride with a photographer, an amiable Parisian who'd contracted himself out for air crash work to support his more artistic side — landscape black-and-whites. Like a good starving artist, he gave Davis his portfolio to study on the twenty-minute drive. The guy was actually good. As far as Jammer Davis could tell.

Davis got a good look at the Lyon airport as they drove. It was a fairly busy regional hub, maybe a dozen midsized jets nested at the passenger terminals. The terminal buildings had a modernist tilt, two grandiose main structures that reached for the sky. It was getting to be an architectural cliche, he thought. Give an airport designer a blank check, and you'd get no end of columns, arches, wings, and height.

The photographer drove around the airfield on a perimeter road, skirting the two north-south runways. He pulled into a quiet corner of the airport, a place that in the States might have been referred to as a "business park." There were groups of offices, workshops, and hangars. The photographer pointed to the correct building. Davis thanked the fellow and wished him luck. He really meant it, too.

It was labeled soixante-deux. Building Sixty-two. A boxy two-story support complex was attached to a larger hanger. Both seemed relatively new. Davis could just make out the faint impression of a name on the hangar s corrugated sidewall where the large letters of a sign had been removed. All that remained was a shadow where the paint had weathered unevenly — primaire. The name stood there like some pale, ghostly apparition, serving as the headstone of yet another European budget airline gone into receivership. Now the place had found a new life. Any remains of the carcass of primaire had been exhumed. Padlocks were snapped off, electricity restored, and the floors swept up. Building Sixty-two had been fully requisitioned and prepared for the cause of World Express 801.

At the main entrance a woman sat behind a table. She was shuffling papers, a bureaucratic bird featherbedding her nest with forms and messages. She was good at it, three neat piles. In, Out, Trash, Davis guessed. If she were a cashier, she'd be the type who put every bill in the tray face up, aligned the same way. He stopped right in front of her.

"Bonjour. Je suis Jammer Davis." He pronounced the J in his name hard, not wanting anybody to start calling him Zhammer.

The woman smiled officiously. "Yes, Mr. Davis. The investigator-in-charge has been expecting you."

She had gone right to English. Davis wondered if his French was that rusty. The woman checked his NTSB identification and said, "Follow me."

At the mouth of a hallway they passed a single rent-a-gendarme. He was sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette and reading Le Monde. Security, Davis reckoned. The first stop was a small office. The woman arranged Davis against a blank wall, then picked up a camera that was connected to a computer by a cable.

"Don't smile," she said.

"But I'm happy."

A disapproving frown.

Davis gave a subtle kink to his upper lip. All the pose needed was a number board hanging around his neck, maybe a height scale on the wall.

There was a click, and the woman started pressing buttons to feed his picture to the computer. As they waited for the finished product, she handed him a folder. Inside was a single page labeled, "Rules of Conduct for Investigators." Don't talk to the press without approval. Dress standards. A code of personal conduct. At the top of the page was a little cartoon policeman blowing a whistle. In case you didn't know what "rules" were, Davis supposed.

Minutes later, the woman handed over a smart photo ID with a lanyard. Davis hung it around his neck and fell back into formation. As they left the room he discreetly dropped the rulebook into a trash can.

They ended up in the hangar, a cavernous place with bright fluorescent lights that gave full detail and color to every thing. The place was cold, and Davis wondered if it simply wasn't heated or if the heat had been turned off in some misguided effort to preserve evidence. An assortment of tugs, forklifts, and handcarts buzzed around in a frenzy, clearing the concrete floor so the remains of World Express 801 could be brought to its postmortem slab.

He followed his escort to the middle of the place where a group was gathered around someone giving a talk. The angles changed as Davis got closer, and he was surprised to see a large piece of wreckage. Usually debris was left in the field for the best part of a week, until every inch had been meticulously mapped and documented. This investigation was barely forty-eight hours old, so Davis decided that whoever was in charge was either very efficient or very rushed.

He settled into the fringe of the crowd. The wreckage was a large section of the cockpit, left front side. The captain's seat was still recognizable, though its back panel had been exposed to heat — the plastic was discolored and shot with a thousand tiny bubbles. It was a mystery how airplanes broke apart. Jagged metal and scorched wire bundles might surround a pristine section of seats or instruments, hardware that looked as fresh as the day it had come out of the factory. A photographer was at least snapping pictures from all angles, and a young woman was busy labeling parts and entering data into a laptop. Maybe they were just organized.

A man stood in front of the group talking and gesturing. He might have been lecturing a class of undergraduates. His frame was tall and angular, the face dominated by high cheekbones and a prominent nose. He had clear skin with few lines — mid-fifties, but not a guy who spent time outdoors. The gray hair on top was thin, but on the sides it was long and wavy and tousled. His outfit was a classic — tan cotton shirt and vest, pants with lots of pockets, and at the bottom a virgin set of hiking boots. Indiana Jones minus the hat, whip, and dust. His movement seemed stunted, locking in position now and again, and Davis realized he was posing for the photographer.

The man addressed the gathering in English, under a heavy French accent. One look at the crowd told Davis why. There were clearly a lot of nationalities here. But then, CargoAir was a worldwide consortium, a far-flung archipelago of suppliers and designers and subcontractors. The inquiry would have to reflect it. There would be a hundred interested parties — some helping, others getting in the way. For the most part, Davis would avoid them, because he wasn't here to make friends or build teams. He was here to solve a crash. And to do that, he preferred to work alone, a pelagic creature that swam where it liked and ignored the currents. There were always currents.

"You can see the captain's station is largely intact," the speaker said. His words flowed with a carefree ease derivative of two possible sources — competence or sublime overconfidence. "This indicates that the copilot s side of the aircraft was the first to impact. Of course, data will confirm this in time. But if proven, it will be a confirming indicator of which pilot was at the controls in the moments before impact." He paused, waiting for the obvious.

"Why is that?" someone asked obligingly.

"Empirical psychological studies have proven that in the last instant of any crash, be it aircraft or automobile, the operator will instinctively steer away from impact to save himself."

Empirical psychological studies? Davis cringed.

Another voice prodded, "Even if the outcome is hopeless?"

The speaker emphasized, "Particularly if the outcome is hopeless. So, with regard to the captains thoughts, this section tells us—"

"Nothing," Davis interjected.

The speaker fell silent. A sea of heads turned.

Davis said, "When an airplane hits, tons of metal hit the ground and break up — it's chaos and it's random. Certain parts of the airframe, because of their inherent structural strength or frangible nature, tend to be the most intact. Wings, tail, landing gear. If a main body section this big survives, there's one of two reasons." Davis paused, but nobody asked. "You either have a low speed or low-angle impact."

The speaker reestablished control. "I don't think we have met, sir."

"Jammer Davis, NTSB."

"Ah, yes. Our American liaison. Thank you for your… opinion. As you are leading the human factors group, you will be happy to know that this is my specialty as well. I am a resident professor at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, specializing in aviation psychology. "The man paused, and Davis had the impression he was mulling coverage of the rest of his curriculum vitae. Instead, he edged through the crowd and held out a hand. "I am Dr. Thierry Bastien, investigator-in-charge of this inquiry."

Davis thought, Christ, a shrink at the helm. He said, "Nice to meet you."

The two shook hands. Then the Frenchman arced out an arm and said, "The others here are also involved in our investigation. We will be gathering for lunch soon. However, since all the working group leaders are present, perhaps an impromptu meeting would be in order."

"A meeting?"

"Certainement! Your information, Mr. Davis, the seventy-two-hour profile of the captain — it holds great interest for us all."

"Really? Why is that?"

Bastien did not answer. He only smiled politely, adjourned his lesson, and then asked for the key players to remain behind.