Millennium

1 "A Sound of Thunder"

Testimony of Bill Smith

My phone rang just before one o'clock on the morning of December 10.

I could leave it there, just say my phone rang, but it wouldn't convey the actual magnitude of the event.

I once spent seven hundred dollars for an alarm clock. It wasn't an alarm clock when I bought it and it was a lot more than that when I got through with it. The heart of the thing was a World War Two surplus air-raid siren. I added items here and there and, when I was through, it would have given the San Francisco earthquake stiff competition as a means of getting somebody out of bed.

Later, I connected my second telephone to this doomsday machine.

I got the second phone when I found myself jumping every time the first one rang. Only six people at the office knew the number of the new phone, and it solved two problems very neatly. I stopped twitching at the sound of telephone bells, and I never again was awakened by somebody who came to the house to tell me that the alarm had come in, I had been called and failed to answer, and I had been replaced on the go-team.

I'm one of those people who sleep like the dead. Always have; my mother used to tumble me out of bed to get me to school. Even in the Navy, while all around me were losing sleep thinking about the flight deck in the morning, I could stack Z's all night and have to be rousted out by the C.O.

Also, I do drink a bit.

You know how it is. First it's just at parties. Then it's a couple at the end of the day. After the divorce I started drinking alone, because for the first time in my life I was having trouble getting to sleep. And I know that's one of the signs, but it's miles short of alcoholism.

But a pattern had developed of arriving late at the office and I figured I'd better do something about it before somebody higher up did. Tom Stanley recommended counseling, but I think my alarm clock worked just as well. There's always a way to work out your problems if you'll only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done.

For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffee-maker. When you're up and have the coffee perking, it's too late to go back to sleep.

We all laughed about it at the office. Everybody thought it was cute. Okay, maybe rats running through a maze are cute, too. And maybe you're perfectly well adjusted, without a single gear that squeaks or spring that's wound too tight, and if so, I don't want to hear about it. Tell it to your analyst.

So my phone rang.

So I sat up, looked around, realized it was still dark and knew this wasn't the beginning of another routine day at the office. Then I grabbed the receiver before the phone could peel the second layer of paint off the walls.

I guess I took a while getting it to my car. There had been a few drinks not too many hours before, and I'm not at my best when I wake up, even on a go-team call. I heard a hissing silence, then a hesitant voice.

"Mr. Smith?" It was the night-shift operator at the Board, a woman I'd never met.

"Yeah, you got him."

"Please hold for Mr. Petcher."

Then even the hiss was gone and l found myself in that twentieth-century version of purgatory, 'on hold,' before I had a chance to protest.

Actually, I didn't mind. It gave me a chance to wake up. I yawned and scratched, put on my glasses, and peered at the dart tacked to the wall above the nightstand. There he was, C. Gordon Petcher, just below the chairman and the line that read "GO-TEAM MEMBERS -- Notify the following for all catastrophic accidents." The chart is changed every Thursday at the end of the work day. The Chairman, Roger Ryan, is the only name that appears on every one. No matter what happens, at any time of the day, Ryan is the first to hear about it.

My own name was a little further down the list in the space marked 'Aviation Duty Officer/IIC,' followed by my beeper number and the number of my second home phone. 'IIC,' by the way, is not to be read as 'two-C,' but as 'Investigator In Charge.'

C. Gordon Petcher was the newest of the five members of the National Transportation Safety Board. As such, he was naturally a little suspect. Those of us hired for our expertise always wonder about new Board members, who are appointed for five-year terms. Each has to go through a trial period during which we decide if this one is to be trusted or endured.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, Bill."

"That's okay, Gordy." He wanted us to call him Gordy.

"I was just talking to Roger. We have a very bad one in California. Since it's so late and the accident is so big, we've decided not to wait for available transport. The JetStar is waiting for the go-team to assemble. I'm hoping it can take off within an hour. If you -- "

"How big, Gordy? Chicago? Everglades? San Diego?"

He sounded apologetic. That can happen. Breaking really bad news, you can feel that somehow you're responsible for it.

"It could be bigger than Canary Islands," he said.

Part of me resented this new guy speaking to me in agency shorthand, while the rest of me was trying to digest an accident bigger than Tenerife.

Outsiders might think we're talking about places when we mention Chicago, Paris, Everglades, and so forth. We're not. Chicago is a DC-10 losing an engine on take-off, killing all aboard. Everglades was an L-1011, a survivor crash, bellying into the swamp while the crew was troubleshooting a nose-gear light. San Diego was a big, grinning PSA 727 getting tangled up with a Cessna in Indian Country -- the low elevations swarming with Navajos, Cherokees, and Piper Cubs. And Canary Islands ...

In 1978, at the Tenerife Airport, Canary islands, an unthinkable thing happened. A fully-

fueled, loaded Boeing 747 began its take-off while another 747 was still on the runway ahead of it, invisible in thick fog. The two planes collided and burned on the ground, as if they'd been lumbering city buses in rush-hour traffic instead of sleek, lovely, sophisticated flying machines.

It was, or had been until I got the phone call, the worst disaster in the history of aviation.

"Where in California, Gordy?"

"Oakland, east of Oakland, in the hills."

"Who was involved?"

"A Pan Am 747 and a United DC-10."

"Mid-air?"

"Yes. Both planes fully loaded. I don't have any definite numbers yet -- "

"Don't worry about it. I think I've got all I need right now. I'll meet you at the airport in about -- "

"I'll be taking a morning flight out of Dulles," he said. "Mr Ryan suggested I remain here a few more hours to coordinate the public affairs side of things while -- "

"Sure, sure. Okay. See you around noon."

I was out of the house no more than twenty minutes after I hung up. In that time I had shaved, dressed, packed, and had a cup of coffee and a Swanson's breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage. It was a source of some pride to me that I had never done it faster, even before the divorce.

The secret is preparation, establishing habits and never varying from them. You plan your moves, do what you can beforehand, and when the call comes in you're ready.

So I showered in the downstairs bath instead of the one by the master bedroom, because that took me through the kitchen where I could punch the pre-programmed button on the microwave and flip the switch on the Mr Coffee, both of which had been loaded the night before, drunk or sober. Out of the shower, electric razor in hand, I ate standing up while I shaved, then carried the razor upstairs and tossed it into the suitcase, which already was full of underwear, shirts, pants, and toiletries. It was only at that point I had to make my first decisions of the day, based on where I was going. I have been sent on short notice to the Mojave Desert and to Mount Erebus, in Antarctica. Obviously you bring different clothes.

The big yellow poncho was already packed; you always prepare for rain at a crash site. The Oakland hills in December presented no big challenges.

Close and lock the suitcase, pick up the stack of papers on the desk and shove them in the smaller case which held the items I always had ready for a go-team call: camera, lots of film, notebook, magnifying glass, flashlight and fresh batteries, tape recorder, cassettes, calculator, compass. Then down the stairs again, pour a second cup of coffee and carry everything through the door to the garage -- left open the night before -- hit the garage-door button with my elbow on the way out, kick the door shut and locked behind me, toss the suitcase and briefcase into the open trunk, hop in the car, back out, hit the button on the Genie garage-door picker-upper and watch to make sure it closes all the way.

Aside from picking a few items of clothes, it was all automatic. I didn't have to think again until I was on Connecticut Avenue, driving south. The house was all battened down because I kept it that way. Thank God I didn't have a dog. Anyway, Sam Horowitz next door would keep an eye on the place for me when he read about the crash in tomorrow's Post.

All in all, I felt I had adjusted pretty well to bachelor living.

I live out in Kensington, Maryland. The house is way too big for me, since the divorce, and it costs a lot to heat, but I can't seem to leave it. I could have moved into the city, but I hate apartment living.

I took the Beltway in to National. That time of night Connecticut Avenue is almost deserted, but the lights slow you down. You'd think the Investigator In Charge of a National Transportation Safety Board Go-Team on his way to the biggest aviation disaster in history would have a red light he could mount on top of his car and just zip through the intersections.

Sad to say, the D.C. police would take a dim view of that.

Most of the team lived in Virginia and would get to the airport before me, whatever route I took. But the plane wouldn't leave without me.

I hate National Airport. It's an affront to everything the NTSB stands for. A few years back, when the news of the Air Florida hitting the 14th Street bridge first came in, a couple of us hoped (but not out loud) we might finally be able to shut it down It didn't turn out that way, but I still hoped.

As it was, National was just too damn convenient. To most Washingtonians, Dulles International might as well be in Dakota. As for Baltimore ...

Even the Board bases its planes at National. We have a few, the biggest being a Lockheed JetStar that can take us anywhere in the continental U.S. without refueling. Normally we take commercial flights, but that doesn't always work. This time it was too early in the morning to find enough seats going west. There was also the possibility, if this really was as big as Gordy said, that a second team would follow us as soon as the sun came up. We might have to treat this as two crashes.

Everybody but George Sheppard was already there by the time I boarded the JetStar. Tom Stanley had been in contact with Gordy Petcher. While I stowed my gear Tom filled me in on the things Petcher either had not known or could not bring himself to tell me when we talked.

No survivors. We didn't have an exact count yet from either airline, but it was sure to be over six hundred dead.

It had happened at five thousand feet. The DC-10 had gone almost straight down. The 747 flew a little, but the end result was the same. The Ten was not far from a major highway; local police and fire units were at the scene. The Pan Am Boeing was up in the hills somewhere. Rescue workers had reached it, but the only word back was that there were no survivors.

Roger Keane, the head of the NTSB field office in Los Angeles, was still on his way to the Bay Area and should be landing soon. Roger had been in contact with the Contra Costa and Alameda County Sheriff's offices, advising them on crash site procedures.

"Who's running the show at LAX?" I asked.

"His name's Kevin Briley," said Tom. "I don't know him. Do you?"

"I think I shook his hand once. I'll feel better when Rog Keane gets to the site."

"Briley said he was told to grab the next flight to Oakland and meet us there. He'll be in L.A. a little bit longer, if you want to talk to him."

I glanced at my watch.

"In a minute. Where's George?"

"I don't know. He got the call. We tried him five minutes ago and there was no answer."

George Sheppard is the weather specialist. We could take off without him, since his presence at the crash site wasn't absolutely necessary.

And I was ready to go. More: I was aching to go, like a skittish race horse in the starting gate. I could feel it building all around me, and all around the nation. The interior of the JetStar was dark and calm, but from Washington to Los Angeles and Seattle, and soon all around the world, forces were gathering that would produce the goddamdest electronic circus anyone ever saw. The nation slept, but the wire services and the coaxial cables and synchronous satellites were humming with the news. A thousand reporters and editors were being roused from bed, booking flights to Oakland. A hundred government agencies were going to be involved before this thing was over. Foreign governments would send representatives. Everyone from Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas to the manufacturer of the smallest rivet in an airframe would be on edge, wondering if their factory had turned out the offending part or written the fatal directive, and they'd all want to be on hand to hear the bad news as it happened. By the time the sun came up in California a billion people would be clamoring for answers. How did this happen? Whose fault is it? What should be done about it? And I was the guy who had to provide those answers. Every nerve in my body was crying out to get in the air, get there, and start looking.

I was about to order the take-off when a call came in from George, sparing me a decision that he'd surely have resented. He was having car trouble. He'd called a taxi, but suggested we'd better take off without him and he'd catch up later. I heaved a sigh of relief and told the pilot to get us out of here.

What's it like on your way to a major airline disaster? Fairly quiet, for the most part.

During the first hour I made a few calls to Los Angeles, spoke briefly to Kevin Briley. I learned that Roger Keane had boarded a helicopter and was surely at the DC-10 site by now.

Briley was about to leave to catch his own flight to Oakland, where he would meet me at the airport. I told him to set up security.

Then some of the others made calls to Seattle, Oakland, Schenectady, Denver, Los Angeles. Each of the go-team members would be forming his own team to look into one aspect of the crash, and each wanted to get the best possible people. Usually that was no problem. The grapevine operates quickly in a crash this size. Almost everyone we called had already heard; many were already on their way. These were people we knew and trusted.

But none of that took very long. After that first hour we were alone in the sky on the five-hour flight to Oakland. So what did we do? Do you have any idea how much paper work is involved in an accident investigation? Each of us had half a dozen reports in progress. There were reports to read and reports to write, and endless items to review. My own briefcase bulged with pending work. I did some of it for an hour or so.

Finally I wasn't understanding what I was reading. I yawned, stretched, and looked around me. Half the team was asleep. That struck me as a fine idea. It was 4:30 in the morning, Eastern time, three hours earlier on the West Coast, and none of us were likely to get any sleep until well past midnight.

Across the aisle was Jerry Bannister, in charge of structures. He's the oldest of us: a big man with a huge head and thick gray hair, an aeronautical engineer who got his start on the Douglas assembly line building Gooney Birds because the Army recruiter rejected him. He's deaf in one ear and wears a hearing aid in the other. Looking at him, you'd think he was the biggest mistake the Army ever made. I'd put him up against a platoon of German soldiers any day, even at age sixty. He's got one of those craggy faces and a pair of those giant hands that would make him look right at home in a machine shop. It's hard to picture him at a drawing board or putting a model through wind-tunnel tests, but that's what he's good at. After the war he put himself through college. He worked on the DC-6 and the DC-8, among many others.

He was sound asleep, head back, mouth open. The guy is almost nerveless; nothing rattles him. He collects stamps, of all things. He's nutty about philately; once he starts talking about it it's impossible to shut him off.

Behind him, his bald head gleaming in the cone of light from overhead, was Craig Haubner, my systems specialist. He would spend the rest of the flight filling page after page of his yellow legal tablet, bounce off the plane and out to the crash site and spend all day and into the night poking and peering into the wreckage, and return to the temporary headquarters still neat, alert, and full of energy. It was impossible to like Haubner -- he wasn't very good with people, and sometimes didn't even seem to be human -- but we all respected him. His ability to examine a bit of charred wire or bent hydraulic tubing and tell exactly what happened to it is little short of the occult.

Then there was Eli Seibel, also awake, pawing through the matchbook covers, paper napkins, torn envelopes and crumpled papers he is pleased to call his working notes. I never complain to him about it, though I grit my teeth when I see him at work. Out of the chaos he manages to turn in very good work. He's overweight and allergic to just about everything and the only one of us without a pilot's license, but he's cheerful, popular with the secretaries at the office, and competent at his specialty, which is powerplants.

In the seats behind me was Tom Stanley, with his feet out in the aisle and the rest of him vainly trying to curl up and get comfortable. At twenty-seven, he's the youngest member of the team. He'd never been in the service -- I suspected he'd have been a draft-dodger if he'd been old enough for Viet-Nam -- and the only aviation-related job he'd held before coming to work for the Board was as an Air Traffic Controller. His family has a lot of money. He started out at Harvard, of all places, before switching to M.I.T., and his dad paid every penny.

He lives in a house that's worth five times what mine would sell for. All in all, I could hardly imagine a biography more calculated to bring out hostility from the likes of old pros like Jerry, Craig ... and myself. And that's pretty much how Haubner and Bannister felt about him. Eli Seibel tolerates him, and Levitsky more or less tolerates all of us.

But I get along with Tom quite well. If there was such a thing as a second-in-command of an NTSB investigation (which there is not), I would choose Tom Stanley for the post. As it is, I confer with him a lot.

The secret is probably his love of flying. He's been doing it since he was about eight, and I love flying so much myself that I can't find it in myself to resent the money that made it possible for him. I own a wonderful old Stearman biplane that swallows too much of my salary and probably will never be paid for. Tom owns a mint-condition Spitfire. And he lets me fly it. What can you say about a man like that? Tom would be chairing two sub-groups in the investigation: Air Traffic Control and Operations. The other person who would wear two hats was asleep in the back of the plane.

She was Carole Levitsky, in charge of Human Factors and Witnesses. She'd only been with the Board six months. This would be her second major crash. Originally a research psychologist with experience in forensics and, industrial stress factors, she had managed to more or less win over us hard-technology types. I suspect she knew what made us all tick a lot better than we did ourselves; she had a way of looking at you that pretty soon had you thinking "I wonder what I really meant by that?" The one thing that still made us all nervous was a lingering suspicion that she spent as much time studying the effects of stress on us as she did on the pilots and ATC's who figured in the crashes we investigated. As I already mentioned, there were things about myself I'd just as soon keep away from a psychologist, and the rest of us were all fertile ground for job stress syndrome as well. Carole is a small woman with short, dark hair and a rather plain face. She works well with the overwhelmingly male groups that assemble for an investigation.

There were three team members not present. George Sheppard would look into the weather as a factor leading up to the crash. Then there was Ed Parrish, who normally wasn't called up to the crash site since his function was Maintenance and Records. He'd be going to Seattle and Los Angeles, where the airframes were built, and to the Maintenance facilities of Pan Am and United, where he would pore through the mountains of papers filled out every time a commercial jet is worked on. And not even on the go-team list was Victor Thomkins, in charge of the Washington labs where the Cockpit Voice Recorders and Flight Data Recorders would be analyzed.

It was a good team. The only glaring absence was C. Gordon Petcher, who really should have been on the plane with us. Not that he was necessary; I was in charge, whether he was there or not. The field phase of the investigation was my responsibility. But it looked better to have a Board Member present to handle the press. I wondered why he'd elected to wait until morning to fly to the coast? But I didn't wonder for long. I was asleep almost as soon as I leaned back in my seat.

I stepped off the plane, glassy-eyed, into the glare of television lights. They were at the foot of the stairs, crews from as far away as Portland and Santa Barbara. All the bright young men and women were holding mikes out toward us and asking stupid questions.

It's a ritual; the death-dance of our times. Television news is nothing without pictures, and it hardly matters what the pictures are so long as there's something to back up the narration. A plane crash presents them with special problems. What they'd have for their next newscast would be some indistinct night-shots of the crash sites -- nothing more than twisted wreckage, with an intact wing or tail if they were lucky -- some aerial shots of plowed-up ground that didn't look like much of anything, and shots of the people who flew in from Washington to sort it all out. Of those, a news editor would choose the shots with people in them, so there we were, shuffling between the plane and the helicopter, cameras before us and cameras behind us, wearing artificial smiles and saying nothing.

I got into the copter without even noticing who it belonged to. Inside was a man who stretched out his hand. I looked at it, then took it without any enthusiasm.

"Mr Smith? I'm Kevin Briley. Roger Keane said I should take you out to the Mount Diablo site as soon as you got here."

"Okay, Briley," I said, shouting to be heard over the noise of the chopper. "One, I'm your boss right now, not Keane. Two, I said I wanted security here, and by that I meant keeping the press away from us until we had something to say. You fucked up on that. So three, you're staying right here. I want you to talk to whoever runs this airport, then look up Sarah Hacker from United and call somebody at Pan Am in New York and tell them what you need, which is some meeting space here in the terminal building, some hangar space somewhere to put what's left of those two aircraft, and a place to pen up these vultures and keep them out of my hair. Then get us some hotel rooms, rent a couple of cars ... hell, Briley, talk to Sarah Hacker. She'll know what needs to be done. She's been through this before."

"I haven't, Mr Smith." Briley managed to look belligerent and chagrined at the same time.

"What should I tell the reporters? They want to know when they can expect a press conference."

"Tell them noon today. I doubt like hell there'll be one by then, but tell 'em anyway. And guess what? You get to catch the flak when it gets postponed." I grinned at him, and he managed a tired smile and shrug. Maybe he'd hate my guts, and maybe he'd get things done just to spite me. I didn't mind. He hopped out, and we closed the sliding door on the helicopter. Almost immediately the pilot started up. I looked around. It was a good old Huey, owned and operated by the U.S. Army. Hueys are great, but they tend to be drafty. The pilot wore a sergeant's stripes.

"How far apart are the two planes?" I asked him.

"About twenty miles, sir."

"Do you know which one Roger Keane is at? He's the guy from -- "

"I know him, sir. I just took him to the one on Mount Diablo. He said I should bring you there."

"That's fine. What's it like? On the ground."

"Muddy. It stopped raining about a half hour ago. The trucks are having a lot of trouble getting to it. There's nothing up there but fire trails."

When I found out the DC-10 was not too far out of the route to the 747 crash site, I told the sergeant to detour and fly over it. It wasn't hard to find.

The DC-10 had made an impact about half a mile north of Interstate 580, not far from Livermore. In what looked m be open fields, hundreds of red and blue lights flashed. Some flame was visible, but the fuel had by then burnt itself out and the damp ground wasn't going to present any problems. All the pinpoints of light were more or less centered on a dark, circular area.

Obviously, I had known what to expect, but some part of me is still surprised, still asks the stupid question. I was out here to see a plane crash, but where was the plane? The pilot brought us down lower, nervously eyeing the myriad lights of other aircraft hovering, landing, or taking off from the vicinity. Still, there was no plane. There were spotlights down there. All they showed was churned up ground and a meaningless confetti of small, shapeless objects, nothing that looked bigger than a hubcap or a car door.

I got a bad feeling looking down at it. Part of it was because it was an unusual site; generally the imprint is a long, messy streak. There will be some recognizable objects strewn along the way, some of them quite large, like engine cowlings, big hunks of wing, part- of a fuselage. The mark Flight 35 had left on the ground looked very much like what a bullet would make hitting thick glass: a crater and rays of disturbance.

Flight 35 had literally splashed into the ground.