The First Casualty

6

It was, perhaps, fitting that the French BEA, the agency charged with examining and investigating crashes of French-operated aircraft, should be located on the site of the first successful solo transatlantic flight, a feat easily eclipsing an earlier duo flight by a pair of World War I pilots. It was there on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis touched down 3,500 miles and 33½ hours from Roosevelt Field, Long Island. It was an exploit of individual courage not to be equaled until man walked on the moon.

Almost 100 years later, the field’s 8,000-foot runway, multiple terminals, and status as Europe’s busiest general aviation airport in no way resembled the open pasture that greeted the young American. Among the buildings clustered around the aviation center was a three-quarter acre, two-story structure that housed France’s equivalent of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

Inside, two men stared at a computer monitor in a combination of disbelief and incomprehension. The orange boxes recovered from the ocean floor more than 3,000 meters below the surface must have been affected by the great pressure of such depths. But the flight and voice recorders had been specifically designed to exist in such a hostile environment indefinitely, long after the batteries no longer sent out signals as to their location.

“Impossible!” Patrick Guyot, PhD in physics, exclaimed with the buzz of lips peculiar to the French pronunciation of the word. He was scrolling down the computer screen for the third time.

Charles Patin, aeronautical engineer, stepped over to a counter where a beaker sat on a single-ring burner, noted it was empty of the coffee usually brewed in it, and said, “Unusual, I agree. But impossible? We have checked and rechecked the readings, and they are consistent: The pressure driven instruments failed, the pressure altimeter, the static pressure vertical speed indicator. And the airspeed indicator, which would indicate the pitot tube, the…”

“And what is the likelihood of redundant instruments failing simultaneously? Even so, instrument failure was not the cause of this crash.” Guyot looked around and lowered his voice before continuing though he and Patin were the only two in the room. “The aircraft literally disintegrated in the air. I mean, parts of the tail assembly were found nearly twenty kilometers from the fuselage’s pieces. The wings weren’t even found in the search area at all. What are the odds of a storm causing that?”

Patin was looking for the small bag of ground coffee kept in a drawer. “Worse than you would get in the casino at Monte Carlo, I agree. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There is no known limit to the severity of weather in those latitudes.”

Guyot held up a multipage document. “And this series of tests: There is no explanation as to how parts of the aircraft’s aluminum seem to have simply melted. There is also evidence of high heat on surfaces.”

“Odd, I agree. I wonder if somehow lightning…”

Guyot shook his head. “To burn like that, lightning would need to be grounded. There is no ground between an airplane at thirty thousand plus feet and the earth.”

Patin eased into a wooden chair that was every bit as uncomfortable as it looked. “If not lightning, what?”

Guyot pulled over the mate to his companion’s chair and plopped down into it so close that the two men’s knees were nearly touching. He fished a blue box of cigarettes from a shirt pocket, Gitanes, with a picture of a wisp of smoke forming a dancer. “Surely, you don’t think what I’m thinking.”

He offered the box.

Patin shook his head. He was almost a year past his last cigarette. He gave a wan smile. “Unless I can read your mind…” He studied the other man’s face. “No! You cannot be serious!” He ground a finger into his temple, the French gesture to show one was mentally unbalanced. “This is crazy! Without absolute proof, I would not sign any report that even hints at…”

Guyot leaned forward so that his face was closer to Patin’s, his cigarette temporarily forgotten. “We are obligated to report what we find, not what we think. Our report will simply relate that certain instruments aboard the flight failed at or about the same time. Panic would be the likely result of publicly stating the aircraft literally shattered in flight. We will pass that information along in confidence. There is also the strange matter of the few bodies recovered, the ones no one wants to admit exist. Desiccated and shrunken like prunes. How does one explain that? The politicians are the ones paid to decide what to do with it. Then, I intend to report what we suspect to the appropriate persons, say the DGSE, informally. If we are right, national, if not international, security is at stake.”