"At this press conference Smith will get his first glimpse of Mister Arnold Mayer, the mystic physicist, the well-known crackpot. Mayer's questions will seem idiotic to Smith, but his name and face will stick in his mind. It wouldn't hurt if he had another name and another face that impressed him even more that night. We're doing better, Louise, but we're far from out of the woods."
"I won't do it."
He looked at me for a long time, in silence. At last he steepled his fingers in a very human-like gesture, put them to his chin, and rocked back and forth. He sighed, if you can believe that.
"Tell him about the kid, Louise," he said. "She's only a wimp."
I stood up, intending to go over and dismantle him, but I guess standing up was a mistake.
I passed out.
12 The Productions of Time
Testimony of Bill Smith
It came out like this: " ... dead! They're all dead, every one of them! They're burnt, Gil, they're dead and burned up and torn to pieces, all dead -- "
Then the plane hit the mountain and Wayne DeLisle had nothing more to say.
It was getting on in the evening when we finally had the tape cleaned up and processed enough to hear those words clearly. When the operator shut off his machine we all just sat there for a while.
I couldn't begin to describe the sheer horror in the man's voice. It came through, though, even with the poor technical quality.
To say we were shocked would be an understatement. None of us had ever heard anything quite like that from a CVR. Fear, tension ... sure. They're not robots, the people who fly these planes. They try to conceal their emotions in a moment like that -- I guess it's a reflex -- but it comes through.
No. It just didn't make sense. I've come to expect heroic behavior, or at least stoicism, when monitoring a CVR tape, but panic would not throw me too much. Pilots are just like the rest of us. They suffer mental problems, drinking problems, marital problems. They go crazy, but hardly ever as the result of an emergency in the air.
They don't have time. Not even passengers go crazy that quickly. Contrary to what you've seen in the Airport movies, in the first few moments after an impact a few people will scream a little and maybe jump up in reaction, but that generally calms down pretty quickly. After that, the dominant reaction is to just sit there in their seats, stunned, for a fairly long time.
They don't know what to do. The common response to that, in a plane, is to do nothing. They become pliant, eager to do what the flight attendants tell them. It's only if the emergency stretches out and they get time to form their own hare-brained ideas that you have to watch out for them.
Wayne DeLisle just shouldn't have gone that nutty that quickly.
In thirty-three seconds he'd gone from a competent pilot, a take-charge guy who was willing to get out of his secure seat and go- moving around in a plane that was bucking and turning like a rock rolling down a hill just so he could try to help the passengers, to a gibbering ... well, coward, crying about how they were all dead. Dead and burned.
We spent some time discussing it.
Jerry: "Maybe they were all dead. There's indications that the fuselage might have been breached. We found some bodies and debris a good ways from the main site." The verdict on that was in pretty soon; even Jerry didn't stick to it long. If there was cabin depressurization it would have blown out the cockpit door and maybe DeLisle with it. Some people would have been sucked out, but the rest would have been all right. They were only at five thousand feet, so decompression was no problem, nor lack of oxygen.
Craig: "He said they were burned, too. Maybe there was a fire in the cabin before it went in."
Eli: "In the first-class lounge? I don't buy it. Everything I saw looks like the fire was restricted to the engines ... maybe the wings, but no further. At least until it hit, when everything went up. I don't see a wing fire spreading that far forward that quickly."
Craig: "Maybe it was downstairs. Maybe he got back to tourist."
Tom: "In a 747? Listen, we're assuming the plane wasn't holed, or we'd have heard it on the tape. It makes a hell of a noise."
Jerry: "We might not hear it if the hole was toward the back."
Tom: "Yeah, but how's he going to get there? Into the first-class lounge, down the stairs, back to tourist, and then all the way back to the cockpit in thirty-three seconds? Not in that plane. It would be a miracle if he got down the stairs without breaking his fucking neck."
I agreed. It would have been easier to walk on a roller coaster.
"So," I said, "we can postulate he didn't get much farther than the stairway. It doesn't seem reasonable that he'd see anything there but a bunch of scared people."
Carole interrupted us after we'd gone on like that for quite a while.
"You guys are going to have to learn to accept the obvious," she said.
"What's that?" Jerry wanted to know.
"That he simply went crazy."
"I thought you psychologists didn't like that word."
She shrugged. "I'm not prejudiced against it when it's the simplest one that fits. But I used it to rub your faces in it. I know you don't want to believe that a pilot could flip out like that, and I'll admit it's rare. But you've all pretty well proved that when he went back into the lounge all he could have seen were frightened people, not burnt corpses."
Tom protested. "But he said he saw -- "
"He didn't say he saw anything. Don't treat it as a reliable eyewitness account of anything.
Treat it as the last realization of a man pushed beyond his limits. He said they were all dead and burned. He was a man trained to fly a plane but he couldn't do it because it wasn't his plane. He knew more than the passengers; he had more reason to panic, because he knew they were all doomed. He could look at the reality Gil Crain and the others could keep denying because they had things they could do. He just gave in and said what he knew would happen -- that they were all going to die. And he was right."
None of us liked it, but it ended the discussion, at least for then. Carole was the human-
factors expert. Thinking it over, I had to agree that the main reason I was reluctant to accept her explanation was the one she'd mentioned: I didn't want to believe a pilot could come unglued that fast. But he must have.
We held our nightly meeting -- the first of many -- not long after the first run-through of the 747 tape.
It was all we could do to squeeze everyone into the smaller of the two airport rooms.
There must have been over a hundred people there who had a right to be present. I'm afraid I dozed through a lot of it, but I can doze with my eyes open, so nobody noticed. I hope.
The nightly meetings are a fixture of any investigation. Everybody that's been working on the crash gets together and compares notes. Decisions are made about what avenues to pursue.
We agreed that the computer at Fremont -- which is where the Oakland Air Region Traffic Control Center is actually located -- would have to be gone over by an expert team.
Tom already had some people in mind. Otherwise, it was mostly a matter of confirming things already done and telling everybody to keep doing them. Many of the physical aspects of an investigation take quite a while.
After that the meeting could have gone on for ten more hours. Any meeting will, if you let it. But in the early stages I've found it's just a lot of wind. Later on some longer meetings would be in order, but when I saw by my watch that this one had been going on for two hours I chopped it off short and told everybody not actually working in the hangar to go home and get some sleep.
Some of them didn't like that, but they couldn't do anything about it. It was my investigation. Maybe on paper it was C. Gordon Petcher's, but in fact it was mine. And speaking of good old Gordy ...