Joe said, “They don’t just run it fast forward to the last few minutes?”
“No. Something earlier in the flight, something that seemed to be of no importance to the pilots at the time, might provide clues that help us understand what we’re hearing in the moments immediately before the plane went down.”
Steadily rising, the warm wind was brisk enough now to foil the lethargic bees on their lazy quest from bloom to bloom. Surrendering the field to the oncoming storm, they departed for secret nests in the woods.
“Sometimes we get a cockpit tape that’s all but useless to us,” Barbara continued. “The recording quality’s lousy for one reason or another. Maybe the tape’s old and abraded. Maybe the microphone is the hand-held type or isn’t functioning as well as it should, too much vibration. Maybe the recording head is worn and causing distortion.”
“I would think there’d be daily maintenance, weekly replacement, when it’s something as important as this.”
“Remember, as a percentage of flights, planes rarely go down. There are costs and flight-time delays to be considered. Anyway, commercial aviation is a human enterprise, Joe. And what human enterprise ever operates to ideal standards?”
“Point taken.”
“This time there was good and bad,” she said. “Both Delroy Blane and Santorelli were wearing headsets with boom microphones, which is real damn good, much better than a hand-held. Those along with the overhead cockpit mike gave us three channels to study. On the bad side, the tape wasn’t new. It had been recorded over a lot of times and was more deteriorated than we would have liked. Worse, whatever the nature of the moisture that reached the tape, it had caused some patchy corrosion to the recording surface.”
From a back pocket of her jeans, she took a folded paper but didn’t immediately hand it to Joe.
She said, “When Minh Tran and the others listened, they found that some portions of the tape were clearly audible and others were so full of scratchy static, so garbled, they could only discern one out of four or five words.”
“What about the last minute?”
“That was one of the worst segments. It was decided that the tape would have to be cleaned and rehabilitated. Then the recording would be electronically enhanced to whatever extent possible. Bruce Laceroth, head of the Major Investigations Division, had been there to listen to the whole tape, and he called me in Pueblo, at a quarter past seven, Eastern Time, to tell me the status of the recording. They were stowing it for the night, going to start work with it again in the morning. It was depressing.”
High above them, the eagle returned from the east, pale against the pregnant bellies of the clouds, still flying straight and true with the weight of the pending storm on its wings.
“Of course, that whole day had been depressing,” Barbara said. “We’d brought in refrigerated trucks from Denver to collect all the human remains from the site, which had to be completed before we could begin to deal with the pieces of the plane itself. There was the usual organizational meeting, which is always exhausting, because so many interest groups — the airline, the manufacturer of the plane, the supplier of the power plants, the Airline Pilots Association, lots of others — all want to bend the proceedings to serve their interests as much as possible. Human nature — and not the prettier part of it. So you have to be reasonably diplomatic but also damn tough to keep the process truly impartial.”
“And there was the media,” he said, condemning his own kind so she wouldn’t have to do it.
“Everywhere. Anyway, I’d only slept less than three hours the previous night, before I’d been awakened by the Go-Team call, and there was no chance even to doze on the Gulfstream from National to Pueblo. I was like the walking dead when I hit the sheets a little before midnight — but back there in Washington, Minh Tran was still at it.”
“The electronics engineer who cut open the recorder?”
Staring at the folded white paper that she had taken from her hip pocket, turning it over and over in her hands, Barbara said, “You have to understand about Minh. His family were Vietnamese boat people. Survived the communists after the fall of Saigon and then pirates at sea, even a typhoon. He was ten at the time, so he knew early that life was a struggle. To survive and prosper, he expected to give a hundred and ten percent.”
“I have friends…had friends who were Vietnamese immigrants,” Joe said. “Quite a culture. A lot of them have a work ethic that would break a plow horse.”
“Exactly. When everyone else went home from the labs that night at a quarter past seven, they’d put in a long day. People at the Safety Board are pretty dedicated…but Minh more so. He didn’t leave. He made a dinner of whatever he could get out of the vending machines, and he stayed to clean the tape and then to work on the last minute of it. Digitize the sound, load it in a computer, and then try to separate the static and other extraneous noises from the voices of the pilots and from the actual sounds that occurred aboard the aircraft. The layers of static proved to be so specifically patterned that the computer was able to help strip them away fairly quickly. Because the boom mikes had delivered strong signals to the recorder, Minh was able to clarify the pilots’ voices under the junk noise. What he heard was extraordinary. Bizarre.”
She handed the folded white paper to Joe.
He accepted but didn’t open it. He was half afraid to see what it contained.
“At ten minutes till four in the morning Washington time, ten till two in Pueblo, Minh called me,” Barbara said. “I’d told the hotel operator to hold all calls, I needed my sleep, but Minh talked his way through. He played the tape for me…and we discussed it. I always have a cassette recorder with me, because I like to tape all meetings myself and have my own transcripts prepared. So I got my machine and held it to the phone to make my own copy. I didn’t want to wait until Minh got a clean tape to me by courier. After Minh hung up, I sat at the desk in my room and listened to the last exchanges between the pilots maybe ten or twelve times. Then I got out my notebook and made a handwritten transcript of it, because sometimes things appear different to you when you read them than when you listen. Occasionally the eye sees nuances that the ear misses.”
Joe now knew what he held in his hand. He could tell by the thickness that there were three sheets of paper.
Barbara said, “Minh had called me first. He intended to call Bruce Laceroth, then the chairman and the vice chairman of the Board — if not all five Board members — so each of them could hear the tape himself. It wasn’t standard protocol, but this was a strange and unprecedented situation. I’m sure Minh got to at least one of those people — though they all deny hearing from him. We’ll never know for sure, because Minh Tran died in a fire at the labs shortly before six o’clock that same morning, approximately two hours after he called me in Pueblo.”
“Jesus.”
“A very intense fire. An impossibly intense fire.”
Surveying the trees that surrounded the meadow, Joe expected to see the pale faces of watchers in the deep shadows of the woods. When he and Barbara had first arrived, the site had struck him as remote, but now he felt as exposed and vulnerable as if he had been standing in the middle of any intersection in L.A.
He said, “Let me guess — the original tape from the cockpit recorder was destroyed in the lab fire.”
“Supposedly burned to powder, vanished, no trace, gone, good-bye,” Barbara said.