Sam 7, p.30
SAM 7, page 30
‘Visiting mortuaries is no kind of fun,’ she went on. ‘But at least I’m accustomed to them. I guess I can take it.’
‘Then I will make the arrangements.’ Allom departed to telephone, returning twenty minutes later in a state of slight agitation.
‘I am so sorry. It is more complicated than I had thought. The mortuary is organized by a specialist firm retained by the airline. I spoke to the head office. First they said it is their policy never to allow relatives into the mortuary after an air crash. When I argued they said it was a matter for the police. They could not authorize.’ As he recounted what he had clearly been a verbal battle, Allom’s command of English grammar began to slip. ‘I argued more. They said in any case less than forty bodies have been positive identified. No Maier is among them. It is very strange. I was thinking the police ask relatives to make formal identifications after accidents.’
‘Maybe not after air crashes.’
Connie sat puzzled for a few moments. Then the long nurtured reactions of a wealthy American girl, used to getting her way, came to the surface.
‘Listen, Jakov,’ she said firmly. ‘No disrespect to you. None at all. But would you mind if I call the US Embassy? After all, I was born an American citizen. They’ll have some centralized organization going for relatives by now.’
Allom could not object. This woman had the determination that builds nations, the grit Israel herself could use.
Connie discovered that the Embassy had a counsellor service operating on a twenty-four hour basis – and had done since half an hour after the crash.
‘A number of next of kin have arrived,’ the vice-consul on duty told her. ‘And we’ve a load of telex and cable messages. Most people are waiting for the British to come up with information and we’re telexing back for details. Dental histories and such. You’re the first we’ve had wanting to go right in there. I’ll see what I can do.’
Connie waited impatiently for another half hour, for an hour. Shortly before 11.00 a.m., the vice-consul rang back apologetically.
‘I’m afraid, Mrs Maier, you’ll have to ask the police. Not only is there strict security, but they feel, well, it could be a pretty upsetting experience for anyone.’ The vice-consul circled round the direct phrases that he might have used. ‘I have to warn you that few of the corpses are, well, easily recognizable. I really would advise against visiting the mortuary, Mrs Maier.’
Connie replaced the telephone.
‘Jakov,’ she called. ‘Who was that helpful policeman you met? Let’s go find him.’
While the helicopter was flying over Southwark, Donaldson had begun catching up on his own team’s progress at Victoria. In contrast to the previous morning, he was feeling alert and vigorous. He had half expected to be woken in the middle of the night by a call from Jane, but no peremptory buzzing from the night porter had disturbed his slumber. He had risen at 7.00, shaved, and descended to make a swift survey of the morning papers as he munched toast and marmalade in the dining room.
The crash again dominated the headlines, this time with a mixture of casualty figures and speculation deriving from Johnson’s outburst on television. The number of bodies retrieved had evidently reached 400. Along with an assortment of interviews with people who had narrowly escaped death were photographs of the wreck, of lost children reunited with their parents and, not surprisingly, of Johnson himself.
Donaldson could not restrain a smile as he skipped through the sabotage theories. Each paper’s air correspondent had his own idea, though there was a certain consensus of opinion about a possible bomb in the DC-10’s rear toilets. No newspaper, however, had any theories about a missile.
Thanking his Maker for small mercies, Donaldson gulped down his coffee and took a taxi to Rochester Row, hopeful that the flightpath calculations would have arrived. They had. With them was a note confirming that spectrographic analysis of the fragment he had found in the tail suggested that it was relatively impure, unstressed metal which had been fractured by blast. It certainly was not any part of a turbine blade.
Now, as the police car drove him back to Victoria, Donaldson felt he had been living with the turmoil on the station for a week at least. It was hard to believe that the disaster was still only forty hours old. Except for the distraction of Jane’s unexpected moods, the pressure of events had absorbed him totally. It was always the same with major accidents. The moment when brainpower began to dominate what had happened, instead of vice versa, was as slow in arriving as the catastrophe was fast. But, unlike Commander Thompson, he would never control events. His life was spent analysing the reasons for them. It struck him that perhaps what Jane really objected to was the fact that he dealt entirely in the unexpected. She could never tell her friends in advance what he was going to be investigating, or when, or where; and with every emergency he vanished from ordinary domestic routine.
Coming back to immediate questions, he reflected that he was a long way from mastering the causes of this crash, even if a missile did prove to have been responsible. For all he knew, a partial disintegration of the rear engine could have also damaged the tail. Or the control cables that operated the elevators could have been severed. Equally, Bill Curtis himself could have had heart failure as the emergency developed and taken the wrong corrective action. Heart failure was an element in a surprising percentage of airline accidents and Curtis was a good fifty years old. Every possible contributory factor would have to be examined and either ruled out or judged partly responsible. It was like a French trial. Everyone was guilty until proved innocent.
When Donaldson stepped out of the car at Victoria he saw that the new day had brought its changes. Where there had been a long line of fire appliances in Buckingham Palace Road, now there were only four. The one remaining ambulance had gone. Significantly, so had the khaki painted army trucks, and he guessed that the last bodies must have been recovered. Parked by the Cartoon Cinema was another of the RAF’s sixty-foot-long low loaders of the kind jocularly known as a ‘Queen Mary’ because of its size. On it was one battered but recognizable aircraft engine, mounted in a protective cradle. As he walked through the entrance into the station, he almost bumped into McPherson, directing the transfer of another engine out of the low loader. The engine itself lay on wooden baulks on top of two ordinary luggage trolleys, which were cracking under the weight in spite of the wood spreading the loads. In the roadway sweating workmen busied themselves round a big Scammell truck with a crane mounted on it.
‘We got the bastard out at last, Jim,’ announced McPherson, wiping his forehead with a hairy forearm. His hands were black with oil and soot.
‘There’s your rear engine for you,’ he went on caustically, ‘and further forward than I trust I’ll ever see one again. It must have hit the building like a steam hammer. It’s been a right pig digging out. In fact, we could never hae done it wi’out a rare bit of kit these railway boys own. Have you seen that Lukas jack affair?’
Donaldson nodded. He remembered watching one raise part of the cargo hold the day before. McPherson glanced around.
‘Its a miracle, that thing. Lifted this lump like a baby while the man stood playing with the keyboard like a toy organ. Not that we didn’t have a hell of a time swinging it across on to these damn fool trolleys. Had to use two sets of block and tackle. You know, Jim, moving stuff out of here’s no’ going to be so easy.’
‘I’m arranging for us to use railway wagons,’ said Donaldson, but his eyes were on the engine. None of the enormous round intake cowling remained. That most characteristic feature of the DC-10’s silhouette must be lying in fragments on the platforms. The engine was like the kernel of a nut. Outside were the cowlings; at the heart the near solid hunk of elaborately machined turbines which delivered the power. At the front of the engine was a huge fan, more than a man’s height in diameter, which in flight swirled air back to the two stages of high pressure compressor. Donaldson noted that the fan’s thirty-eight massive blades had been violently bent back and the ring protecting them torn off. Behind it was a long casing which hid the turbine compressors and the annular combustion chamber. Severed pipes, coils of wire and mangled auxiliary components hung around the casing’s circumference, all scarred by fire.
‘It’s a bloody great engine, it is,’ remarked McPherson, admiration strong in his voice. ‘The manufacturer’s manual arrived last night. One inch less than nine feet in maximum diameter. And one inch more than sixteen feet long. 41,000 pounds of thrust on take-off. A bloody fine engine.’
‘Well,’ said Donaldson practically, ‘no doubt when it’s been taken apart at Farnborough we’ll know roughly how much thrust it was delivering when it hit.’
McPherson pointed at the way the fan blades were bent and broken.
‘At first glance I’d guess it was no more than windmilling. And it’s most certainly been on fire in the air. I’ve an idea that one of the turbines broke up.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Donaldson. ‘As well as being hit by flying metal from the outside?’
‘I’m not certain, mind. But I’ll bet you a tenner to five pounds that when she’s opened up they’ll find deposits of alloy downstream from the second turbine, and the turbine itself will be stripped clean as a whistle. There’ll be not a blade on it, that’s my opinion.’
‘Could it have been an explosive disintegration?’
McPherson glanced at Donaldson warily, a cunning expression on his dirt-smeared face.
‘If it’s explanations for those bloody reporters you’re seeking, then that’s one you could get away with.’
Donaldson’s thoughts were racing. Keeping their theories secret was going to be extremely difficult. ‘Are the manufacturers sending a technical adviser to help you?’ he asked. The complexity of the powerplant was such that the investigation team would need a specialist familiar with its precise type.
‘Aye,’ McPherson admitted grudgingly, ‘a man’s arrived from Frankfurt and he’ll be waiting at Farnborough.’
‘Well, be nice to him,’ said Donaldson. McPherson was apt to resent rival experts. ‘And don’t let him see anything that could lead him to guess what we think has happened. All right?’
‘You’re joking!’
‘I am not, Mac. We have to keep this under wraps. So stall him, take him out to lunch. Anything you like. Okay?’
Donaldson moved away, leaving McPherson dolefully shaking his head, and began checking the progress made in removing the wings and. fuselage. The team of mechanics had been expanded today. Technicians from both his own Ministry’s establishment and from the RAF were painstakingly marking each piece of debris with its location in the wreckage. Removing it all would be a mammoth task, involving a multiplicity of decisions: where precisely to dismember unmanageably large sections; how to extricate them from the roof girders which railway engineers were busily cutting away in some places and supporting in others; how to raise the starboard engine from its burial place in the lavatory beneath the remains of the bookstall when no crane could be brought on to the concourse. They would be lucky if they got it all out by next Wednesday, as he had told the railway engineers they might.
Nearby the airframe inspector detailed to assist him was making a chart of the wreck, showing the exact distribution of the debris. The chart would be a key document at the eventual public inquiry and would be published. Donaldson was discussing it when, to his surprise, he saw the Chief Fire Officer bearing down on them.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here, Mr Plowden.’
Plowden was in the everyday uniform of the Fire Service, a conventional black tunic and a peaked hat with a shield-shaped enamelled badge based on London’s coat of arms. He shook hands with Donaldson, as if being out of firefighting gear restored formality to his working relationships. But the way he spoke was terse and unsparing as ever.
‘When I’ve been in charge of a fireground I check it out myself. There’s a lot of worry in this business. I wouldn’t want anyone else held responsible for what I’ve handled.’
Plowden gestured at the last four fire crews, who were rolling up hoses and taking away the tripod-like fixed ground monitors that had held them.
‘We’re putting the hoses up. There’s no fire risk worth speaking of any more. All the unburnt kerosene was washed down into the drains yesterday. Ordinary water’s the cure for that. It was cutting out the bodies that held us up.’
‘When did you find the last one?’
‘Three hours ago. Soon after dawn. It’s all yours now.’
Donaldson gazed at the wreck. He recalled Melville’s efforts: saving life from the flames; cutting through to the corpses of the crews; searching in the still hot metal for the flight recorder.
‘There is one thing,’ he said.
Plowden glanced at him sharply, anticipating further demands on his permanently overcommitted resources.
‘I’d like to see Melville’s devotion to duty recognized.’
‘Oh.’ There was relief in Plowden’s voice. ‘Oh yes. He’s a good lad, Mick Melville. Between ourselves I’ve ordered him round to headquarters this afternoon to tell him so.’
‘I’m glad. If anyone deserves a medal out of this, he does.’
‘I may yet recommend it,’ grunted Plowden who considered awards were the Fire Brigade’s business, not outsiders. He shook hands again before rejoining his men.
As the ‘Queen Mary’ low loader rumbled down the M3 motorway to the Farnborough exit, bearing the two battered aircraft engines cradled in steel and timber frames, McPherson sat up front in the cab. The roar of the motor effectively blocked conversation with the driver, so he silently pondered the effects that an external explosion might have on a turbine, something of which he had no experience to date. Was it the explosion or the crash that had severed the fuel lines? If the former, then the rear engine could have suffered a flame out. Basically a jet burns fuel mixed with air inside a combustion chamber. The air expands colossally and then is shot out backwards, pushing the aircraft forwards. If deprived of fuel, the flame goes out and the engine ceases to produce power, though its finely balanced turbines will continue windmilling. Was this engine burning and turning, or only turning? Either way its outside was certainly on fire. Then again, had internal disintegration sent slivers of turbine blade slicing like shrapnel through the casing and into the adjacent tailplane?
There were going to be a hell of a lot of questions for the scientists at Farnborough to tackle, McPherson reflected, and few simple answers. It was very possible that the warhead of the missile had not damaged the tail enough to bring the airliner down by itself, but had had its task completed for it by a disintegrating engine, by the slipstream tearing away more elevator and, finally, by the crew failing to appreciate the gravity of the situation fast enough. The public inquiry called by the Home Secretary would want to hear a precise reconstruction of the whole complex series of events that had filled the plane’s last forty-three seconds, complete with details as fiddling as temperatures, probable turbine speed, the velocity of the fragments thrown out, and the exact extent of fire damage in the air as opposed to fire after the crash. The report would have to cover how the other engines had been performing and whether there were faults in them that could have contributed to the accident. All in all, the powerplant investigation group had a job on its hands that could last for months. It was just as well that they had the facilities of the largest aircraft experimental establishment in Western Europe to help them.
McPherson was jolted out of his unpleasing reverie as the truck swung off the motorway and headed for the drab lines of streets and shops that had turned Farnborough from a village into a sprawling town with a growing complement of light industries and a world famous name as the venue of the biennial International Air Show. A few minutes later, the driver eased the low loader through the main gate of the Royal Aircraft Establishment and the security guard checked them in. The RAE looked what it was – a place that had grown according to need. Hangars, workshops and offices were spread out around one side of the airfield, but the overall impression was misleading. Nothing proclaimed the fact that 8,000 people worked here, more than 1,400 of them scientists. The whole place was a classic piece of British understatement and it always tickled McPherson’s sense of humour that the only permanent monument to the successes of the past was a small tree, standing gaunt and leafless near the ancient black painted, corrugated iron sheds that had housed the original army balloon factory in 1905 and that were now the airfield fire station. The tree was leafless for the very good reason that it was fashioned of metal, a commemorative replica of the stunted growth to which S. F. Cody used to tether the crude biplane he built there, and in which he made the first officially recognized powered flight in the British Isles in October 1908.
The low loader ground past this curious monument in second gear and, obeying traffic lights before crossing the end of the main runway, followed the perimeter track round by the large white hangar where the stress tests on the Concorde supersonic airliner had been carried out. Then it went on behind the raised terraces where aircraft manufacturers set up their stands during the Air Show. Half a mile further the driver stopped at hangar T49, the graveyard of the airfield, the place where the structures department would lay out the remains of the Atlantic Airlines DC-10.
A group of men were waiting, with a mobile crane standing by. McPherson noticed that the concrete hard-standing at the side of the hangar was completely taken up with the wreckage of a variety of aircraft. He climbed down from the cab and one of the four accident investigators based at Farnborough stepped forward to greet him.
‘How are you, Mac? Long time no see.’
‘Good to see you again.’ McPherson shook hands with his colleague then jerked a thumb at the wrecked planes on the concrete. ‘You’ve cleared some space for us, I see.’
‘Correct. We had to move several others out to make room.’
McPherson drew the man aside.
‘Why not show me the hangar for a wee moment?’ Mystified, the investigator led him through the door and into the high hangar, its floor dark with oil stains. Rows of bright lights hung suspended among its green painted roof girders. Completely empty, save for various trestle tables, and lightweight metal frames, the interior looked huge. Eventually the pieces of the DC-10’s fuselage would be mounted on the metal frames and the innumerable small components of its mechanical and electrical systems would be laid out on white oilcloth sheets on the tables. Already a blackboard stood at one side with the DC-10’s details chalked on it. It would take weeks, possibly months, to sort out all the wreckage into precise order, nor could it be removed until the public inquiry was over. Then some parts would be sent to the United States, if the airline or the manufacturers wanted them, while the bulk was handed over to the insurers for sale as scrap.
