B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (26 page)

Jenny could barely force open her eyes, let alone contemplate trying to operate the computer on her console.

‘Here we go—’

Jenny experienced a brief sensation of weightlessness as the aircraft clawed emptily at the air before gravity started to suck it back towards earth. Artificial as it was, the sensation was every bit as dreadful as it had been in the Cessna. Her stomach rushed up towards her throat. Closing her eyes only made the nausea worse.

Glen wrestled with the joystick and pumped on the rudder pedals. ‘In direct law I haven’t got the plane’s systems to help me; all that computing power is useless. It’s just me trying to wrest control of the world’s largest commercial airliner. Perfect for level flight, but an absolute pig in a stall . . .’

They jolted violently to the left as the aircraft tumbled over onto its right side. Glen fought simultaneously with the thrust levers and joystick, and seemed for a moment to regain control, only for the nose to dip violently and once again they were pinned to the back of their seats, scything vertically downwards through the clouds.

Glen pulled the joystick back as far as it would go, but the nose refused to lift.

‘Dan did better fighting gravity than I did,’ Glen said. ‘We’re not pulling out of this.’

Jenny watched the figures on the altimeter hurtle downwards . . . 15,000, 10,000, 5,000, 2,000.

‘It’s no good!’ Glen said.

Jenny instinctively brought her hands over her face, bracing for impact, but as the altimeter slid past 1,000 and she caught a glimpse of the River Severn between the clouds, the lights went up, the screens clicked off, and the simulator slowly reorientated itself to the horizontal.

There was a moment of silence as all three of them seemed to turn their minds simultaneously to those who had experienced it for real.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t manage to pull off your landing,’ Glen said. ‘I’ll hazard a guess and say that he must have had some power in the engines to get anything like level – I hear it landed belly down.’

‘That’s what the passenger injuries suggest.’

‘We could try again. We’ve time.’

‘It’s all right,’ Jenny said, unbuckling her seat belt. ‘I think I’ve seen enough.’

Michael said, ‘So your best guess is that Murray responded incorrectly to a computer or an electrical error?’

Glen said, ‘On the voice recording you’ve got Stevens reacting to what sounds like a jolt of turbulence three minutes before the level-off. It could be that was a lightning strike. It’s even possible that tripped something in the electrical system and caused a fault that triggered the speed warning. That, in my opinion, was the real bit of bad luck. A false speed warning would have brought all the Air France and Qantas incidents flooding back. But the fact is the 380 has state-of-the-art pitot tubes. Post-Air France, the Airbus has probably got the most reliable airspeed indicators in the world.’

‘A mismatch between man and machine,’ Jenny said. ‘A machine copes with crisis through brutal logic; the human mind reverts to intuition.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better,’ Glen said.

‘Which is what you meant by Nuala having too much imagination. She wasn’t robotic enough to work hand in glove with the computers.’

Glen glanced at Michael. ‘If the pilot of a modern passenger plane isn’t prepared to trust his equipment absolutely, he’s no business strapping into the cockpit. I’m not saying Dan Murray would definitely have landed that craft if he’d stuck to the protocols, but he would have stood a much better chance. And so would all the people in the back. The Airbus doesn’t just prevent crises, it knows how to deal with them – and in my long experience, better than most pilots do.’

‘You seem disappointed,’ Jenny said, as she and Michael walked out of the building into the cold, damp night.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m biased – one pilot not wanting to believe another would screw up like that.’

‘What about Glen – are you sure he doesn’t have an agenda?’

Michael shook his head. ‘You won’t find a straighter guy in the business.’

Jenny was still struggling to fit what she had just experienced together with all the many questions in her mind which still remained unanswered. ‘Say it was pilot error, we still don’t know what Nuala was doing on the flight, or why Brogan had traces of plastic explosive on his lifejacket.’

‘It really doesn’t matter, does it? They’re all dead.’ He turned away and started off across the car park towards the roadway.

‘Michael?’

He kept on walking.

‘Michael, please—’ She was confused. She hadn’t expected him to react emotionally.

As she started after him, her phone rang. It was a caller she couldn’t ignore – Simon Moreton.

‘Hello, Simon.’

‘Ah, Jenny – good news all round, I hear?’

‘Really?’

‘You’re being sensible and Sir James Kendall is addressing the world’s press at the D-Mort in the morning. I was thinking of making the trip down. I’m so grand these days, they’ll even give me a car.’

‘There are nicer places for a day out.’

‘Why don’t we go together? Spot of lunch afterwards? It’s about time we caught up.’

Moreton always couched his invitations as if they were pleasant social engagements, but Jenny had learned that was just the way the game was played. The only reason he left London was to stamp his authority on the rebellious provinces, and if he could manage some gentle flirting at the same time, so much the better.

‘Why not?’ Jenny said.

‘Excellent. I’ll pick you up from your office at ten.’

As she put away her phone, Jenny scanned the darkness for Michael, but he had disappeared through the gates and away down the road. She jumped into her Land Rover and drove in the direction she thought he had gone. There was no sign of him on the deserted pavements. He seemed determined not to be found.

As she turned round and began the long journey home, she pictured him flying through the night back to Bristol, alone with his ghosts. And for a fleeting moment she wished she were with him.

S
IMON
M
ORETON WAS ON SPARKLING FORM
. Revelling in his elevation to the rank of Director at the Ministry of Justice, he now referred to himself as a ‘mandarin’. Jenny was supposed to be impressed, but she had never been one to admire a man for his status. Her ex-husband was an eminent heart surgeon, but in her experience the higher up the greasy pole he climbed, the more self-important and objectionable he had become. Her former lover, Steve, had been a failed architectural student scratching a living from the land when they had first met, and his complete disinterest in all the things by which most men marked their achievements had been one of the qualities that attracted her most.

As Moreton whisked her through the north Somerset countryside in the back seat of a sleek government Jaguar, she was expected to play the willing consort, and she dutifully obliged.

Whatever he had come to say, he was leaving it until later. For the time being it was all gossip from the corridors of power intended to make him seem important and to seduce Jenny into feeling part of the in-crowd. The latest excitement centred on a senior High Court judge (no names, only subtle hints at his identity) who, it turned out, had been entertaining a young man at his official lodgings at the public expense. It was sufficient grounds to demand his resignation, only he had intimated to the Lord Chief Justice that were he to be pushed out he would make sure that the dirty linen of an unspecified number of his colleagues would also be washed in public. Everyone in the Ministry was on tenterhooks, waiting to see who would blink first.

‘That’s the problem with today’s world,’ Moreton mused, ‘no sense of honour.’

‘I hope you’re not trying to make me go quietly, Simon,’ Jenny joked.

‘Good gracious, no – I’m your number one fan. Think how complacent I’d become without you to keep me on my toes.’

The government car swept unhindered through the roadblock outside the D-Mort and deposited them at the entrance to a covered walkway leading directly to the marquee, which the previous week had served as the reception centre for the relatives of the dead. Once inside, they were greeted by a young lance corporal from the Welsh Guards who directed them to the seats in front of the dais from where Sir James would be making his announcement. In the large open space behind the few rows of chairs, the world’s press and broadcast media were jockeying for position. Photographers and news cameramen perched on stepladders, TV and radio reporters rehearsed their intros in a dozen different languages, and the old-fashioned newspaper men gathered in huddles trading rumours.

‘I can’t say I’ve ever been to one of these before,’ Moreton said excitedly.

‘What about the families?’ Jenny asked. ‘Are they allowed to attend?’

‘As far as I know this is strictly for the media and the likes of us. It’s not in anyone’s interests to have a lot of grieving relatives exploited for the cameras.’

‘Or asking awkward questions.’

‘Jenny, Jenny, you really are a cynic.’ He found their reserved seats at the centre of the front row. ‘Best in the house – you can’t say I don’t look after you. All I ask in return is that you give me a brief tour of the campus afterwards. Heaven forbid we’ll ever need to build another, but you never know.’

‘My pleasure,’ Jenny said drily.

As the final minutes to midday ticked by, she was struck by a mounting sense of unreality. The anticipation among the waiting crowd was like that of an expectant theatre audience. The tragedy of the previous week had given way to the drama of the unfolding story. The relentless twenty-four-hour news schedule demanded another segment of the narrative, and Sir James Kendall and his colleagues knew that if they didn’t provide one someone else would. If they were to stay in charge of events, they had to lead the media.

Sir James mounted the platform with a man whom he introduced as Edward Marsham of the Air Accident Investigation Branch. Jenny had heard Marsham on the radio and had pictured a more imposing figure than the man who hovered at Kendall’s side. The primary purpose of the news conference was, Kendall explained, for Marsham to outline initial findings into the cause of the accident. Then Kendall would give a brief update on the status of the bodies held in the D-Mort.

Uncomfortable in the glare of the spotlight, Marsham’s forehead gleamed with perspiration as he stepped up to the microphone. Relying heavily on his notes, he introduced an animated re-creation of the last minutes of the flight. Displayed on a pair of large, flat-panel screens mounted either side of the dais, it showed the ill-fated 380 climbing upwards towards the level-off height of 31,000 feet.

‘Initial weather data from the Met Office suggested that there were no storms active in the flight’s path,’ Marsham explained. ‘However, data has now been gathered which establishes beyond doubt that between fifteen and eighteen minutes into the journey, the aircraft passed through a dense bank of cumulonimbus, responsible, we believe, for the turbulence which caused First Officer Stevens to remark at 09.16.07 on the cockpit voice recording that it was “bumpy”. He also appears to query whether passenger seat belts might be appropriate, but Captain Murray seems to disregard the suggestion. We also know that several seconds after this, at approximately 09.16.24, the aircraft stopped transmitting flight data via ACARS.

‘It’s a well-documented fact that the action of an aircraft passing through clouds containing positively charged ions can actually provoke a discharge of lightning. It is highly probable that this is what occurred here. The American FAA estimate that each commercial airliner is on average struck by lightning once a year. Aircraft hulls are so designed that the lightning is simply conducted along the outside and back into the air. The electrical systems on the A380 are further shielded with surge and grounding protectors. In nearly all cases lightning has no discernible effect on the aircraft or its systems, except perhaps for a small flickering of lights or instruments lasting less than a second. Indeed, in comprehensive tests carried out by NASA in the early 1980s, aircraft were deliberately flown into storms on 1,400 separate missions. They were struck by lightning a total of 700 times with no ill effect.

‘That said, while most lightning carries a negative charge to the ground, the rarer form of positive lightning – which, as its name suggests, carries a positive charge to the ground – is characteristically up to ten times more powerful than its negative counterpart. Positive lighting can travel distances of up to ten miles, and may be triggered by man-made objects in the atmosphere such as rockets or aircraft. While there has only been one aircraft lost to positive lightning in the last forty years, it is conceivable that a bolt of a billion volts or so may have caused a temporary disturbance in some of the aircraft’s electrical systems, including flight computers. While it’s too early to say exactly what effect that might have had, we are increasingly certain that this was the inciting cause for the sequence of events that followed.’

The image on the screen showed a lightning bolt striking the aircraft on the lower side of the nose beneath the cockpit. Marsham tapped some keys on the computer and switched the image on the screens to a still taken of the aircraft’s nose on the quayside at Avonmouth.

‘Look carefully on the underside of the nose directly beneath the cockpit windows. You will see a distinct black discoloration, a streak, if you will, angled upwards from right to left. We believe this was caused by the heat of the lightning.’

He clicked to another image, which showed a closer view of what resembled a scorch mark on the white hull.

‘There is the point of impact, on the hull directly outside the avionics bay. It caused no physical damage to the structure of the aircraft, but may – and I stress
may
– have caused an electrical failure of some sort. What we now know from the cockpit voice recording is that a speed warning was issued at 09.20.41 at a time when data from air traffic control suggests that the aircraft was travelling at a cruising speed of 479 knots. The speed warning was repeated several seconds later.’ He paused, and for the first time in his presentation looked up from his notes. ‘The speed warnings were clearly anomalous.’