B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (43 page)

‘As far as she knew. But she thought that what had really grabbed Kennedy’s attention was a new message thread on Airbuzz about the dangers presented by integrated modular avionics.’

‘You’ve lost me—’

‘Older aircraft had sealed flight computers. They were closed systems. If a fault developed, you would replace the whole unit. On the most modern aircraft such as the A380 the computers are modular – one module for engines and fuel, one for the aileron actuators, one for cabin pressure and so on. If there’s a problem with one part of the system you unplug a module and slot in a new one. It’s cheaper, allows for more frequent updating, and in theory it’s an easier system to maintain. The only snag is that you’re introducing vital components into a single aircraft from multiple suppliers, some of whom are using commercial off-the-shelf software. In other words, any one of a number of companies can produce a module to run a vital system—’

The penny dropped. Jenny finished his sentence for him. ‘And if faulty or malicious software were somehow introduced into it—’

‘That’s the worry,’ Ransome said. ‘But big modern planes mean cheaper seats. And if I’m not the cheapest, I’m not in the sky.’

They looked at each other, the enormity of the story leaving them at a loss for words.

After a moment, Ransome said, ‘You mentioned other passengers on 189.’

‘Yes. Jimmy Han you know about, but there were several others with onward flights to Washington. It seems some of their tickets had been rearranged to ensure they were all travelling together—’

She was interrupted by the phone ringing on the coffee table between them. Ransome answered it and listened to a message from his assistant. He looked across at Jenny. ‘There’s a Detective Inspector Williams wanting to speak to you.’

Williams? How had he traced her here?

She took over the receiver. ‘Hello?’

‘Mrs Cooper – you’re with Mr Ransome.’

‘How did you know where I was?’

‘It just came over the police radio – I expect you’ll have company in a minute. Listen, I’m at Heathrow Terminal Four. Your Mr Dalton’s just hopped on a plane to New York – Flight 199. I almost caught up with him, but it took off five minutes ago. And you’ll never guess who was raising hell at the departure gate – a Mrs Michelle Patterson. She was trying to get her husband off the flight and telling anyone who cared to listen that his company were responsible for what happened to 189. She told me he was attempting to flee jurisdiction before he was arrested. Can you tell me what the hell’s going on?’

Jenny’s mind was racing ahead. She called over to Ransome. ‘New York Flight 199 that’s just left Heathrow – get me a passenger list now!’ Picking up with Williams, she said, ‘I need some more time. Can you put a message out that you’ve apprehended me.’

‘Lie, you mean?’

‘Call it misinformation.’

‘Call it shafting those English bastards and I’ll do it with pleasure, Mrs Cooper.’

‘Thanks. I owe you.’

Jenny replaced the receiver and joined Ransome, who was issuing instructions down another line. Moments later his assistant was running through the door with an open laptop.

‘The passenger manifest—’

The assistant set the machine down on the meeting table and opened the newly arrived email.

Taking control of the computer, Jenny scrolled through the list of names listed in alphabetical order, their corresponding seat numbers in a column on the right.

‘Who are you looking for?’ Ransome asked.

Jenny didn’t hear him. Having spotted Dalton’s name she skipped straight down to the ‘Ps’. There was
Patterson, Greg (Mr) 18C
, then scrolling down she picked out
Sanders, Thomas (Wing Cmdr) 55C
, and right below him,
Sherman, Michael (Mr) 57A
. What was Michael doing on the flight with Sanders and Patterson? Could they have been summoned to Washington, too?

‘What’s going on?’ Ransome demanded.

‘When was the last time you spoke to Kennedy?’

‘Shortly after 189 went down. Why?’

‘Just tell me what was said.’

‘I called him. Naturally, I wanted to know if he had any insight into what had happened. He was adamant that what happened to 189 was nothing to do with any of the threats he’d mentioned last year. He was insistent we keep flying at all costs.’

‘Or what?’

Ransome didn’t answer.

‘He must have said something,’ Jenny insisted.

‘He repeated his earlier threat . . . He said we’d lose our US landing slots.’

‘I try hard not to leap to unfounded conclusions,’ Jenny said, ‘but I have a feeling that the problem with your planes might be bigger than anyone dare contemplate. It seems the computers operating them have developed minds of their own, but of course computers don’t have minds, do they? They just do what someone has told them to do. And what if that someone isn’t the pilot?’

‘It wouldn’t happen again. It couldn’t—’

‘Surely that depends on whether the person trying to make their point feels they’ve made it. You could trust Kennedy and carry on regardless, but if I were you I’d get this aircraft back on the ground as quickly as possible.’

F
LYING CONDITIONS OVER
E
NGLAND
were as favourable as could be expected in late January. Skies over Heathrow were bright and departures were running on time. Captain Patrick Finlay and First Officer David Cambourne had conducted their pre-flight preparations in a subdued atmosphere and Flight 199 had secured a take-off slot for eleven fifty-four a.m., six minutes ahead of schedule. Taxiing away from the stand at Heathrow, Finlay gave silent thanks. He had been the pilot originally scheduled to fly 189, but had been put out of action by a bout of full-blown flu that had laid him low for nearly a fortnight. Dan Murray and many of the cabin crew had been good friends. It would take a long time to accept they were gone.

David Cambourne was a reassuring presence alongside Finlay in the first officer’s seat: quiet, dependable and thorough. Despite having been close to First Officer Ed Stevens and having been on friendly terms with many of 189’s cabin crew, he was dealing with his grief like a true professional. The briefest glance in a meeting room in the canteen had sealed their tacit agreement that the crash wouldn’t be mentioned. They had an aeroplane with 576 passengers on board to get safely to New York; nothing was more important than that.

As Finlay lined up at the head of the runway for the first time in nearly three weeks, he was surprised not to feel in the least nervous. Like Dan Murray, he had cut his teeth flying older Boeings and hadn’t flown an Airbus until his early forties. Since the crash he had heard other pilots voicing their suspicions of fly-by-wire technology in the media, but he remained resolutely in favour. As a young first officer he had had his one and only brush with disaster when his captain – a man nearing retirement – had decided to try to fly over a tropical storm en route to Barbados in an ageing DC9. The Airbus simply didn’t allow a pilot to stray so far from the boundaries of safety. Better to trust to the cold logic of computers, he reasoned, than to the whims of stubborn pilots who thought they knew best.

‘Beautiful day,’ Finlay said, as he awaited the final word from the tower.

‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ Cambourne replied, glancing at the weather display on his navigation screen. ‘Dense high-level cloud over mid-Wales and a hundred-mile-an-hour headwind all the way from Anglesey to Iceland.’

Finlay ran a swift mental check on his fuel contingency. Ransome’s insistence on loading light always made him a little insecure, especially on a transatlantic crossing, but he was confident that he had taken on more than enough to cope with a little wind.

He watched the American Airlines 747 that had been queuing ahead of them slowly lift from the ground and take to the air.

Word came through from the tower. ‘Skyhawk 1–9-9 cleared for take-off runway two seven left, wind two three zero at ten.’

First Officer Cambourne replied: ‘Cleared for take-off runway two seven left, Skyhawk 1–9-9.’

Captain Finlay released the brakes and moved the four thrust levers forward. The flight management computers did the rest, pushing the engines up to the pre-set take-off thrust level of 88 per cent of maximum power. As the aircraft weighing over one million pounds slowly picked up speed, it struck Finlay that the thrust lever he was gripping tightly in his left hand was for no one’s benefit other than his own. It was merely an electrical selector switch whose function could as easily have been performed by a tiny joystick a few centimetres high. One day soon pilots would lose the emotional attachment to controls that mimicked the manual levers of the analogue age; flying a plane would be more akin to a video game and, some even predicted, more safely done remotely from the ground.

Moments later the only sound in the cockpit was the gentle hum of the engines as Flight 199 began its slow, sweeping pre-programmed turn to the west. Finlay ran his eye over the array of screens that seemed to envelop him and felt there was something deep in the human psyche that was profoundly excited by a machine so far removed from the baseness of nature. As they passed through 5,000 feet, leaving the ugly sprawl of London far behind, he realized what that was: the world below was stuck in the inexorable cycle of life and death; this wonderful craft was a glimpse of immortality.

Michael looked down from his window seat at the green Berkshire countryside flitting beneath wisps of cloud. He had expected to feel uneasy aboard the 380, but it appeared so solid and enormous, and the seats were so comfortable, that he was already beginning to sense the gentle pull of sleep. God knows, he could do with some. Sitting at the bar in the departure lounge, he had declined Dalton’s offer of a pill, preferring a large Bloody Mary, and then another. Sanders had drunk tonic water. He was still on duty and wouldn’t relax until he had safely delivered both men to Kennedy. Michael had a lot of questions for the American when they met, and if he didn’t get answers he fancied he might punch the bastard’s lights out.

It had been a hell of a two weeks, a hell of a twenty years. There had numerous pilots he’d known whom he hadn’t expected to see grow old, but Nuala was never one of them. He had had a colleague in the RAF who had become so tightly wound during their first tour in Afghanistan that he would have laid money on him putting a bullet through his head if he managed not to be shot down; more than a decade later he was still very much alive and well. It was Nuala, the sensible, capable one, who had fallen from the sky; Nuala, the kind and beautiful girl he had loved, but was so scared he’d hurt that he’d walked away.

He had lost count of the times he had replayed the events of their final meeting in his mind. He had walked into the office at the end of the day to find her sitting with a computer on her lap. She had looked as startled as he was, and was wiping tears from her cheeks the moment they stepped the other side of the door. She hadn’t meant to cry – he understood that – but couldn’t help herself. She was still in love, and he was still fighting it. She had wanted him to touch her, a hand on her arm, a kiss on her forehead – anything – but he had denied her it all. He recalled the relief he had felt when she told him it wasn’t a personal visit, but that she needed advice – the kind only he could give.

She had insisted they talk somewhere where they couldn’t be overhead. Michael took her to pub a few miles from the airport. It had felt incongruous sitting in a 400-year-old snug bar listening to her talk excitedly about state-of-the-art avionics, but at least she was no longer crying. She had always been happiest talking about planes: her eyes would light up like a little girl’s. Male pilots were addicted to the freedom from responsibility flying brings, but for Nuala it was much more than that; she seemed fused with her passengers and crew in a way no male pilot ever was or wanted to be. He suspected that flying solo would have brought no joy to her at all.

She had talked non-stop for nearly two hours. He was treated to a detailed history of the evolution of fly-by-wire philosophy and technology which had culminated in the A380. She adored the aircraft and revered its architects and builders as heroes, which was why the faults she had come to believe had crept into its computers had troubled her so deeply. But there were some incidents which seemed beyond all normal explanation. Dan Murray’s near disaster with the disobedient thrust lever had been one of them, and Alan Farraday’s instrument blank-out another. What troubled her most of all was that there was no pattern to these errors, and by all accounts Ransome’s engineers were as baffled as she was.

It was Farraday who had forced the issue. Nuala had told Michael how Farraday had grown more anxious about the error he had experienced over the Pacific repeating itself. Unhappy with Mick Dalton’s failure to trace the cause of the fault, he had recruited Nuala to help persuade the chief engineer to copy the entire contents of the aircraft’s flight computers onto a separate hard drive, which he intended to have analysed by independent experts. Dalton had carried out the download, compressed the files and transferred them to Nuala. She was all set to transfer them to Farraday when he came off his motorbike.

She had met Dalton several times during December to discuss Farraday’s case and that of several other Ransome pilots who had experienced anomalies, hoping to trace them back to the same root but without success. Growing increasingly anxious for answers, she had cast the net wider on Airbuzz and been alarmed to discover a rash of reports of similar incidents from pilots working for several different airlines. The problem was so widespread that she started to canvass opinion on the forum as to whether a pilots’ committee should be formed to present their concerns to aviation authorities across the world.

A plan was beginning to take shape when she was visited at home on a Sunday afternoon by an American who had introduced himself as Doug Kennedy, and who claimed to be from the Federal Aviation Authority. She had immediately suspected that he was no mere airline official. She described him as having the hardness of an experienced military man beneath a cloak of civility. He knew all about Airbuzz and claimed that the FAA had also known that she’d been behind it for more than two years.