Sole Survivor (15 page)

Joe turned to watch the bird as it passed overhead and away.

“Flight 353,” Barbara said, “was tight on course and free of problems when it passed the Goodland navigational beacon, which is approximately a hundred and seventy air miles east of Colorado Springs. By the time it ended here, it was twenty-eight miles off course.”

Encouraging Joe to stay with her on a slow walk around the crater rim, Barbara Christman summarized the known details of the doomed 747 from its takeoff until its premature descent.

Out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, Flight 353, bound for Los Angeles, ordinarily would have followed a more southerly corridor than the one it traveled that August evening. Due to thunderstorms throughout the South and tornado warnings in the southern Midwest, another route was considered. More important, the headwinds on the northerly corridor were considerably less severe than those on the southern; by taking the path of least resistance, flight time and fuel consumption could be substantially reduced. Consequently, the Nationwide flight-route planning manager assigned the aircraft to Jet Route 146.

Departing JFK only four minutes behind schedule, the nonstop to LAX sailed high over northern Pennsylvania, Cleveland, the southern curve of Lake Erie, and southern Michigan. Routed south of Chicago, it crossed the Mississippi River from Illinois to Iowa at the city of Davenport. In Nebraska, passing the Lincoln navigational beacon, Flight 353 adjusted course southwest toward the next major forward beacon, at Goodland in the northwest corner of Kansas.

The battered flight-data recorder, salvaged from the wreckage, eventually revealed that the pilot made the proper course correction from Goodland toward the next major forward beacon, at Blue Mesa, Colorado. But about a hundred and ten miles past Goodland, something went wrong. Although it experienced no loss of altitude or airspeed, the 747 began to veer off its assigned flight path, now traveling west-southwest at a seven-degree deviation from Jet Route 146.

For two minutes, nothing more happened—and then the aircraft made a sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, as if the pilot had begun to recognize that he was off course. But just three seconds later, this was followed by an equally sudden four-degree heading change, nose left.

Analysis of all thirty parameters covered by this particular flight-data recorder seemed to confirm that the heading changes were either yawing of the craft or resulted in yawing. First the tail section had swung to the left—or port—while the nose had gone right—starboard—and then the tail had swung to the right and the nose to the left, skidding in midair almost as a car might fishtail on an icy highway.

Post-crash data analysis also gave rise to the suspicion that the pilot might have used the rudder to execute these abrupt changes of heading—which made no sense. Virtually all yaws result from movements of the rudder, the vertical panel in the tail, but pilots of commercial jets eschew use of the rudder out of consideration for their passengers. A severe yaw creates lateral acceleration, which can throw standing passengers to the floor, spill food and drinks, and induce a general state of alarm.

Captain Delroy Blane and his copilot, Victor Santorelli, were veterans with forty-two years of commercial piloting between them. For all heading changes, they would have used the ailerons—hinged panels on the trailing edge of each wing—which facilitate gentle banking turns. They would have resorted to the rudder only in the event of engine failure on takeoff or when landing in a strong crosswind.

The flight-data recorder had shown that eight seconds after the first yawing incident, Flight 353’s heading again abruptly changed three degrees, nose left, followed two seconds later by a second and even more severe shift of seven degrees to the left. Both engines were at full performance and bore no responsibility for the heading change or the subsequent disaster.

As the front of the plane swung sharply to port, the starboard wing would have been moving faster through the air, rapidly gaining lift. When the starboard wing lifted, it forced the port wing down. During the next fateful twenty-two seconds, the banking angle grew to one hundred forty-six degrees, while the nose-down pitch reached eighty-four degrees.

In that incredibly short span of time, the 747 went from earth-parallel flight to a deadly roll while virtually standing on end.

Pilots with the experience of Blane and Santorelli should have been able to correct the yaw quickly, before it became a roll. Even then, they should have been able to pull the aircraft out of the roll before it became an inevitable plunge. Under any scenario that the human-performance experts could conceive, the captain would have turned the control wheel hard to the right and would have used the ailerons to bring the 747 back to level flight.

Instead, perhaps because of a singular hydraulic-systems failure that defeated the pilots’ efforts, Nationwide Flight 353 rolled into a steep dive. With all jet engines still firing, it
rocketed
into this meadow, splashing millennia of accumulated soil as if it were water, boring to the bedrock with an impact powerful enough to crack the steel blades of the Pratt and Whitney power plants as though they were made of balsa wood, sufficiently loud to shake all the winged residents out of the trees halfway up the slopes of distant Pikes Peak.

Halfway around the impact crater, Barbara and Joe stopped, now facing east toward beetling thunderheads, less concerned about the pending storm than about the brief thunder of that year-ago night.

Three hours after the crash, the headquarters contingent of the investigating team departed Washington from National Airport. They made the journey in a Gulfstream jet owned by the Federal Aviation Administration.

During the night, Pueblo County fire and police officials had quickly ascertained that there were no survivors. They pulled back so as not to disturb evidence that might help the NTSB arrive at an understanding of the cause of the disaster, and they secured the perimeter of the crash site.

By dawn, the Go-Team arrived in Pueblo, Colorado, which was closer to the incident than Colorado Springs. They were met by regional FAA officials, who were already in possession of the flight-data recorder and cockpit-voice recorder from Nationwide 353. Both devices emitted signals by which they could be located; therefore, swift retrieval from the wreckage had been possible even in darkness and even from the relative remoteness of the site.

“The recorders were put on the Gulfstream and flown back to the Safety Board’s labs in Washington,” Barbara said. “The steel jackets were badly battered, even breached, but we were hopeful the data could be extracted.”

In a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles driven by county emergency-response personnel, the Safety Board team was conveyed to the crash site for its initial survey. The secured perimeter extended to the gravel road that turned off State Highway 115, and gathered along both sides of the paved highway in that vicinity were fire trucks, black-and-whites, ambulances, drab sedans from federal and state agencies, coroners’ vans, as well as scores of cars and pickups belonging to the genuinely concerned, the curious, and the ghoulish.

“It’s always chaos,” Barbara said. “Lots of television vans with satellite dishes. Nearly a hundred and fifty members of the press. They clamored for statements when they saw us arrive, but we didn’t have anything to say yet, and we came directly up here to the site.”

Her voice trailed away. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans.

No wind was at play. No bees moved among the wildflowers. The surrounding woods were full of motionless monk trees, which had taken vows of silence.

Joe lowered his gaze from the silent storm clouds, black with throttled thunder, to the crater where the thunder of Flight 353 was now only a memory held deep in fractured stone.

“I’m okay,” he assured Barbara, though his voice was thick. “Go on. I need to know what it was like.”

After another half minute of silence, during which she gathered her thoughts and decided how much to tell him, Barbara said, “When you arrive with the Go-Team, the first impression is always the same. Always. The smell. You never ever forget the stench. Jet fuel. Smoldering vinyl and plastic—even the new blended thermoplastics and the phenolic plastics burn under extreme conditions. There’s the stink of seared insulation, melted rubber, and…roasted flesh, biological wastes from the ruptured lavatory holding tanks and from the bodies.”

Joe forced himself to continue looking into the pit, because he would need to go away from this place with a new strength that would make it possible for him to seek justice against all odds, regardless of the power of his adversaries.

“Ordinarily,” Barbara said, “in even terribly violent crashes, you see some pieces of wreckage large enough to allow you to envision the aircraft as it once was. A wing. The empennage. A long section of fuselage. Depending on the angle of impact, you sometimes even have the nose and cockpit mostly intact.”

“In the case of Flight 353?”

“The debris was so finely chopped, so gnarled, so compacted, that on first look it was impossible to see that it had been a plane. It seemed to us that a huge portion of the mass must be missing. But it was all here in the meadow and scattered some distance into the trees uphill, west and north. All here…but for the most part there was nothing bigger than a car door. All I saw that I could identify at first glance was a portion of an engine and a three-unit passenger-seat module.”

“Was this the worst crash in your experience?” Joe asked.

“Never seen one worse. Only two others to equal it—including the Pennsylvania crash in ’94, Hopewell, USAir Flight 427, en route to Pittsburgh. The one I mentioned earlier. I wasn’t the IIC on that one, but I saw it.”

“The bodies here. How were they when you arrived?”

“Joe…”

“You said no one could have survived. Why are you so sure?”

“You don’t want to know the
why.
” When he met her eyes, she looked away from him. “These are images that haunt your sleep, Joe. They wear away a part of your soul.”

“The bodies?” he insisted.

With both hands, she pressed her white hair back from her face. She shook her head. She put her hands in her pockets again.

Joe drew a deep breath, exhaled with a shudder, and repeated his question. “The bodies? I need to know everything I can learn. Any detail about this might be helpful. And even if this isn’t much help…it’ll keep my anger high. Right now, Barbara, I need the anger to be able to go on.”

“No bodies intact.”

“None at all?”

“None even close to intact.”

“How many of the three hundred and thirty were the pathologists finally able to identify…to find at least a few teeth from, body parts, something, anything, to tell who they were?”

Her voice was flat, studiedly emotionless, but almost a whisper. “I think slightly more than a hundred.”

“Broken, severed, mangled,” he said, hammering himself with the hard words.

“Far worse. All that immense hurtling energy released in an instant…you don’t even recognize most of the biological debris as being human. The risk of infectious disease was high from blood and tissue contamination, so we had to pull out and revisit the site only in biologically secure gear. Every piece of wreckage had to be carted away and documented by the structural specialists, of course—so to protect them we had to set up four decontamination stations out along the gravel road. Most of the wreckage had to be processed there before it moved on to a hangar at Pueblo Airport.”

Being brutal to prove to himself that his anguish would never again get the better of his anger until this quest was completed, Joe said, “It was pretty much like putting them through one of those tree-grinding machines.”

“Enough, Joe. Knowing more details can’t
ever
help you.”

The meadow was so utterly soundless that it might have been the ignition point of all Creation, from which God’s energies had long ago flowed toward the farthest ends of the universe, leaving only a mute vacuum.