‘I’ve emailed you some pictures.’
God, he loved the way other countries dealt with confidentiality issues.
Twenty minutes later Tom called her back. ‘You got scoring on the disc flange!’
Pam laughed, a rich, joyous sound as if she really was enjoying her joke. ‘I know!’
Tom’s mind ticked like a Geiger counter on Bikini Atoll. The fan blades were attached to the fan disc, a ring of intricately tooled titanium alloy, which in turn was bolted to the flat face of the drive shaft via perfectly matched flanges. The integrity of the bond between the two flanges was crucial. There was no margin for error when two surfaces were required to maintain synchronicity at 5,500 r.p.m. ‘How the hell did that happen?’
Pam made a long musical hum of ‘Who knows?’ ‘We’re thinking it may be nothing to do with the crash at all. That maybe it was scratched during maintenance or something.’
Tom heard the subtle inflection in her voice. ‘We’re thinking?’
‘The team.’
‘But not you?’
A long pause from Ostrich World. ‘We-ell … the team thinks it can’t be relevant, that if the scoring was caused during operation, it would have been picked up before … this.’
Tom nodded. Movement between the fan disc and the shaft would certainly have been picked up by the airborne-vibration monitoring system and gauged on a small black-faced dial on the cockpit’s central pedestal. The dial was calibrated up to five units. Any vibration over two was reportable by the crew on landing, although it wasn’t a fail-safe system. Change the crew, change the defect – the long-suffering engineers’ mantra was cynical but true: what one crew refused to fly with, another cheerfully ignored. And even if a 1.9 reading had been noted and reported, small random vibrations were notoriously difficult to replicate in tests. ‘Transient’, they were called. Sometimes they were there; sometimes they just went away.
And sometimes they came back.
‘You got the shaft?’ Matching score marks on it would indicate the damage had been caused during operation.
‘No,’ she said, ‘not yet.’
‘You find the black box?’
She must have known he was going to ask about vibration readings. ‘The VDM showed a vibration of just under two units.’
‘But then it stopped working.’
‘That’s when everything stopped working.’
They paused for a moment, respecting the euphemism.
Two units of vibration weren’t enough to make the scoring the cause of the crash. But something about it had obviously kept niggling away at Pam, and now it was bothering Tom, too. He itched to see the fan disc; burned to run his fingers over the faces of the two connecting flanges.
A jet engine was so precisely machined – and operated at such enormous speeds – that the tiniest problems could become fatal flaws in the blink of an eye. The fan blade-tip speed could approach Mach 1 a mere one-eighth of an inch from the fan casing. The slightest imbalance …
The long silence across the miles was filled with their minds addressing a previously unconsidered problem, mentally dissecting the engine of a 737, stripping it down to its heart, then poring over every part of the assembly, probing for chinks in its armour.
‘Maybe the scoring’s a symptom, not a cause,’ he said. It was possible that something had gone wrong somewhere else and that the disc and the shaft had parted company as a result. In that case, scoring – and even deeper gouging – could easily have been caused as the two metal faces ripped apart.
‘Hmm,’ said Pam, sounding unconvinced. ‘Or maybe there was something wrong with the manufacture.’
That possibility was so frightening that Tom actually shivered. If there was a fault in the manufacturing process, then who knew how many planes might be in the skies right now with the same fault lying dormant in their engines, waiting to manifest itself in wholesale carnage? ‘Have you checked the trail?’
‘Yes. Everything’s properly papered.’
He sighed with relief. Every airline part imported into or made in the US was numbered, logged and had a paper trail stretching back to the manufacturer. That paperwork outlived the part it documented. Years after a part was destroyed, its paperwork still languished in old files. For some years the paper trail had been converted to computer records that could be printed off as required. But in many countries, when a plane was sold, the paperwork transferred with it was taller than a Harlem Globetrotter.
‘Where did the plane come from?’
‘Hold on.’ He could hear her shuffling papers. ‘It was a twelve-year-old jet bought by SAA six years ago from Avia Freight.’
‘Converted?’
Silence again while she checked. ‘QC.’
QC was Quick Change. The 737-400 QC could be quickly refitted for passengers or for cargo.
‘How about yours?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll check. I’ll get back to you.’
‘Okay.’
‘Hey, Pam, thanks.’
She laughed again, as if she had nothing better to do with her time than discuss downed planes with him half a world away.
Tom looked up Munro’s report online. It told him only that the Pride of Maine had been manufactured thirteen years before its untimely death. He called CalSuperior and asked for their operations department. When he identified himself to a chirpy-sounding man, all the chirp went out of his voice and he became sullen, as if the investigation into the demise of the Pride of Maine was a personal insult.
‘I thought this investigation was over.’
‘You thought wrong.’ Tom waited irritably while the guy got the information he needed. The Pride of Maine was a second-hand purchase – as so many cargo planes were. This particular 737 had been bought a mere three years before.
‘Where was it purchased?’
‘Purchased from …’ Again, the formerly chirpy man took a good long time to find the information for him, then told him so grudgingly that Tom wanted to reach down the phone line and throttle him.
‘… Avia Freight.’
Tom felt a little thrill up the back of his neck.
*
The Avia Freight offices in LA were on Sepulveda Boulevard, sandwiched between a Denny’s parking lot and the Sunny View Motel. The Sunny View, in turn, was permanently in the shadow of the neighbouring office block, making it quite possibly the only motel in LA without a sunny view – or a view at all, thought Tom, as he looked round at the eight lanes of traffic pumping smog just inches from the car-sized motel pool, which oozed under an opalescent slick.
The interior of Avia Freight had a clean, corporate look that made Tom feel immediately like a bum. He’d put on his badge and his NTSB jacket, but the pretty young clerk (actress-slash-clerk, no doubt) glanced at his sneakers and dismissed him out of hand. She asked him if she could get him anything – coffee, water, juice? – without smiling. Tom shook his head and picked up the first magazine on the table beside the leather couch. Embarrassingly, it turned out to be Hustler and, although he could feel his ears burning, he felt obliged to flick defiantly through it under the gaze of the girl, who had no doubt placed it there for her own amusement.
‘There’s a great article in there about paragliding,’ she said, barely able to keep a straight face.
‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m only looking at the pictures.’
The surprise in the actress-slash-clerk’s eyes was worth it. To hammer home his admittedly small advantage, he let the magazine drop open and carefully tugged the centrefold clear of the staples. He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ She shook her head, clearly dumbfounded, as he folded it neatly into his back pocket.
