The Mind Man

Chapter twenty

Gus Hinckley sat in the quiet gloom of his Washington DC office reflecting over the fate of Conway Airlines Flight 480. A single lamp on his cluttered desk provided the only source of light in the windowless room whose walls were almost completely concealed behind shelves of books, journals, reports and aviation magazines. He looked over the top of his spectacles to turn the recording device on again. It was late and he needed to be heading home but he wanted to hear the final moments again. He had listened to the cockpit voice recorder taken from the black box of Flight 480 many times endeavoring to find clues that would point to the flight's demise. Microphones in the cockpit near the pilots' heads picked up every sound and word spoken throughout the entire flight. Everything appeared regular and routine up until the last few seconds of the tape. Gus had been an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board for coming up to thirty years and this one had him baffled. He had listened to the tape in sync with the flight data recorder to create a timeline leading up to the disaster. The FDR, however, indicated that all the mechanical functions of the airplane had operated completely normally and without malfunction making the events immediately prior to the incident particularly bewildering. 

Fifty-three year old Captain Ferguson was an experienced pilot with over 20,000 hours of flying experience. He had flown for Conway for more than twelve years. His first officer, Brandon Akroyd, was much younger with a lot less experience but had still managed to accumulate a respectable 1200 hours in narrow-body aircraft since joining Conway two years prior. Listening to the tape assured Gus that the rapport between the two men was congenial and for most of the flight they had chattered light heartedly in the cockpit about a number of trivial subjects often turning something into a joke. Good interaction between the crew was always a reassuring sign. They had commented several times on the ideal flying conditions which prevailed on the night of the flight; a clear, moonlit sky with minimal turbulence. Information extracted from the FDR had confirmed this and everything pointed towards a routine flight. 

Gus pressed the record button. The light from the lamp on his desk reflected off his spectacles which rested comfortably at the end of his long thin nose. The tape resumed just after the first officer had returned to the cockpit after a short absence. 

"What about those Packers in the Super Bowl?" 

"Yeah who would have thought?" 

There was a brief period of silence before the first officer spoke again. 

"Sir, why are we off autopilot?" 

Gus had listened to the recording so many times he knew exactly what was coming next and it disturbed him. It was the first sign of anything unusual happening in the cockpit. 

"I felt the airplane come off course a while back. The instruments don't seem to be functioning properly. I took manual control as a precaution." 

"With all due respects sir, I didn't feel anything. Here let me check..." 

At this point the FDR revealed that the left aileron was commanded downwards rolling the airplane slightly to the right. The rudder, however, remained in the neutral position. 

"Sir, what are you doing?" 

"I'm leveling the airplane." 

The FDR showed the left aileron was shifted further downwards. The airplane banked more steeply to the right. It started turning in the same direction. The rudder had now moved to the right. 

"But sir we are turning right." 

"No we're not. We're turning left. I'm correcting to bring the airplane level." 

"No you're not we are going over. You have to stop sir...stop!" 

"I'm just trying to..." 

"What the heck..." 

At this point data from the FDR indicated that the rudder was hard right. Ferguson must have had his foot firmly down on the right rudder pedal. The ailerons were being forced to their maximum displacements. He was intentionally commanding a severe right turn pushing the airplane to its limits. The first officer tried to fight the erroneous control inputs of his Captain from his position in the cockpit but he was too late. The airplane went into a violent downwards spin. 

"Sir... sir...oh no...ahhhhhh!" 

The tape went silent.

Gus, in his capacity of human performance investigator with the NTSB, had been one of the first to the crash site. Nothing prepared him for what he saw. In all the years he'd been with the NTSB he had never witnessed anything like CA480. The area was no bigger than a football field. The eighty ton jet had slammed into a clearing in the forest at a decent rate of between four thousand and six thousand feet per minute and had virtually disintegrated on impact. What had not been destroyed by the collision with the ground was incinerated in a ball of exploding jet fuel. He was sure the pungent smell of the bio suits they were forced to wear would haunt him for the rest of his life. He and his colleagues had spent many days sifting through the rubble and pulling parts of the airplane from out of the blackened, burnt earth until they had finally discovered the orange black box. He had then returned to Washington with this precious cargo in his possession to begin the analysis and the painstaking search for a cause. In a baffling case such as this he would have to consider all sources and forms of information. His tasks over the ensuing months would include constructing a psychological profile on Ferguson to determine if he was emotionally unstable or suicidal. Checks would be made for bombs, terrorists or terrorist targets; luggage would be checked against the passenger list; interviews would be sought with the people who loaded the airplane and surveillance tapes which captured the loading procedure scrutinized. He would even have to sift through comments offered by the public suggesting why the airplane had crashed. There was already a substantial list on his desk and it was continually growing. He had noted that someone was suggesting large amounts of radio magnetic radiation in the sky that night, one saying that it flew into the path of a UFO force field and even one crackpot saying the pilot fell victim to a telepathic attack. He never ceased to be amused by the vivid imagination of the general public. Over the years he had heard it all. 

He switched off the recording and turned back to his computer screen. The director was expecting him to finalize the preliminary field report in a few days so he retrieved his document to add some final text. He knew that what he was going to write would be eagerly awaited and thoroughly scrutinized by everyone with a connection to the flight but it was all he had at the moment. The investigation would continue for months, even years. Every piece of wreckage pulled from the blackened fire crater out in Ohio had to be meticulously examined. There would be interviews, public hearings and a host of other protocol to follow before the final report presenting their findings could be published. There was always the possibility that it would be shelved; its status remaining undetermined, although the NTSB loathed to have unresolved cases on their books. The implications were potentially catastrophic. An entire global fleet of this one type of aircraft could be removed from the sky. The NTSB had to come up with an explanation for the cause of the crash. Everyone from the shattered families through to the aircraft manufacturer expected conclusive answers so the problem could be rectified, preventing further incidents. The victim's relatives also wanted closure. 

He thought for a moment, running a hand over his balding scalp. Nothing made sense. Why had Ferguson disengaged the autopilot four minutes before the crash? From the technical data there appeared to Gus no reason for him to take manual control of the airplane. There was no evidence of any unusual movement or other aircraft being in the vicinity. And why hadn't he discussed his actions with his co-pilot? It seemed his co-pilot was unaware of this significant change to the status of the aircraft until he observed it for himself upon his return to the cockpit. Ferguson's actions resembled someone who had suddenly become drunk or drugged. Gus sucked in a lung full of air before placing his fingers over the keyboard. It was a perplexing scenario. Everything indicated to Gus that Captain Ferguson's professionalism towards his job, at some point in the time preceding the demise of the flight, had all but evaporated. He had literally flown a plane full of people into the ground. 

Gus began typing the final comment to his report slowly and deliberately.

'At this preliminary stage of the investigation, the most probable cause of the Conway Airlines Flight 480 accident is the airplane's departure from normal cruise flight and subsequent impact with the ground as a result of the Captain's erroneous flight control inputs and breakdown of communication between the Captain and his co-pilot.'