Millennium

Craig: "Maybe it was downstairs. Maybe he got back to tourist."

Tom: "In a 747? Listen, we're assuming the plane wasn't holed, or we'd have heard it on the tape. It makes a hell of a noise."

Jerry: "We might not hear it if the hole was toward the back."

Tom: "Yeah, but how's he going to get there? Into the first-class lounge, down the stairs, back to tourist, and then all the way back to the cockpit in thirty-three seconds? Not in that plane. It would be a miracle if he got down the stairs without breaking his fucking neck."

I agreed. It would have been easier to walk on a roller coaster.

"So," I said, "we can postulate he didn't get much farther than the stairway. It doesn't seem reasonable that he'd see anything there but a bunch of scared people."

Carole interrupted us after we'd gone on like that for quite a while.

"You guys are going to have to learn to accept the obvious," she said.

"What's that?" Jerry wanted to know.

"That he simply went crazy."

"I thought you psychologists didn't like that word."

She shrugged. "I'm not prejudiced against it when it's the simplest one that fits. But I used it to rub your faces in it. I know you don't want to believe that a pilot could flip out like that, and I'll admit it's rare. But you've all pretty well proved that when he went back into the lounge all he could have seen were frightened people, not burnt corpses."

Tom protested. "But he said he saw -- "

"He didn't say he saw anything. Don't treat it as a reliable eyewitness account of anything.

Treat it as the last realization of a man pushed beyond his limits. He said they were all dead and burned. He was a man trained to fly a plane but he couldn't do it because it wasn't his plane. He knew more than the passengers; he had more reason to panic, because he knew they were all doomed. He could look at the reality Gil Crain and the others could keep denying because they had things they could do. He just gave in and said what he knew would happen -- that they were all going to die. And he was right."

None of us liked it, but it ended the discussion, at least for then. Carole was the human-

factors expert. Thinking it over, I had to agree that the main reason I was reluctant to accept her explanation was the one she'd mentioned: I didn't want to believe a pilot could come unglued that fast. But he must have.

We held our nightly meeting -- the first of many -- not long after the first run-through of the 747 tape.

It was all we could do to squeeze everyone into the smaller of the two airport rooms.

There must have been over a hundred people there who had a right to be present. I'm afraid I dozed through a lot of it, but I can doze with my eyes open, so nobody noticed. I hope.

The nightly meetings are a fixture of any investigation. Everybody that's been working on the crash gets together and compares notes. Decisions are made about what avenues to pursue.

We agreed that the computer at Fremont -- which is where the Oakland Air Region Traffic Control Center is actually located -- would have to be gone over by an expert team.

Tom already had some people in mind. Otherwise, it was mostly a matter of confirming things already done and telling everybody to keep doing them. Many of the physical aspects of an investigation take quite a while.

After that the meeting could have gone on for ten more hours. Any meeting will, if you let it. But in the early stages I've found it's just a lot of wind. Later on some longer meetings would be in order, but when I saw by my watch that this one had been going on for two hours I chopped it off short and told everybody not actually working in the hangar to go home and get some sleep.

Some of them didn't like that, but they couldn't do anything about it. It was my investigation. Maybe on paper it was C. Gordon Petcher's, but in fact it was mine. And speaking of good old Gordy ...

Briley came up to me as everybody was shuffling out, looking like he had bad news. I let him off easy.

"I already know," I told him. "Gordy didn't make the evening flight. He'll show up in the morning. I heard he held a press conference in Washington."

"That's what I was told."

"It must have been a cute one. I haven't talked with him, so I wonder what he told them?"

"That the situation was well in hand, I gather. Just like you're going to have to do in about twenty minutes."

I groaned, but I was already resigned to it. The press had been promised a conference. All it would really be, to my way of thinking, was what they call a "photo opportunity." They'd have footage of me to put on the late news. There was certainly damn little I could tell them.

I hate inefficiency. You'd have to look a long, long ways before you found a better example of it than the press conference.

The duplication of effort is enough to make you break down and cry. Is it really necessary for the evening Eyewash News in Kankakee, Illinois, to send a cameraman to cover an airline disaster in California? And it's not just television, though every major station in the seven surrounding states had a camera there. All the newspapers were there, too. Reporters from India and Japan and England and, for all I know, Bali, the Maldive Islands, and Kampuchea. There were the magazine reporters and the columnists. There must have been a hundred just from the aviation journals. There were scientists from every university in the state. There were the nonfiction authors who specialise in quickie news books, and concept people whose job it is to swarm around Patty Hearst or Gary Gilmore or anybody and anything that captures the country's attention for a few days and assign pimp writers and pimp producers to write cash-

in books and make cash-in television movies. They are the packagers of disaster. In a couple of months we'd be seeing the results of their efforts: "The Last Seconds of Flight 35" and "Collision!" and "Mount Diablo" and "Crash of the Jumbos."

I wondered who they'd get to play Bill Smith.

I'd have been tickled pink if all they wanted to do was stand in front of wreckage in the middle of the night in mud up to their knees, hold mikes up to their faces, and look solemn.

But they wanted to talk to me, and all I'd ever wanted to know was why? There was no story from me. They knew that as well as I did, but they had to have a circus, anyway.

So I stood up there in front of a forest of microphones and squinted into the lights and cursed C. Gordon Petcher, who should have had this job. If he wasn't good for this, what was he good for? I started out with the standard statement that there'd be no comment about facts still under investigation. Then I gave them the things we knew, which they all knew already. It was just a dry recital of where the planes came from, where they were bound, the time of impact, the location of the sites. I told them how many passengers and crew had been on each plane (we'd finally gotten those figures: 637 total), that there were ten missing and probably dead on the ground, and seven injuries on the ground, all hit by the DC-10. Names of the dead were being withheld pending notification ... Well, you fill it in. You've heard it on the evening news.

Causes of the crash were still under investigation.

Questions, anyone? Well, my God, don't everyone shout at once.

"Mr Smith, was everyone on the basketball team killed?"

That was the first I'd, heard of a basketball team. It turned out some collegiate team was on the 747. I told the reporter that if they were on the plane, they were certainly dead, as there had been no, repeat no, survivors. How many times would I have to say that? "What about Senator Gray?"

"Was he on one of the planes?"

"That's our information."

"I can't confirm or deny that. If he was on it, he's dead."