Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

The stage was set for his own Pulitzer just two months into the new job when an American Airlines DC-10 lost an engine and crashed on takeoff from O’Hare Airport in Chicago in 1979. In the months that followed, Pace’s investigative work produced exclusive after exclusive on problems with the DC-10 and airline maintenance procedures. His stories led to congressional investigations and a myriad of changes in FAA regulations, and earned him, at the age of twenty-five, journalism’s highest award for national reporting.

And still aircraft kept crashing. He was on the scene five months after the American tragedy when a Western Airlines DC-10 crashed in Mexico City. And for the January, 1982, crash of an Air Florida 737 in the icy Potomac River in Washington. And a Delta crash in a storm at Dallas-Fort Worth in 1985. Another in-flight collision over San Diego in 1986. The 1988 Pan Am 747 shattered by a bomb an hour into its flight from London to New York, crashing in flaming pieces onto a quiet Scottish village in the midst of Christmas celebrations. United Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa, that DC-10 whose crew so deftly flew her for nearly an hour without hydraulic control, almost making the runway before it crashed and cartwheeled. The runway collision in Detroit. The ice-caused accident at LaGuardia in New York.

How many was that? Pace recalled each one, pressing the fingers of his left hand into his leg as he counted them off. Nine? No, with this one, it was ten! Jesus, how many deaths had he witnessed? Hundreds? Thousands, probably.

This disaster was the worst, and not because of the death. The impact of the others had been mitigated—the aircraft and its contents were smashed beyond recognition, or he’d arrived after the worst of the human devastation was cleaned up, or the plane wound up underwater, or he and other reporters were kept too far away to view the carnage.

But on this day, the carnage was everywhere, impossible not to see: dead bodies still buckled into seats, burned bodies on the concrete runway, a severed arm carried by a fireman, a crushed child cradled gently by a rescue worker.

The horror was cumulative. Pace wasn’t certain he could take much more of it. He berated himself that he wasn’t hardened to this. But watching the aftermath of the ConPac disaster, he knew he never would be, and he was appalled suddenly at the idea of spending the rest of his career in a job where his biggest stories were of massive human tragedy.

It was time, perhaps, to think about another beat, possibly Congress, where the paper had an open slot, or the State Department, where a Chronicle staffer was retiring. But Pace cared little for the infighting on Capitol Hill. And he knew little about the complex affairs of state. Maybe it was time for a new career.

But where does a man who is thirty-nine go when he’s spent eighteen years doing journalism, the last fifteen of them as an aviation specialist?

He felt trapped by who he was, where he was, and what he was doing. He was fast approaching middle age, divorced and going nowhere, having been nowhere but to a succession of airports, hayfields, and swamps, chasing answers to the ritual questions about why big metal birds fall out of the sky. He was good at the job. You don’t win Pulitzer Prizes if you’re not good. But he had reached that pinnacle at the age of twenty-five, and he since had the sense that there was little left for him to accomplish. The Pulitzer is the ultimate goal of every newspaper journalist, and he’d won his with forty years of his career still before him. How was he to motivate himself to fill all that time? To know you’re good isn’t enough. To tell yourself you’re doing a public service isn’t enough. Even the sharp-edged thrill that comes with the chase after a good story grows dull when all the stories begin to sound the same. Every year he watched colleagues walk away with major journalism awards, and he knew he’d already had his last, best shot and his own best moment. His time would not come again.

He was stuck in a one-way rut running down the middle of a dead-end street.

Pace turned away from the wreckage and mentally scolded himself for being so negative about a career most journalists would kill to match. He forced himself to breathe deeply and slowly. He concentrated on the NTSB people moving around in the grass, huddling over pieces of wreckage large and small, charting what they found and where they found it. They were members of the go-team, a group of industry and government specialists in virtually all facets of aviation, who rotate on twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week alert to respond to major aviation disasters.

The men cataloging the wreckage were members of the structures group: engineers whose responsibility was to recover and examine the airframe and flight controls. They most likely would be the team that recovered the 811’s two so-called black boxes: the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. They would be sent to the NTSB’s Bureau of Technology downtown for analysis. There they would give up their records of cockpit conversation and aircraft-performance data that would help reconstruct the accident and the events that led up to it. Why they were called black boxes, Pace never knew, since actually they were bright orange.

At other places around the airport, go-team weather specialists would be trying to determine if high winds were a factor. An air-traffic-control group would analyze all ATC services to the dead jetliner. Systems specialists would delve into the guts of the 811. There was a human-factors group to examine the actions of the cockpit and cabin crews, a power-plants group to tear down the engines, witness and maintenance-records groups, and other specialists, all coming from different directions in an effort to find as quickly as possible what error or breakdown had destroyed a jetliner and all 330 people aboard. Within hours, the NTSB teams would be joined by engineers from the aircraft and engine manufacturers, who would lend their expertise to the investigation. The common goal was to find the quickest possible remedial measures to ensure that a similar error or breakdown did not happen again. Not ever.

Pace needed the roster of go-team members. Some of their investigative work would take weeks, but preliminary information would be making the rounds within hours. He knew a lot of people in the industry, and with any luck, there would be someone on the team who could be turned into a source. He felt a definite sense of urgency; he wasn’t the only veteran reporter looking for the inside story.

As if on cue, he met the eyes of Justin Smith, chief aviation writer for The New York Times since before the invention of dirt.

Smith walked over to Pace. “The damndest thing you ever saw?” he asked, a slight Georgia drawl rounding the edges of his words. “Wouldn’t want to be the one to sort it out.”

Pace held out his binoculars. “You want to get up close and personal?”

“Not ’specially.” Nonetheless, Smith took the glasses and held them to his eyes for several minutes. “Jesus!” he whispered, handing the binoculars back to Pace. He jerked his head toward the main terminal. “Goin’ back inside. Wanna tag along?”

Overhead, Pace counted no fewer than nine news choppers taking turns hovering over the wreckage for the videotape that would spice the five, six, and eleven o’clock news on five local stations and four networks. His black mood and the incessant clap of the chopper rotors had given him a headache.

He nodded at Smith, then bent beside Hogan, whose motor drive still whirred through frame after frame.

“There’s nothing more I need out here,” he whispered. “I’m going back to the main terminal to see what’s up.”

“Right,” Hogan replied. “Call if you get work.”