Rick Mofina - Free Fall

These were respectfully presented for viewing at the memorial.

“I don’t think we will survive. Thank you for a good life,” one note had read, while another passenger had written, “Always take care of each other. I’ll always love you. Please don’t forget me.”

Tears had rolled down Veyda’s face as she’d read more notes.

She was intimate with loss.

After their visit to Japan, Veyda and Seth had flown to India and made their way to the location of the world’s third-worst air accident-in 1996, a Kazakhstan Airlines Ilyushin Il-76 had struck a Saudi Arabian Airlines 747.

The Kazakh charter flight, with twenty-seven passengers and ten crew, had originated in Kazakhstan. It had been on its descent to Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport where the Saudi jumbo jet, with 289 passengers and twenty-three crew, had departed for Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The Kazakh jet had wrongly descended lower than its assigned altitude and had collided midair with the Saudi plane, killing 349 people.

Wreckage had fallen from the skies to the fields below, nearly one hundred miles west of Delhi. Pieces of the charter jet had scattered near the village of Birohar, while remains of the Saudi 747 had fallen to the earth near the village of Charkhi Dadri. Enduring the heat, Veyda and Seth had walked among the fields where debris and bodies had rained down from the heavens.

They were aware that upon recovering the cockpit voice recorder from the Saudi plane, investigators had learned that the pilots had recited the Islamic prayer for believers when they face death.

Veyda was well acquainted with death.

She felt a deep, spiritual connection to the disaster sites in Japan, India and the Canary Islands, and was glad that she and Seth had seen them, felt them, breathed them , firsthand.

I need to bear witness to what we’re doing .

She tugged at Seth and they stepped away from the Tenerife memorial at Mesa Mota to be alone. While Seth took pictures, Veyda checked her phone. She took a fast look at Newslead’s stories on EastCloud Flight 4990, and then reviewed Newslead’s stories filed from London on the Shikra Airlines tragedy.

“Have you read them, Seth?”

“I have. I’m disappointed, because she’s by far the best.”

“Still nothing, nothing showing reverence to Zarathustra.” Veyda shook her head. “Does this Kate Page realize the gravity of her failure?”

“Perhaps she needs to be enlightened?”

“This entire sad world needs to be enlightened.”

Veyda tapped her phone to her chin as she took in the airport below, her face stone-cold behind her dark glasses.

“What happened on this island was a tragedy,” she said.

“An epic tragedy. A record number of deaths.”

“Records are made to be broken.”

Farnborough, England

Shikra Airlines Flight 418’s right wing disintegrated and the landing gear ripped away as the jet piled into the ground, scraping, lifting, cartwheeling, breaking into pieces, spilling passengers, catching fire.

Jittery footage of the crash had been captured by an amateur plane spotter, perched outside the perimeter of Heathrow’s southern runway.

Jake Hooper made notes as the video was replayed several times in slow motion by an engineer with the Air Accidents Investigation Branch. Hooper was among the investigators gathered at the AAIB’s headquarters, located amid lush woodland at Farnborough Airport, a forty-five minute drive southwest of London.

In keeping with international agreements, Hooper, Bill Cashill and other American experts, along with a contingent from Kuwait’s Aviation Safety Department and Shikra Airlines, were there to support the British investigation of Shikra Flight 418, which had crashed after its engines had shut down.

The people around the table viewed the tragedy on the flat-screen that covered one wall. The silence that fell over the room was broken by the flipping of pages and the impatient tapping of Bill Cashill’s pen.

“All right, colleagues, shall we continue, then?”

A slide presentation on the crash replaced the video on the screen as Evan Taylor, a lead AAIB engineer, continued. The AAIB’s overview included a timeline, the aircraft’s flight history, summaries of the readouts from 418’s flight data recorder and transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder, as well as the email sent to the Kuwaiti Embassy in London.

“Of course this is all unverified,” Taylor said. “We’ve yet to interview the crew, who are in serious but stable condition in hospital. You all have copies of the currently available information in your folders. Let’s go through it, shall we?”

The group studied every aspect of the preliminary data, looking for the key piece to point them to the cause. Hooper examined factors like the automatic flight control system, autopilot engagement and disengagement, all cockpit flight control input, the control wheel, control column and rudder pedal, and the computer failure indicator.

Other investigators concentrated on the performance of the crew. But they found nothing noteworthy on that front. All crew members were experienced with exemplary records. Blood testing showed no indication of drugs or alcohol. The crew was rested before the flight.

Nothing had emerged as a potential preliminary explanation of the jet’s sudden shutdown of its engines. No reports of wind gusts, no early evidence of a bird strike; a simultaneous dual-engine failure was highly unlikely. Investigators scrutinized readouts for the power plants, and key factors such as fuel levels, fuel pumps and fuel flow. No problems had surfaced, and no evidence had emerged pointing to a system failure or malfunction of the aircraft’s digital fly-by-wire system, an extraordinarily complex control system built by Richlon-Titan.

After several hours of intense work by the group, Taylor opened up the meeting and encouraged brainstorming on possible causes.

“We believe we must give serious consideration to the email received by our Embassy in London,” said Waleed Al-Rashid, lead engineer for Shikra Airlines.

“Why?” Bill Cashill’s head snapped up.

“We think it is a factor, this anonymous communication.” Al-Rashid read from the page: “ ‘Sorrow and pain for one of your planes -Z.’ We cannot rule out the possibility that somehow, someone interfered with the operation of the aircraft.”

“I think you’re grasping at straws,” Cashill said. “We’ve seen nothing to give this claim an ounce of weight, given it came after the incident.”

“But Mr. Cashill,” Al-Rashid said, “the message is signed clearly with an English letter, Z . It is our understanding that American authorities also received a similar email concerning the incident with EastCloud Airlines Flight Forty-nine Ninety, the so-called Zarathustra email. Given that both flights involve aircraft with Richlon-Titan flight systems, I think we have a commonality worth considering, an avenue of investigation worth pursuing, wouldn’t you agree?”

Hooper saw Cashill’s jaw muscles bunching.

“Absolutely not!” Cashill said. “Everyone in this room is aware that the air industry receives groundless ‘threats’ daily, both in-flight and on the ground. And in ninety-nine percent of cases, they are unsubstantiated. Make no mistake, I’m not being cavalier about this. Yes, the FBI, British officials and your own security authorities are investigating both emails but so far, to our knowledge, they’ve found nothing concrete. If they had, they’d be leading both of our investigations right now.”

“Mr. Cashill, I point you to line one twenty-three and those that follow in the transcript-the conversation between Captain Fahad Al-Anjari and copilot, Khalid Marafi, the line starting with Marafi.” Everyone turned to the transcript and read.