John Nance - Lockout

Nothing in the wire harness going into the rear of the cradle showed any signs of change or tampering. It was as if the harness was a standard factory construct, and the plug itself provided no help—only small numbers associated with each pin position could be seen when he disconnected the plug and examined it.

Dan felt his heart sink as he stared at it. What arrogance to think he could figure this out without a schematic. But as Frank moved to his side, the passenger reached out to point to the disconnected rack plug and nodded.

“You recognize something?” Dan asked.

“There is a standard pattern. Power supply, input, output, antenna leads… all of it pretty straightforward.”

“Really? Anything look nonstandard here?”

“You said the radios went off? All of them?”

“Yes.”

“And there were no lights then on the control heads, no indication of power?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Very well. You see, if I were going to build a box to seize control remotely, I wouldn’t need to use the radios. I would just see to it that they were turned off.”

“What are you saying, Frank?”

“We should try to find power to plug in… here and here… to these pins… and you might just reactivate the transceiver. The antenna seems to be in place.”

“I wish we had a circuit tester or ammeter.”

“So do I. But these instruments are all powered by the same voltage. Any positive and negative lead should work.”

They searched the adjacent rack before finding a small box several feet away with blinking lights on the front. Dan unscrewed and removed the box, disconnected the cannon plug on the back of the rack and waited for the aircraft to react.

Nothing.

“Okay, which are the power leads?”

Frank took over, cutting the two appropriate wires and pulling them through far enough to reach the back of the VHF radio. He stripped a section of insulation from each of the cut wires to the radio and spliced the power leads in, and immediately two small LEDs on the front lit up.

“Wait here,” Dan said, scrambling to stick his head above cockpit floor level.

Jerry was already waiting for him. “The number one radio just lit up, Dan! What did you do?”

“Too long to explain. That’s just step one. Call out if anything changes up here.”

“Can I use the radio?”

“Hey man, knock yourself out. We should be adjacent to Italian airspace by now. Maybe Rome control could hear us.”

“Hey… wait a second… it’s not transmitting.”

Dan pulled himself out of the hatch to stand beside Jerry’s chair.

“What do you mean?”

“The audio control panel here… it’s still dark, and even though I know I had the switch selected to the number one radio before all this crap began, when I hit the transmit button, nothing happens.”

Dan reached down and worked with the panel, then looked at his panel on the right side.

“You’re right. We’ve only turned the thing on. Can you change frequencies?”

“Yes. That’s just manual, or at least it works.”

“Can we hear anything?”

“Let me find the right ATC frequencies for where we are, and I’ll let you know, but it isn’t going to help us much unless we can talk.”

Carol was standing beside him, and Dan turned to her.

“Any luck on radio batteries for that satellite phone we were using?”

“No. That was apparently the only one on board.”

Josh Begich looked up, listening to the exchange.

“You know, that telephone can’t be too exotic in terms of what kind of charging power it needs. Perhaps we could find a charger aboard and modify it? I would bet a lot of people have chargers in their carryon bags.”

“I’ll make the announcement and see what we can find,” Carol said, turning to Dan. “And I’ll send Jeanie up to relay for you.”

“Okay, stand by on searching the bags. There’s not much room down there. Jerry? I’m going back down and keep at it.”

“Go for it, Dan. Hey… take a minute to get something to drink or hit the head if you need it.”

“I’m good, but you need a break?”

“Yeah, next time you come up, I need to get out of this seat for a minute.”

Josh was looking over at the two of them. “I thought you couldn’t control anything?”

“We can’t,” Jerry replied, knowing where this was going.

“But, that means that if you need to get up, nothing will change while you’re out of the cockpit, right?”

“Ever hear of Murphy’s Law, kid?” Jerry asked.

“Uh, no. Is that an electronics law?”

“No, it’s life. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. If I unstrap and leave the cockpit with Dan downstairs, guaranteed that’s the exact moment we’ll get control back and go into a dive or something.”

Josh looked even more confused.

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, but then we’d have control back, right?”

Jerry looked up at Dan who was suppressing a laugh, then back at Josh Begich.

“I’ll have to explain this to you later, kid. It’s like the facts of life.”

Dan returned to the underdeck area with renewed hope, but the look on Frank Erlichman’s face was funereal.

“What’s wrong, Frank?”

“I traced the autothrottle circuit. I doubt we can touch it.”

“Show me. What do you mean?”

Frank led him forward to a separate electronics rack, pointing to a large electronic box and the nomenclature on the identiplate.

“I think this is what you were looking for. But please look at the wiring harness. I traced the basic wires and they go to the cabinet, and then another autothrottle related box, then back to the cabinet, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to be sure you can regain control by cutting anything.”

“It would be a gamble, in other words?”

“A big one.”

Dan looked at his watch, the gesture well understood by Frank who had an ashen look about him.

“Okay… let’s think about this. The engine power is frozen at the same level as when this happened,” Dan began, counting off points on his fingers. “That means they’re not controlling it, most probably, they’ve just disconnected our ability to set it. Regardless of the back and forth wiring, the big question is: Which one of these boxes, if turned off instead of on, would restore our ability to move the throttles?”

“You’re playing, I think, with fire,” Frank said. “These are computer controlled and not as simple as the radio.”

“Well… you may have a point. We turned the radio on but still can’t transmit on it because we didn’t turn on the audio selector panel.”

“We can probably find that circuit.”

“No… let’s… could we try a few things for the throttles and be ready to reverse if it doesn’t go right?”

“There are no switches. You mean, pull the racks out from their plugs?”

“How about stripping a section of wire, cutting it in the middle, and if all hell breaks loose, just re-twisting the ends together.”

“We can’t do that with gloves, and there is substantial voltage.”

“I have to try.”

Once again Dan stuck his head above floor level to brief Jerry and the others on what he was about to do and position Carol to relay any information from Jerry if there was a change.

With five minutes of work stripping wires, they were ready, and Dan used a glove to insulate his hand while running the exposed wire into a pair of uninsulated nail clippers.

“Okay. Here goes.”

The sound of the click as the clippers snapped through the 18-gauge wire was almost inaudible, but Dan could feel the tiny impact in his gloved fingers. At first, it seemed as if there were no further reaction, until he realized he was leaning forward slightly against the deceleration of the airplane.