John Varley: Millennium

"I don't know. He got the call. We tried him five minutes ago and there was no answer."

George Sheppard is the weather specialist. We could take off without him, since his presence at the crash site wasn't absolutely necessary.

And I was ready to go. More: I was aching to go, like a skittish race horse in the starting gate. I could feel it building all around me, and all around the nation. The interior of the JetStar was dark and calm, but from Washington to Los Angeles and Seattle, and soon all around the world, forces were gathering that would produce the goddamdest electronic circus anyone ever saw. The nation slept, but the wire services and the coaxial cables and synchronous satellites were humming with the news. A thousand reporters and editors were being roused from bed, booking flights to Oakland. A hundred government agencies were going to be involved before this thing was over. Foreign governments would send representatives. Everyone from Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas to the manufacturer of the smallest rivet in an airframe would be on edge, wondering if their factory had turned out the offending part or written the fatal directive, and they'd all want to be on hand to hear the bad news as it happened. By the time the sun came up in California a billion people would be clamoring for answers. How did this happen? Whose fault is it? What should be done about it? And I was the guy who had to provide those answers. Every nerve in my body was crying out to get in the air, get there, and start looking.

I was about to order the take-off when a call came in from George, sparing me a decision that he'd surely have resented. He was having car trouble. He'd called a taxi, but suggested we'd better take off without him and he'd catch up later. I heaved a sigh of relief and told the pilot to get us out of here.

What's it like on your way to a major airline disaster? Fairly quiet, for the most part.

During the first hour I made a few calls to Los Angeles, spoke briefly to Kevin Briley. I learned that Roger Keane had boarded a helicopter and was surely at the DC-10 site by now.

Briley was about to leave to catch his own flight to Oakland, where he would meet me at the airport. I told him to set up security.

Then some of the others made calls to Seattle, Oakland, Schenectady, Denver, Los Angeles. Each of the go-team members would be forming his own team to look into one aspect of the crash, and each wanted to get the best possible people. Usually that was no problem. The grapevine operates quickly in a crash this size. Almost everyone we called had already heard; many were already on their way. These were people we knew and trusted.

But none of that took very long. After that first hour we were alone in the sky on the five-hour flight to Oakland. So what did we do? Do you have any idea how much paper work is involved in an accident investigation? Each of us had half a dozen reports in progress. There were reports to read and reports to write, and endless items to review. My own briefcase bulged with pending work. I did some of it for an hour or so.

Finally I wasn't understanding what I was reading. I yawned, stretched, and looked around me. Half the team was asleep. That struck me as a fine idea. It was 4:30 in the morning, Eastern time, three hours earlier on the West Coast, and none of us were likely to get any sleep until well past midnight.

Across the aisle was Jerry Bannister, in charge of structures. He's the oldest of us: a big man with a huge head and thick gray hair, an aeronautical engineer who got his start on the Douglas assembly line building Gooney Birds because the Army recruiter rejected him. He's deaf in one ear and wears a hearing aid in the other. Looking at him, you'd think he was the biggest mistake the Army ever made. I'd put him up against a platoon of German soldiers any day, even at age sixty. He's got one of those craggy faces and a pair of those giant hands that would make him look right at home in a machine shop. It's hard to picture him at a drawing board or putting a model through wind-tunnel tests, but that's what he's good at. After the war he put himself through college. He worked on the DC-6 and the DC-8, among many others.

He was sound asleep, head back, mouth open. The guy is almost nerveless; nothing rattles him. He collects stamps, of all things. He's nutty about philately; once he starts talking about it it's impossible to shut him off.

Behind him, his bald head gleaming in the cone of light from overhead, was Craig Haubner, my systems specialist. He would spend the rest of the flight filling page after page of his yellow legal tablet, bounce off the plane and out to the crash site and spend all day and into the night poking and peering into the wreckage, and return to the temporary headquarters still neat, alert, and full of energy. It was impossible to like Haubner -- he wasn't very good with people, and sometimes didn't even seem to be human -- but we all respected him. His ability to examine a bit of charred wire or bent hydraulic tubing and tell exactly what happened to it is little short of the occult.

Then there was Eli Seibel, also awake, pawing through the matchbook covers, paper napkins, torn envelopes and crumpled papers he is pleased to call his working notes. I never complain to him about it, though I grit my teeth when I see him at work. Out of the chaos he manages to turn in very good work. He's overweight and allergic to just about everything and the only one of us without a pilot's license, but he's cheerful, popular with the secretaries at the office, and competent at his specialty, which is powerplants.

In the seats behind me was Tom Stanley, with his feet out in the aisle and the rest of him vainly trying to curl up and get comfortable. At twenty-seven, he's the youngest member of the team. He'd never been in the service -- I suspected he'd have been a draft-dodger if he'd been old enough for Viet-Nam -- and the only aviation-related job he'd held before coming to work for the Board was as an Air Traffic Controller. His family has a lot of money. He started out at Harvard, of all places, before switching to M.I.T., and his dad paid every penny.

He lives in a house that's worth five times what mine would sell for. All in all, I could hardly imagine a biography more calculated to bring out hostility from the likes of old pros like Jerry, Craig ... and myself. And that's pretty much how Haubner and Bannister felt about him. Eli Seibel tolerates him, and Levitsky more or less tolerates all of us.

But I get along with Tom quite well. If there was such a thing as a second-in-command of an NTSB investigation (which there is not), I would choose Tom Stanley for the post. As it is, I confer with him a lot.

The secret is probably his love of flying. He's been doing it since he was about eight, and I love flying so much myself that I can't find it in myself to resent the money that made it possible for him. I own a wonderful old Stearman biplane that swallows too much of my salary and probably will never be paid for. Tom owns a mint-condition Spitfire. And he lets me fly it. What can you say about a man like that? Tom would be chairing two sub-groups in the investigation: Air Traffic Control and Operations. The other person who would wear two hats was asleep in the back of the plane.

She was Carole Levitsky, in charge of Human Factors and Witnesses. She'd only been with the Board six months. This would be her second major crash. Originally a research psychologist with experience in forensics and, industrial stress factors, she had managed to more or less win over us hard-technology types. I suspect she knew what made us all tick a lot better than we did ourselves; she had a way of looking at you that pretty soon had you thinking "I wonder what I really meant by that?" The one thing that still made us all nervous was a lingering suspicion that she spent as much time studying the effects of stress on us as she did on the pilots and ATC's who figured in the crashes we investigated. As I already mentioned, there were things about myself I'd just as soon keep away from a psychologist, and the rest of us were all fertile ground for job stress syndrome as well. Carole is a small woman with short, dark hair and a rather plain face. She works well with the overwhelmingly male groups that assemble for an investigation.