SAM 7 by Richard Cox

Author:Richard Cox [Cox, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silvertail Books
Published: 2024-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

7

At the Farnborough Data Centre three technicians were patiently decoding the information on the flight recorders, painstakingly re-creating the only ‘eyewitness’ accounts there would ever be of what had happened aboard Atlantic Airlines Flight 260. No living person anywhere, no observer on the ground, not even the air traffic controller who had listened to the second pilot’s last radio transmissions, would ever be able to speak with the same authority as would the tapes from the doomed aircraft. These two automata were voices from the grave.

Dick Hearn, who had brought them to the Data Centre at Farnborough, was a long-time specialist in their interpretation, but even he invariably became tense and nervous during the process of unscrambling their information. For each tape presented different problems, and it would be a rash man who stated categorically which one was more important than the other.

The flight recorder, on which much of the development work had been done at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough airfield, spelt out the aircraft’s height, speed, course, engine power and various other ‘parameters’ of performance, revealing what had happened mechanically in astonishing detail. But it is the crew who make the in-flight decisions and the reasons for their actions would emerge from the cockpit voice recorder, an innovation to which some pilots had objected as an invasion of privacy. That age-old wish ‘if only walls could speak’ was made reality by the four microphones positioned on the flight deck which had fed their separate clues into the DC-10’s cockpit voice recorder. Hearn knew that one microphone would have listened throughout the flight to Captain Bill Curtis, another to his second pilot, and a third to the engineer seated at the wide instrument console behind them, while a fourth ‘area microphone’ would have picked up remarks exchanged by all three, plus a multitude of other sounds: engine noise, the clunk of the nosewheel retracting into its bay underneath the floor after take-off; the stewardess’s chat as she brought in coffee; the rustle of maps; the grinding whirr as the flaps were lowered on the approach to landing. Then, Hearn presumed, there would be recorded the blare of warning horns when the engine blew up, Curtis’s crucial orders, the terrible crunch of the impact – and sudden silence. All this and more would be on the tape – unless it had malfunctioned or been damaged.

Hearn arrived at the Data Centre shortly after 9.00 p.m. It was a small building on a new industrial estate just outside the perimeter fence of the airfield. Although the Royal Aircraft Establishment was next door, the centre was a completely separate, commercial concern, and for this reason Hearn had to supervise the readout process. It was not unknown for complex legal actions to hinge on allegations that a flight recorder had been tampered with. Consequently he would have to certify officially that the machines had not been out of his sight from the time Donaldson handed them over right through to the making of master copies of the tapes.

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