“What is it?”
“I’m pretty sure I know what went wrong on Flight 545.”
She climbed the scaffolding and walked out on the wing. Doherty was crouched over the leading edge. The slats were now removed, exposing the innards of the wing structure.
She got down on her hands and knees next to him, and looked.
The space for the slats was marked by a series of drive tracks—little rails, spaced three feet apart, that the slats slid out on, driven by hydraulic pistons. At the forward end of the rail was a rocker pin, which allowed the slats to tilt downward. At the back of the compartment she saw the folding pistons which drove the slats along the tracks. With the slats removed, the pistons were just metal arms poking out into space. As always, whenever she saw the innards of an aircraft, she had a sense of enormous complexity.
“What is it?” she said.
“Here,” Doug said.
He bent over one of the protruding arms, pointing to a tiny metal flange at the back, curved into a hook. The part was not much larger than her thumb.
“Yes?”
Doherty reached down, pushed the flange back with his hand. It flicked forward again. “That’s the locking pin for the slats,” he said. “It’s spring-loaded, actuated by a solenoid back inside. When the slats retract, the pin snaps over, holds them in place.”
“Yes?”
“Look at it,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s bent”
She frowned. If it was bent, she couldn’t see it. It looked straight to her eye. “Doug…”
“No. Look.” He set a metal ruler against the pin, showing her that the metal was bent a few millimeters to the left. “And that’s not all,” he said. “Look at the action surface of the hinge. It’s been worn. See it?”
He handed her a magnifying glass. Thirty feet above the ground, she leaned over the leading edge and peered at the part. There was wear, all right. She saw a ragged surface on the locking hook. But you would expect a certain amount of wear, where the metal of the latch engaged the slats. “Doug, do you really think this is significant?”
“Oh yes,” he said, in a funereal tone. “You got maybe two, three millimeters of wear here.”
“How many pins hold the slat?”
“Just one,” he said.
“And if this one is bad?”
“The slats could pop loose in flight. They wouldn’t necessarily fully extend. They wouldn’t have to. Remember, these are low-speed control surfaces. At cruise speed the effect magnifies: a slight extension would change the aerodynamics.”
Casey frowned, squinting at the little part through the magnifying glass. “But why would the lock suddenly open, two-thirds of the way through the flight?”
He was shaking his head. “Look at the other pins,” Doherty said, pointing down the wing. “There’s no wear on the action surface.”
“Maybe the others were changed out, and this one wasn’t?”
“No,” he said. “I think the others are original. This one was changed. Look at the next pin down. See the parts stamp at the base?’
She saw a tiny embossed figure, an H in a triangle, with a sequence of numbers. All parts manufacturers stamped their parts with these symbols. “Yeah …”
“Now look at this pin. See the difference? On this part, the triangle is upside down. This is a counterfeit part, Casey.”
For aircraft manufacturers, counterfeiting was the single biggest problem they faced as they approached the twenty-first century. Media attention focused mostly on counterfeit consumer items, like watches, CDs, and computer software. But there was a booming business in all sorts of manufactured items, including auto parts and airplane parts. Here the problem of counterfeiting took a new and ominous turn. Unlike a phony Cartier watch, a phony airplane part could kill you.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll check the maintenance records, find out where it came from.”
The FAA required commercial carriers to keep extraordinarily detailed maintenance records. Every time a part was changed out, it was noted in a maintenance log. In addition, the manufacturers, though not required to, maintained an exhaustive ship’s record of every part originally on the plane, and who had manufactured it. All this paperwork meant that every one of the aircraft’s one million parts could be traced back to its origin. If a part was swapped out from one plane to another, that was known. If a part was taken off and repaired, that was known. Each part on a plane had a history of its own. Given enough time, they could find out exactly where this part had come from, who had installed it, and when.
She pointed to the locking pin in the wing. “Have you photographed it?”
“Oh sure. We’re fully documented.”
“Then pull it,” she said. “I’ll take it to Metals. By the way, could this situation give you a slats disagree warning?”
Doherty gave a rare smile. “Yes, it could. And my guess is, it did. You got a nonstandard part, Casey, and it failed the aircraft.”
Coming off the wing, Richman was chattering excitedly. “So, is that it? It’s a bad part? Is that what happened? It’s solved?” He was getting on her nerves. “One thing at a time,” she said. “We have to check.”
“Check? What do we have to check? Check how?”
“First of all, we have to find out where that part came from,” she said. “Go back to the office. Tell Norma to make sure the maintenance records are coming from LAX. And have her telex the Fizer in Hong Kong to ask for the carrier’s records. Tell him the FAA requested them and we want to look at them first.”
“Okay,” Richman said.
He headed off toward the open doors of Hangar 5, out into the sunlight. He walked with a sort of swagger, as if he were a person of importance, in possession of valuable information.
But Casey wasn’t sure that they knew anything at all.
At least, not yet.
OUTSIDE HANGAR 5
10:00 a.m.
She came out of the hangar, blinking in the morning sun. She saw Don Brull getting out of his car, over by Building 121. She headed toward him.
“Hello, Casey,” he said, as he slammed the door. “I was wondering when you’d get back to me.”
“I talked to Marder,” she said. “He swears the wing isn’t being offset to China.”
Brull nodded. “He called me last night. Said the same thing.” He didn’t sound happy.
“Marder insists it’s just a rumor.”
“He’s lying,” Brull said. “He’s doing it.”
“No way,” Casey said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Look,” Brull said. “It doesn’t matter to me, personally. They close this plant in ten years, I’ll be retired. But that’ll be about the time your kid starts college. You’ll be looking at those big tuition payments, and you won’t have a job. You thought about that?”
“Don,” she said “You said it yourself, it doesn’t make sense to offset the wing. It’d be pretty reckless to—”
“Marder’s reckless.” He squinted at her in the sunlight “You know that. You know what he’s capable of.”
“Don—”
“Look,” Brull said. “I know what I’m talking about. Those tools aren’t being shipped to Atlanta, Casey. They’re going to San Pedro—to the port. And down in San Pedro, they’re building special marine containers for shipment.”
So that was how the union was putting it together, she thought. “Those are oversize tools, Don,” she said. “We can’t ship them by road or rail. Big tools always go by boat. They’re building containers so they can send them through the Panama Canal. That’s the only way to get them to Atlanta.”
Brull was shaking his head. “I’ve seen the bills of lading. They don’t say Atlanta. They say Seoul, Korea.”
“Korea?” she said, frowning.
“That’s right.”
“Don, that really doesn’t make sense—”
“Yes, it does. Because it’s a cover,” Brull said. “They’ll send them to Korea, then transship from Korea to Shanghai.”
“You have copies of the bills?” she said.
“Not with me.”
“I’d like to see them,” she said.
Brull sighed. “I can do that, Casey. I can get them for you. But you’re putting me in a very difficult situation here. The guys aren’t going to let this sale happen. Marder tells me to calm ’em down—but what can I do? I run the local, not the plant.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s out of my hands,” he said.
“Don—”
“I always liked you, Casey,” he said. “But you hang around here, I can’t help you.”
And he walked away.
OUTSIDE HANGAR 5
10:04 a.m.
The morning sun was shining; the plant around her was cheerfully busy, mechanics riding their bicycles from one building to another. There was no sense of threat, or danger. But Casey knew what Brull had meant: she was now in no-man’s land. Anxious, she pulled out her cell phone to call Marder when she saw the heavyset figure of Jack Rogers coming toward her.