“Miranda Chase? You do the investigation on Eames’ Cessna 208?”
Two years ago. Fourteen passengers (only licensed for thirteen though not relevant to the incident’s cause). Final ground contact eleven thousand feet on Pikes Peak in Colorado. No survivors. Airport of origin…ah, Aspen.
She nodded carefully, unsure of the pilot’s pending reaction.
The approaching plane had finally resolved from a point of light to a bullet shape as it approached. It was Air Force-gray as she’d anticipated.
“Read that report. Eames was always a sloppy idiot. You nailed it in one, Ms. Chase. That man was a pilot error waiting to happen since the day he left the womb. Probably botched that departure as well.”
She’d had no doubts about the accuracy of her report, but she liked that the pilot seemed pleased. That would increase the care he was likely to take when transporting her and her team. She had no idea if she was supposed to say anything about his opinion regarding Eames’ birth.
Instead, she turned back to the helicopter. “What else would you include on a preflight checklist for this particular model that isn’t there?”
He eyed her, then the helicopter. “That’s an easy one, but it would be hard on you for a while.”
“What’s your suggestion?”
“Make every dumbass pilot out there be a hundred percent responsible for their own bird. Make them not lease it but own it, get the airframe and engine maintenance certification like I did, and have them put their own family’s welfare on the line if they do something wrong and the bird goes down on their watch.”
“That seems reasonable.”
He then smiled for the first time. “Reasonable but unlikely?”
“Sadly,” Miranda admitted. “Why would that be hard on me?”
“Because of all the idiots falling out of the air until it thinned the herd. Darwinian selection of every dumbass not smart enough to take care of his own equipment.”
“Or her own equipment,” Holly joined them from where she’d been chatting with the others. “I like it.”
Miranda didn’t. “Though I find little fault with your hypothesis, I’m not in favor of anything that increases the number of aircraft crashes.”
He chuckled. “I expect not. I’m Brett Vance,” he held out a hand, which he used to shake hers with too much strength and energy.
She responded with her own name, again, because she couldn’t think of what else to say. It left her right arm vibrating like it had just been through a crash of its own.
“C’mon, Ms. Chase. I’ll really walk you through this bird.”
And he did. Not just the preflight, but strengths and shortcomings. He fetched a ladder and they peeled back engine cowlings. He showed her how to inspect the rear-rotor drive shaft bearings with a mechanic’s eye rather than a pilot’s.
When Major Jon Swift showed up, she and Brett were lying together under the belly of the helo between the skids. They were discussing the paths and percentages of force-transference vectors through the hull’s skin material versus the internal structure in the event of a hard landing.
“Hi, Miranda,” Jon knelt on the other side of the skid’s open frame.
She waved but kept listening to Brett about the structural changes AgustaWestland had made to the 109 before certifying it for skids rather than wheels.
4
“What do you think happened?” Brett called over the intercom as they climbed toward the site—the audio system from PS Engineering, very high end. She’d also always like the SIG headsets for their comfort and sound insulation.
“I never conjecture prior to a crash investigation,” Miranda hadn’t wanted the copilot seat—because she didn’t want such a clear view of the crash prior to assessing terrain and other external factors—but Brett had insisted. The rest of her team, Jon Swift, and Brett’s nine-year-old son Jeffrey were seated in the back. They were clear of the airport and beginning the mile-high climb to the crash site.
Now she could see the anticipated switchover to the dark conifers. Several fourteeners revealed themselves to the south—each popping into view like a giant Jack-in-the-box, which she’d never gotten over her fear of though she’d finally learned how to hide her reactions.
“Well, you aren’t going to find the answer up there. I’ve been flying fire crews in all morning and there’s not much to see. I was first on site around four a.m. this morning.”
Miranda didn’t want to hear this. It was in the wrong order. She hadn’t even begun the site investigation and suddenly she was receiving information from a witness, typically the very last step in her information-gathering process.
She always approached a crash in spheres of influence. Weather and terrain at the outermost; the pilot’s intellectual process (or lack thereof) at the very innermost. Eyewitness accounts were only the slightest shade removed from those of the pilots themselves—assuming they survived. She’d never found either source to be wholly reliable, emotionally neutral, or even, on occasion, coherent.
But she couldn’t think how to stop Brett Vance.
“I was in the oval office when—”
“The Oval Office? Why were you meeting with Roy?” And furthermore, President Roy Cole was sixteen hundred miles from here. “And how did you get here so quickly from DC?”
He glanced over at her for a long moment with a slight frown. She wanted to ask Mike what it meant, but he was in the back and wouldn’t be able to see his expression.
“The toilet. The room with the oval piece of porcelain. My oval office.”
“Oh.” Other than Mike, she had very little experience with Coloradan colloquialisms.
“Anyway, that’s where I was when the world lit up like daylight. Actinic white, like welding flame, not a gas fire.”
Following his detailed analysis of the A109’s strengths and weaknesses, she knew to trust Brett’s word on the spectral temperature of the light. A fuel fire, even an explosive one, trended deeply into the yellows and oranges. Even at its hottest, it would never be described as actinic white.
“I live just down there,” he nodded toward sprawling homes scattered among the trees at the base of the mountain’s ski area. “Old home, nothing fancy, but we like it and I didn’t want to sell off to the developers. We’re just two miles from the top of Snowmass, plus a mile down.”
A direct line of two-point-two-three miles—eleven seconds at the speed of sound.
“Counted thirteen seconds before a big boom rolled in—real sharp.”
Thirteen seconds would imply that his distances were inaccurate or his accelerated excitement level at the explosion had caused him to count inaccurately. Assuming he knew the elevation difference between his home and the top of Snowmass mountain, thirteen seconds would place his home two-point-four-five miles horizontally from Snowmass, not two miles.
Though such an inaccuracy seemed unlikely in Brett Vance’s case.
Oh! She’d neglected altitude. The speed of sound slowed in thinner air: nine percent slower at Aspen’s elevation and almost fourteen percent at Snowmass’ peak. If she integrated the speed of sound over the distance, thirteen seconds was surprisingly accurate for a human observer without a stopwatch or other aid.