July 15, 1977
Lisa Ronning, daughter of well known Jacksonville attorney, Jason Ronning, was killed Thursday in a plane crash near Brunswick, Georgia.
The plane, a single-engine Alon Aircoupe, went down five hundred yards west of the Intercostal Waterway, three miles south of the Georgia resort community. Witnesses reported hearing the two seat plane as it passed low over a housing development. Robert Brentwood, a private pilot who lives less than a mile from the crash site, reported that he heard the engine making unusual noises. "The thing was coughing and sputtering. It sounded like fuel starvation or carburetor icing," he said. A fire broke out shortly after the crash, killing Miss Ronning. The plane's pilot, Stewart Pryce, escaped with minor injuries. Miss Ronning and Mr. Pryce had planned to be wed in the fall.
The cause of the accident is under investigation by authorities from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
September 22, 1995
It is more fun to make love in the tropics than in Pittsburgh.
He was having a wonderful honeymoon in San Miguel. He adored their lodge, Hacienda Alta Vista, a nineteenth-century coffee estate that had been lovingly restored, then converted into a charming bed-and-breakfast. About thirty-five miles southwest of the steamy and crowded capital city of Nueva Madrid, Alta Vista was the perfect spot to be alone and naked with his new bride, high in the tranquil San Miguel rain forest.
"Can I get you another rum?" he asked. Her glass was nearly empty.
"In a minute."
He watched as she lazily rocked in the soft-cushioned chair on their private veranda. He couldn't take his eyes off her soft blond hair and her smooth white skin glowing warm in the soft candle light.
He picked out the symphony of birds caroling in the cool night air. In his reverie, he was scarcely aware of the only man-made sound - a jet, miles away, descending into the island's main airport.
"Tomorrow, let's get up early and watch the sunrise." He eased behind her chair and gently stroked her shoulder, then took another sip from his drink. The dark liquid kindled his passions.
Suddenly, from somewhere on the other side of the mountain, a bright flash of light illuminated the night sky.
The woman shot upright in her chair. "My God! What was that?"
"Storm's coming in." He set his glass on the table and walked nude in front of her. "Don't be afraid of a little lightning."
A deep rumbling, like a furious blast of dynamite, shook the veranda .
"That's the loudest thunder I ever heard," he said.
He reached out to her, lifting her from the chair. The two lovers clutched tightly together. Their fear slowly subsided. Then it turned to lust.
"Maybe we should sleep in again tomorrow," she giggled. He knew she was still giddy at the sight of his excitment. He guided her towards the bedroom. "I didn't think it was supposed to rain tonight."
The window behind them rattled loudly once again. "That does sound awfully close," he said. "It's going to start pouring any minute." He looked forward to the gentle sound of rain falling on the metal roof as they made love. "Anyway, I'm sure we can think of something fun to do in our room."
He felt her face warm with embarassment.
"I'm sure we can," she said.
In a few moments, they were too happily occupied with one another to notice that rain never fell outside their bedroom window.
She glanced over her shoulder. The other flight attendant was at the back of the plane, picking up the last of the meal trays. Jennifer stepped into the cramped galley and yanked the curtain shut behind her. She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.
Her hands shook.
The plane was slowing. She could tell by the low hum of the engines at the tail of the plane and the shrill whisper of air rushing by the door next to her. She knew from years of flying this route that Aero Rojo Flight Sixty Three would soon be on the ground in Nueva Madrid.
Thank God, she thought.
She grabbed a tiny bottle from the liquor cabinet, then listened to the comforting snap as she twisted the bottle cap, breaking the seal. Her mouth watered in anticipation.
She did not drink on the job very often, but tonight she wanted to feel the soothing warmth of alcohol in her nervous stomach.
She took a gulp and felt her muscles begin to relax.
"God, I need this drink." She smiled as she threw the empty bottle in the open trash container.
This trip had not gone well for Jennifer Black-Colon. Last night at the hotel, she'd been propositioned for the third time in three nights by the slightly drunk and very bald co-pilot. She thought he was a slimy creep and told him so, which only made him press his unwanted advances all the more.
Later, she had gotten queasy from eating a piece of undercooked Venezuelan grouper at the hotel's restaurant. Aero Rojo, unquestionably the cheapest airline in the southern hemisphere, put its flight crews up in some of the worst dumps in South America.
Then, the last straw, she had been kept awake all night by amorous grunts and groans seeping through the walls from the room next to hers.
"I'm only twenty-six," she told herself as she chugged down another shot of vodka. "But I'm getting too old for this shit."
Suddenly, the idling engines roared to full power and a tremendous pressure crushed Jennifer hard to her knees on the rusty floor.
She saw blood splash on the galley wall and noticed bright flashes of white light shooting before her eyes.
She was confused.
She thought she smelled the sweet fragrance of her eighteen-month-old son's chestnut brown skin.
She was certain she could hear a familiar voice calling to her....Mommy, Mommy.
* * *
Doug Wilson was pumped! Tonight's air traffic was the kind approach controllers lived for. Fifteen jets scheduled into the airport in as many minutes. No F-16 fighter jets screaming down the final at three-hundred-and-fifty knots, no ninety knot puddle-jumping Cessna practicing approaches and gumming up the works. Just a pack of jumbo 747s, Airbuses and DC-10s heading his way filled with happy tourists.
"Happy, that is," Doug thought, "until they'd be assaulted by the airport's crooked taxi drivers, ignored by the Bahia's haughty hotel staff, disgusted by a walk along beaches littered with garbage and sickened by a dose of Montezuma's Revenge, San Miguel style."
But that was not Doug's concern as his left hand rolled the computer trackball on the console in front of him. He grabbed hand-offs - took over control of the planes from other controllers - by clicking the radar scope's blinking curser on one brightly flashing tag of data after another.
At times like this, most times actually, Doug truly loved his job. He got to play this great video game and got paid big bucks for doing it. Nice!
He'd been an air traffic controller for six years, two as a trainee and a bit over four years as a Full Performance Level controller at Nueva Madrid, the FAA's "Frontier Outpost in the Sunny Caribbean." Tonight, carefully guiding planes with their thousands of passengers, he couldn't help thinking that he had become one smooth radar dude.
Doug saw that his radar screen, not much bigger around than a large Domino's thin-crust, was coming alive with a swarm of electronic letters, numbers and symbols. As they scooted hurriedly across the scope like a legion of shiny green ants, Doug concentrated on "getting the flick" and setting up his approach sequence. He focused his gaze on the flickering radar display like a sculptor staring intently at a block of rough marble. He was visualizing what his beautiful creation would look like when he had finished with it.
Doug's headset crackled with the deep voices of pilots enthroned like royalty in their jet cockpits. Tiny loudspeakers above his radar scope, directly below the black radio panel with its rows of silver switches and blinking red lights, shot staccato messages from other controllers in the dimly lit control room.
Delta's back to two-fifty!
"Two-fifty, Delta Whisky." Doug replied with his phonetic initials, acknowledging the speed assigned to an inbound aircraft.
You've got two-three-oh on Trans World, Dougie boy. Launch 'em!
"Thanks, pardner. Here he goes! Delta Whisky."
Doug then cleared the Trans World flight to climb to twenty-three thousand feet.
Hey, amigo, you take eight miles in trail on a pair coming in the north gate?
"Si, Señor." Doug agreed to accept two arriving planes less than ten miles apart.
"Funny," Doug thought. "Only the Gringos use Spanish in the control room. The locals aren't allowed to. Go figure!"
Supervisors, watching over their controllers' shoulders, crisscrossed the room with their long, black headset cords. They formed a tangled spider web in the center of the darkened, tennis-court-sized room. The Nueva Madrid Combined Center/Approach Control - the CAPP - looked and sounded like a high-tech version of the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Focusing his thoughts, accepting the blinking hand-offs from the other controllers into his arrival gates - the ten mile wide lanes of jet traffic streaming onto his scope - Doug got ready to rumble!
Nueva Madrid Approach, American nine-thirty-seven heavy, descending to one-one thousand with information Delta.
Near the top of Doug's screen, about forty miles north of Nueva Madrid International, the big American Airline jet's data tag confirmed the altitude and showed a ground speed of three hundred and thirty knots. About two inches further up towards the top of the scope - about eight miles in trail of the American jet - the next plane in line, a Lufthansa Airbus, was blinking hand-off.
Doug rolled the track ball and clicked a button on his radar console. The target's data tag stopped flashing. At the same time as he took this hand-off, he decided to put the American Airlines jet number three in line behind two planes coming onto the left edge of his radar screen.
He was using the rule all approach controllers learned in their first week of training: "ties go to the straight-in." He would vector the planes from the north behind the two jets screaming in from the west.
"Works every time!" Doug knew from experience.
"Well, almost every time," he chuckled to himself.
"American nine-thirty-seven, Nueva Madrid Approach," Doug said, stomping down hard on the foot-peddle microphone switch. "Turn right heading two-zero-zero, vector I-L-S runway one-zero final approach course. Descend and maintain three thousand."
The incantation, easily understood by pilots and controllers but merely gibberish to the uninitiated, led the lumbering mass of airborne aluminum down the correct path toward the busy airport.
Doug leaned to his left and slashed at the big jetliner's flight progress strip with his blue felt-tipped pen. The paper strips of flight information had been delivered to his position by the lovely "does-she-or-doesn't-she" Señorita Maria Duran, his pretty Assistant Controller. She'd ripped them off the printer with her lovely red-tipped fingers, stuffed them gently into the plastic strip holders and delicately arranged them in time sequence, one above the other, on the narrow rails of his flight strip bay.
Down to three, coming right to two hundred, American nine-thirty-seven heavy.
"This guy's good," Doug noted. Like all controllers, Doug appreciated talking to pilots who sounded like they knew what they were doing.
He snapped up two hand-offs blinking along the left side of his scope. When the two planes checked on his radio frequency, Doug cleared them both to fly at two-hundred-and-fifty knots, dumped them down to three thousand feet above the dark waters of the Atlantic Ocean and eased them right ten degrees. Now he had them aimed perfectly at the airport.
More hand-offs flashed at the bottom of Doug's scope. These airliners from the south had to be treated differently than the ones from the north. They had to come in over the top of the range of five-thousand-foot mountains, thirty-five miles southwest of Nueva Madrid.
"South Air four-thirty-one, descend and maintain six thousand, turn left heading three-five-zero, vector sequence I-L-S one-zero." Doug put a special emphasis on the "six thousand" as he cleared South Air Flight four-thirty-one to begin its descent into the capital city. He didn't want this clown spoiling their day by getting the wrong altitude - not with those mist-shrouded mountains poking up out there.
Doug was starting to get busy. Only three minutes after taking the first hand-off on the American Airlines plane from the north, Doug had eight jets on the frequency and there were three more hand-offs blinking along the edge of the radar scope. Nueva Madrid Approach was no Atlanta or Chicago, but with only two controllers - an East guy and him on the West/Final sector - he was working enough traffic to keep himself very busy.
He eased to his right, punched one of the fifteen red buttons blinking on the land-line control panel, putting himself "in the ear" of the tower cab Local Controller. The old control tower was across the field from the more modern CAPP, perched on top of the Raul Betincourt International Airport terminal building.
"Bend over, boys. Here they come!" he joked.
"Just put 'em on me. I'll fix your mess for you." the tower controller drawled. Doug recognized the voice - Don Rigg. Easy to work with. Took anything you gave him.
"Later, Buddy. Gotta run. I got all these big jets calling me. Delta Whisky."
"Dodger Roger," the deep voice shot back.
"Tower controllers," Doug mused. "Radar does all the work, tower boys get all the attention." He envied them, though, if only for their daytime view of the beautiful island beach with its tanned beauties lazing in the bright, tropical sun.
"But it's dark out now," he said to himself, checking the clock in the windowless room. "Back to work!"
"American nine-thirty-seven, cleared I-L-S runway one-zero approach. Speed one-seven-zero to the marker. Contact tower one-one-eight-point-three." Doug recited the litany yet once again, the final approach clearance he'd spat out hundreds, no, thousands of times before.
He knew he had this ATC thing down cold. He was good. "A legend in my own mind." His thoughts raced, his right foot held down the mike switch, his left heel tapped out a nervous rhythm no one else heard.
The approach sequence was looking great. He was up to twelve planes now, more than two thousand people depending on him to keep them alive. There were three big jets lined up on their final approach to the runway, one plane turning from base leg towards the airport and two more jets zipping along a few miles south of the field. He had these two on vectors heading west, aimed towards the point where he would turn them back to the airport in line behind other arriving planes. Another two airliners flew along the north side of the airport and four jumbo-jets streamed in the arrival gates toward the busy traffic pattern.
He was delighted that his traffic sequence was running so smoothly. It seemed more like a simulator training problem than real airplanes. Each plane was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. There were no emergencies, no scratchy radios, no "where's my traffic?" every time he issued a turn or slowed someone down.
Doug was having fun!
He rolled his radar track ball once again and snagged two more hand-offs, one from the north, the other from the south.
"Delta-five-ten, descend to three thousand, slow to two-thirty," he commanded the inbound MD-80 from the north.
Roger, down to three. Slowing. Delta five-ten.
Next, he cleared Aero Rojo Flight Sixty Three, a Boeing 727, coming up from South America.
He leaned back in his chair, satisfied that all was going very nicely. He watched for a moment as his sexy young assistant brought another handful of flight strips.
"Damn," he thought. "These San Miguel women are beautiful! Jet black hair, shiny dark-brown eyes that jump right out at you, smooth skin the color of sun-kissed olives. Simply beautiful!"
As the Delta Airlines MD-80 from the north broke out of the clouds at four thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, its Captain could see the twinkling lights of Nueva Madrid dancing under the black sky about twenty miles ahead, slightly to his left.
To the south, as Aero Rojo Flight Sixty Three descended through four thousand feet, it slammed into the side of Alta Vista Peak, instantly killing Jennifer Black-Colón and the other eighty-eight people on board.
In the past six months Stewart Pryce had been proposed to five times. As a single man, eligible, ruggedly handsome with his perfectly trimmed moustache and just as perfectly trimmed thirty-eight-year-old body, Stewart had become quite an item along the Colorado Front Range. Women from Boulder to Ft. Collins appreciatedd his gracious Southern manners, his shoulder length brown hair - usually pulled back into a neat pony tail - and smooth, baritone voice. They loved the way he focused his hazel eyes on theirs when he listened to them speak. They were also happy to learn that he had plenty of money and was willing to spend it on them.
How many women? For Stewart, it was a matter of simple arithmetic. He had his job at the Denver Air Route Traffic Center; that's forty hours a week. He had his Macintosh computer to play with; there's another ten hours a week. He had his perfectly maintained black '80 Yamaha 650 Special. The classic motorcycle took up another eight to ten pleasant hours of his time. That left him one, sometimes two, nights a week that he devoted to the care and feeding of his reputation as God's gift to the women of Colorado. This was not a label he had unfairly earned, he believed. He was not particularly conceited, but he was confident. Life was fun for Stewart. Not serious, not any more, just fun.
Tonight's lucky winner was a luscious blond; tall, eyes like pieces of the blue Colorado sky, lips cotton-candy sweet and gentle fingers that he hoped would soon skim across his chest as lightly as a Rocky Mountain breeze.
He had met the young woman at the library in Boulder, where he'd gone to read some of the current computer magazines. He remembered that it used to be you couldn't talk in libraries. Now they are like bus depots: mostly a hangout for loudly snoring bums or giggling teenagers escaping from their parents. It was also a great place, he had discovered, to strike up new friendships.
"Hi," she glided towards Stewart's table holding out a scrap of paper. "Do you know where I can find the computer books?"
He was a self professed genius at dividing women into two basic categories: Yes I will and No I Won't. This girl - sorry, lady, he corrected himself - was a Yes I will, and then some!
"I am very interested in computers myself, young lady, and just the person to help you find what you're looking for." He rose from his chair and extended his hand. "Stewart Pryce, at your service."
She took his hand. "Not many men could pull that line off. You've done it very nicely. Judith Swensen. With an 'E'." She flashed a row of snow white teeth. Her parents had obviously invested wisely over the years keeping their lovely daughter's smile perfect. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Pryce."
"I would love it if you would call me Stewart, Ms. Swenson, with an 'E'," he said with enough of his Southern accent to sound charming without any hint of red-neck.
"Stewart, I'm Judy. Now, can you help me find something on creating web pages?"
"A webmeister?" he laughed easily. "Tell me what you know about web publishing so I can show you the perfect book."
Judy explained that she was designing her first web site, a project dumped on her by the "computer illiterate" boss of the insurance agency where she worked.
He could see she was enjoying him: this good-looking man with his charming manners. He knew she felt comfortable with him and she was happy she'd met him.
Stewart was happy, too. It was his Saturday night; everyone else's Friday, but air traffic controllers are shift workers. In any case, he had the evening free and she was a knockout!
They chatted, mostly about computers, as he found her a basic guide to web page design and HTML coding, the computer language used to create the pages.
He had learned years ago, when he was a student at the University of Georgia in Athens, that women responded best if you meet them "where they are." She was into her computer project, so that's where he focused, only very gradually introducing the element of friendship.
Once he had gotten her off to a good start on her project, he decided to make his move.
"It would be a pleasure, Judy, to chat with you a bit more. You are a most interesting young woman. Let's get these books checked out for you and then have a cup of coffee on the Mall." There were a few very nice outdoor restaurants on the Pearl Street Mall, perfect places for him to get to know his new friend better.
The early fall had been wonderful, warmer than usual with only a hint of the glorious Colorado winter that would soon turn the aspen gold and cover the mountain tops with frosting-like snows.
"I'd love that. A cup of espresso would be perfect before I start tackling the World Wide Web." She looked at Stewart in a way that hinted she too had other things she might enjoy tackling this evening.
The ride up the mountain road to Stewart's cabin in Estes Park had been exhilarating for both of them. He always carried an extra helmet with him, which he'd had her put on. He also carried a warm leather jacket in the bike's saddle bags, now filled with her books. He believed that women would appreciate his concern for their comfort and safety, even though they might suspect that other females had straddled the soft saddle behind him on the motorcycle, their arms clutched tightly around his trim waist.
They both laughed as they went into his cozy but faintly rustic home beside the rushing mountain stream. She loved the comfortable feel of the red leather couch where she sat as he tended to the fireplace. He poured her a glass of Chablis from his well stocked bar and put out some cheese and grapes for her to nibble on. Yani's Reflection of Passion was playing quietly on the Sony HST-231 stereo, another of Stewart's expensive toys.
He watched her look at the rough wood walls with their paintings of cowboys and Indians. "A Redlin and a Catlin," she said. "They're both tributes to the majesty of the West. I admire your taste." She glaanced at the log-beamed ceiling and stone fireplace. They gave the room a masculine look, but a room a woman could enjoy too.
She sighed as if to say she knew that this was going to be a wonderful evening.
Stewart finished tending to the warm fire crackling in front of them, then sat beside her. "Are you comfortable?"
He was focused now. He had a goal. He was directing her like he would a jetliner at work, moving it right where he wanted it.
"I know the motorcycle is not practical," he said. "But I hope you enjoyed the ride up here through the crisp night air."
"I haven't been on a motorcycle for more than two years." She leaned ever so slightly his way. "I'd forgotten how much fun they are."
He was seeing the look he hoped for: her pretty blue eyes starting to glaze over with the first stirrings of passion.
Last week it had been a brunette he'd picked up at the Walrus restaurant. Next week, who knew? Not that he was bored, it's just that his Creator had made things awfully easy for Stewart.
It had been that way in college. Girls fawned over him at the gym where he worked out and threw themselves at him after the basketball games - never mind he was only second-string. In the Air Force, where he'd been an air traffic control officer, he'd been pursued by eager women from Panama to the Philippines, where one doe-eyed honey had the temerity to suggest that he was really quite a shallow person. As if he cared! It was ironic. Being with women helped him forget; helped him ease the pain.
He took her hand in his, and examined it closely. "I'm something of a palm reader, Judy." He ran his index finger slowly over her delicate palm, sending a tingle of warmth up her arm.
"Where do you see me in, say, half an hour?" she was clearly leering at him now.
"Although you will believe you're in heaven, lovely lady, I don't see you straying far from this very room."
"Good," she cooed, sliding closer to him and putting her arms around him. Their lips met, gently at first, brushing softly. Then she parted her lips and her tongue traced the line of his lower lip.
He stroked her long, elegant neck as they kissed, her silky blond hair caressing the back of his hand. She was wearing a pink cardigan pullover, which he easily slipped up over her head and placed neatly beside her on the couch. She moaned quietly as he ran his fingers lightly along the the outline of her collar bone, then gently followed down the lacy edge of her black satin bra, skimming the top of her breasts with his fingers. She was diligently unbuttoning his denim shirt, kissing and licking each bit of newly exposed flesh, then threw his shirt on the floor next to the coffee table.
"Lie back," she lightly pushed him, her voice deeper than before.
He eased himself back on the couch, the leather cool against his back for an instant, but quickly warming with his heat.
She eased her body slowly on top of him, her hair cascading down the side of her face, enclosing them both in a soft, blond cocoon. They were alone, surrounded by the snug, golden glow, sheltered from the outside world. He reached his hands behind her, holding the clasp of her delicate bra in his fingers and gently, patiently ...
Riinnggg!!!
The phone on the end table, louder than Big Ben, clanged inopportunely.
"Damn!" the girl sprang up like a child caught being naughty. She lost her balance and fell with a thump to the floor.
Riinnggg!!!
"Damn!" Stewart echoed. "Sorry, I forgot to turn it off. I keep it this loud so I can hear it from my study. Are you all right?"
Riinnggg!!!
"Oh, I'm fine," she fumed, glaring up at him. Stewart, always sensitive to a woman's feelings, appreciated that it was hard for Judy to keep her dignity with breasts falling out of her bra, her hair sticking in her mouth. "You might as well answer your damned phone," she growled. The mood was clearly broken.
"Sorry," Stewart repeated. He really was sorry. This was just getting interesting.
"Pryce here," he barked, grabbing the phone and watching the lovely girl - he'd learned she was only twenty two - slide back into the sweater he'd won from her only a few minutes before.
"Stewart? Jeff." It was his best friend, the United States Air Traffic Controllers' Association Regional Vice-President, Jeffrey Robins. "Not a bad time, I hope."
Stewart glanced at the girl and noticed a small tear - was it sadness or anger? - he couldn't tell.
"No. Just getting ready for bed. What's up?" he asked, knowing Jeff would only call if it were important.
Judy had gotten up from the floor and was pacing in front of the fireplace brushing her hair. She was making a point of not looking at him.
"I just now got word. There's been a nasty one down in San Miguel. The report is around ninety dead."
Stewart focused. "Oh, man! Ninety dead? Is it our fault?" Questions flashed into his mind. Lots of questions.
"Looks like it." The man on the other end was talking faster and more precisely. "One of our guys may have cleared a seven-two-seven into the side of a mountain."
"Jesus!" Stewart gasped, distracted only slightly by the girl's mounting frustration as she brushed her hair faster and faster. She was making it increasingly obvious to Stewart that she had not ridden forty-five miles on the back of a noisy motorcycle in the chilly mountain air to be ignored by some dick-head from the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon Line who was clearly more interested in his telephone conversation than in her!
"I'll be down in the morning," he told his friend.
He looked at Judy, hoping that perhaps all was not lost.
She shot him a level glance, then wheeled about, snapped on the helmet and zipped up the jacket. Then she flung the door open with a thud and stomped out into the night.
"Actually," he said, "I think I can make it there tonight. Are you at the Center?"
"Yep. I've got the midnight shift," the older controller replied. Like Stewart, Jeff Robins only spent sixteen hours a month "on the boards" working air traffic. Both men regularly chose to work the midnight shift, when traffic was lightest. They didn't kid themselves. If you don't work the airplanes all the time, you loose your edge. That perfect timing required to keep things running safely and smoothly simply isn't there.
The rest of the time, the USATCA Regional Vice President and Stewart Pryce, the union's National Safety Chairman, worked out of the small office the FAA provided them in its Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center in Longmont.
"Okay, pardner. See you around three."
Stewart hung up the phone, quickly dressed and trudged out into the chilly night air to take the hot-tempered blond back down the mountain.
* * *
"How the hell did you dump the guy to three thousand feet in a six-thousand-foot minimum vectoring area?" It was Mike Mason's booming voice, aimed square in the face of Doug Wilson. Mike had been an ATC supervisor long enough to lose any semblance of tact. Like most air traffic supervisors, he had come up from the controller ranks, but, about the same day he began wearing bifocals, he realized he had better quit working traffic before he killed someone. Unfortunately, the traits that had worked so well for him as a controller - the ability to make quick decisions, then force them to work out - made him a pain in the ass as a supervisor.
"I want to hear the tape," Doug mumbled, staring at his shoes, expressionless.
"We won't make a statement until we've heard the tape," interjected Paul Barton, chief of the USATCA Union Local in the Nueva Madrid CAPP, the facility that housed both the San Miguel Enroute Center and Nueva Madrid Radar Approach Control.
To Doug, this meeting in the cramped, dingy supervisors' office seemed surreal. All the talk of a "deal" - a plane wreck for God's sake! - seemed in some way like a twisted joke; a joke that didn't apply to him.
In the more than six years he'd been working air traffic, he'd never had a deal of any sort - at least he'd never gotten caught. Oh sure, like every controller he'd had a few close calls. There had been times he had vectored a couple of planes tighter than legal standard separation, but never anything dangerous. Nothing like this. He was a good controller with a clean record.
Doug had come to trust himself. He'd long ago quit worrying that he would do something stupid on the radar position. He knew for a fact that he was a better controller than Mike Mason had ever been, so the supervisor's tone of voice was particularly galling. He knew that the tapes, constant recordings of the sector frequencies and phone lines, would certainly vindicate him. This was a clear-cut case of pilot error, a very fatal pilot error.
He'd seen pilots make lots of small mistakes over the years. They'd read back a wrong heading or fly through the localizer. He'd even seen an airliner land at the wrong airport, for Christ's sake! So, Doug developed this theory about pilots. They were scared, he figured. If man was supposed to fly, he'd have been born with airline tickets. So, the people who sat in those flimsy machines six miles above the ground, day in and day out, knew in some corner of their minds that they didn't belong there. They were trespassers in the majestic blue sky, and they had better watch out. It made them cranky and defensive; it led to some pretty dumb mistakes, he had told himself half-seriously.
"Here's the tape." A technician brought the oversized twenty-four-track tape reel into the cramped room and laid it carefully on the desk. It looked like a movie reel.
Mike Mason began stringing the long, wide tape through the refrigerator-sized tape deck that stood in the corner. It was a haunting presence next to a bookcase filled with government regulations that no one read. The ugly machine was only used during investigations of pilot or controller mistakes. Doug cringed at the sight of it.
As Mason began the process of fast forwarding and then reversing the tape to find the spot they wanted, the machine chirped and whistled bits of static. It was background gibberish and high-pitched nonsense that sounded almost funny. The noise broke the silence and made the nervous men in the room smile. Both the radio and land line communications were on the same tape, so they had to listen closely to make out the words.
Mason stopped the machine when he heard Doug's voice. Then he pushed the start button.
Bend over boys, here they come.
"OK. This is where it starts," Doug said, embarrassed by his antics on the line.
"Very professional," Mason growled, looking in his shirt pocket. Doug knew that his supervisor wanted a cigar, but this new non-smoking, non-cussing, non-farting FAA they worked for wouldn't allow it in their grubby air traffic control building.
As the tape played, Doug recreated the action in his mind. Whenever he listened to a tape, he could picture exactly what had happened on the radar scope. After listening to five minutes of the tape - Doug knew that the men in the room would all have to admit that it was first-rate- they heard:
Delta five-ten, descend to three thousand, slow to two-thirty.
The next transmission would be Aero Rojo Sixty Three. They would hear the tape for themselves, Doug thought. They would hear him clear the Boeing down to six thousand feet, well above the mountains. They would hear the pilot read back six thousand, just as he was positive he had heard a few hours before. He knew it. He would be clean as a whistle.
Oh sure, there had been a trace of doubt. There always was. He had heard tapes before where he thought he'd said one thing but had actually said something else. Or a pilot had read back a clearance incorrectly and he hadn't caught it. But Doug Wilson knew he was right on the money this time.
The three men in the room leaned forward in their chairs - not necessary since the volume was blaring - but they didn't want to miss a word.
They heard Doug issue his clearance.
They heard the pilot's read back.
They glanced at one another.
Silence.
Then the union boss, Paul Barton, grunted just loudly enough for all of them to hear.
"Jesus Christ!"
