Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (39 page)

May 3, 1953, Palos Verdes, California

It was a mini-gathering of the clan, and for the first time in years, laughter was rocking the walls of their Malaga Cove house. Vance, on his way to get ice, was happier than he had ever been since Madeline had left him. The irony was that the happiness was almost all Madeline’s doing. He was convinced that she had deliberately chosen Jill as a substitute for herself, and Jill turned out to be the most wonderful wife any man could have wanted.

As smart as Madeline had been, Vance now realized that she lacked what Jill had in abundance, an ability to love unconditionally. Jill constantly exerted herself for others, and it was the combination of her pushing and Tom’s begging that had finally persuaded Nancy to try again. Now the three of them were in the backyard, laughing and talking as if there had never been a problem, all three of them convinced that the baby in the crib, Vance Robert Shannon, was the cutest, most brilliant child in history. Born on Groundhog Day, February 2, 1953,
Vance Robert was named for his two grandfathers, and they were already calling him V.R.

Tom had come home from Korea in January, resigned his commission, and thrown himself on Nancy’s mercy. She was so glad to see him and to have him there when the baby was born that they reconciled immediately.

Harry and Anna were in the backyard as well, joining in the laughter, but with an obvious constraint. After a long, steady decline that accelerated every time Harry was sent somewhere on temporary duty, Anna had at last faced her problem and agreed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. The Shannons had never been big drinkers, and all of the backyard laughter came not from alcohol but from goodwill and soft drinks. Anna was perfectly open about her problem, as she had to be, and the whole family was trying to help. She spoke sadly of Marie, now in a mental hospital in San Diego.

Harry had come to Vance earlier, asking, “Dad, I think Tom has done absolutely the right thing, and I wonder if I shouldn’t follow his example?”

“You mean give up your commission and leave the Air Force?”

“Yes. Anna needs me, and I’ve been gone too often.”

“Well, Harry, I could certainly use you in the business here. It would be like we originally planned, back when the big war ended, the three of us working together. The big thing, though, is Anna’s health. I don’t think you have much choice; you’ve got to stick with her.”

The bag of ice cubes had frozen solid in the big Deepfreeze where Jill kept enough food to supply an Army division. Vance threw it into the sink and began pounding on it with a wooden mallet, considering how life tended to even things out. Both of his sons had been blessed with extraordinary good fortune in their health, their intelligence, and their careers. Both had more than their share of marital problems, but at least Tom’s seemed to be smoothing out. In contrast, Vance had
enjoyed a wonderful life with Margaret, twelve good years with Madeline, punctuated by six months of intense despondency when she left him without any explanation. Now he was incredibly happy with Jill. He wondered why he should have been so lucky when his boys had to endure so much.

The phone rang in the study. “Damn, people shouldn’t be calling on Sunday.” He yelled out the window, “Harry, would you pick up this ice, please?” and ran down the hallway. Madeline had had the house decorated once in all the years she’d lived there. Jill had already redone the house twice and was talking about a third go at it. It was a matter of supreme indifference to Vance, but if it made her happy, he wanted her to do it.

He answered the phone and George Schairer’s voice came through, not calm and collected as usual but brimming with tightly controlled excitement.

“Vance, did you hear the news? A Comet crashed yesterday after takeoff from Calcutta.”

“Jesus! Was it the same as the last one?” The previous March, a Comet had lifted its nose too high and run off the end of the runway at Karachi—something that had happened before, at Rome.

“No, they tell me this one exploded in mid-air. They don’t know whether it was a bomb or what. Forty-three people killed.”

“What do you think, George? Sabotage?”

“Our guys think it might be a massive explosive decompression, caused by metal fatigue.”

“With all due respect, George, I doubt it. I saw the test results, and they were thorough. De Havilland believed the airplane was good for eighteen thousand flights before fatigue would be a problem. Anybody know how many cycles this one had?”

“We’ve been tracking the Comets pretty well, Vance, and this airplane couldn’t have had more than six or seven hundred flights.”

“There you are. How about turbulence? Maybe it just broke up in a storm?”

“That’s a possibility, but we doubt it from what we know now. But we’d like you to come up here tomorrow, Vance, if you can, and let us brief you on all we know. De Havilland has requested that you be brought on board their inspection team.” He paused, shaking his head, then went on. “They woke me up in the middle of the night, and asked me if we could send a team over to check their figures. They asked specifically for you to be on the team. This tells me they are worried about pressurization, too. They begged me to keep it a secret, of course; they’ve got a lot going on this. I said I would, and you’ll have to, too, of course.”

“Can I take Jill?”

“No reason not to, George, but we want you to be at de Havilland’s by the end of the week, if at all possible. Perhaps she could join you if she cannot make the trip with you.”

Vance knew that would never do and hastened to set the trip up. Jill had never been abroad before and was enchanted with everything from their flight across the country to the wonderful trans-Atlantic service on a Pan Am Constellation. On whim, Vance had booked them into the Basil Hotel and found that it had changed very little from his wartime visits. Even the food had not improved, and he and Jill were much impressed with the ceremony by which stone-cold toast was brought to them with their “full English breakfast” in the morning. He left Jill in London to shop while he went up to Hatfield Aerodrome, to spend time with the de Havilland people.

The de Havilland factory was plunged into gloom. This was the third incident for the Comet since October 1952. The first accident, on takeoff from Rome, had been caused by the pilot rotating too soon. The increased drag from the nose-up attitude planted him on the runway until he ran off the end. Fortunately, none of the forty-three
people on board—seven crew and thirty-six passengers—had been injured.

The crash at Karachi on March 2, 1953, had been a repeat of the first, with the pilot raising the nose too soon and allowing the aircraft to tear off the end of the runway. This time the airplane exploded, killing the crew of five and six de Havilland support personnel.

When Vance walked into the de Havilland offices, he found he had stepped into the middle of an internal company fight. One faction, headed by Sir Geoffrey de Havilland himself, was convinced that the aircraft had been sabotaged and resented any implication of a possible structural defect. A much smaller, less powerful, but still forceful faction, headed by Ronald Davies, was more open-minded, demanding that a full investigation be made of the structural integrity of the aircraft.

Davies was hosting him. He was small, well-spoken, with glasses that seemed about to catapult from his prominent nose. He had been with de Havilland since 1939. His concern was obvious. As with most de Havilland employees, he was both depressed and defensive, but strangely defiant.

“Three accidents in seven months. This could sink us, Mr. Shannon. We’ve got to get to the bottom of the cause, and do it now. One more accident and you can write the Comet off.”

“I hope that’s not the case, Mr. Davies. The first two accidents were clearly pilot error, and you’ve taken the necessary steps to avoid similar accidents in the future. And this one may have been sabotage.”

“It sounds insane to say so, but I hope it is sabotage. We can deal with that; we can watch who our passengers are, inspect our cargo, and so on. But has Mr. Schairer told you what we fear?”

“Explosive decompression due to metal fatigue? Yes, he told me, and that’s a real possibility. But you’ll be able to tell that, will you not, when you recover the wreckage?”

“I can only hope so. We have nineteen aircraft flying, and thirty more on order. If we don’t find the cause now, I don’t think de Havilland can survive.”

Shannon spent the next ten days immersed in data. They showed him everything he asked for and gave him all the staff support he needed. It was less like an American firm than an old-fashioned English insurance organization, with clerks wearing green visors and sleeve protectors. But they were very competent, anticipating his requests and never failing to come up with a requested document.

He could not come up with an answer. It was impossible to examine all of the years of data, but each time he took a sample of the figures and analyzed them, they made sense. These were professionals, serious people who had sought to make a great advance, realized the risks involved, and taken every possible step to build a safe airplane.

Still, there had been a pell-mell rush to production. He looked at the dates. The decision to go ahead with the basic design was made on September 27, 1946—ironically, the same day that Geoffrey de Havilland’s son was killed in the D.H. 108. No connection, of course, but somehow unsettling. The Comet flew thirty-three months later—an incredibly fast process for so large and so advanced an aircraft. Production was authorized even though only sixteen aircraft had been ordered.

Shannon was troubled and he could not articulate the reason. Intuitively, he felt that placing the engines in the wing was wrong, and he could not avoid focusing in on the square windows in a pressurized cabin. He could tell de Havilland of his feelings, but he could not point to any data to back them up. Even when he reported to Boeing he would have to be careful not to appear unscientific.

Vance arranged it so that he could go to London to see Jill three or four times in the interval, taking her to the theater each time he did. Other than beginning to be a bit
bored by English cooking, she was having a glorious time people-watching at pubs, on the underground, and on the street. She made friends by the carload, and oftentimes he would find that she had invited another couple to dinner with them, and they were always interesting people. The idea that the Brits were staid was totally wrong—Jill always found a way to break the ice and get conversations rolling, and it was their guests who sometimes got a little ribald in their conversations, using expressions that Vance would never have allowed at home.

On his last day at the de Havilland plant, Davies cornered him. “Well, Mr. Shannon, what do you think? Did we do our homework?”

Shannon had carefully reviewed the testing process de Havilland had used. Pressurized sections of the fuselage had been placed in an altitude chamber and taken up to a simulated 70,000 feet with temperatures of minus seventy degrees centigrade. They had built a huge water chamber into which a fuselage could be submerged, and pressure-checked it there at up to sixteen and one-half pounds per square inch. Everything seemed eminently reasonable.

“Mr. Davies, I find no failings at all in your test procedures, in their rigor, or in the conclusions drawn from them. Based on them, I think your estimate of sixteen-thousand flights, or cycles, is conservative. But . . .”

His voice trailed off and Davies bristled. “But what?” His tone was at once insistent and pleading.

“May I speak off-the-record?”

“Certainly.”

“Intuitively, I think that the problem is metal fatigue and that the proper course for de Havilland would be to ground all the Comets and redo the entire pressurization test program. Somehow there is an element missing in the test program that is encountered in actual operations. It might be that there is more stress induced by repetitive pressurizations and depressurizations in flight than in
your test program. It might be the combination of the stresses of flights, landings, and pressurization. In that case, the storm might have triggered the violent explosion in the last accident. But somewhere in the mix is a fatal flaw.”

Davies exploded, “What are you talking about? That is absolutely absurd. You are supposed to be an engineer, not a bloody fortune-teller! You and Boeing would like nothing better than to see de Havilland ground the Comet and leave the field open to you!”

Yet even as he spoke, Vance could tell that Davies believed him.

“I don’t want to offend you, Mr. Davies, and I certainly have no malice toward de Havilland, a company I greatly admire. You asked me to speak, off-the-record, and I did. My remarks will not be in my formal report, but I feel I’ve discharged my duties to you by telling you what I really think. Believe me, Boeing is competitive, but they would never wish aircraft disasters on you or on anyone.”

Davies turned and walked away, obviously shaken.

Both Vance and Jill were glad to climb aboard the Pan Am Connie for the flight home. “What’s the matter, Vance? You’ve been gloomy ever since you got back from de Havilland.”