Free Total Control by David Baldacci Page B

pilot for many years, he had joined the NTSB after a close friend had crashed a two-seater Piper into the side of a hill after a near miss with a 727 during a heavy fog. It was then that Kaplan decided he should do less flying and more work trying to prevent accidents.
    George Kaplan was the designated investigator in charge and this was absolutely the last place in the world he wanted to be; but, unfortunately, one obvious place to seek preventive safety measures was at the scene of aircraft accidents. Every night members of the NTSB crash investigative "go-teams" went to bed hoping beyond hope that no one would have need of their services, praying that there would be no reason to travel to distant places, to pick through the pieces of yet another catastrophe.
    As he scanned the crash area, Kaplan grimaced and shook his head again. Starkly absent was the usual trail of aircraft and body parts, luggage, clothing and the millions of other items that routinely would be discovered, sorted, cataloged, analyzed and papered until some conclusions could be found for why a 110-ton plane had fallen out of the skies. They had no eyewitnesses, because the crash occurred in the early morning and the cloud cover was low. It would have only been seconds between the time the plane exited the clouds and when it struck the earth.
    Where the plane had penetrated the ground, nose first, there now existed a crater that later excavation would determine to be approximately thirty feet deep, or about one-fifth as long as the aircraft itself.
    That fact alone was a terrifying testament to the force that had catapulted everyone on board into the hereafter with frightening ease. The entire fuselage, Kaplan figured, had collapsed like an accordion, fore and aft, and its fragments now rested in the depths of the impact crater. Not even the empennage, or tail assembly, was visible. To compound the problem, tons of dirt and rock were lying on top of the aircraft's remains.
    The field and surrounding areas were peppered with bits of debris, but most of it was palm-sized, having been thrown off in the explosion when the aircraft hit the earth. Much of the plane and the passengers strapped inside would have disintegrated from the terrible weight and velocity of the impact and the igniting of the jet fuel, which would have caused another explosion bare seconds later, before thirty feet of dirt and rubble combined for an airtight mass grave.
    What was left on the surface was unrecognizable as a jet aircraft.
    It reminded Kaplan of the inexplicable 1991 Colorado Springs crash of a United Boeing 737. He had worked that disaster too as the aviation systems specialist. For the first time in the history of the NTSB, from its inception in 1967 as an independent federal agency, it had not been able to find probable cause for a plane crash. The "tin-kickers," as the NTSB investigators referred to themselves, had never gotten over that one. The similarity of the Pittsburgh crash of a USAir Boeing 737 in 1994 had only heightened their feelings of guilt. If they had solved Colorado, many of them felt, Pittsburgh might have been prevented. And now this.
    George Kaplan looked at the now clear sky and his bewilderment grew. He was convinced the Colorado Springs crash had been caused, at least in part, by a freakish rotor cloud that had hit the aircraft on its final approach, a vulnerable moment for any jetliner. A rotor was a vortex of air generated about a horizontal axis by high winds over irregular terrain. In the case of United Airlines Flight 585, the irregular terrain was supplied by the mighty Rocky Mountains. But this was the East Coast. There were no Rocky Mountains here. While an abnormally severe rotor could conceivably have knocked a plane as large as an L500 out of the sky, Kaplan could not believe that was what had befallen Flight 3223. According to air traffic control, the L500 had started falling from its cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet and