Free Airframe by Michael Crichton

Access Recorder on this plane?”
    “Apparently not,” she said. “It’s not required. FAA regulations require a CVR and a DFDR. The Quick Access Recorder is optional. Looks like the carrier didn’t put one on this plane.”
    “At least, I can’t find it,” Ron said. “But it could be anywhere.”
    He was down on his hands and knees, bent over a laptopcomputer plugged into the electrical panels. Data scrolled down the screen.

    “This looks like data from the flight control computer,” Casey said. “Most of the faults occurred on one leg, when the incident occurred.”
    “But how do you interpret this?” Richman said.
    “Not our problem,” Ron Smith said. “We just offload it and bring it back to Norton. The kids in Digital feed it to mainframes, and convert it to a video of the flight.”
    “We hope,” Casey said. She straightened. “How much longer, Ron?”
    “Ten minutes, max,” Smith said.
    “Oh sure,” Doherty said, from inside the cockpit. “Ten minutes max, oh sure. Not that it matters. I wanted to beat rush hour traffic but now I guess I can’t. It’s my kid’s birthday, and I won’t be home for the party. My wife’s going to give me hell.”
    Ron Smith was starting to laugh. “Can you think of anything else that might go wrong, Doug?”
    “Oh sure. Lots of things. Salmonella in the cake. All the kids poisoned,” Doherty said.
    Casey looked out the door. The maintenance people had all climbed off the wing. Burne was finishing up his inspection of the engines. Trung was loading the DFDR into the van.
    It was time to go home.
    As she started down the stairs, she noticed three Norton Security vans parked in a corner of the hangar. There were about twenty security guards standing around the plane, and in various parts of the hangar.
    Richman noticed, too. “What’s this about?” he said, gesturing to the guards.
    “We always put security on the plane, until it’s ferried to the plant,” she said.
    “That’s a lot of security.”
    “Yeah, well.” Casey shrugged. “It’s an important plane.”
    But she noticed that the guards all wore sidearms. Casey couldn’t remember seeing armed guards before. A hangar at LAX was a secure facility. There wasn’t any need for the guards to be armed.
    Was there?

BLDG 64
4:30 P.M .
    Casey was walking through the northeast corner of Building 64, past the huge tools on which the wing was built. The tools were crisscrossed blue steel scaffolding, rising twenty feet above the ground. Although they were the size of a small apartment building, the tools were precisely aligned to within a thousandth of an inch. Up on the platform formed by the tools, eighty people were walking around, putting the wing together.
    To the right, she saw groups of men packing tools into large wooden crates. “What’s all that?” Richman said.
    “Looks like rotables,” Casey said.
    “Rotables?”
    “Spare tooling that we rotate into the line if something goes wrong with the first set. We built them to gear up for the China sale. The wing’s the most time-consuming part to build; so the plan is to build the wings in our facility in Atlanta, and ship them back here.”
    She noticed a figure in a shirt and tie, shirtsleeves rolled up, standing among the men working on the crates. It was Don Brull, the president of the UAW local. He saw Casey, called to her, and started toward her. He made a flicking gesture with his hand; she knew what he wanted.
    Casey said to Richman, “Give me a minute. I’ll see you back at the office.”
    “Who is that?” Richman said.
    “I’ll meet you back at the office.”
    Richman remained standing there, as Brull came closer. “Maybe you want me to stay and—”
    “Bob,” she said. “Get lost.”
    Reluctantly, Richman headed back toward the office. He kept glancing over his shoulder as he walked away.
    Brull shook her hand. The UAW president was a short and solidly built man, an ex-boxer with a broken nose. He spoke in a soft