The Three by Sarah Lotz Read Free Book Online

Investigates
, which ran for four seasons on the Discovery Channel. This account is a partial transcript of one of our many Skype conversations.
    You gotta understand, Elspeth, an incident of this magnitude, we knew it would be a while before we could be absolutely sure what we were dealing with. Think about it. Four different crashes involving three different makes of aircraft on four different continents–it was unprecedented. We knew we’d have to work closely and coordinate with the UK’s AAIB, the CAA in South Africa, the JTSB in Japan, not to mention the other parties who had a stake in the incidents–I’m talking about the manufacturers, the FBI, the FAA and others I won’t go into now. Our guys and gals were doing all they could, but the pressure was like nothing I ever experi enced. Pressure from the families, pressure from the airline execs, pressure from the press, pressure from all sides. I wouldn’t say I was expecting a clusterfuck exactly, but you got to expect some misinformation and mistakes. People are human. And as the weeks rolled on, we were lucky if we managed to get more than a couple of hours’ sleep a night.
    Before I get to what I know you want to hear, I’ll give you a brief overview, put it into context for you. Here’s how it went down. As the IIC [Investigator-in-Charge] on the Maiden Airlines incident, the second I got the call, I started rounding up my Go Team. A regional investigator was already on site doing the initial stakedown, but at that stage all the footage we were getting was from the news. The local incident commander had briefed me via cellphone on the conditions at the site, so I knew we were facing a bad one. You gotta remember, the place where the plane went down, it was remote. Five miles from the nearest levee, a good fourteen miles from the nearest road. From the air,unless you knew what you were looking for, you couldn’t see any sign of it–we flew over it before we landed, so I saw that for myself. Scattered debris, a watery black hole about the size of your average suburban home, and that saw-grass that cuts through your flesh.
    Here’s what I knew when I was first briefed: A McDonnell Douglas MD-80 had crashed minutes after take-off. The air traffic controller reported that the pilots had indicated an engine failure, but I wasn’t about to rule out foul play at this early stage, not with reports trickling in about incidents elsewhere. There were two witnesses, fishermen, who saw the plane behaving erratically and flying too low before plummeting into the Everglades; they said they saw flames coming from the engine as it dropped, but this wasn’t unusual. Witnesses almost always report seeing signs of an explosion or fire, even if there’s no chance of there being any.
    I immediately told my systems, structures and maintenance guys to haul ass to Hangar 6. The FAA had assigned us the G-IV to fly to Miami–I needed a full team on this one and the Lear wasn’t going to cut it. Maiden’s track record with maintenance had caused us some concern before now, but the aircraft itself was known to be reliable.
    We were an hour away when I got the call that they’d found a survivor. Remember, Elspeth, we’d seen the press footage–you wouldn’t even know a plane had gone down unless you’d been right there at the site, it was completely submerged. I got to admit I didn’t believe them at first.
    The boy had been rushed to Miami Children’s Hospital, and we were getting reports that he was conscious. No one could believe that a) he’d managed to survive, and b) he wasn’t taken by the alligators. There were so many of the goddamned things we had to call in armed guards to keep them away while we were pulling up the debris.
    When we landed, we headed straight to the site. DMORT [Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team] were already there, but it didn’t look like they were going to find any intactbodies. With so little to go on, top priority was to find