Vincenti stepped over to Hardcastle — followed closely by Gaspar, ready to intervene if he was needed. But instead of venting his frustration and anger on Hardcastle or Sheehan, Vincenti held out a hand, and Hardcastle took it. “Before I forget what you did for me, before I remember you’re a fucking politician now,” Vincenti said in a low voice, “thank you.”
“Thank you for trusting me — and I hope I can keep your trust,” Hardcastle said. “Now, listen up: you and Colonel Gaspar stand beside me — right beside me, not in back of me. Don’t try to push your way through the crowd — Marc will do the pushing. Colonel Gaspar, you give them the nocomment routine — after all, you’re the military and you’re not on trial. Al, you try to answer every question they throw at you — you won’t be able to, but you have to look like you’ve got nothing to hide. Turn toward the reporter asking you questions, make eye contact but ignore the cameras. Don’t react to a question, don’t get pissed off. Think first, then go ahead and answer. Don’t listen to what I’m saying. I’m not your lawyer, and we can’t look like we’re conspiring against telling the truth. Don’t worry about what I’ll be saying — believe me, we’ll be saying the same thing.”
“The judge directed us not to talk to the press.”
“You work for the U.S. Senate now, Al — and you’re fighting for your career, remember that,” Hardcastle said. “We control the situation now. Defend your uniform after we get Henri Cazaux.”
Memphis International Airport
Three Days Later
“Memphis Tower, Express-314 with you, GPS three-six left,” the pilot of the Universal Express Boeing 727 reported.
“Express-314, good evening, ident,” Bill Gayze, one of the six controllers on duty at Memphis International Airport’s control tower, responded. By force of habit, he scanned outside the slanted windows at the direction of the ILS (Instrument Landing System) outer marker, about six miles to the south. He could see a string of lights in the sky, all flying northward — airliners’ landing lights. Between eleven P.M. and one A.M., when the big overnight package company Universal Express had its incoming flights (Universal’s huge package-sorting “superhub” was located at the north part of Memphis International), it was normal to have one aircraft landing every sixty to ninety seconds.
Gayze checked the tower BRITE (Bright Radar Indicator Tower Equipment) scope, the short-range three-dimensional radar mounted high up on the wall where everyone could see it. An aircraft data block on the top of the BRITE scope in the control tower of Memphis International illuminated briefly — the Delta flight was number seven for landing. “314, radar contact, report five miles out, you’re number seven.”
“Express-314, wilco.” The Universal Express flight was using one of the new GPS instrument approaches, in which aircraft maneuvered from point to point on an instrument approach by means of satellite navigation. The satellite approaches, coupled with differential GPS signals from a nearby radio station, ensured incredible precision for arriving flights — using GPS, an experienced airline captain- could make a perfect landing and could even taxi most of the way to his gate, without ever seeing the pavement. Except for an aircraft emergency like an unsafe landing gear, going “missed approach” (where a pilot flies his plane within one or two hundred feet of the ground but has to abort the landing because he or she couldn’t see the runway) was almost a thing of the past here in Memphis. The added safety and reliability of the GPS approaches meant that the airport managers and the FAA could safely increase the traffic here at Memphis — every runway at Memphis, and indeed almost every runway in the country, now could have its own precision instrument approach. The concept of “blind flying” and “nonprecision approaches” had almost been eliminated, thanks to GPS.
Gayze’s thoughts were interrupted by a call on the interfacility interphone: “Memphis Tower, Romeo-17.”
“Memphis Tower.”
“Hi, Bill, Doug on seventeen.” Doug Latimer, at the sector-seventeen console, was a D-2 controller at Memphis TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control), located one hundred and eighty feet below Gayze’s feet at the base of the tower at Memphis International. The D-2 controller assisted the sector radar controller by making phone calls to other air traffic control agencies, making radio calls as necessary to back up the radar controller, and maintaining the computerized tracking strips on each flight assigned to the controller. “Arrival report visual three-six left for Universal Express 107, a Shorts 300, one-five miles to the southwest at eight thousand. Can’t find his strip. Can you handle him?”
“Sure,” Gayze said. Every aircraft on an IFR flight plan has a “strip,” or a piece of paper used by air traffic controllers to monitor and log a plane’s progress. All Universal Express flights flew on IFR flight plans — company policy — and they were carefully tracked from start to finish by both the company and the FA A. A tracking strip was generated by a Flight Service Station or an Air Route Traffic Control Center and electronically passed from sector to sector as the plane progressed. Although it was not unheard of for a plane to lose its “strip,” it was pretty unusual these days.
A plane without a strip was not officially “in the system” and was handled on a workload-permitting basis. This guy was lucky — it wasn’t too busy at the moment. Right now there were almost one hundred and fifty planes of all sizes scattered around Universal Express’s “super hub,” loading up and preparing for departure — it was busy, but not too bad to handle this one straggler.
“Tell him he can have runway two-seven if he wants it,” Gayze said.
Runway two-seven lay across the northern part of the airport, right beside Universal Express’s freight and package delivery complex. Normally it was a mad race for Universal’s pilots to get to their cargo gates ahead of the others — this guy seemed to be taking it easy.
“Stand by,” Latimer said. Gayze could hear the controller’s conversation with the pilot over the phone line, then: “Okay, Bill, he’s taking vectors to two-seven at six thousand feet, two thousand inside ten, D.L.”
“Approved, B.G.,” Gayze responded, passing the information to the tower controllers handling arrivals to runway two-seven. “How’s it looking out there tonight, Doug? Busy?”
“I think every plane in Texas is heading your way tonight, Bill,” Latimer said.
“Great,” Gayze said wearily. “Ask your boys to vector the southwest arrivals south of Tunica, we’re starting to bunch up.” The string of lights aiming at runway three-six was starting to get longer and more tightly packed, and the flights were coming in faster. Each airplane under instrument flight rules in the airspace around Memphis International had a protective “cylinder” at least six miles in diameter and two thousand feet thick, with the plane in the center, which could not be violated under any circumstance. If the pilots could see the runway or a preceding aircraft and advised the controller of that, Gayze could tighten the spacing up to about two miles and five hundred feet, but most pilots flying at night were too busy scanning their instruments and running checklists to accept responsibility for separation. Things were going smoothly now, but one plane going too fast or too slow could create a whipsaw effect that could cause problems very quickly. Better to start extending the traffic now, rather than wait.