“Except for the people who are working with TRX, the rest of you need to get back to Washington and dig in. Admiral Dunedin and SECNAV will want the report ASAP.”
Jake Grafton came back to the hospital about tea that night to look in on Rita and talk to the doctor on duty. When he was finished, he dragged Toad off to the VOQ. “If you’re blaming your- self about this, you’d better stop,” he said when they were in the car.
Tarkington was glum. “She fought it all the way down. The controls were just too sensitive. The plane was out there on the edge of the envelope — high G, high angle of attack — and every time she thought she had it under control she lost it again. She kept saying, ‘I’ve got it this time.’”
“She’s not a quitter.”
“Not by a long shot” Toad looked out the passenger’s side win- dow. “A hundred and twenty pounds of pure guts.”
“So now you’re telling yourself you should have ejected on the second departure.”
“Only a thousand times today.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I should have.”
“Why didnt you? Because she is your wife?”
“Naw,” said Toad Tarkmgton, swallowing hard. “That wasn’t it. For just a few seconds there I was flying with you again, over the Med, and you were telling me to hang in there. Toad-man, hang tough. So I hung tough. I wanted to give Rita that chance. She was asking for it. So I sat there and watched the altimeter unwind and waited for her to perform her miracle, and look — I may have killed her, or crippled her for life.”
“It’s all your fault, is that it?”
“Aw. Christ, CAG.”
“Well, if you’d been in the front seat and she’d been in the back, what would you have done?”
“About what Rita did. If I were as good a pilot as Rita.”
“I’ve been around these planes for a few years. Toad, and let me tell you, there are no right answers. Some answers are better than others, but every option has unforeseen twists. If you had jumped when the plane departed the second time, with fifteen or sixteen thousand feet of altitude, you and Rita would have spent the rest of your lives thinking you jumped too soon, that you might have saved it if you had hung in there just a little longer. My father always called that being between a rock and a hard place.”
Toad shook his head.
“Years ago, in Vietnam, I learned that you can’t second-guess yourself. You have to do the best you can all the time, make the best decision you can in the time you have to make it — which is always precious little — and live with the consequences regardless. That’s the way flying is. And occasionally you’re going to make a mistake, nick it up. That’s inevitable. The trick is to not make a fatal mistake.”
Jake Grafton’s voice hardened. “Flying isn’t chess or football or checkers! Flying isn’t some game I Flying is life distilled down to the essence — it’s the straight, two hundred-proof stuff. And Rita knows; she’s a U.S. Naval Aviator. She chose this line of work and worked like a slave to earn that ride today. She knows.”
“Yes,” Toad admitted. “She knows.”
At 3 A.M. Rita’s mother answered her phone in Connecticut. She had obviously just awoke. “This is Toad Tarkington, Mrs. Mora- via.” You know, the guy who married your daughter? “Sorry to bother you this time of night I tried to call earlier—“
“We were at a party. Is everything okay?” She was wide awake now and becoming apprehensive.
“Well, not really. That’s sorta why I’m calling. I thought you should know.”
She went to battle stations while Toad tried to collect his thoughts.
He interrupted her torrent of words. “What it is — Rita and I jumped out of an airplane today, Mrs. Moravia- Rita’s over in the hospital now.”
He could hear her talking to Mr. Moravia. The pitch in her voice was rising.
“Anyway, Rita’s banged up pretty good and I thought you should know.”
“How bad is it?”
“She’s in a coma, Mrs. Moravia. She hit the ground before her parachute had time to open.” Silence. Dead silence. Toad contin- ued, “Anyway, I’m with her and she’s getting the best medical treatment there is and I’ll call and let you know when anything changes.”
Mr. Moravia spoke now. Perhaps his wife had handed him the phone. “What’s the prognosis, son?”
“She could die, Mr. Moravia. She’s in bad shape.”
“Should we come out there?” He didn’t even know where Toad was calling from.
“Not now. When she comes out of the coma, that might be a good idea. But not now. I’ll keep you advised.”
“Are you okay?”
“Fine, sir. No injuries.” Nice that he should ask. Toad thought.
“We’ll pray for her.”
“Yes, Do that. I’m doing some of that myself.”
Harry Franks, the program manager for TRX, stood in the middle of the hangar issuing orders. A small army of workmen were plac- ing wreckage in piles as he directed. They had been working since dawn.
He greeted Jake Grafton without enthusiasm. “Give me five more minutes and we’ll go upstairs,” he said, then pointed to a pile for a forklift operator with a piece of what looked like outboard wingtip.
Jake and the commanders wandered toward the door, trying to get out of the way. The plane had exploded and burned when it hit, so the pieces that were left were blackened and charred.
In an office on the second floor, the engineers from the company that had manufactured the fly-by-wire system, AeroTech, were completing the setup of their equipment. An AeroTech vice presi- dent sat on one of the few chairs, sipping coffee and watching the final installation of the network of wires that powered and con- nected the test boxes. He didn’t look very vice presidential. He and the engineers had flown in early this morning and had had only a few hours’ sleep. He stood up to shake hands with Jake.
After the introductions, they got right to it. The only surviving processor from the crashed prototype was carefully removed from its bent, damaged box and its innards exposed. It was physically examined by the assembled experts with all the curiosity of a group of med students examining a man with a new disease.
Jake backed off to let the experts have room. He found himself beside Harry Franks. ‘Tell me again how the fly-by-wire system works.”
“The aircraft had negative stability,” Franks said, hooking his thumbs behind his belt and warming to the subject. “Most high- tech tactical aircraft today have negative stability.” Jake nodded.
Franks continued. “A human cannot fly a negatively stable ma- chine. It would be like trying to keep a barn door balanced on top of a flagpole- So computers actually do the flying. In that way we could build a highly maneuverable aircraft and optimize its low- observable — stealth — features without worrying that we were com- promising or negating the ability of the pilot to control it. Now, the way it works is pretty neat.”
Jake allowed himself a small smile. All engineers think elegant solutions to technical problems are neat.
‘There are three computers,” Harry Franks continued. “They each sample the aircraft’s attitude and all the other raw data — like air density, temperature, airspeed and so on — forty times a second. Then they see what control input the pilot has made. The pilot’s control input merely tells the three computers what the pilot wants the plane to do. The computers then figure out what control throws are necessary to comply with the pilot’s order, and they compare their answers. They take a vote. Any two computers can overrule the third. After the vote, the agreed electrical signal is seat to the hydraulic actuators, which move the controls. This little sequence takes place forty times a second. You understand?”
“Yep-I think so. But how does the computer know how much to move the controls? That’s what the pilot does in a conventional airplane.”
“Well, obviously, the computer has to be told. So the data that it uses is placed in a Programmable Read-Only Memory, a PROM- Since it’s electrical, we call it an E-PROM. There are other types, like UV-PROMS and—“
Jake halted him with his hand. “So what you guys did when Rita complained of control sensitivity was to change the E-PROMs?”
“Yeah. Exactly. They come on chips. The data is just fried into the little beggars. We called AeroTech and they cooked us some more and flew ‘em down. That’s all there was to it.”
