Richman struck the lever with the clipboard. It clanged against the metal. He turned the clipboard and pushed the lever with one edge. Nothing happened.
"You want to keep trying?" Burne said. "Or are you starting to get the point? It can't be done, Clarence. Not with that cover in place."
"Maybe the cover wasn't in place," Richman said.
"Hey," Burne said, "that's good thinking. Maybe you can knock the cover up, by accident. Try that with your clipboard, Clarence."
Richman swung the clipboard at the edge of the cover. But the surface was smoothly curved, and the clipboard just slid off. The cover remained closed.
"No way to do it," Burne said. "Not by accident. So. What's the next thought?"
"Maybe the cover was already up."
"Good idea," Burne said. "They're not supposed to be flying with the cover up, but who the hell knows what they did. Go ahead and lift die cover up."
Richman lifted the cover up on its hinge. The handle was now exposed.
"Okay, Clarence. Go to it."
Richman swung his clipboard at the handle, banging it hard, but with most lateral movements, the raised cover still acted as a protection. The clipboard hit die cover before it struck the handle. Several times on impact, the cover dropped back down again. Richman had to keep stopping to lift the cover up again before he could proceed.
"Maybe if you used your hand," Burne suggested.
Richman tried swiping at the handle with his palm. In a few moments, the side of his hand was red, and the lever remained firmly up and locked.
"Okay," he said, sitting back in the seat. "I get the point."
"It can't be done," Bume said. "It simply can't be done. An uncommanded slats deploy is impossible on this aircraft. Period."
From outside the cockpit, Doherty said, "Are you guys finished screwing around? Because I want to pull the recorders and go home."
As they came out of the cockpit, Burne touched Casey on the shoulder and said, "See you a minute?"
"Sure," she said.
He led her back in the plane, out of earshot of the others. He leaned close to her and said, "What do you know about that kid?"
Casey shrugged. "He's a Norton relative."
"What else?"
"Marder assigned him to me."
"You check him out?"
"No," Casey said. "If Marder sent him, I assume he's fine."
"Well, I talked to my friends in Marketing," Burne said. "They say he's a weasel. They say, don't turn your back on him."
"Kenny..."
"I'm telling you, something's wrong with that kid, Casey. Check him out."
With a metallic whir from the power screwdrivers, the floor panels came away, revealing a maze of cables and boxes under the cockpit.
"Jesus," Richman said, staring.
Ron Smith was directing the operation, running his hand over his bald head nervously. "That's fine," he said. "Now get the panel to the left."
"How many boxes we got on this bird, Ron?" Doherty said.
"A hundred and fifty-two," Smith said. Anybody else, Casey knew, would have to thumb through a thick sheaf of schematics before he answered. But Smith knew the electrical system by heart.
"What're we pulling?" Doherty said.
"Pull the CVR, the DFDR, and the QAR if they got one," Smith said.
"You don't know if there's a QAR?" Doherty said, teasing him.
"Optional," Smith said. "It's a customer install. I don't think they put one in. Usually on the N-22 it's in the tail, but I looked, and didn't find one."
Richman turned to Casey; he was looking puzzled again. "I thought they were getting the black boxes."
"We are," Smith said.
"There's a hundred and fifty-two black boxes?"
"Oh hell," Smith said, "they're all over the aircraft. But we're only after the main ones now - the ten or twelve NVMs that count."
"NVMs," Richman repeated.
"You got it," Smith said, and he turned away, bending over the panels.
It was left to Casey to explain. The public perception of an aircraft was that it was a big mechanical device, with pulleys and levers that moved control surfaces up and down. In the midst of this machinery were two magic black boxes, recording events in the flight. These were the black boxes that were always talked about on news programs. The CVR, the cockpit voice recorder, was essentially a very sturdy tape deck; it recorded the last half hour of cockpit conversation on a continuous loop of magnetic tape. Then there was the DFDR, the digital flight data recorder, which stored details of the behavior of the airplane, so that investigators could discover what had happened after an accident
But this image of an aircraft, Casey explained, was inaccurate for a large commercial transport. Commercial jets had very few pulleys and levers - indeed, few mechanical systems of any sort. Nearly everything was hydraulic and electrical. The pilot in the cockpit didn't move the ailerons or flaps by force of muscle. Instead, the arrangement was like power steering on an automobile: when the pilot moved the control stick and pedals, he sent electrical impulses to actuate hydraulic systems, which in turn moved the control surfaces.
The truth was that a commercial airliner was controlled by a network of extraordinarily sophisticated electronics - dozens of computer systems, linked together by hundreds of miles of wiring. There were computers for flight management, for navigation, for communication. Computers regulated the engines, the control surfaces, the cabin environment.
Each major computer system controlled a whole array of sub-systems. Thus the navigation system ran the ILS for instrument landing; the DME for distance measuring; the ATC for air traffic control; the TCAS for collision avoidance; the GPWS for ground proximity warning.