Probable Cause

A piston twin out of a flight school goes into standing wheat a mile and a half off the runway with two aboard. The exercise at that point in the course is a simulated engine failure at four hundred feet — the instructor pulls a throttle back and the student handles it — and the ground says it was still flying when it arrived. Banked. Left wing down.

Audrey Lindholm reads the path the way the deputy read it, and the reporter, and the father. A light twin carries no flight data recorder and no cockpit voice recorder. The question is airspeed, and nothing in that field can tell her what it was.

A cabin-class twin comes down in standing timber nine miles short of the runway with three aboard, and one of them is alive. On the hillside, with her head a foot from his and a saw running, the pilot tells the volunteer fire chief that he ran it out of fuel. He says it more than once, and he is making sense.

Audrey Lindholm gets there a day late, five hundred and forty miles, onto ground two dozen people have worked. Both mains intact. Both auxiliaries intact. Nothing breached. Fifty-eight gallons come out of that airplane into two open drums on a hangar floor, weighed tank by tank.

An air ambulance goes down in national forest in the Idaho panhandle on the fifth of January, three aboard, nobody alive. Audrey Lindholm drives four hundred and ten miles and gets as far as a gate. Twelve miles of unplowed road, then a north slope with four feet of new on something older. Friday, they tell her. Maybe. That is the honest one.

Snow keeps everything. The path is five hundred and twenty yards, the most complete one she has ever stood on, and there is no seeing it. Every piece lies where it came to rest under three storms, and uncovering it destroys what preserved it. Three days cost her nothing off that airplane. Three days cost her the subject.

Twenty-two minutes past seven on a July morning, a Part one thirty-seven operator working a section of canola off a private strip east of a town called Upton. One airplane. One seat. One man.

One seat is its own kind of file. There is no passenger, so there is no second account, and there is no crew, so there is nobody who was in the airplane and is now sitting in a hospital corridor waiting to be asked. Whatever gets known about that morning is going to come off the ground, off the paper, and out of the mouths of people who were standing somewhere else at the time.

The physical answer arrives early and nobody contests it. The crack is old. And then physics stops, because a fatigue fracture records load cycles and not dates.

A quarter past seven on a March morning, a scheduled commuter comes down eleven miles down the valley from the field it left, on rangeland on the east slope of the Cascades. Nine passenger seats, three of them sold, four aboard, and all four died in the impact.

The wreckage path lies along a heading the airplane had not been flying, and it is not the shortest way out of that country either. It is the highway. Nobody standing on that ground says what that means.

Eleven items come out of the left wing root, and nothing on it is broken, torn, sheared, bent or missing. The joint at the middle of them came out assembled exactly as it was built and correctly safetied, the pin in and spread. Which leaves a box of the airplane's maintenance records in the back of Audrey Lindholm's truck, and she has not opened it.