McCormick didn’t have to wait long. Thirty seconds later the phone rang. McCormick looked at his wife. “Three guesses who that is.” Paula McCormick just smiled and let her head flop back onto the pillow.
Once more George McCormick pushed the speaker button.
“McCormick.”
“George. Gary Dennison.”
“Hi, Gary, what’s new?”
“Very funny.” It was obvious from Service Director’s tone he was not amused. “I know you’ve been briefed by the Comm Center. I want you to leave tonight. This one could really be ugly in a lot of ways.”
“It’s one-thirty, Gary. Just how do you expect me to get to New York, much less Chestertown? There aren’t any flights out of Reagan-National or Dulles until tomorrow morning, and I haven’t a clue which airline connects into Chestertown, if any.”
“You’re not going to fly commercial. I’ve made arrangements for you to go on the G-159. They’ll fly you right into Glenn Falls Warren County Airport. It’s close to the crash site. You’ll be going with the NTSB team. Get your tail out to Hangar Six ASAP.”
McCormick was stunned. “How the hell did you manage that at this hour of the night, or at any hour for that matter?”
“Hey, I’m the Service Director, remember?”
Dennison did not have that kind of authority, and both of them knew it, but he obviously had managed it somehow.
“Okay, Gary. I’ll be in touch.”
McCormick was the FAA’s weekend duty officer. He wasn’t surprised when he received the second phone call at his townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia, notifying him that the Essex County Sheriff’s Department had discovered the wreckage. McCormick suspected that a midair collision had occurred almost four hours earlier when he received the first call from the Comm Center telling him that New England Radar Approach Control had simultaneously, and unexpectedly, lost radar and radio contact with two aircraft. New England had immediately instituted “Search and Rescue” procedures, called the local police, and notified the Comm Center. They, in turn, had dutifully passed that information along to McCormick. There had been little doubt in McCormick’s mind at the time of the first phone call what had happened. He simply had to wait for the police or someone else to find the crash site to confirm his suspicions. The 1:30 am call did just that. McCormick knew the all-important question was going to be, Why?
McCormick was fifty-three. Like most men his age, he had gained about twenty-five pounds he didn’t need. His five-foot-eight-inch medium frame didn’t do much to evenly distribute the weight, most of which deposited itself around his midsection. He’d been with the Federal Aviation Administration for thirty-one years, the last five working as an Aircraft Accident Investigator at the FAA’s National Headquarters in Washington, DC. McCormick was a company man. His job kept him in the field most of the time, away from the nine-story building at 400 Independence Avenue that housed an eight-by-eight cubicle the government designated as his “office.” The cubicle contained a small gray metal desk whose drawers jammed on a regular basis. Atop the desk sat a fifteen-inch screen powered by a 486 computer. A straight-back, four-legged metal chair, and a dirty, chipped beige plastic phone whose only redeeming feature was voice mail completed the decor. McCormick’s nameplate rested on top of one of the cubicle walls, strategically placed so as to be able to be seen by anyone trying to find his cubbyhole among the many other catacombs throughout the sixth floor.
McCormick made it a point to stay out of political discussions and office intrigue with his coworkers. Like many in government, he disliked its affirmative action policies but was acutely aware that to voice opposition to them would result in a career not highlighted by upward advancement. McCormick was good at his job. He had spent years working as an air traffic controller before taking this assignment. That experience enabled him to look in the right places to search for the cause of accidents, especially if one of the causes was controller error. McCormick was also good at taking care of his own life and responsibilities. His son and daughter were grown. In two more years he would retire. He and his wife looked forward to moving to southwestern North Carolina, far away from the political rat race inside the beltway.
After getting off the phone with Gary Dennison, McCormick threw a change of clothes along with some personal items in an overnight bag, called the local cab company, told his wife he would be gone for most of the weekend, and at 2:15AM Saturday morning, climbed into the waiting cab outside his home. Normally he would have taken the Metro, but the last train from the Springfield and Van Dorn stations had long since departed. After a silent thirty-five-minute ride, he arrived at the gate outside Hangar Six, located at the south end of Ronald Reagan Airport far from the main passenger terminals. Security had been notified he was coming, and McCormick passed through the gate’s checkpoint without being hassled. It was raining hard. Lightning lit the night sky like flashes from a camera being constantly clicked. The inevitable claps of thunder followed almost immediately. From the white color of the lightning and the one-second interval between flashes and sound, McCormick knew the storms were directly over the airport. With his overnight bag in one hand and an attaché case in the other, McCormick ran as best as he could the sixty or so yards from the gate to the hangar door. He was drenched by the time he got there.
Once inside, McCormick met with three members of the National Transportation Safety Board, an official government photographer, and two aircraft inspectors from the FAA’s Washington Flight Standards District Office. All of them would fly to Glenn Falls aboard the FAA’s G-159 Gulfstream. The thirty-seven-passenger commuter aircraft was powered by two recently overhauled Rolls-Royce 529-8X propeller-driven engines. The FAA owned two of the 187 Gulfstreams that had been built between 1958 and 1969. Usually these aircraft flew upper-echelon FAA personnel to official government functions; occasionally they were used for the far more productive purpose of transporting essential personnel to aircraft accident sites. Gary Dennison, McCormick’s Service Director, had called the FAA Administrator and arranged for the use of the aircraft and a crew. There were ten or twelve members of the press in the hangar when McCormick arrived, all with authorization to accompany the investigators on the flight. Somehow they had gotten wind of what had happened; no doubt some citizen had been monitoring New England’s radar approach control frequency on some sort of shortwave radio receiver and “dropped a dime” when he realized that two planes were missing. How the press had gotten flight authorization at that hour of the night and on that short notice was a mystery to McCormick.
The massive frontal thunderstorms in the DC area delayed their takeoff until 3:45 am. The clouds in the overcast night sky enveloped the Gulfstream just after takeoff at three hundred feet where it immediately encountered moderate turbulence. The entire aircraft rattled and seemed to bounce in all directions at once. A very nervous McCormick tightened his seat belt to the point of pain. His hands gripped the sides of his seat. He could see the headlines now: “FAA and NTSB Investigation Team Die in Plane Crash on Way to Accident Site.” They broke out of the cloud deck at twelve thousand feet then continued to fifteen thousand. The turbulence subsided. McCormick sheepishly looked around and breathed a quiet sigh of relief. He wasn’t the only one.
It was almost six o’clock Saturday morning when the Gulfstream landed at Floyd Bennett Memorial Airport and taxied onto the large parking apron in front of the fixed base operator, Empire East Aviation. The newly remodeled facility was able to accommodate twenty-five transient aircraft plus thirty-three itinerant. McCormick couldn’t help but wonder how many people knew that Floyd Bennet had been the pilot on Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s historic first flight over the North Pole. Afterward, word leaked that Chief Warrant Officer Bennet “confessed” that due to an oil leak Byrd had ordered him to simulate the flight by orbiting just north of Kings Bay, Spitzbergen. This so-called confession was never substantiated or proved. Warren County Airport had recently been renamed for Bennet. The Naval Air Station located on Flatbush Avenue just past the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge in Brooklyn, New York, that had been named after Bennet had long since been replaced as a national park.
The