UAAG CH23

In aircraft accident investigations, it is not unheard of for investigators to piece a plane back together, though it is rare.

Most crashed aircraft do not shatter so completely; often, they retain a nearly intact shape, making it not too difficult to piece them back together. But for a plane like Martha 123, which slammed into a mountain at high speed and ultimately shattered into fragments, the difficulty of piecing it back together was visible to the naked eye.

However, Zhuo Huan was not joking.

The next day, the investigation team began reconstructing the skeleton of the aircraft.

A plane is not a jigsaw puzzle where you can simply piece fragments together one by one. An airplane is a 3D structure. To piece together a complete aircraft, one must first build a complete steel skeleton for it. Just as a house needs a foundation, the investigation team spent three full days, utilizing the painstaking efforts of over thirty investigators and workers, to finally complete the construction of the aircraft’s steel skeleton.

Technicians from ATR also arrived in Schaffhausen at this time to provide technical support to the investigation team: no one knew their own aircraft better than they did.

The grand undertaking of piecing the plane together had slowly unfolded, destined not to be accomplished overnight.

On the other side, through the airport and airline, Lina found over a hundred passengers who had previously flown on Martha Flight 123. She contacted these people online and offered to cover all travel expenses. eventually, more than thirty people agreed to come to Schaffhausen to accept interviews and inquiries from the investigation team.

In the candy factory warehouse, the aircraft wreckage fragments that once littered the floor were now all gathered to one side, replaced by a massive steel airplane skeleton. It spanned more than half the warehouse, aggressively occupying the very center. Dozens of investigators and ATR technicians held fragments, measuring them against the skeleton, finally confirming their positions, and then attaching the wreckage.

Lina came to the warehouse, found Fu Cheng in the crowd, and waved to him.

Fu Cheng walked to the warehouse entrance. Lina said, “Five passengers have already arrived. Fu, I would like to ask you to conduct the interviews with me.”

Fu Cheng thought for a moment: “Are we not calling Teacher Zhuo?”

Lina asked back in surprise: “Do you think Reid is suitable for such an occasion?”

This statement was well-founded; Fu Cheng couldn’t refute it at all. He put down the work at hand and went with Lina to the candy factory’s office building.

Since UAAG bought this candy factory, it had naturally become the investigation headquarters. The two arrived at the fourth floor, where five people were sitting in the corridor—men and women, old and young. Lina stepped forward and spoke a few words in German. Then she led a young girl into the office.

The door closed gently. The girl sat opposite them, while Fu Cheng and Lina sat on the other side.

After entering the room, the girl looked around with curious eyes. Not everyone has flown on a plane, and the vast majority of people have nothing to do with air crashes in their lifetime, let alone contact with an aircraft accident investigation team.

This was a spacious office, cluttered with various documents and instruments. A whiteboard in the room was covered in words written with red and black markers—people’s names, Martha Airlines, and Martha 123. Next to these words were photos of the two pilots.

Lina turned on the voice recorder: “Hello, may I ask when you flew on Martha Flight 380?”

The girl immediately withdrew her gaze and sat up straight: “Um, cough, I flew on this plane from Berlin to London a month ago…”

Throughout the morning, a dozen more people came one after another.

Like passing travelers in this world, they walked through the office door, left their few remaining faint impressions of Martha 380, and then left in a hurry.

By evening, all thirty-six interviews were completed. Fu Cheng organized the interview materials. Hearing the clicking sound of a chair moving, he turned his head. He saw Lina standing in front of the whiteboard, looking up at the blond young man with a brilliant smile.

Her hand tightly gripped the voice recorder, her gaze fixed on her close friend’s carefree smile. Hot tears filled her eyes and finally burst forth. She abruptly reached out to cover her mouth, preventing the sound of crying from escaping through her fingers.

Fu Cheng’s lips moved, about to offer comfort, when Lina said, “Let me be alone for a while, Fu.”

Fu Cheng was silent for a moment: “Lina, my condolences.”

Staring at her best friend on the whiteboard, Lina said with a hoarse voice: “He never told me his work was this hard. He never said…” The sobbing could no longer be suppressed, venting from her throat.

Lina cried aloud in grief. Fu Cheng took the interview materials and walked out of the office, leaving her a quiet space.

Inside the door was a woman’s desperate and broken weeping; outside was an oppressive silence.

Fu Cheng closed the door. He turned around, his movements suddenly pausing.

After a long while, Fu Cheng spoke softly: “Teacher Zhuo, when did you arrive?”

The setting sun shone obliquely into the room through the window at the end of the corridor, falling on the concrete floor, glowing with a cool warmth. The man wearing a thin coat stood leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets, head slightly lowered. He seemed to be chewing gum, his lips moving up and down with the chewing motion.

“Only been here five minutes.” Pausing, Zhuo Huan looked at him: “How did the interviews go?”

Fu Cheng was silent for a moment, then handed the documents in his hand to the other.

Zhuo Huan took them and glanced at them roughly. Emitting a scoffing sound from his nasal cavity, he handed the documents back to Fu Cheng and turned to leave: “Let’s go, back to piecing the plane together.”

Fu Cheng hesitated for a moment, but still stepped forward to follow.

Under the glow of twilight, the two walked side by side, leaving the quiet corridor.

Those documents were placed in the investigation headquarters’ database by Fu Cheng. When the truth finally came to light and the investigation report was written, they would be included.

Six hours ago, in the office, the girl had said in English—

“I boarded a bit late. Just as I got settled, the co-pilot came into the cabin to explain and demonstrate how to use the seat belt for us. This is a budget airline, of course, it doesn’t have those LED screens like other big planes, so these safety reminders have to be spoken by people. But it was my first time seeing a pilot do this, so it left a deep impression.”

The old man had said in German—

“I was the first to board the plane; maybe I went a bit early. I saw the captain repairing a chair. He was very surprised to see me and quickly explained that there was no problem with the chair, just a loose screw that he needed to tighten.”

The teenager recalled while saying—

“Because I forgot to take something, I went back onto the plane. I saw the captain and co-pilot dismantling seats. I was extremely surprised. They helped me find my lost bag. When I left, I looked back and saw them still holding screwdrivers dismantling chairs. Why dismantle the chairs? Were those chairs too old and needed replacing?”

In the deathly silent office, Fu Cheng looked at the puzzled teenager.

“…Yes, because those chairs were too old, so they needed to be replaced.”

Why dismantle the chairs?

Because after sending off the last flight of passengers, they had to work as cargo pilots to transport goods.

So dismantling the chairs as much as possible would leave more space to load cargo and increase transport profits a little. This was the airline’s requirement. Every day after sending off passengers, they dismantled all forty-plus seats and moved them to the luggage hold. Then, in the early hours of the next day, they would arrive two hours early to reinstall these seats one by one.

Day after day, repeating the same thing.

This was the daily work of Leon Lorraine and Gerard Truffaut.

At 8 PM, everyone continued piecing the plane together in the warehouse. Lina walked into the warehouse with red eyes. She called Gao Yun out and said some words. When Gao Yun returned, Fu Cheng asked him: “What did Lina say to you?”

Gao Yun’s expression wasn’t very good. He sighed: “Lina told me that EASA headquarters has made a conclusion and issued a certain warning penalty to Martha Airlines. But Fu, there are no other penalties. Since Martha Airlines could cooperate with a shell company to fabricate a Martha Flight 123 out of thin air, they must have conducted legal consultations. Their actions must be completely legal; no one can sanction them. So just now Lina asked me, can European aviation law really only do this much… I told her, yes, unfortunately, this is the ending.”

Speaking of this, Gao Yun smiled bitterly: “After I immigrated, sometimes I feel the Western system is very good, and sometimes I feel it is extremely absurd. The law always serves the class of people, and this class is a chasm we can never cross in our lifetime. If this happened in China, at least Martha Airlines wouldn’t remain unscathed like this, unable to find even a single person to take responsibility.”

Fu Cheng naturally couldn’t answer this.

Two days later, Su Fei returned to Schaffhausen with the repaired black box data.

“The black box was slightly damaged when the plane hit the mountain and exploded, but the problem isn’t serious, so it’s basically repaired. At the ATR headquarters in France, I already separated the flight data and cockpit voice recorder and split out five audio tracks. Should we look at the flight data first, or listen to the voice recording first?”

Su Fei didn’t know that Zhuo Huan had already rejected pilot error as the cause of this crash. It might be a cause, but it was definitely not the main cause.

Zhuo Huan stood by the large screen: “Look at the flight data.”

Su Fei: “OK!”

The punk teenager’s fingers crackled on the keyboard, and soon, the complete flight data curve was projected onto the large screen.

The flight data curve of the plane’s black box included multiple parameters such as the plane’s pitch attitude, roll attitude, and lateral overload. The ATR-72 is an old plane produced in the 1980s, so its black box recorded very few parameters, only 11 items.

If it were a movie, the investigator would definitely carefully check from the first second of the black box record to explore whether there were anomalies. However, this is reality.

Almost the second after the flight data curve was projected onto the large screen, four or five voices sounded simultaneously—

“Roll attitude?!”

Fu Cheng stood up and walked to the large screen. He looked at this roll attitude data carefully. A moment later, he turned to Zhuo Huan: “I’ve never seen such roll data. In fact, even when military fighter jets perform maneuver demonstrations, they rarely do such highly dangerous rolling maneuvers. It is absolutely impossible for a civil airliner to perform such a rolling motion artificially.”

Gao Yun immediately raised a question: “Yesterday, the investigators and I completed a full inspection of the right engine and confirmed there were no anomalies with the right engine. Now the black box data also shows clearly that it wasn’t an engine problem; the engine was intact until the crash. Then what on earth is going on with this strange roll attitude?”

Zhuo Huan rubbed his chin, his voice deep: “Problem with the hydraulic system?”

The ATR-72 uses a traditional hydraulic system.

Pilots control the plane through the hydraulic system. The hydraulic system is equivalent to the plane’s blood vessels, transporting blood (the pilot’s commands) to every cell of the plane. If there is a problem with the hydraulic system, the pilot simply cannot control the plane, and crashing is an inescapable outcome.

Fu Cheng suddenly thought, “Could it be a special downdraft? According to the weather report on the day Martha 123 crashed, there were thunderclouds twenty kilometers east of Zurich Airport. Although Martha 123’s route didn’t pass through that cluster of thunderclouds, perhaps under special reasons, it affected the plane’s flight?”

Gao Yun followed Fu Cheng’s train of thought: “You mean, once the downdraft affected the plane’s roll attitude, the plane rolled over. Then firstly, because the plane had just taken off, the altitude wasn’t enough, so the pilots didn’t have time to adjust; secondly, these two pilots were indeed too young, inexperienced, with average flying skills. Coupled with long working hours, they were driving while fatigued, unable to respond well, flustered, which led to the plane hitting the mountain?”

Fu Cheng turned his head to look at Zhuo Huan: “Teacher Zhuo, what do you think?”

Zhuo Huan stood in front of the large screen, his gaze fixed tightly on the plane’s roll data curve.

After a long time, he said: “There are many possibilities. Fu Cheng, go check the weather data for that day. You must confirm if the thunderclouds that day produced downdraft phenomena, and if they could affect the flight of a plane twenty kilometers away.”

Fu Cheng nodded: “Okay.”

“As for the others…”

Gao Yun and the rest instantly became nervous.

Zhuo Huan: “Finish piecing the plane together first.”

Everyone: “…”

As if unaware of the resentful gazes behind him that had almost solidified into substance, Lord Zhuo was extremely calm. He said to Su Fei: “Let’s listen to the cockpit voice recording.”

The originally somewhat noisy office suddenly quieted down because of this sentence.

Everyone held their breath, waiting to hear what the two pilots had said before the crash, and what warning prompts the plane had given.

Ten minutes later, Zhuo Huan closed his eyes briefly. He announced in a calm voice: “The cockpit voice recording has no valid reference value and will not be used as investigation material for the time being.”

No one questioned his words because, in the entire thirteen-minute conversation, the two pilots said almost nothing meaningful. Apart from the final desperate screams and the frantic roars of powerlessness while trying to correct the plane’s attitude back to horizontal, only cries of “NO” remained.

No, no, no…

The final words of every air crash victim are always shockingly similar.

There are no recollections of life’s past events, nor rational analysis of the accident’s cause. When the clouds break and they see the mountain wall close at hand, all they can think of, all they can blurt out, is only these cries of “no.”

This is reality.

Cruel reality.

On October 18, 2020, Gerard Truffaut’s body was flown back to Toulouse, France, for burial.

It had been exactly sixteen days since the crash occurred.

The internet’s memory is short. When the accident first happened, netizens learned that the co-pilot who died in the crash was actually the heir to the Truffaut Group, and all social media exploded. The number one trending tag on Twitter that day was “Truffaut.” However, as time passed, gradually, people no longer remembered this air crash.

Until today, sixteen days later, at Gerard Truffaut’s funeral, people remembered this matter again.

Online, countless people left messages of “R.I.P,” mourning the poor victim.

In Toulouse, by the Canal du Midi, people dressed in black suits stood quietly by the cemetery, watching the black coffin being lifted by four young men, carried into the grave, and gently placed down. They were Gerard’s former friends; before he was kicked out of the Truffaut family, they often gathered to play ball together.

It wasn’t that Madame Truffaut hadn’t thought of finding her son’s current friends to carry the coffin, but when she looked, she found that the son she had doted on for over twenty years had been too busy with work to make friends. His only friend was Leon Lorraine, and now both were sleeping deep underground together.

The priest softly recited the eulogy, commemorating this young and lonely soul.

Under the brilliant sunlight, everyone closed their eyes, listening to the soft mourning.

When everything ended, and the four friends picked up shovels to heap soil onto the coffin piece by piece, sealing away the last bit of the coffin’s color, Madame Truffaut finally couldn’t hold back her desperate wailing. In her husband’s arms, she cried aloud, losing her voice.

Lina wore a black dress; she stood in the center of the crowd, watching from neither far nor near.

“May he rest in peace in heaven.”

“Amen.”

Following the priest’s words, everyone closed their eyes and prayed for the deceased to rest in peace: “Amen.”

The funeral was left to the butler. The Truffaut family butler, with red-rimmed eyes, saw these guests off on behalf of the overly grief-stricken Madame Truffaut and Mr. Truffaut, who needed to comfort his wife.

Lina walked up to the grieving couple. Mr. Truffaut still kept a straight face. His eyes were full of tears, but he didn’t let them flow out. He looked up at the young blond woman in front of him, his voice muffled: “Stephanie.”

“Uncle Truffaut,” Lina said.

The Truffaut family and the Romain family were old friends, or rather, until five years ago, they had gotten along very well. Until the Truffaut family heir, Gerard, suddenly said he wanted to be a pilot and refused to enter the family group, creating a rift in the relationship between the two families.

Mr. Truffaut said coldly: “I still remember how Gerard talked to me about you five years ago. It was you who made him fall in love with planes. I never thought that when you played with model airplanes together as children, he would actually embark on the path of a pilot because of it. And facts have proven that he had no talent for being a pilot at all.”

Lina couldn’t help interrupting him. She said in disbelief: “Gerard is gone; can you not be so cruel!”

“Oh? What did I say wrong? That kid Patrick said this sentence, didn’t he? I heard he personally said Gerard was not an excellent pilot. When the plane crashed, he didn’t make the most reasonable and correct choice at all; all he did was panic blindly.”

Lina: “Under those circumstances, as a young pilot, what could he have done? could you have looked death calmly in the eye and successfully maneuvered a plane that suddenly lost control?”

“Stephanie, you…”

“I didn’t come to argue with you.” Lina interrupted Mr. Truffaut rudely, causing the latter’s face to darken instantly. However, she didn’t care at all: “I came because I wanted to give you the cockpit voice recording last recorded by the black box.” Saying this, she took out a USB drive from her bag. “If you don’t want it, it doesn’t matter. These are Gerard’s last words before he died. Don’t worry, he didn’t say a word about you; he had no energy to care about anything other than flying. After all, as you said, he was a talentless, garbage pilot. He was too busy taking care of flying the plane; how could he have time to do other things or think about other things?”

Mr. Truffaut’s face was livid. He gave a cold snort and didn’t reach out to take the USB drive.

Madame Truffaut, however, grabbed the USB drive: “Thank you, Lina.”

Hearing Madame Truffaut call out her nickname, Lina’s stubborn and angry expression softened. She nodded slightly to the Truffaut couple and turned to leave. Halfway there, she suddenly turned around and said to Mr. Truffaut: “Have you seen the sheep hidden inside the box?”

Mr. Truffaut froze instantly. He looked up, staring blankly at Lina.

Looking at his expression, Lina knew the answer. She gritted her teeth, but finally couldn’t help saying: “You were wrong about one thing. Gerard liked planes, never because of me. Yes, I gave him many plane models, and when we were young, I took him to visit the McFly factory and saw many planes. But that was all because he liked planes that I took him. I always treated him as a biological younger brother. He hid a sheep inside a box, yet I truly feel heart-stricken for him; after so many years, no one has ever seen that sheep.”

Lina looked again at the bewildered Madame Truffaut: “Have you seen it? You haven’t seen it either.”

After finishing, leaving the bewildered Truffaut couple behind, Lina closed her eyes and strode away.

Back in the car, she took out a tissue to wipe the tear stains from the corners of her eyes.

“Crying for you again. Today’s eye makeup isn’t waterproof. If you see me with smudged eyes, you’ll definitely say I love to cry again.”

“Gerard…” The voice stopped abruptly.

Covering her lips, Lina cried out in pain in the back seat of the car.

Returning to Schaffhausen, getting out of the car, Lina had already wiped her tears dry. Before walking into the investigation headquarters, she took out her phone and found “Gerard” in her contacts. Staring fixedly at this name, she slowly smiled and sent a message.

[Today’s sunshine is as brilliant as your hair.]

[No haze.]

[It is the best sunny day.]

[Goodnight, Little Prince.]

“And at night you will look up at the stars. Where I live everything is so small that I cannot show you where my star is to be found. It is better, like that. My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens… they will all be your friends. And, besides, I am going to make you a present…”

“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night… You–only you–will have stars that can laugh!”

—The Little Prince

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