The plane was in a dive.
The camera slid faster and faster, banging into a midships bulkhead, spinning so it was now facing forward. It raced : toward a body lying in the aisle. An elderly Chinese woman looked up in time for the camera to strike her in the forehead, and then the camera flew into the air, tumbling crazily, and came down again.
There was a close view of something shiny, like a belt buckle, and then it was sliding forward once more, into the forward compartment, still going, banging into a woman's shoe in the aisle, twisting, racing forward.
It went into the forward galley, where it lodged for a moment. A wine bottle rolled across the floor, banged into it, and the camera spun several times, then began to fall end over end, the image flipping as the camera went all the way past the forward galley to the cockpit.
The cockpit door was open; she had a brief glimpse of sky through the flight deck windows, blue shoulders and a cap, and then with a crash the camera came to rest, giving a steady view of a uniform gray field. After a moment, she realized the camera had at this point lodged beneath the cockpit door, right where Casey had found it, and it was taping the carpet There was nothing more to see, just the gray blur of carpet, but she could hear the alarms in the cockpit, the electronic warnings, and the voice reminders coming one after another, "Airspeed ... Airspeed," and "Stall ... Stall." More electronic warnings, excited voices shouting in Chinese.
"Stop the tape," she said.
Harmon stopped it.
"Jesus Christ," he said.
She ran through the tape once more, and then did it in slow motion. But even in slow motion, she realized, much of the movement was an indistinguishable blur. She kept saying, "I can't see, I can't see what's happening."
Harmon, who had by now become accustomed to the sequence, said, "I can do an enhanced frame analysis for you."
"What's that?'
"I can use the computers to go in and interpolate frames where the movement is too fast."
"Interpolate?"
"The computer looks at the first frame, and the frame following, and generates an intermediate frame between the two. It's a point-mapping decision, basically. But it will slow down - "
"No," she said. "I don't want anything added by the computers. What else can you do?"
"I can double or triple the frames. In fast segments, it would give you a little jerkiness, but at least you'd be able to see. Here, look." He went to one segment, where the camera was tumbling through the air, then slowed it down. "Now here, all these frames are just a blur - it's camera movement, not subject movement - but here. See this one frame here? You get a readable image."
It showed a view looking back down the aircraft. Passengers falling over the seats, their arms and legs streaks from swift movement.
"So that's a usable frame," Harmon said. She saw what he was driving at. Even in rapid movement the camera was steady enough to create a useful image, every dozen frames or so.
"Okay," she said, "do it."
"We can do more," he said. "We can send it out, and - "
She shook her head. "Under no circumstances does this tape leave this building," she said.
"Okay."
"I need you to run me two copies of this videotape," she said. "And make sure you run it all the way to the end."
IAA/HANGAR 4
5:25 P.M.
The RAMS team was still swarming over the Transpacific aircraft in Hangar 5. Casey walked past to the next hangar in the line, and went inside. There, working in near silence in the cavernous space, Mary Ringer's team was doing Interior Artifact Analysis.
Across the concrete floor, strips of orange tape nearly three hundred feet long marked the interior walls of the Transpacific N-22. Crosswise strips indicated the principal bulkheads; parallel strips were placed for each row of seats. Here and there, white flags stood in wooden blocks, indicating various critical points.
Six feet overhead, still more strips had been pulled taut, demarcating the ceiling and upper luggage compartments of the aircraft. The total effect was a ghostly orange outline of the dimensions of the passenger cabin.
Within this outline, five women, all psychologists and engineers, moved carefully and quietly. The women were placing articles of clothing, carry-on bags, cameras, children's toys, and other personal objects on the floor. In some cases, thin blue tape ran from the object to some other location, indicating how the object had moved during the accident.
All around them on the hangar walls hung large, blowup photographs of the interior, taken on Monday. The IAA team worked in near silence, thoughtfully, referring to the photos and notes.
Interior Artifact Analysis was rarely done. It was a desperation effort, seldom yielding useful information. In the case of TPA 545, Ringer's team had been brought in from the start, because the large number of injuries carried with it the threat of litigation. Passengers literally would not know what happened to them; assertions were often wild. IAA attempted to make sense of the movement of people and objects within the cabin. But it was a slow and difficult undertaking.
She saw Mary Ringer, a heavyset, gray-haired woman of fifty, near the aft section of the plane. "Mary," she said. "Where are we on cameras?"
"I figured you'd want to know." Mary consulted her notes. "We found nineteen cameras. Thirteen still and six video. Of the thirteen still cameras, five were broken, the film exposed. Two others had no film. The remaining six were developed, and three had shots, all taken before the incident. But we're using the pictures to try and place passengers, because Transpacific still hasn't provided a seating chart."