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Night Watchman 12/21/2019 1:54:05 AM
Day four of the Christmas roundup of my seven books goes to Night Watchman, unusual for me in that it does not stray from the home shores of England. Politics and aviation are the two themes. NIGHT WATCHMAN
1
MARCH 9th.
Captain McGregor felt he was somehow responsible for the Leaning Tower. This was nonsense, but his was perhaps the butterfly effect that triggered it off. Chaos theory suggests that the future is beyond predicting, because the flapping of a butterfly in the Caribbean may eventually lead to a typhoon in China. Tiny initial cause, massive final effect.
McGregor's trip to San Francisco was routine, no suggestion of any flapping butterfly. Routine peck on the cheek for wife Jane, before setting off in his BMW. Routine drive from his home in Maidenhead to Heathrow, on this occasion rather better than normal, because the M4 was not the usual parking lot.
The first hint that 'routine' might not be the appropriate word came at flight briefing. It seemed innocent enough at the time, just a note from Captain Melville, the airline’s head of training, that co-pilot Alan Hardaker had only recently converted onto the 747: his landings still tended to be 'arrivals', and needed some polishing up.
As an old hand on the Jumbo, McGregor was familiar with the problem. Ever since Wilbur and Orville invented the flying machine, pilots had relied on the Mark One Human Eyeball to get themselves safely back onto terra firma.
Until the 747 came along. The first clue that something different might be needed came early on, when a Boeing test pilot undershot the runway, badly damaging his company's new toy. This monster was not only twice the size of anything that had gone before, but the cockpit was located on the upper deck and the landing attitude was nose up; this meant the main wheels of a 747 were so far behind and below the pilots they hit the ground when the Human Eyeball thought there was still a long way to go.
Years of visual experience had to be discarded. You were not about to land in that field beyond the end of the runway, it just looked that way. The drill became to trust your instruments, or the special visual approach slope indicators Boeing had been forced to install at every major airport, and just fly the slope until the radio altimeter registered fifty feet. Then you started to think about putting her down. At the thirty feet call you got serious. For new boys this last bit might be something of a controlled crash, but it was safe. And once your Mark One Eyeball got the hang of the new conditions, you'd be touching down without upsetting the customers. First Officer Hardaker only needed a bit more experience and he'd be greasing in the Jumbo with the best of them.
McGregor mentally filed the training captain's note and studied the pre-flight information. A time of ten hours forty one minutes, on the great circle route across Greenland and Arctic Canada, approaching San Francisco from the north. On a Mercator map it looked an odd way of getting there, but it was actually the shortest and avoided some nasty headwinds further south.
The Met forecast warned of moderate Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) north of Scotland. After that, a nice smooth ride. In spite of many years and umpteen millions spent trying to crack the problem, CAT forecasting remained little more than guesswork. These bumpy bits were usually just irritating, very occasionally scary. In either case there was little you could do except strap them in and take your punishment.
Their destination was going in for a light westerly wind, with the chance of sea fog. You hardly needed to be an expert to make such a forecast. Every picture of the Golden Gate Bridge has downtown 'Frisco swathed in a white mist, murky and cool, while across the bay in Oakland it's sizzling.
Although the airport lies on the lee side facing the bay, fog is unpredictable stuff. McGregor remembered watching one display, the fog rolling in over the hill, threatening to blanket the airport, but the air warming just enough in its downward path to melt the fog just before it reached ground level.
Yes, fog was unpredictable, which meant the trip's script wrote itself. The usual formula was for pilots to share the flying, so McGregor, as captain and the more experienced, would take the more challenging first sector into San Francisco. Alan Hardaker, new to the 747, would fly the return into Heathrow. Good old familiar Heathrow. Home territory. Just the place for a tyro first officer to polish up his landings.
No one realised it at the time, but a butterfly had flapped its wings.
2
Rather to his surprise, Damian White MP had come to enjoy his surgeries. Like many a budding politician he had started off with grandiose notions of changing the world. The Mother of Parliaments beckoned in all its glory. He would help make Britain a place fit for heroes. Etcetera.
He soon discovered that the Mother of Parliaments was a decrepit rabbit warren that would have been condemned as unfit for human habitation by most local councils. Worse still, the rabbits - members of parliament - that scurried around its corridors, were a fractious lot, agreement on any subject as rare as virgins in a brothel.
We're not talking here about ideological differences between parties. Winston Churchill put it in a nutshell, when showing the Commons chamber to a new colleague, who commented: 'So we sit here, facing the enemy?' 'No, no,' replied Winston. 'Facing us is His Majesty's Opposition. You'll find the enemies on our side'.
All political parties are uneasy alliances of big egos, with little in common bar a thirst for power. Warfare is constantly simmering below the surface, often to erupt into open conflict.
But party members have to agree for parliament to function. The alternative is anarchy. You can think what you like, but party bullies - the Whips - are on hand to make sure you toe the line for the serious stuff: the voting. Then you do as you're told.
On this basic principle Damian all too often found himself at loggerheads with the party he represented. The Tory member for Mid Oxon not only thought for himself - that was bad enough - he also voted according to his beliefs. The French have a word for such behaviour: 'insupportable'.
Damian White was 'insupportable'. Every party has a sprinkling of such characters, who are usually tolerated as examples of what a broad church that party is. The press loves to snipe at the usual voting by party edict, so anything that softens this image is seen as good PR. However, if the government has a slender majority, just a few mavericks may bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. Then they become truly insupportable.
Damian, like the others of his ilk, soon realised that taking the maverick path was to abandon all hope of political preferment. No front bench for him. So he joined the ranks of parliamentary plodders, many sitting there unrecognised by the world at large for thirty, even forty years. They were the essential cannon fodder for when the division bell rang. Their lack of ambition was tacitly appreciated by the party bosses, who always had more than enough predators fighting for the top jobs.
Backbenchers did little harm. Except when the government had a slender majority and they became mavericks.
