Impact Read Free

instead of sitting at a formal dais in the ballroom of a palace he has somehow come to consider his due. Still, although he is never unaware that getting where he is has involved some rather weighty trade-offs, at this point in his life Alec Hawthorne does not often regret the bargain.
    Comforted by the well-worn rationale, Hawthorne sighs, then sips a nice Bordeaux. In the next moment, because his mind operates as often by Newtonian as by Freudian principles, his serenity is routed by a pang of fear. He is suddenly convinced he is an imposter, present at the dais under false pretenses, a con man who will momentarily be found to know nothing about the law or the world or even about himself.
    A molten flow of insecurity descends from his throat to his abdomen. He closes his eyes and holds his breath. After a minute the specter of ineptitude disappears, leaving behind a burning belly and a skim of sweat. Wiping his brow with a magnificently woven napkin, Hawthorne turns his attention to the center of the dais, where proceedings are ready to begin.
    A rotund man stands, dears his throat, passes a hand across his gleaming pate, and manages a sentence on the second try. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. Thank you. As program chairman of the Association of Commercial Airline Pilots’ thirty-fifth annual convention, I have the privilege of introducing the keynote speaker of the evening. I say privilege, because our guest tonight is truly a bird of a different feather, as it were. He is not a pilot or aeronautical engineer or airline executive. Alec Hawthorne is a lawyer, and in the opinion of most, he is the heir apparent to the throne of the legendary Ed Haroldson, the foremost aviation attorney of our time.
    â€œAlec is no stranger to the association. Most of you have heard of him; several of you have worked with him on a consulting basis in one of his many lawsuits; a few of you have been grilled by him on the witness stand or at a deposition, and it is no secret that more than one of our members has taken an early retirement after enduring that ordeal. Alec’s accomplishments are many, but perhaps foremost is this: In the past twenty-five years, Alec Hawthorne has recovered more than half a billion dollars—that’s right, billion —on behalf of the victims of air disasters, their families, and heirs. And in the process of collecting those sums, Alec has been a primary factor in pointing the finger of blame in such proceedings where it justifiably belongs.
    â€œIt was Alec Hawthorne who first made public that the cockpit instrumentation of the DC-8 was arranged so that a pilot could, entirely by accident, put the engines into reverse thrust while airborne; that the instruments in different models of the Caravelle were in different locations, leading to pilot confusion and passenger jeopardy; that the T-tail design of the early 727s caused a dangerously excessive sink rate, resulting in premature touchdown. Such revelations led not only to large verdicts for Mr. Hawthorne’s clients but to the actions necessary to remedy the defects. In other words, our guest has been the leader in showing that pilot error—the so-called ‘Oh Christ’ activity—that is all too often cited as the cause of an air disaster, is almost always design-induced, the result of engineering that fails to account for the human factors inevitably present in modern aviation.”
    The chairman wipes his brow again, gulps some water, glances nervously to his side to see how it is going so far, then shuffles his notes and clears his throat. “Pilots, as the saying goes, are the first ones at the scene of an accident. Because Alec Hawthorne may be the world’s foremost authority on why planes crash, we have asked him to speak to us tonight on the general subject of safety in the skies and on the international airline pilots’ role in improving airline performance. Ladies and