to the many opportunities for human error which existed with baggage handling. Efficiency experts periodically examined airline baggage systems, and periodically they were improved. Yet no one had come up with a system which was infallible, or even close to it. The result was that all airlines employed staffs, at every major terminal, whose job was solely to trace missing baggage. Such staffs were seldom idle.
An experienced, cagey traveler did the best he could by making sure that the tags which agents or porters put on his bags when he checked in showed his correct destination. Often they didn't. With surprising frequency, wrong tags were slapped on in baste, and had to be changed when the error was pointed out. Even then, when the bags disappeared from sight, there was the sense of having entered a lottery, and at that point the traveler could only pray that some day, somewhere, he would be reunited with his luggage again.
Tonight, at Lincoln International---though no one knew it yet---the baggage for Flight Two was already incomplete. Two bags, which should have gone to Rome, were at this moment being loaded aboard a flight for Milwaukee.
Freight was now going aboard Flight Two in a steady stream. So was mail. Tonight there were nine thousand pounds of mail in colored nylon bags, some for Italian cities---Milan, Palermo, Vatican City, Pisa, Naples, Rome; others onward transmission to faraway places, whose names read like pages from Marco Polo... Zanzibar, Khartoum, Mombassa, Jerusalem, Athens, Rhodes, Calcutta...
The heavier-tban-usual mail load was a bonus for Trans America. A flight of British Overseas Airways Corporation scheduled to leave shortly before Trans America Flight Two, had just announced a three-hour delay. The post office ramp supervisor, who kept constant watch on schedules and delays, promptly ordered a switch of mail from the BOAC airliner to Trans America. The British airline would be unhappy because carriage of mail was highly profitable, and competition for post office business keen. All airlines kept uniformed representatives at airport post offices, their job to keep an eye on the flow of mail and insure that their own airline got a "fair share"---or more---of the outgoing volume. Post office supervisors sometimes had favorites among the airline men, and saw to it that business came their way. But in cases of delay, friendships didn't count. At such moments there was an inflexible rule: the mail went by the faster route.
Inside thc terminal, at lower level, and a few hundred feet from the Boeing 707 aircraft which was now Flight Two, was Trans America Control Center (Lincoln International). The center was a bustling, jam-packed, noisy conglomeration of people, desks, telephones, teletypes, Tel Autographs, private line TV, and information boards. Its personnel were responsible for directing the preparation of Flight Two and all other Trans America flights. On occasions like tonight, with schedules chaotic because of the storm, the atmosphere was pandemonic, the scene resembling an old-time newspaper city room, as seen by Hollywood.
In a corner of the control center was the Load Control Desk---the desk top invisible beneath a sea of paper---occupied by a young, bearded man with the improbable name of Fred Phirmphoot. In his spare time Phirmphoot was an amateur abstract painter; recently he had taken to throwing paint on canvas, then riding over it with a child's tricycle. He was reputed to dabble---at weekends---with LSD, and also suffered from body odor. The last was a constant annoyance to his fellow workers in the control center---hot and stuffy tonight despite the cold, bitter weather outside---and more than once Fred Phirmphoot had been told that he should take a bath more often.
Yet, paradoxically, Phirmphoot had a keen mathematician's mind, and his superiors swore that he was one of the best load control men in the business. At the moment he was masterminding the loading of Flight Two.
An airplane (Fred Phirmphoot would occasionally explain to his bored beat friends), "She's a bird that's a teeter-totter, man. If you ain't hep, that airplane chick'll teeter or totter, maybe the twain; but me, baby, I don't let it none."
The trick was to distribute weight correctly through the airplane so that its fulcrum point and center of gravity were at predetermined places; hence, the aircraft would be balanced, and stable in the air. Fred Phirmphoot's job was to calculate how much could be stowed aboard Flight Two (and other flights) and where. No mailbag, no individual piece of freight, went into any position in the aircraft hold without his say-so. At the same