She was Carole Levitsky, in charge of Human Factors and Witnesses. She'd only been with the Board six months. This would be her second major crash. Originally a research psychologist with experience in forensics and, industrial stress factors, she had managed to more or less win over us hard-technology types. I suspect she knew what made us all tick a lot better than we did ourselves; she had a way of looking at you that pretty soon had you thinking "I wonder what I really meant by that?" The one thing that still made us all nervous was a lingering suspicion that she spent as much time studying the effects of stress on us as she did on the pilots and ATC's who figured in the crashes we investigated. As I already mentioned, there were things about myself I'd just as soon keep away from a psychologist, and the rest of us were all fertile ground for job stress syndrome as well. Carole is a small woman with short, dark hair and a rather plain face. She works well with the overwhelmingly male groups that assemble for an investigation.
There were three team members not present. George Sheppard would look into the weather as a factor leading up to the crash. Then there was Ed Parrish, who normally wasn't called up to the crash site since his function was Maintenance and Records. He'd be going to Seattle and Los Angeles, where the airframes were built, and to the Maintenance facilities of Pan Am and United, where he would pore through the mountains of papers filled out every time a commercial jet is worked on. And not even on the go-team list was Victor Thomkins, in charge of the Washington labs where the Cockpit Voice Recorders and Flight Data Recorders would be analyzed.