"Captain and first officer in good condition."
"Ah, 545, you said there were injuries to the crew."
"Yes. Two stewardesses have been hurt."
"Can you specify the nature of the injuries?"
"I am sorry, no. One is not conscious. The other one, I don't know."
Marshall was shaking his head "He just told us nobody was unconscious."
"I'm not buying any of this," Levine said. She picked up the red phone. "Put a fire crew on level one alert. Get the ambulances. Order neuro and ortho teams to meet the plane and have Medical notify the Westside hospitals." She looked at her watch. "I'll call the LA FSDO. This'll make his damn day."
LAX
5:57 a.m.
Daniel Greene was the duty officer at the FAA Flight Standards District Office on Imperial Highway, half a mile from LAX. The local FSDOs-or Fizdos, as they were called- supervised the flight operations of commercial carriers, checking everything from aircraft maintenance to pilot training. Greene had come in early to clear the paper off his desk; his secretary had quit the week before, and the office manager refused to replace her, citing orders from Washington to absorb attrition. So now Greene went to work, muttering. Congress was slashing the FAA budget, telling them to do more with less, pretending the problem was productivity and not workload. But passenger traffic was up four percent a year, and the commercial fleet wasn't getting younger. The combination made for a lot more work on the ground: Of course, the FSDOs weren't the only ones who were strapped. Even the NTSB was broke; the Safety Board only got a million dollars a year for aircraft accidents, and-
The red phone on his desk rang, the emergency line. He picked it up; it was a woman at traffic control.
"We've just been informed of an incident on an inbound foreign carrier," she said.