Based in Washington, NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) Officer Ace Kelso will be known to many readers as the star of Ace Investigates, which ran for four seasons on the Discovery Channel. This account is a partial transcript of one of our many Skype conversations.

You gotta understand, Elspeth, an incident of this magnitude, we knew it would be a while before we could be absolutely sure what we were dealing with. Think about it. Four different crashes involving three different makes of aircraft on four different continents–it was unprecedented. We knew we’d have to work closely and coordinate with the UK’s AAIB, the CAA in South Africa, the JTSB in Japan, not to mention the other parties who had a stake in the incidents–I’m talking about the manufacturers, the FBI, the FAA and others I won’t go into now. Our guys and gals were doing all they could, but the pressure was like nothing I ever experienced. Pressure from the families, pressure from the airline execs, pressure from the press, pressure from all sides. I wouldn’t say I was expecting a clusterfuck exactly, but you got to expect some misinformation and mistakes. People are human. And as the weeks rolled on, we were lucky if we managed to get more than a couple of hours’ sleep a night.

Before I get to what I know you want to hear, I’ll give you a brief overview, put it into context for you. Here’s how it went down. As the IIC [Investigator-in-Charge] on the Maiden Airlines incident, the second I got the call, I started rounding up my Go Team. A regional investigator was already on site doing the initial stakedown, but at that stage all the footage we were getting was from the news. The local incident commander had briefed me via cellphone on the conditions at the site, so I knew we were facing a bad one. You gotta remember, the place where the plane went down, it was remote. Five miles from the nearest levee, a good fourteen miles from the nearest road. From the air, unless you knew what you were looking for, you couldn’t see any sign of it–we flew over it before we landed, so I saw that for myself. Scattered debris, a watery black hole about the size of your average suburban home, and that saw-grass that cuts through your flesh.

Here’s what I knew when I was first briefed: A McDonnell Douglas MD-80 had crashed minutes after take-off. The air traffic controller reported that the pilots had indicated an engine failure, but I wasn’t about to rule out foul play at this early stage, not with reports trickling in about incidents elsewhere. There were two witnesses, fishermen, who saw the plane behaving erratically and flying too low before plummeting into the Everglades; they said they saw flames coming from the engine as it dropped, but this wasn’t unusual. Witnesses almost always report seeing signs of an explosion or fire, even if there’s no chance of there being any.

I immediately told my systems, structures and maintenance guys to haul ass to Hangar 6. The FAA had assigned us the G-IV to fly to Miami–I needed a full team on this one and the Lear wasn’t going to cut it. Maiden’s track record with maintenance had caused us some concern before now, but the aircraft itself was known to be reliable.

We were an hour away when I got the call that they’d found a survivor. Remember, Elspeth, we’d seen the press footage–you wouldn’t even know a plane had gone down unless you’d been right there at the site, it was completely submerged. I got to admit I didn’t believe them at first.

The boy had been rushed to Miami Children’s Hospital, and we were getting reports that he was conscious. No one could believe that a) he’d managed to survive, and b) he wasn’t taken by the alligators. There were so many of the goddamned things we had to call in armed guards to keep them away while we were pulling up the debris.

When we landed, we headed straight to the site. DMORT [Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team] were already there, but it didn’t look like they were going to find any intact bodies. With so little to go on, top priority was to find the CVR [cockpit voice recorder] and black box; we’d need to get specialist divers in. It was bad in there. Hot as hell, crawling with flies, the stench�� We needed full bio-hazard suits, which aren’t fun to wear in those sorts of conditions. Right from the get-go I could see that it was going to take weeks for us to piece this one together, and we didn’t have weeks, not now that we knew other planes had gone down that day.

I needed to talk to that kid. According to the passenger list, the only child of that age group on board was a Bobby Small, travelling back to New York City with a woman we assumed was his mother. I opted to go alone, leaving my team on the scene to do the preliminaries and liaise with the locals and other parties who were en route to the crash site.

The press was swarming around the hospital, dogging me to make a statement. ‘Ace! Ace!’ they were calling. ‘Was it a bomb?’ ‘What about the other crashes, are they connected?’ ‘Is it true there’s a survivor?’ I told them the usual, that a press statement would be issued when we knew more, that investigations were still under way etc. etc.–the last thing I was going to do as IIC was shout my mouth off before we had something concrete.

I’d called ahead to say I was on my way, but I knew it was a long shot that they’d let me talk to him. While I waited for the doctors to give me the go-ahead, one of the nurses hustled out of his room, careened straight into me. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. I caught her eye, said something like, ‘He’s all right, huh?’

She just nodded, scuttled off to the nurses’ station. I tracked her down a week or so later, asked why she’d seemed so disturbed. She couldn’t put it into words. Said she had a feeling that something was off; she just didn’t like being in that room. She felt guilty for saying it, you could see. Said she must have been more affected by the thought of all those people dying at once than she realised; that Bobby was a living reminder of how many had lost their lives that day.

The child psychologist who was on the case arrived a few minutes later. Nice gal, mid-thirties, but looked younger. I forget her name… Polanski? Oh right, Pankowski. Thanks. She had only just been assigned, and the last thing she wanted was some gung-ho investigator upsetting the boy. I said, ‘Lady, we got an international incident on our hands here, that boy in there may be one of the only witnesses who can help us.’

I don’t want you to think I’m insensitive, Elspeth, but at that stage the info on the other incidents was sketchy, and for all I knew, that boy could be a key to the whole thing. Remember, in the Japanese situation, it was a while before they confirmed there were any survivors, and we didn’t get word about the girl from the UK incident till hours later. Anyway, this Dr Pankowski said the boy was awake, but hadn’t said a word, he didn’t know his mother was more than likely dead. Asked me to tread carefully, refused to let me film the interview. I agreed, although it was standard procedure to record all witness statements. Gotta say, afterwards, I couldn’t decide if I was glad I hadn’t been able to film it or not. I reassured her that I was trained in interviewing witnesses, that one of our specialist guys was on the way to do a follow-up interview. I just needed to know if there was anything specific he remembered that could help point us in the right direction.

They’d given him a private room, bright walls, full of kids’ stuff. A SpongeBob mural, a stuffed giraffe that looked kind of creepy to me. The boy was lying flat on his back, a drip in his arm, you could see the abrasions where the saw-grass had sliced his skin (we all fell foul of that particular hazard in the days to come, let me tell you), but other than that, he’d suffered no other significant injuries. I still can’t get over that. Like everyone said at first, it really did look like a miracle. They were prepping him for a CAT scan, and I knew I only had a few minutes.

The doctors hovering around his bed weren’t happy to see me, and Pankowski stuck to my side as I approached his bed. He looked really fragile, specially with all those cuts on his upper arms and face, and sure, I felt bad about questioning him so soon after what he’d been through.

‘Hiya, Bobby,’ I said. ‘My name is Ace. I’m an investigator.’

He didn’t move a muscle. Pankowski’s phone beeped and she stepped back.

‘I sure am glad to see you’re okay, Bobby,’ I went on. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

His eyes flipped open, looked straight into mine. They were empty. I couldn’t tell if he was even hearing me.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Good to see you’re awake.’

He seemed to look right through me. Then… and listen, Elspeth, this is going to sound as hokey as hell, but they started to swim, like he was about to cry, only… Jesus… this is hard… they weren’t filling with tears but with blood.

I guess I musta cried out, because next thing I know Pankowski’s at my elbow and the staff are buzzing round the boy like hornets at a picnic.

And I said: ‘What’s wrong with his eyes?’

Pankowski looked at me as if I’d just sprouted another head.

I looked back at Bobby, stared right into his eyes, and they were clear–cornflower blue, not a trace of blood. Not a drop.