319 Pandora’s Box

Could somebody know exactly where this plane was gonna come down …


Summary: The FBI investigates why a corporate jet crashed in a federal forest area.

Original air date
: March 30, 2007 (US)

Written by
: Andrew Black

Directed by
: Dennis Smith

Opening numbers:

6150: Feet
275: Miles per hour
88: Black box inputs
6: Seconds to impact


Family Concepts: (character development)

  • Alan has owned the Craftsman house for thirty years
  • Amita is especially careful locking doors after a watch was stolen from her dorm room when she was an undergrad.
  • Charlie has worked “over fifty” criminal cases
  • Edgerton is the fourth best shot in the US

Episode Quotes:

  • Alan: Two sons that solve crimes, neither one cares [the house was robbed].
  • Edgerton: You shouldn’t come between a man and his fiber.
  • Colby: Trust me Professor Eppes’ calculations are right.
  • Charlie: I paid two percent over market value for the heirloom.
  • Millie: No chess, I win and you pout.
    Alan: Yeah well, we’re not playing poker; I’m not your personal ATM.

Episode Synopsis:

Forest ranger, Phil Hadwin, is checking forest roads when a low-flying plane sails overhead and crashes against a nearby mountain.  While checking the crash site for survivors, Hadwin is shot.  The FBI and the NTSB are on the scene at daylight and Charlie has invited himself along, even though the Eppes’ Craftsman home was burglarized the night before.

The NTSB asks CalSci for help decoding the plane’s “black box” and they discover instrumentation recorded the plane flying about 4000 feet higher than it actually was at the time of the crash.  Charlie and Amita also work out the debris field for the crash site is much larger than it should be, and determine the difference is because the plane was carrying about 1000 pounds of weight not listed on the manifest.  When confronted with this information the CEO of Aeronautics, the company that owned the plane, admits the plane was taking a prototype of a scramjet to New Mexico for testing.  The only problem is the prototype wasn’t in the wreckage of the plane.

An analysis of the flight management computer for the plane shows the software was tampered with two days before the flight.  The FBI pulls in Mike Daley an IT professional with Aeronautics after his fingerprints are found in the area where the computer system so stored.  He claims he always updates the computer as he knows how and is small enough to fit in the small space.  He claims the plane’s mechanic John Wellner gave him the updates for the computer system.

When the FBI can’t locate Wellner, they search his apartment and trash.  The search reveals recent purchases of a strong padlock and a storage facility rental.  Wellner also withdrew a large sum of money form his bank.  David and Ian Edgerton locate the storage facility and find not only the missing scramjet, but Wellner’s body.

Charlie does some further work with the “black box” and finds a malicious program was stored on the computer, one that would upload itself to the FAA’s mainframe when the box was locked up to a computer.  Charlie finds the program already stored on the FAA computers and shows how it would hide any plane from radar. He is also about to trace back the author of the code to Mike Daley.  Daley admits he wrote the code, but that no one was supposed to die.  He doesn’t know who wanted the code, just that Wellner had a contact who would pay $2 million for the pass codes to use it.

Daley agrees to wear a wire when he meets with Wellner’s contact, one Victor Morelos a drug runner Wellner knew in Florida.  Daley meets with Morelos but things quickly fall apart and Morelos finds the wire.  As the FBI moves in, Morelos takes Daley hostage but is killed by Edgerton.

Alan seems to recover form the shock of having his house broken into, and while Charlie works out a mathematical solution to finding who robbed them, Don shows up with the stolen stuff, including Alan’s laptop which has a GPS system the police used to find the stolen goods.