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The National Transportation Safety Board, the US agency responsible for investigation plane crashes, is headquartered in a squat, seventies-ear office building on the banks of Potomac River in Washington, DC.
美国国家交通安全委员会简称（NTSB），一家低矮的主要负责调查飞机失事原因的机构，其总部设在华盛顿特区的波托马克河岸，拥有70多间办公室。
Off the agency's long hallways are laboratories filled with airplane wreckage:
从该机构长长的走廊里，可以看到实验室里到处都是飞机的残骸:
a mangled piece of engine turbine, a problematic piece of helicopter rotor.
一块破损的引擎涡轮，一块从直升机上掉下来的转轮。
On a shelf in one of the laboratories is the cockpit voice and data recorder-the so-called black box-from the devastating ValueJet crash in Florida in 1996, where 110 people were killed.
在一个实验室的架子上放置了一个驾驶舱声音和数据录音装置——它被称为“黑匣子”——里面记录了1996年瓦卢杰航空公司发生在佛罗里达的坠机事故，该事故伤亡惨重，在这场事故中有110人遇难身亡。
The recorder is encased in a shoe box-size housing made out of thick, hardened steel, and on one end of the box,
黑匣子有如一个鞋盒大小，由厚重的钢铁制成，
there is a jagged hole, as if someone- or, rather,something- has driven a stake into it with tremendous force.
其中一端有一个齿形圆洞，好像有人或有硬物以很大的外力扎入。
Some of the NTSB investigators are engineers, who reconstruct crashed from the material evidence.Others are pilots.
可依据物证来还原事故现场的工程师、飞行员
A surprising number of them, though, are psychologists, whose job it is to listen to the cockpit recorder and reconstruct what was said and done by the flight crew in the final minutes before a crash.
以及让人意想不到的参与者——心理学家构成了NTSB的调查小组，他们的主要工作就是聆听黑匣子，还原飞行员在事故发生前几分钟的所作所为。
One of the NTSB's leading black-box specialist is a gangly fiftyish PhD psychologist named Malcolm Brenner,and Brenner was one of the investigators on the Korean Air crash in Guam.
NTSB负责调查黑匣子的专家组成员之一，是一位名叫麦肯·博瑞纳的心理学博士，他50多岁，身材瘦长，博瑞纳也是曾亲临关岛事故现场的调查人员之一。
"Normally that approach into Guam is not difficult," Brenner began.
“正常情况下，通过那条线路进入关岛并不难。”博瑞纳说。
Guam airport had what is called a glide scope, which is like a giant beam of light stretching up into the sky from the airport, and the pilot simply follows the beam all the way down to the runway.
关岛机场有跑道射灯，那就好比从机场射出一道巨型的光束照亮整个天空，飞行员可以很清楚地跟随光束进入跑道。
But on this particular night, the glide scope was down."It was out of service," Brenner said. "It had been sent to another island to be repaired.
“但是在那天晚上，跑道射灯坏了，”博瑞钠说，“跑道射灯被送到其他岛上进行维修。
So there was a notice to airman the glide scope was not operating."
因此机场人员向飞行员提示‘跑道射灯’无法正常运作。”
In the grand scheme of things, this should not have been a problem.
在众多程序中，这不是个大问题。
