The Crash Detectives

by Christine Negroni

  The 737 descended through the cloud cover in a level attitude and then quickly went nose high as it slammed into a number of homes, killing two residents inside one bungalow and forty-three people on board the airplane.

  Charles Colson, once special counsel to Nixon and another character who was jailed for his role in Watergate, would later tell Time magazine that Dorothy Hunt was murdered by the CIA. The charge remains alive among those of a conspiratorial bent. Yet as a murder plot, it falls short on the credibility scale.

  Too many people would have had to be involved to carry off a complex plan that also had to factor in the unforeseeable conditions that would lead to the plane’s speed getting away from the pilots. Murder by airplane is a concept more likely to succeed in crime fiction than in reality.

  In the movies, the bad guy tampers with the victim’s car, which then goes off a cliff. In aviation, however, sabotage must do more than create the failure mechanism; it must make sure it goes undetected while triggering the catastrophe at just the right time so that it can also penetrate a highly developed safety net. Short of commandeering the airplane and purposely crashing it, detonating a bomb, launching a missile, or setting a fire—all of which leave evidence in the wreckage—intentionally causing a crash is not so simple.

  “What’s possible and what’s not?” asks retired airline pilot and novelist John Nance, whose books sometimes feature crime at thirty-five thousand feet. He knows how tricky it is to come up with a credible murder plot where an airliner is the weapon. “The linchpin is predictability; how certain are you that A is going to produce B? That’s what you must have.”

  Parts can be tampered with to create a crime novel plot, such as slicing the brake line, but in aviation, the most capricious elements of all, according to Nance, are sitting at the front of the airplane. Pilots can rise to the challenge and save the day or they can founder and become another link in an unbroken chain to disaster. There are fascinating examples of both pilot heroics and failures, which you will read about later in this book. Yet rare is the would-be assassin who can orchestrate all the instruments of destruction in advance. Sometimes an air accident is just an accident. Other times, however, it is an enigma.

  A Diplomat Dies

  One thing investigators don’t expect to find on the scene of an air disaster is passengers with gunshot wounds. Yet two of the fifteen people on the plane with United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld had been shot, and that was just one of many surprising discoveries. There are various theories about what caused the plane to fly into the trees on a dark night in September 1961. It could have been an assassination or kidnapping plot or an attempted interception by mercenaries to divert Hammarskjöld from his peace mission. It could have been a mechanical problem or an error by the crew. Although the accident has been investigated four times, what really happened remains a mystery.

  The UN-chartered DC-6 was approaching the airport at Ndola, in Northern Rhodesia,1 during a violent interlude in the decolonialization of the Congo. The Belgians had ostensibly pulled out of the country, but in the resource-rich state of Katanga, European-backed mercenaries were still around supporting its attempt to secede from the Republic of the Congo.2 Hammarskjöld wanted a cease-fire between the mercenaries and the UN troops that were there to assist the Republic of the Congo. Stopping the violence was to be the first of a two-step effort to reverse Katanga’s secession. Because of their commercial interests in the region’s resources, Africa’s colonial powers, Belgium, Britain, and France, opposed the UN plan. The Americans had a different concern: in these Cold War days, certain factions in the U.S. government worried that the Soviet Union would take advantage of the turmoil in Africa to gain an advantage.

  So when Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash, it was like an Agatha Christie novel. There were plenty of suspects.

  Accompanying the secretary-general on the flight were two UN executives, four security officers, two soldiers, and a secretary. Six men, all Swedes, made up the flight crew.

  For security reasons, Hammarskjöld’s trip to Northern Rhodesia to meet with Katanga leader Moise Tshombe was hush-hush: The plane would follow a circuitous route. The crew would maintain radio silence, using only an emergency channel staffed by an operator communicating with them in their native Swedish.

  But if the Hammarskjöld visit was a secret, it was badly kept. Journalists, protesters, and mercenary pilots were waiting at the airport, along with Lord Cuthbert Alport, the region’s British high commissioner. Tshombe was there, too, under a special exception to the whites-only rule imposed in British-controlled Northern Rhodesia.

  The Swedish DC-6, known as Albertina, was on final approach to the Ndola Airport at around midnight on September 18. During the last bank, a wing hit the trees and then the ground not far from a twelve-foot anthill. The plane plowed into it and cartwheeled to the right. The still-spinning propellers on the right wing dispersed fifteen hundred gallons of fuel along a three-hundred-foot path as the plane slowed and came to rest. There was a fire on the ground, but it could not be determined when it started. Evidence, autopsies, and eyewitnesses offered conflicting information. The plane could have been on fire as it flew; it could have caught fire when it crashed; or the fire could have been rekindled after the crash. There was testimony to back up all three possibilities.

  The captain of the Albertina, Per Erik Hallonquist, had radioed the tower of his anticipated arrival at 12:20 a.m. Why the air traffic controller waited until 2:20 to issue an alert when the plane did not arrive is not clear. Maybe he was reassured by Lord Alport, who for some reason told the tower staff not to worry about the missing plane because Hammarskjöld had probably changed his plans.

  That night, John Ngongo and Safeli Soft were camping in the forest not far from the airport, tending a charcoal-making kiln. It was clear and sometime after 10:00 p.m., Ngongo said, when he and Soft saw a large aircraft fly overhead, followed by a smaller plane that sounded like a jet. The engine and the wings of the big plane were on fire, according to Ngongo. The two men got to the crash scene at dawn, where they found the plane smoldering and the body of a man, whom they later learned was Dag Hammarskjöld, lying apart from the plane, propped up against an anthill.

  Susan Williams, author of Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa, writes that the men went to Timothy Kankasa, the township secretary, to report what they had found. Kankasa went to the scene with them and returned to call the police. Kankasa said it was between 9:00 and 9:30 a.m., but it wasn’t until afternoon that he heard ambulances. By contrast, a number of other locals say they came upon the wreckage that morning and that it was surrounded by uniformed soldiers and police and cordoned off with red tape.

  Obviously, it couldn’t be both. The Federation of Rhodesia authorities’ story doesn’t match either of the bystanders’ accounts. The authorities said the plane wasn’t discovered until 3:15 p.m., fifteen hours after it crashed eight miles from the airport. The mysteries were multiplying.

  If Kankasa called the police in the morning, why did it take them so long to get to the site? If police were there early on, what were they doing and why was 3:15 p.m. given as the time of their arrival? These are not academic questions because there was a surprise in the middle of the charred wreckage: a survivor.

  Harry Julien, Hammarskjöld’s director of security, was suffering from first-and second-degree burns, sunburn, a fractured ankle, and a head injury, but he was very much alive. If the authorities had deliberately slowed getting him medical treatment, why?

  “We know that the crash was known; Timothy Kankasa reported it early on to the authorities, but nobody came,” Susan Williams told me. “The authorities knew about the crash. We know there were people there. We know the ambulances didn’t come.” The sun was blazing, it was September, and Julien had been suffering for fifteen hours.

  “I am Sergeant Harry Julien, security officer to the OUN,” he told his nurse at Ndola Hospital. “Please
inform Léopoldville of the crash. Tell my wife and kids I’m alive before the casualty list is published.”

  Harry Julien entered the hospital with a good prognosis, but six days later he succumbed to renal failure. A. V. (Paddy) Allen, the police inspector who accompanied Julien to the hospital, was surprised because he did not think Julien’s injuries were life-threatening, adding another odd element to an exceptionally odd case.

  In the ambulance, Julien shared details of the accident with Allen and later with hospital personnel. A tape recorder in his room was supposed to document what he said, but either the machine was not turned on or the tapes disappeared, because the reports contain only the brief statements Julien made to the police, the nurses, and physician Mark Lowenthal.

  “It blew up,” he said, when asked what happened as the plane was making its pass over the runway. “There was great speed. Great speed.”

  Officer Allen asked him, “What happened then?”

  “Then there was the crash,” Julien replied.

  Julien said the others were trapped on the plane. Autopsies showed they were all badly burned. This made it even more curious that Hammarskjöld’s body, untouched by fire, was outside the airplane when witnesses saw it. The diplomat could have been tossed out of the plane and away from the blaze on impact, or someone might have moved him.

  Hammarskjöld was not the only one found in an unexpected condition. One passenger was in the cockpit, an unusual place for him to have been on approach to landing, and then there were the two who had bullet wounds.

  The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry under the director of civil aviation concluded that the bullet wounds had to have been the result of fire detonating the ammunition being carried on the plane. The experts consulted by Williams for her book concluded that this was not possible. “Ammunition for rifles, heavy machine-guns and pistols cannot, when heated by fire, eject bullets with sufficient force for the bullets to get into a human body,” according to a Swedish explosives expert. Another said, “If bullets were found in the bodies of any of the victims of the air crash, they must have passed through the barrel of a weapon.”

  As to the cause of the crash itself, a dozen scenarios have been considered. In his book Disasters in the Air, Jan Bartelski weighs the theories and suggests one of his own.

  A nearly undamaged instrument panel from the captain’s position was found in the wreckage, and the static line to the altimeter was disconnected. In their report, the Rhodesian investigators discounted the significance of this, but Bartelski suggested that the bad instrument could have led the pilots to believe they were higher than they were as they approached the airport.

  As in my MH-370 theory, Bartelski acknowledges certain assumptions. His scenario is based on his experience flying the DC-6. According to Bartelski, Albertina was a DC-6B, which had an idiosyncratic pressurization system. It did not always depressurize on landing. On one occasion a crew member was blown out the door because of the positive pressure differential—in a situation like what happened to American Airlines purser José Chiu in Miami in 2000. For this reason, pilots flying the DC-6B depressurized the aircraft before landing, at an estimated two thousand feet.

  Capt. Per Erik Hallonquist arrived at the Ndola airport ten minutes earlier than he anticipated and had to make a steeper and faster descent than planned, dumping the cabin pressure at a higher altitude by opening the emergency pressure-release valve. This sudden, drastic change “could have had a catastrophic effect on the flexible line” to the altimeter, Bartelski writes. Getting from a separated static line to making the approach sixteen hundred feet too low involves a number of missteps, combined with design features unique to the DC-6 and certain laws of physics.

  “I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened that way; it could,” said Nick Tramontano, who piloted and worked on DC-6s during his career with Seaboard World Airlines.3 When I asked him to analyze the altimeter-gone-bad theory, he said he’d take a look and compare it with DC-6 maintenance manuals.

  Tramontano said that the pilot’s and first officer’s separate altimeters could have given the same and, in this case, incorrect altitude information if the captain switched the static source to alternate, the position in which the switch was found at the crash site.

  Bertelski writes that investigators were not as familiar with the specifics of the DC-6B as they should have been, which caused them to dismiss this important evidence in the wreckage.

  With the exception of Bertelski’s detailed explanation, nearly every other theory has a malevolent element, in keeping with the violent and chaotic last days of colonialism in central Africa. Mercenary pilots have confessed to, or boasted in public about, shooting down the plane. These comments were plausible. On the flight just before the one to Ndola, Albertina had been hit with machine-gun fire by Katangan forces in Elizabethville,4 and the damage repaired. People at the crash site saw holes in the fuselage consistent with weapons fire. The Rhodesian inquiry, however, concluded that shots to the plane would not have disabled the flight controls enough to cause it to crash.

  A separate team assembled by the United Nations was working at the same time as the Rhodesians. The UN team hired Max Frei-Shulzer, a Swiss microbiologist and forensic scientist, to answer the question of whether the plane had been attacked.

  Why Frei-Shulzer was hired is puzzling. His work with the Zurich Police Department involved handwriting analysis and lifting evidence from surfaces with tape—think fingerprints and fiber residue—but he had no expertise in aviation or metallurgy. His technique for settling the issue of whether bullets were in the fuselage consisted of melting down four thousand pounds of fused aluminum and looking for the presence of other metals. Bartelski describes it as “an extremely critical metallurgical process requiring accurate temperature control.” After Frei-Shulzer made soup of the plane, he said he could “exclude the possibility of hostile actions from the air and from the ground.” He also discounted sabotage.

  In 1962, the Rhodesian board of inquiry followed Frei-Shulzer’s lead, concluding that the crash was “probably due to human failure.” The complete discounting of overt action against the flight was not accepted by the UN then, or in its 2015 review. Yet these and other contradictions have been examined multiple times as people associated with the case have come forward with new information and as forensic technology advances. Still, some unexplored aspects of the accident cannot be reviewed half a century later.

  For example, it would not be possible to reconstruct some of the critical factors impacting the pilots’ performance, MacIntosh, the retired safety investigator, said. “The issue of making this nighttime approach, where everybody is looking out the window and nobody is looking at the altimeter, and you think you are flying level and you are not, those things are never going to be discussed.” After flying multiple missions in the Congo for the U.S. Air Force, MacIntosh left the area two weeks before the Hammarskjöld crash. His interest in what happened has not waned.

  Yet the person responsible for the most recent revival of the Hammarskjöld whodunit is not a scientist, aviation professional, or criminologist. Susan Williams is a British historian specializing in Africa. On every research trip to the continent, she would come across some thread of the mystery that begged to be pulled. And she pulled enough of these threads to weave her own complex tapestry that includes independent analysis of memos, witness statements, and photographs of the bodies. She makes a compelling case that during the conflict-ridden period marking the beginning of the end for colonialism in central Africa, what happened to the secretary-general was probably deliberate. The cover-up was possible only because the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was ruled by Britain, which was able to control every aspect of the investigation.

  National, racial, political, and commercial biases all played a role, she said. To try to extract those intrusions from what is supposed to be the objective work of air crash investigators would be like trying to reassemble the Albert
ina after it was boiled down by Frei-Shulzer.

  The Hammarskjöld Commission relied heavily on Susan Williams’s work Who Killed Hammarskjöld? when it prompted the United Nations to launch the fourth inquiry into the crash early in 2015. After a review of the evidence that lasted nearly a year, a three-member panel of experts made one small step forward when it ruled out an uncontrolled descent and, therefore, a midair explosion. Controlled flight into terrain was the most likely scenario, the panel said, based on the swath of downed trees along the final flight path and the wreckage distribution. This small advance does not explain what caused the pilots to fly the plane too low. Still, Williams finds it heartening.

  “The truth is starting to emerge, and I find it exciting,” Williams told me, adding optimistically, “It would be hard to imagine that a cover-up like this could happen now.”

  Susan, read on.

  The Dodge

  On either end of 1985, air safety agencies in Bolivia and Canada were thrust into one of America’s biggest political scandals when plane crashes in those countries were linked to wide-ranging Reagan administration programs to provide support to Nicaraguan rebels and arms to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair.

  American lives were lost on American-made airplanes operated by American airlines, but America’s air safety agencies did not participate in the investigations in a significant way, and a probable cause was not satisfactorily determined. Two books suggest cover-ups intended to hide the relationship of the airlines to secret and perhaps prohibited U.S. government activity.

  On December 12, 1985, a DC-8 operated by the Miami-based air charter company Arrow Air crashed fifteen seconds after take-off from Gander, Newfoundland. Two hundred fifty-six people were killed, most of them U.S. Army soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. The soldiers were on their way home for Christmas to the base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.