In his book Final Destination: Disaster, Jehn writes that between New Year’s and the FAA flight test a few weeks later, repairs had been made to the system. “A rep was there” from the company fixing things before the inspection, Jehn told me. “Of course it was going to pass.”
The first attempt to get investigators to the site came about five days after the crash, when helicopter pilot Rus Stiles took a Sikorsky Black Hawk over Mount Illimani. The helicopter was on loan from United Technologies. The company’s chief executive, Harry Gray, was a personal friend of Ambassador Arthur Davis, whose wife was killed in the disaster.
“All we could see was a cut in the snow that formed the shape of the wing,” Stiles told me. “The plane was so buried, I don’t remember any part of the airplane. I didn’t see the tail at all.” Stiles said he could hover, but landing or leaving people on the mountain was out of the question. Nearly a year would pass before investigators attempted to access the wreckage again.
Jehn read all the early news accounts and was struck by how many leads there were to follow: criminal, political, and operational. Initially, there was reason to suspect an in-flight explosion because people who lived nearby reported hearing “a roar of thunder” and seeing pieces of the plane falling from the sky. Another news story raised the possibility that Davis, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, might have been the target of an assassination attempt by the country’s military dictator, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner.
Ambassador Davis was scheduled to be on the flight with his wife, Marian, but changed plans at the last minute. Davis and Stroessner had a sometimes contentious relationship, and there was more: Paraguay was earning the ire of the U.S. government for its involvement in drug trafficking. Two months before the crash, the Americans slashed financial aid to Paraguay, and the bulk of the remaining three-million-dollar appropriation went to the Peace Corps. By coincidence (or maybe not), the director of the Peace Corps in Paraguay was also killed on Flight 980.
Eastern Airlines’ participation in the movement of illegal drugs also had to be considered relevant, Jehn said. The airline had been in the news for repeated violations of drug trafficking laws. Drugs had been seized twenty-two times on Eastern’s jets in 1984, and the contraband was always hidden in areas accessible only by aviation personnel. One pilot testified to a Senate committee during a hearing that he saw money being taken off planes at Eastern’s Panama hub.
Based on the stories pilots told him and also reported to the FBI in Miami, Jehn suggests that Eastern Airlines may have been assisting the Reagan administration’s clandestine effort to supply weapons to Nicaraguan rebels in the Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages, drugs-for-rebels, it-has-a-lot-of-names scandal that dominated the fortieth president’s second term from 1984 to 1988.
It wasn’t all political intrigue, though. Like the questionable integrity of the navigational aids at La Paz, Jehn and the ALPA (Air Line Pilots Association) pilots who were part of the probe discovered alarming facts related to human error. None of the three men in the cockpit that night had any experience flying in South America, with its high terrain and low-tech navigation facilities. Company policy required a check captain to supervise the first flight into the region, but not the second. This trip back to Miami was the pilot’s second flight; the supervising pilot was riding as a passenger.
Don McClure, an ALPA air safety pilot, flew a re-creation of Flight 980 and noted that the airline’s radio-based navigational system, called Omega, “continually steered the aircraft off course approximately five miles to the east,” or toward the direction of Mount Illimani. Jehn found errors on navigational charts.
Jehn’s interest in Eastern Flight 980 was professional: an airliner had crashed; colleagues were dead. Working separately on a parallel course was Judith Kelly, whose mission was more personal. William Kelly, her husband of sixteen years, was the Peace Corps director in Paraguay. He was traveling aboard Eastern 980 to Miami on business. Judith, who also worked for the Peace Corps, had stayed behind in Asunción. It didn’t take her long to realize that her government wasn’t pulling out all the stops to determine what had happened.
Six months after she was made a widow, Judith Kelly flew to Bolivia, hired a guide, and climbed Mount Illimani, arriving at nineteen thousand feet to the place where the wreckage of the plane was scattered. She took a few small pieces, left letters she had written to her husband, and climbed back down. Then she traveled to the United States and appeared on NBC’s Today show to talk about what she’d done and to challenge the NTSB to get up there and have a look. “I made it, a woman, on my own,” she explained to Jehn when the two met years later. Her message to the NTSB: certainly the U.S. government and Eastern airlines, with all their resources, could get up there and conduct a proper inquiry. She’d proven it could be done.
From her home in San Antonio, Texas, Alisa Vander Stucken, twenty-eight, watched Judith Kelly berate the NTSB on the morning news in the summer of 1985 and thought “it was awesome.” Her husband, Mark Louis Bird, was the second officer on Flight 980. Like Kelly, Vander Stucken was discouraged, and puzzled at the lack of progress in the probe. “I expected both the government and the airline to get down there and investigate and find out what happened,” she said. But after the crash faded from the news, Vander Stucken’s only source of information was in the letters and phone calls from Judith Kelly. “I think it’s pretty sad when a woman has to go up and try and do that for herself,” she said of Kelly’s hike up Mount Illimani, “instead of the airline or the government; the NTSB. I mean, that’s what they’re there for.”
In his book, Jehn claims that then NTSB chairman Jim Burnett, a Republican appointee of President Reagan who died in 2010, was accommodating the interests of the White House or Eastern or both with this perfunctory investigation. No one I spoke with who was associated with the NTSB then agrees with that conclusion. Peter Kissinger, the board’s managing director at the time, said he could not imagine why there would have been reluctance to look into the circumstances. “We truly live by the adage no stone unturned,” he told me.
Still, Jehn’s perception that Burnett was extremely political did square with that of others who spoke to me both on and off the record. Ron Schleede recalled disagreeing with Burnett over the handling of another accident investigation. “He wanted to have a hearing for some political reason,” and Schleede was opposed, he explained. Ultimately Schleede prevailed, but “Burnett was pissed,” the investigator said. “He said, ‘Okay, can we get Mr. Schleede reassigned to the railroad division?’” It sounded like a joke to me, but that’s not how Schleede saw it. “A lot of senior people left the NTSB because of Jim Burnett,” he said.
At the time of Flight 980, the NTSB did have a close relationship with Eastern. Burnett’s special assistant was a former Eastern pilot named John Wheatley. “Burnett, for some reason, he was really more in contact with Eastern than the other carriers,” said Tom Haueter, the former director of aviation safety at the NTSB. “Why that was, I don’t know, but it did seem to me that there were a lot of Eastern people around at the time.”
Eleven years after the crash, NTSB investigator5 Greg Feith told a meeting of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators that politics can drive a case in one direction or another. He knew about it firsthand because when the NTSB finally acted on Judith Kelly’s challenge, Feith was chosen to lead an expedition to the wreckage on Mount Illimani.
In late August 1985, quite out of the blue, Feith was part of an NTSB teleconference in which investigators were invited to volunteer to climb to nineteen thousand feet and look for the black boxes of the Boeing 727. Feith was just twenty-eight and new at the job. He lived in Denver, at an altitude of five thousand feet. His workouts kept him in good shape, and included hiking in the Rockies. Recognizing it would be good for his career, he volunteered to go. More experienced investigators had also stepped up, but it was Feith who was selected. Feith didn’t know that the agency’s interest in the accident had been dorma
nt, but he knew the NTSB was being pestered by Judith Kelly.
The first indication that something was not right with his assignment was the timing. The climbing season, May to September, was over. It had been ten months since the crash, but all of a sudden it was rush, rush, rush. “It was thrown together at the last minute.” Feith told me he was notified on September 25, arrived in DC on October 1 to plan the trip, and left for La Paz on October 2. “There wasn’t a lot of planning time. It was more or less, ‘You’ve got the go-ahead. See ya.’”
Feith was joined by two engineers from Boeing, Jim Baker and Al Errington, and two representatives of ALPA, pilot Mark Gerber and his brother Allen, who was not a pilot. The four men were experienced climbers. Royce Fichte, a diplomat at the American embassy in La Paz, and Feith would follow their lead and that of their professional guide, Bernardo Guarachi, who took Kelly up Illimani in June and had been the first to inspect the crash site on foot, in January, at the request of Col. Grover Rojas, the Bolivian air force’s director of rescue operations.
The men had little time to acclimate even to the twelve-thousand-foot altitude of La Paz, and the lack of preparation was apparent immediately. The climb began on October 8 and was beset with problems. Errington succumbed to altitude sickness first, so he and Baker did not go on. The Gerber brothers, Fichte, and Feith continued up the mountain, but then Mark Gerber fell ill and Fichte also began to deteriorate. Feith made it to the crash site, but said he had just hours there to dig around in the snow. Though he found the plane’s tail section, where the flight and data recorders should have been, he did not see the black boxes. Fearing for the health of the team, the group started back down the mountain to La Paz the following morning.
It was a frustrating experience. Errington suggests that the men were too eager, especially the experienced climbers. “We guided the team through youthful overexuberance,” he told me. They were feeling good enough to push forward instead of remaining cautious. “We should have gone slower, and we realized it, but we really wanted to get things done. We could have slowed things down, but we didn’t.”
The Gerber brothers interpret the time pressure and the assortment of other planning and support blunders as a deliberate campaign to foil them. “The whole situation was rather bizarre,” Mark Gerber said. “Looking back, we were there to do a job, yes, but it was a sham.” The Gerbers agreed with Jehn. “There were political games going on,” Gerber said.
Supporting their suspicion is this: even before the climbers left for La Paz, the Bolivian Board of Inquiry on Accidents and Incidents had written its report. It had been submitted on September 4, and concluded that “the accident was apparently caused by the aircraft’s deviation from its airway.” It was a statement of the obvious that didn’t include any of the information the NTSB had gathered. Of course it was a deviation from the airway—the airway didn’t cut through the mountain. The question was why the plane was where it should not have been. If there was any effort made to find the answer, it wasn’t in the report. The issues raised by McClure, the findings of O’Rourke, the reports of eyewitnesses—none of that made it in, either.
Considering how much information has come from armchair investigators, it is fitting that after thirty-one years, two adventurers from Boston should be the ones to claim to have discovered pieces of the black boxes. In May 2016, Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner climbed Mount Illimani to a field of debris where they found uniforms, engines, human remains, and fragments of orange metal. On their return to the U.S., Stoner posted on the internet site Reddit, “There’s a smashed up flight recorder on my kitchen counter!” Michael Poole, once the head of Canada’s flight recorder laboratory, said data might be recoverable even after all this time. Even so, the NTSB had no plans to reexamine an accident that was the responsibility of the Bolivians, a spokesman said.
The inconclusive conclusion of the Bolivians is the only official record of a crash that was in every way an American catastrophe, just as Arrow Air had been. Just as with Arrow Air, the NTSB was satisfied to let the Bolivians have the only and final word.
In his role as chief international aviation affairs officer for the NTSB from 1988 to 2011, Robert MacIntosh navigated the complex and often delicate relationships between governments. Even he was surprised at the noticeable lack of interest in pursuing the safety and security lapses exposed by the parties looking into the crash of Eastern 980. “It’s not typical, and that’s about all I can say.”
Around Christmas 1985, as the first anniversary of the crash approached, a journalist asked the NTSB investigator in charge, John Young, about Flight 980. “Any secrets about the crash are buried beneath snow at an elevation where excavation is virtually impossible,” he said.
Young, who died in 2005, might as well have written the script for many investigations to come, including MH-370, where reliance on recovering the airplane is so great that even the Royal Malaysian Police can’t make progress without it. When asked for the status of the police probe into the disappearance of MH-370, Inspector-General Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar replied, “I’m not at liberty to reveal” any news “until at an official inquiry when the black boxes are discovered.”
While everyone agrees that having the airplane is nice, not all investigations are so neatly presented. Without ever leaving his desk, George Jehn came up with enough clues to write a book filled with possibilities. Investigators never know what they’re going to find when they start asking questions and digging through records. And before they give up, first they have to try.
Snow Job
Of all the air accidents linked to political intrigue, the Air New Zealand Flight 901 disaster over Antarctica seems the most incredible. Featuring lies, manipulation, document shredding, and burglary and set in one of the world’s most inhospitable places, it is a tale worthy of any tinfoil hat–wearing conspiracy theorist, except that it is true.
In 1977, long before cruise lines started offering tours of Antarctica, Qantas and Air New Zealand inaugurated one-day sightseeing trips through which adventure seekers could spend a day on a first-class aerial tour. Antarctica and back in just one day—who wouldn’t want to take that flight? On Air New Zealand, the flights were scheduled during the near-twenty-four-hour days of the austral summer on a McDonnell Douglas wide-body DC-10.
From altitudes as low as fifteen hundred feet, passengers could see the Ross Ice Shelf; McMurdo Sound; New Zealand’s scientific and industrial research center at Scott Base; the Americans’ McMurdo Station, with its ice airfield; and even expedition sled dogs and indigenous emperor penguins. Most impressive was the still-active Erebus Volcano, the twelve-thousand-foot-high exclamation point of Ross Island.
These weekly trips were conducted only one month a year, so there was not much opportunity for pilots to gain experience in this unusual environment. Of the eleven flights between February 1977 and November 1979, only one captain had flown to Antarctica more than once.
It was considered a plum assignment. Management pilots handled most trips, often with VIP guests of Air New Zealand or journalists on board. So line pilot Capt. Jim Collins was surprised to be rostered on the flight on November 28, 1979. Flying with Collins would be first officers Greg Cassin and Graham Lucas and flight engineers Nick Moloney and Gordon Brooks. Brooks was the only one of the five who had flown an Air New Zealand Antarctic flight before. For the others, their first “Antarctic Experience” would be this one.
Shortly after arriving over the ice, the jumbo jet slammed into Mount Erebus, instantly killing all 257 people on board. At the time, it was unfathomable that the experienced airmen would descend into this well-known high terrain. Yet that shocking event was eclipsed by what happened next. The airline figured out how the plane happened to be over Mount Erebus; it was a terrible, tragic data entry error, as simple as it was unintentional. Rather than confess, however, the people at Air New Zealand decided to hide the truth by incriminating the pilots.
When Captain Collins made the decision to desc
end from sixteen thousand to six thousand feet to give his passengers a better view of Antarctica, he was confident that he was approaching the continent over McMurdo Sound, a forty-milewide expanse of water that ended at landfall at the McMurdo waypoint.
He and the two first officers thought this because it was the route they had been shown at a mandatory preflight briefing nineteen days earlier. It was also the route Collins and Cassin flew at the flight simulation session that followed, according to the testimony of two other pilots who attended the session with them.6 The night before the crash, Captain Collins, a bit of a cartography nerd, sat in the dining room of his home in Auckland with his daughters and showed them the path he would fly, moving to the living room floor when one of the maps proved to be too big for the table. He pointed out to his two elder daughters, Kathryn, sixteen, and Elizabeth, fourteen, the mountains of Victoria Land, about twenty-five miles to the west of his overwater course, and Mount Erebus, twenty-seven miles to the east.
When Collins checked in at Auckland Airport the following day, however, the information given him to program the flight plan into the plane’s inertial navigation system had been altered. In an attempt to correct a data entry error made fourteen months earlier, Air New Zealand changed by two degrees of latitude a waypoint on the routing. Rather than approach the continent over the flat terrain of McMurdo Sound, the plane would fly directly over Mount Erebus, the twelve-thousand-foot volcano. Even though this made for a very different flight path, the crew was not notified of the change.
Neither the captain nor the first officers would have noticed the difference just looking at the numbers, which are latitude and longitude coordinates for a series of waypoints between Auckland and the continent of Antarctica. The pilots would have had to pull out maps and cross-check the routing to catch the switch, which they had no reason to do. They had been briefed on the route and had practiced it in the simulator. That was the purpose of their November 9 session, and that is what Captain Collins had reviewed so intently the night before.
The Crash Detectives Page 10
