The Mystery of Flight 427

by Bill Adair

  There had long been a culture clash between Boeing and ALPA that was rooted in the starkly different styles of engineers and pilots. Boeing engineers existed in a black-and-white world of data. In their view, if you got enough data, you could do anything—build a perfect wing, design a better engine, or fix a faulty part. But they were perplexed by the macho personalities of the pilots who flew their creations. It didn’t help that in 1955 test pilot Tex Johnston shocked Boeing’s top brass by making a risky barrel roll in a prototype of the 707 in front of thousands of people. Boeing president William Allen was furious that a pilot had endangered the plane and so many people with such a daredevil maneuver. The engineers also resented ALPA’s long fight to get a third pilot in the 737 cockpit. The union said the third pilot was needed for safety, but officials at Boeing and the airlines saw it as a blatant attempt to get more people on the payroll.

  On the other hand, pilots complained that the Boeing engineers didn’t appreciate them. The pilots felt they had a trait that couldn’t be measured on any chart: courage. They—not some beady-eyed engineer with a slide rule in his pocket—were responsible for hundreds of lives every day. When a pilot shot a tight approach into La Guardia on a snowy night, all the data in the world would not make the wheels touch down safely unless the pilot knew what he was doing. The engineers had no equations that mentioned guts.

  In Hopewell, it was clear that Boeing and ALPA were rival teams. They were cordial with each other, but they didn’t mix much. Cox found that the Boeing investigators rarely spoke up and always traveled in packs. When everybody else got together for breakfast or dinner, the Boeing guys would go off on their own. Cox jokingly called Boeing a black hole—information went in, but it didn’t come out.

  6. THE GLOW FROM THE HILL

  In the first few days after the crash, members of the CVR team listened to the cockpit tape many times. The team quickly identified most of the sounds on the tape, such as the snap of a shoulder harness, clicks from the elevator trim wheel, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the stickshaker. But there were a few thumps they could not identify. They listened to the sounds hundreds of times but could not recognize them. The thumps were muted and did not seem to originate from the metal fixtures of the cockpit. It was time for some experiments.

  On September 11, three days after the crash, members of the CVR team arrived at Washington National Airport and walked to a gate where a silver USAir plane was parked. Their goal was to record a variety of sounds on the plane’s CVR to see if they matched the thumps from Flight 427.

  Sounds on cockpit tapes were often as valuable as the pilots’ words. Investigators could calculate engine thrust from the distinctive hum of a jet engine. They could determine runway speed by counting clicks heard as the plane’s nose wheel ran over embedded lights. Sounds could be displayed on a graph like a fingerprint, with squiggly lines representing volume or pitch. By taking a fingerprint of a mysterious sound and comparing it with one from a known sound, investigators could look for a match.

  Al Reitan, a voice recorder specialist with the NTSB, came to the airport with Mike Carriker, a Boeing test pilot, and Paul Sturpe, a USAir pilot. The silver plane at the gate was the same model as the accident airplane, a 737–300, with the same type of cockpit voice recorder. They turned on the plane’s auxiliary power unit to provide electricity to the CVR and began a series of tests.

  They tried to imagine what might have happened in the cockpit to cause the thumps. They flipped switches and yanked on levers. They dropped notebooks on the floor and turned the trim wheel. They fiddled with the clip that held pilot checklists. They pulled on the flap handle and triggered the stick-shaker. They stomped their feet in the doorway and in the first-class galley.

  Then they returned to the NTSB offices at L’Enfant Plaza and used a computer to draw the fingerprints. The strange thumps from the original Flight 427 tape showed up as dark spikes, like a fingerprint of a burglar. All they needed was a match.

  They ran the new tape through the computer. The stomps and slams from the test also showed up on the screen as spikes. But they were distinctly different from the mysterious thumps on Flight 427. The fingerprints did not match.

  Brett felt restless and overwhelmed by all the people who had stopped by to offer their condolences. At one point there were thirty or forty people crowded in his parents’ house, all with good intentions, but Brett couldn’t take it anymore. He needed to get out of there. He wanted to visit the crash site and say a final farewell to Joan.

  USAir had said he could probably see the site and that he might be needed to identify Joan’s body. So Brett, his mother Bonnie Van Bortel, Joan’s brother Dan Lahart, and Brett’s friend Craig Wheatley had piled into his mother’s Jeep Cherokee and driven to Pittsburgh. Brett couldn’t concentrate on the road, so his mom and Craig took over the driving. As they arrived in Hopewell Township, the hill where Joan had died now glowed a brilliant white, lights ringing it like a crown. It almost looked beautiful.

  “Craig, can you pull over?” he asked. They stopped about two hundred yards from the exit for Green Garden Road. Brett got out, knelt in the asphalt by the guardrail, and said a long prayer.

  He was numb that weekend, still trying to make sense of the fact that Joan was gone. Everywhere he went, he carried a crystal frame with their wedding photograph that he had picked up on the way out of the house. Joan looked beautiful in the photo, with her hair pulled back, a perfect smile, and her hand resting gently on Brett’s arm. But the picture called attention to his loss. When he checked into a downtown hotel where USAir had rooms for the families, the bellman saw the picture.

  “Did you know someone in the crash?” he asked.

  “My wife.”

  Suddenly Brett was a celebrity, but for all the wrong reasons.

  USAir was paying for the hotel rooms, meals, and other expenses. The company had offered to fly Brett and his family to Pittsburgh, but the last thing he wanted to do was fly, especially in a USAir plane. At the hotel, he met the airline employee who was assigned to be his liaison during his stay. A saleswoman for USAir, she seemed poorly trained and unprepared for the job. When they met, she broke down and cried.

  Brett told her that he respected anyone who would volunteer for such a difficult job, but over the next two days, he realized that she was clueless. She rode around in a white limo and couldn’t remember the hotel where she was staying. She had a cellular phone so Brett could get in touch with her anytime, but the battery was dead and she did not know how to charge it. She kept flipping through legal pads, reciting directions from her bosses, but she was unable to answer his most basic questions if they weren’t addressed by the instructions on the pads. She seemed more interested in the airline’s needs than in Brett’s. The only time she seemed animated was when he mentioned talking to the media. “You can talk to the media,” she told him, “but we’d advise against it because you’re going through a period of grieving.”

  She tried to explain how they were going to identify the bodies, using a grid system to locate the body parts. But Brett didn’t want to hear about it. “Great,” he said. “I’m glad you’re getting a little science lesson out of it while there are pieces of my wife laying up in that hillside.”

  USAir had reversed itself. There would be no visit to the site and no opportunity to look at Joan’s body. Instead, USAir asked him to send books and perfume bottles that might have her fingerprints.

  Airlines had a long tradition of helping families after a crash. The companies believed it was the compassionate thing to do and also was good for public relations. Most airlines assigned an employee to be a liaison with each family and paid for the family’s travel, funeral expenses, and many other costs. The airlines bought meals, made mortgage payments, and occasionally even paid a speeding ticket for a grieving family member.

  Critics said there was an ulterior motive for the corporate kindness. The airlines could collect a dossier on the victims that could be used in court to fight for
smaller awards. If the airline learned that a victim had a drug problem, for example, it might convince a jury to reduce the amount of the award because the victim would have had a shorter life expectancy. But the airlines insisted that their family coordinators were to help grieving relatives, not to ferret out details about the victim.

  Some airlines were better prepared for a crash than others were. They had thick notebooks that spelled out how they should respond minute by minute, and they offered special training for employees who worked with the victim’s family. But not USAir. It was caught unprepared for the Hopewell crash, even though it had just handled the Charlotte accident two months earlier and had had three other crashes within the previous five years. No airline had as much experience with crashes in the 1990s as USAir did, but the company still seemed bewildered about what to do. USAir’s director of consumer affairs had written a plan to revamp the response for families and establish special training for the airline coordinators, but the plan had not yet been approved by top executives when the Hopewell crash occurred. As a result, Flight 427 families experienced a wide range of responses from the airline. Some said their USAir coordinators were compassionate and organized. Others, like Brett, thought they were ill prepared and insensitive.

  To make matters worse, Brett and his family had to deal with the news media. They had been badgered by reporters the day after the crash, but Brett had refused to talk. A TV news crew tailed him as he drove from his parents’ house to his home in Lisle and then ran up to him in his yard. He told the reporter to leave. “I can’t do this right now,” he said. Another reporter was rude when the family declined to talk, but he eventually left.

  The reporters were engaged in a painful ritual that follows a tragic death, whether the death results from a plane crash, a car accident, or a tornado. Reporters disliked the practice as much as the families did, but the stories were an expected part of news coverage after any disaster. They put a face on the tragedy. In newsrooms all over the country, editors studied the Flight 427 passenger list for anyone from their area. If they found someone, it gave them a stake in the crash.

  A reporter was then assigned to find out everything possible about that victim. The assignment meant checking clips in the newspaper’s library to see if the victim had been in the news, looking at land records to see what the victim owned, and researching court records to see if the victim had ever been arrested or sued. Such inquiries might sound insensitive, but those sources were all public records, and they spoke volumes about the victim’s life. The reporters used city directories and called neighbors, who usually had nice things to say about the victim. The Chicago Tribune’s story was headlined CHICAGOANS MOURN THEIR OWN. It quoted an unnamed relative of Joan’s saying that she “loved life. She was only going to be gone for a day. Just a day.”

  Most reporters dreaded knocking on the door of a widower’s house and handled the task with sensitivity. Many families were willing to talk. It was their chance to commemorate the person they loved. If families preferred not to say anything, most reporters left politely. A few, however, were so intent on getting a tearjerker of a story and beating the competition that they were rude. After the ValuJet crash in 1996, TV camera crews hid in the bushes in a hotel parking lot and then jumped out when they spotted a distraught family. After the crash of TWA Flight 800, a reporter for a New York tabloid posed as a relative of a victim to get inside the hotel where the families were staying.

  On Sunday, September 11, Brett sat in a front pew at St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church in Moon, Pennsylvania, for a service to honor the victims. One hundred thirty-two candles burned on the altar, one for each person on the plane. Brett’s mother gave his hand a comforting squeeze. He clutched the wedding picture to his chest through much of the service, but occasionally tipped it down to look at Joan. At one point, a tear streamed from his cheek and splashed on the picture.

  TV cameras were clustered at the back of the church, trying to capture the grief, but Brett didn’t give them much thought. Then, midway through the service, the priest encouraged the congregation to greet people sitting nearby. When Brett turned to a woman sitting behind him, she shook his hand but looked away nervously.

  When the service ended, a different woman sitting beside Brett introduced herself and said her brother was killed in the crash.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, hugging her. “It’s so easy to forget about everybody else who lost, too.”

  “I’ll pray for you, if you’ll pray for me,” she said.

  “I will, I will pray for you,” Brett said. “I won’t forget.”

  As Brett left, he stopped and did an interview with a TV reporter. But he never spoke to the woman behind him, who had turned away when he went to greet her. The next day, when he picked up the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he was amazed to see the paper had printed his entire conversation with the sister of the victim. The woman behind Brett had been a reporter, writing down every word, yet she never identified herself.

  The next day, Monday, September 12, was Brett’s birthday. Days earlier, he and Joan had talked about going out to dinner to celebrate. But now he was in Market Square in downtown Pittsburgh for another memorial service. About five thousand people packed into the square, a big turnout that was a testament to USAir’s large presence in the city. Brett sat in one of the front rows, beside a man from the Salvation Army. As they sang hymns, Brett couldn’t help but notice the guy’s voice. He had the worst singing voice Brett had ever heard. Brett chuckled a little and for just a moment felt a break from the relentless sadness.

  Brett had never been much of a churchgoer—he believed you did not have to go to church to have religious faith—but he was comforted by the two services. He believed that God occasionally sent you a sign. During the service, a big jet passed overhead, its shadow racing over the crowd. Brett thought it was a sign that Joan was going to be okay.

  Within minutes of the crash, reporters began calling USAir’s Arlington headquarters to ask if the airline was unsafe. The company seemed to have all the warning signs. It had been in deep financial trouble, losing $2.5 billion since its merger with Piedmont Airlines in 1989. It was under pressure to cut costs to compete with more efficient airlines that were charging rock-bottom fares. And now it had had its fifth crash in five years.

  “For USAir, this is Apocalypse Now,” Gerald Myers, author of a book on corporate crises, told the Charlotte Observer. “This is more than a slippery slope for them; it’s a cliff. They’re getting themselves in the same position that Exxon got in with the Valdez or A. H. Robins with the Dalkon Shield.”

  USAir’s financial problems had prompted the FAA to beef up inspections two years earlier. But the day after the Flight 427 crash, FAA administrator David Hinson said his agency had not found any serious problems. “We deem [the airline] to be safe,” Hinson said. “In fact, this afternoon I will be flying on USAir.”

  At a press conference in Pittsburgh, USAir chairman Seth Schofield was swamped with questions about the airline’s safety record. He said the five crashes were not connected in any way.

  “If I thought USAir was an unsafe airline, I would put the entire fleet on the ground until any problems were corrected,” Schofield said. (That is the standard response from an airline chief when his company’s safety record is challenged. ValuJet president Lewis Jordan used nearly identical words after the 1996 crash in the Everglades.)

  In a message posted on company bulletin boards, Schofield warned his employees to be ready for rough times. “In the coming days, you will surely hear and read comments in the media and elsewhere that will offend and hurt you. I encourage you to lean on each other for support and, in doing so, you will strengthen each other.”

  The New York Times asked statisticians if USAir’s safety record was worse than those of other airlines. Most agreed that plane crashes were random events that had no connection with a particular airline. But Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was quo
ted as saying, “If you got on a random USAir flight in the 1990s, your chances of being killed are nine times as high as if you got on a flight of any other airline.”

  The hemorrhage had begun. USAir’s bookings fell drastically over the weekend.

  The dream of every accident investigator was to find the Golden BB. That was the NTSB nickname for some tiny piece of wreckage that instantly explained why a plane crashed. There were just a few Golden BBs in aviation history—a disk from a jet engine that broke apart and caused the crash of a United Airlines jet in 1989, and a latch on a DC-10 cargo door that caused a Paris crash in 1974. But usually investigators had to be plodding and methodical, eliminating one theory after another until they zeroed in on the real culprit. It typically took several weeks before investigators knew the cause, but the NTSB usually took twelve to eighteen months to officially complete a case.

  That wasn’t fast enough for the news media. Reporters were ruthlessly competitive and eager for scoops, which meant they couldn’t wait until the safety board completed its report. In the Flight 427 case, they began speculating about the cause before the NTSB even got to the scene, calling pilots, trial lawyers, and former safety board members and asking them about previous accidents involving the plane. The Seattle Times and the Dallas Morning News both pointed out that the 737’s rudder system had been under scrutiny because of a possible flaw in a hydraulic valve that could make the rudder go the wrong direction. The NTSB frowned on that kind of speculation, preferring to make its own pronouncements as it discovered the evidence, but reporters were merely doing in public what Haueter and his team were doing behind closed doors.