by Bill Adair
The hunger for information about a crash dates back to the first aviation fatality involving the Wright brothers’ plane. Reporters swarmed onto the field at Fort Myer seconds after the crash and ignored requests to move back until the army sent in soldiers on horses that practically trampled the reporters. As recently as the 1980s, reporters were allowed to visit crash sites, stepping over wreckage and dead bodies. But the proliferation of Action News and Eyewitness News and twenty-four-hour cable news channels led to such intense coverage that crash sites are now quickly roped off and reporters are herded as far away as possible. The NTSB typically gives only one or two briefings a day, a short one in the early afternoon and a more detailed one about 7 or 8 P.M.
The NTSB briefings were like a high-stakes game of Twenty Questions. The NTSB stuck to the facts, explaining the evidence without putting it in context. Reporters had to read between the lines and figure out which tidbits were truly important. The game was especially difficult for new reporters, because the NTSB representatives often spoke in jargon, leaving many journalists dumbfounded about what it meant. A handful of aviation reporters from the major newspapers and TV networks knew how to play the game, but most people at the nightly briefings were local journalists who had never dealt with the safety board.
The NTSB’s Aviation Investigation Manual warned about the press. It said investigators should be careful about using cellular phones because reporters might intercept the calls. It said the investigator in charge “should be aware that reporters will be looking to him/her for body language or facial expressions during the Member’s briefing and should, therefore, maintain as neutral an expression as possible.” The manual also gave advice on what to say when reporters asked speculative questions: “Rely on tried and true phrases such as ‘That is one of the many things we will be looking at’; ‘It is much too early to tell as this point’; ‘Right now we are not ruling anything out.’”
The first day in Hopewell, someone had leaked to reporters a copy of the air traffic control transcript. Haueter was angry that it was leaked, because it was not the FAA’s official transcript (which would not be done for days, after every voice had been identified), and it might contain errors. But as he expected, the transcript dominated the news coverage, along with the preliminary information he released from the flight data recorder.
The second day, investigators on the hill found suspicious parts from the thrust reversers, the engine doors that open when a plane lands. These devices reverse the jet blast to slow the plane on the runway. If a thrust reverser opened in flight, it would be catastrophic, like slamming on the brakes on one side of a car. The 737’s engines had safety locks that were supposed to prevent the reversers from activating until the plane was on the runway, but workers on the hill had found evidence that they might have deployed. Also, the workers could not find key pieces that usually locked the reversers in place. At his nightly meeting with investigators at the Holiday Inn, Haueter recounted the findings but warned them not to jump to conclusions.
“Let’s not focus just on this thrust reverser,” he said. He was skeptical about the theory because it did not match the flight recorder, which showed the plane’s engines at idle just before it plunged from 6,000 feet. Also, the fact that it was the right reverser did not match the data that showed the plane rolling to the left. The Boeing investigators urged Haueter not to tell the press because the evidence was incomplete. But Haueter and Vogt decided they should tell reporters everything they had, regardless of whether it was incomplete. If they didn’t mention the reversers at the briefing, the news would probably leak out anyway. (The NTSB was notorious for leaking to the press. Peter Goelz, the agency’s managing director in the late 1990s, joked that the NTSB’s official seal should have an eagle clutching a sieve.)
That night at the briefing, Vogt explained the discovery but cautioned reporters that the reversers could have popped out when the plane struck the ground. The press dove for the story, THE CAUSE? MAYBE THE ENGINE, said a headline in the St. Petersburg Times, THRUST REVERSER SUSPECTED IN USAIR JETLINER CRASH/DEVICE COULD HAVE CAUSED NOSE DIVE, said the Houston Chronicle.
But the next day the thrust reverser theory unraveled. Investigators found locks that showed the reverser doors were closed when the plane hit. The first cause du jour had been ruled out.
Amid all the chaos, Haueter tried to account for every piece of the plane. Nearly all of the wreckage seemed to be on the hill, but a few pieces were turning up elsewhere. A passenger’s business card and some light insulation from the plane were found two and a half miles downwind from the hill. Could that mean the plane had exploded in flight? Clark, an expert on airplane performance, sat down with his laptop computer and launched a program he’d written called WINDFALL. The program used information about wind and the plane’s flight path to estimate where wreckage might have fallen. It said that if pieces had fallen from the plane, they would probably be behind the shopping center.
On September 14, an army of more than 150 volunteers, search-and-rescue team members, and NTSB employees gathered in the parking lot at Green Garden Plaza to start a massive search in the triangle-shaped area that WINDFALL had identified. For several hours, the team members crawled through bushes, waded through creeks, and peeked in backyards.
One volunteer, a USAir flight attendant, paddled a rowboat to the middle of a pond to investigate a mysterious object floating on the water, only to find it was insulation from a building. Another volunteer found something that looked like a rocket in someone’s backyard. It was rushed back to the FAA’s bomb expert, who determined that it was a spare part for a home furnace. Searchers in a helicopter spotted a suspicious panel hanging in a tree and a ground team hurried to find it, but it turned out to be a “DuckTales” kite.
When the search ended, the only items found away from the hill were insulation and light debris that had been carried in the hot plume of smoke. Once again, it looked as if the big jet was intact until it struck the hill.
At his press briefing, Haueter recounted the search. He said USAir employees in Chicago reported nothing unusual about the flight. Engine bolts in the wreckage were cracked, but those cracks probably occurred when the plane hit the ground. The plane’s logbook showed no problems with Ship 513. They had not found the Golden BB.
7. ZIPLOC BAGS
Dave Supplee was accustomed to seeing 737s taken apart. A USAir mechanic on the overnight shift in Tampa, Florida, he could fix anything on a plane—radios, hydraulic pumps, even the cranky APU generators that always seemed to be breaking down. Supplee, thirty-six, was a safety official with his union, the International Association of Machinists, and was on call anytime there was an accident involving a USAir plane. An hour after the Hopewell crash, he got a call from John Goglia, the union’s accident coordinator. “Let me warn you now,” Goglia said in his thick Boston accent, “this one is not pretty. There is total destruction of the aircraft.” Two years earlier, Supplee had worked on another USAir crash, Flight 405 at LaGuardia, but that scene wasn’t nearly as gruesome as the one in Hopewell.
Supplee was an ideal member for the NTSB’s structures group because he could identify the mangled parts lying on the ground and hanging in the trees. “Yeah, this is your air-conditioning bypass valve,” he said. “This is your hydraulic pump.” His group painted lines for a grid to keep track of the wreckage, so they could look for patterns in where the items landed.
When he first arrived at the scene, dressed in his white rubber suit, Supplee felt a sudden emptiness, as if all the life had been drained from the area. He tried not to think about the carnage around him. When he saw a hand or a foot lying on the ground, he called the coroner’s team over. They tagged it, noted the location with a colored flag, and then put it in a one-gallon Ziploc freezer bag. As the week wore on, the foot-high red and yellow flags sprouted everywhere, like survey markers at a construction site. Initially, red flags were supposed to designate body parts and yellow ones, wreckage. But there were
so many body parts that they quickly ran out of red and had to use flags of all colors. It was a strange sight—a rainbow of flags flapping in the wind, an unintended memorial to one of the most gruesome air crashes in U.S. history.
Late one afternoon Supplee was assigned to find the plane’s cargo doors. There was a theory that one of them might have blown out in flight, so Haueter wanted to know if they were all on the hill. A coroner’s team had been working with Supplee’s group, picking up body parts, but the coroners had stopped for the day. Just after the team walked away, Supplee discovered pieces of door trim. Figuring that the rest of the door was buried just below the surface, he and other members of the structures group dug into the rocky soil.
When they pulled up the door, they found a woman’s arm partially covered by the navy blue sleeve of a flight attendant’s uniform. Right beside the arm was a purse. An ALPA investigator opened the purse and found the woman’s passport and wallet. He opened the wallet and saw the cheerful picture of April Lynn Slater, one of the flight attendants. Suddenly death on the hill wasn’t anonymous anymore.
Supplee looked around in hopes that someone from the coroner’s team was still nearby, but they were all gone. It was late afternoon now and everyone was leaving. Supplee realized he would have to leave the arm on the hill for the night. It bothered him that it would be left behind in the darkness until the coroners retrieved it the next day.
A few hours later at the nightly progress meeting, he broke down crying when he told the investigators from the flight attendants union what he had found. When he returned to his hotel room, Supplee called his mother and told her about the horror of the site. She couldn’t understand why he had volunteered for the job. “Why are you there?” she asked. “Why are you putting yourself through this?”
“I just couldn’t imagine not being here,” he said. “I have to do this.” He felt he was making a contribution to safety. That was the paradox about the whole ordeal. Crashes made flying safer.
Many investigators coped with the horror by building imaginary walls. Instead of looking at the body parts scattered around the site, they focused on the wreckage. Haueter told them, “Concentrate on metal, not on people.” Supplee followed that advice but found that he still got upset at the end of the day, when he went back to his hotel room and collapsed on the bed. He would turn on the TV, hoping to forget about the crash, but it would be on every channel.
As the hill got soaked by storms and then baked in the sun, it took on the horrible odor of rotting flesh. Many investigators put cologne, orange juice, or Vicks VapoRub on their surgical masks to counteract the stench. Haueter put a sweet-smelling ointment called Tiger Balm in his moustache.
Supplee was haunted by the sharp smell of bleach. Each time the investigators left the crash site, they had to scrub their hands in a bleach solution to wash away any germs that might be present in the body parts. Supplee then washed his hands with soap to get rid of the bleach smell, but it would not go away. He smelled it every time he put a forkful of food in his mouth, every time he brushed his teeth. The Clorox seemed to be deep in his pores. He took shower after shower, but the smell lingered, triggering flashbacks of the carnage on the hill.
John Cox’s biggest emotional challenge was picking through the cockpit. It was as if someone had destroyed the office where he worked every day. He did not know Emmett or Germano, but they were all part of the pilot brotherhood. Cox found skull fragments and parts of the pilots’ brains on the autopilot panel, but he did not get emotional. He also found a finger with a ring still attached, but even that didn’t bother him. The tragedy did not affect him until he pulled away a thicket of wiring and found Emmett’s epaulets, the shoulder stripes that pilots wear to denote whether they are a captain or a first officer. The epaulets were still attached to Emmett’s shirt, which was splattered with mud.
“One of ours,” Cox said sadly. They had found Emmett, but it just as easily could have been anyone from ALPA. It could have been Cox himself.
He suggested that they take a ten-minute break, but the other investigators wanted to keep working. Cox said he desperately needed a break. He walked away, tears streaming down his cheeks.
The emotion erupted again during dinner at Mario’s, an Italian restaurant that was a favorite of the pilots. Cox tried to convince his ALPA colleagues that he could work on both crash investigations—Flight 1016, the Charlotte accident that had occurred two months earlier, and the one in Hopewell. But the other union members were skeptical.
“You can’t do this,” one of the union officials said. “It’s just too much.”
“Let me find a way,” Cox said.
They talked about what a challenging job it was. Cox found it rewarding—the hunt for clues, the idea that he could help solve the mystery of a crash, and the belief that he could actually make flying safer. But he was overwhelmed. He was working in a steamy rubber suit all day long and was getting only three or four hours of sleep each night. He started crying, right there in the corner booth at Mario’s.
“All right,” he said finally. “You’re going to have to take me off of 1016.”
The next day, he felt invigorated. The Mario’s episode had cleansed him.
“I hit the wall last night,” he told his colleagues. “But I’m better now.”
Many people in the Pittsburgh area regarded Beaver County as a Podunk kind of place. Ever since the steel mills shut down, it had been a bedroom community that emptied every morning as people drove to jobs in neighboring Allegheny County, which included Pittsburgh. Allegheny was bigger, richer, more sophisticated, and had the airport, the museums, the colleges, the Steelers, and the Pirates. Beaver County had the Hopewell High School Vikings.
No one expected the county coroner’s office to be especially sophisticated at body identification procedures. The office was a throwback to the 1960s, with old furniture and a creepy opaque-glass door with CORONER in black letters—it looked like something from a Hitchcock movie.
In a typical year, the tiny office did only 100 autopsies. Two or three of those were unidentified bodies that were found in the woods, but otherwise the coroners knew the name of every dead body they saw. Suddenly they had 132 victims, with bodies torn apart worse than anyone had ever seen, and they had to identify them all.
The coroner’s office sent six teams to the site to photograph and document the remains. Figuring that people sitting in different parts of the plane would be found in the same areas, the teams carefully recorded the location of each body part on the hill. They used a grid system of letters and numbers to indicate the placement, such as “IW32” or “KW920.” Unfortunately, there proved to be no correlation between the location of the body parts and where passengers sat on the plane. Bodies had been blown in every direction.
The bagged body parts were stored in a refrigerated truck on the hill until they could be driven to the morgue at the 911th Airlift Wing, an Air Force Reserve unit at the Pittsburgh airport. A giant hangar normally used for big C-130 transport planes had been appropriated for the massive task of identifying the dead.
Wayne Tatalovich, the county coroner, accepted help from virtually anyone who offered—the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the FBI, and local hospitals and dental schools. As the Ziploc bags arrived, they were X-rayed to find any wreckage that had been mixed with the remains. An FAA bomb expert examined each body part for evidence of explosives. If there were bones in the bag, an anthropologist tried to determine if they were from a male or a female and attempted to estimate the person’s age. Teeth were sent to dentists, who compared them against records submitted by the victims’ families. Fingers went to an FBI team in the hangar that tried to take fingerprints.
The scale of the effort was staggering. There were 132 people on the plane, but 1,800 Ziploc bags. Workers on the coroner’s teams made lots of mistakes. They wrote down the wrong letters for the grids where body parts were found. Their logs and photographs were inconsistent and incomplete. Their com
puters kept breaking down. Some were using Macintosh computers, others were using PCs, and the lists could not be transferred from one computer to the other. Volunteers who logged the findings into the database made repeated errors. In the space where they were supposed to list which personal effects were found with the remains, they often wrote, “Yes.”
Tatalovich worked to keep the process as dignified as possible. Someone said prayers over the 911th’s PA system. Once the body parts had been identified, chaplains escorted the remains to a hearse. Tatalovich made sure that the passengers’ bloodstained money was replaced with new dollar bills from a local bank before wallets were returned to family members.
Each day a committee of pathologists met around a conference table to decide when they had enough information to identify someone. Most were identified through dental records or fingerprints, or both. If those methods didn’t work, pathologists moved to more creative criteria—using skin color, the serial number of a hip replacement, wires in chest bones from open-heart surgery, or distinctive jewelry found on the body parts. The death certificates all said the same thing: “Accidental death due to severe blunt force trauma.”
The process went slowly. A week after the crash, Joan’s body still had not been identified.
To build an airtight case—if he ever came up with the cause—Haueter had to rule out every other possibility, no matter how far-fetched. So it was standard procedure to run drug and alcohol tests on the pilots. The tests nearly always were negative, but they had to be done to assure people that the pilots were not intoxicated. The tests were easy to perform as long as the pilots’ bodies were intact.
In this crash, there were no bodies. Only parts. And Haueter had to be certain that the parts he was testing truly came from Emmett and Germano. Fingerprints and dental records had been sufficient to identify most passengers, but Haueter wanted to use DNA tests on the pilots to be 100 percent sure about the drug and alcohol results.
