The Mystery of Flight 427 Read online

  Brett was a child of suburbia. He and his two brothers grew up in West Chicago. His father was an executive with a food service company, his mom was a teacher. They lived in a spacious colonial house across the street from a picturesque forest preserve that had ponds and hiking trails. It was like an extension of the Van Bortels’ front yard—a huge place where Brett and his brothers could build forts and go camping. In the winter they went cross-country skiing through the tranquil forest; on the Fourth of July, they climbed to the top of an old landfill called Mount Trashmore and watched the fireworks.

  Brett was on the track and swimming teams and played middle linebacker and center on the freshman football squad. He broke his neck in a bad car accident when he was sixteen, but recovered completely. He had always been the writer in the family, even as a boy. On his eighteenth birthday, an age when many boys are in full rebellion against their parents, he wrote his mother a sentimental poem about how much he loved her. He chose the University of Iowa because it had a great English department. His favorite writers were classic authors—Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift, and Shakespeare. But he also liked First Blood, the book that was the basis for the Rambo movies.

  Joan had grown up on a farm in Melrose, Iowa, a tiny town about sixty miles south of Des Moines. Melrose was known as “Iowa’s Little Ireland” because most of its residents, including Joan’s family, were Irish. Her parents grew corn and soybeans and raised cows. As the only girl in a family of five boys, Joan was spared most of the farm duties. That was just as well because she gradually discovered that she preferred living in the city. In choosing to go to the University of Iowa, Joan effectively said good-bye to farm life. (They say in Iowa that you go to the University of Iowa for culture and to Iowa State for agriculture. Joan had chosen culture.)

  Joan and Brett were acquaintances for several years in college but did not start dating until their senior year. After they graduated, they spent a winter skiing in Vail, Colorado, and then moved to Chicago to start their careers. They had bought a ranch-style house on Riedy Road just before they were married. It was a fixer-upper with purple and green walls that desperately needed to be repainted. But they found it a lot more inviting than the sterile shoebox homes in nearby Naperville, the ones on streets with names like Whispering Woods, even though there wasn’t a single native tree for miles. The Lisle house would take some work, but they could give it personality. They were not do-it-yourselfers, but figured they could learn. Their first project was the bathroom. They gave it a new coat of paint and wallpaper, and Brett replaced the toilet himself.

  His latest project was installing floor tile in the kitchen. He had just placed the last tile when the phone rang. It was Joan’s secretary.

  “There’s been a plane crash,” she said. “I think Joan was on it.”

  Brett flipped on CNN. The first words out of the television were

  “…no survivors.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” said CNN anchor Linden Soles. “Well, we had initial reports of 123 people aboard, possibly 130 if that’s counting a crew of 7. Are there a large number of emergency crews in the area right now, Sandra?”

  “The whole county has responded—helicopters, ambulances, medi-rescue, police from all over the county,” the woman replied.

  “Now, your estimation that there are perhaps no survivors from this crash—is that based on what you’ve seen or have you heard any confirmation from any emergency personnel?”

  “We have not really had any confirmation on it, but our understanding is that there are no survivors, but we are not confirmed on that.”

  Brett quickly dialed the number that CNN listed for USAir, but he kept getting busy signals. When he finally got through, the USAir employees were clueless. Brett said he thought his wife was on the plane that crashed. A USAir agent promised to have someone call back.

  Brett’s brother Grant had come over to help tile the floor. He could see that Brett was upset. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I think Joan might have been in a plane crash,” Brett said. His words came out matter-of-factly; it was foolish to jump to conclusions, right? He didn’t know that she was on that particular plane. There were lots of flights from Chicago to Pittsburgh. What were the odds that she was on the plane that had crashed?

  Joan’s secretary said she would go to the office and check Joan’s itinerary. In the meantime, Brett called Joan’s credit card company, hoping that she had charged the tickets and they would have the flight number. The company was no help. Then he tried calling Bob Henninger, the coworker Joan was supposed to meet in Pittsburgh. He left Henninger a message and then repeatedly called the hotel where Joan was supposed to stay. But the hotel operator kept telling him she had not checked in yet. Brett called again and again. Finally the operator connected him to a room. The phone rang.

  Thank God! thought Brett. She’s alive!

  The operator came back on the line: “I’m sorry. She hasn’t checked in.”

  Minutes after the accident, a USAir supervisor typed a few commands into a computer to prevent anyone at the airline from seeing information about Flight 427. Reservation agents who tried to call up the passenger list got a curt response on their screen: UNABLE TO DISPLAY.

  Copies of the passenger list were printed for only three locations—USAir’s situation room in Pittsburgh, its consumer affairs office in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the eighth-floor conference room at the airline’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia—the place that would come to be known as the Next-of-Kin Room.

  Within an hour after the crash, about twenty-five grim-faced managers and vice presidents began to assemble in the big room. A technician hooked up telephones around the table and plugged in a computer that would be used to compile a master list. Flip charts were tacked to the walls so everyone could see important phone numbers and the names of the passengers. A TV in the corner was tuned to CNN.

  ANCHOR LINDEN SOLES: I’m going to bring back Leo Janssens, who is the president of the Aviation Safety Institute. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a non-profit consumer watchdog group. Mr. Janssens, with the crashes and the run of bad luck that you were mentioning that USAir has encountered over the past five years—this is their fifth fatal crash—in three of those crashes, the aircraft were Boeing 737s. Is there any safety suspicion that we should be reading into that number?

  JANSSENS: I really don’t believe so, because the Boeing 737 has been in service, airline service I’m talking about, for approximately 30 years. I don’t know the exact number of flight hours, but it’s got an excellent safety record. Sure there have been crashes, but I ride [the plane] all the time myself. It’s just really too early to tell what has happened and therefore I caution people not to be overly concerned at this point about the Boeing 737. USAir normally runs a very good airline. Of course, their safety record over the past five years has been less than admirable in terms of the rest of the industry.

  Everything in the Next-of-Kin Room was battleship gray—the walls, the table, even the chairs. The color fit the mood. The USAir employees in the room had all volunteered for this duty, but it was the worst assignment they would ever get. They had to review the reservation lists and tickets for Flight 427, determine who had actually gotten on the plane, and then deliver the horrible news to the passengers’ families.

  There was no legal requirement that an airline undertake this unpleasant task. After other sudden fatalities, such as car crashes or shootings, local police departments usually did the notification. They sent an officer or a chaplain to deliver the grim news in person. But when a plane crashed, one hundred to two hundred people were killed instantly, and only the airline readily knew their identities. With such an immediate need to inform so many people, it was impractical to alert police in the hometown of each victim. So it had become customary for airlines to deliver the news by phone.

  It wasn’t fast enough, however. When you’re waiting to hear whether someone you love has died, any wait is too long. Television
created unrealistic expectations. If the TV networks could cover crashes so quickly, it seemed reasonable to think that airlines could rapidly figure out who was on the plane.

  But compiling a list of who actually boarded a plane was surprisingly hard. Many people made reservations and never showed up. Names got misspelled. First and last names got transposed. Long names got cut off by the limits of reservation computers. Babies didn’t need a ticket and often were not included on the passenger manifest. Occasionally people from other flights got on the wrong plane and didn’t realize it until they were in the air. There was an additional wrinkle: In 1994 the government had not yet begun requiring passengers to show photo ID, and people often traveled using someone else’s ticket.

  Calls had already begun pouring in to USAir’s eleven reservation centers from friends and relatives who urgently wanted to know if their husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, or coworkers had been on Flight 427. The USAir agents could say if other flights had landed safely, but they had no information on 427. They could only promise to call back.

  Ralph Miller, a USAir facilities manager and the office computer whiz, was in charge of the passenger list. It was his job to call the airline’s Pittsburgh situation room and the Chicago gate agents and go through the list person by person, comparing reservations with the actual tickets that had been collected at Gate F6 at O’Hare.

  It was a slow process. The names weren’t alphabetized. Miller wasn’t sure if there were 125 or 126 passengers. There was confusion about five or six of them, including a two-year-old girl who was sitting with her mother and did not have a ticket. Several Department of Energy employees had been booked on later flights but were allowed to use their tickets on 427. The reservation and ticket totals didn’t match. Five or six people who turned in tickets at the gate were not on the reservation list. Another five or six were on the reservation list but had not turned in tickets. Names didn’t match. Joan’s credit card still had her maiden name, Lahart, so there was confusion about whether the person named on the card and Joan Van Bortel were two different people.

  As Miller discussed the last few names for the list, he began to worry. Would he get the list right? Would he miss somebody? Would he put someone on the list who had not been on the plane?

  Brett numbly walked outside to his car phone, intending to use it to keep calling the hotel and the airline. That would keep the house phone free in case USAir or Bob Henninger, the man Joan was meeting in Pittsburgh, called back. But as the night wore on, Brett became increasingly convinced that Joan had been on the plane.

  When Henninger finally did call, Brett’s friend Craig Wheatley answered the phone. Henninger said he had gone to the Pittsburgh airport to meet Joan. At first, the flight was listed as fifteen minutes late. Then it was deleted from the TV monitors. When he went to the front counter, he was told that the plane had crashed.

  Craig hung up the phone and came outside to tell Brett. He was a big burly guy who didn’t usually show emotions, but now he was shaking his head, crying.

  He said, “I’m sorry, man.”

  Brett just stood there, stunned. He felt like he was melting, like his shoulders could not bear the weight. At some point he wandered into his bedroom and lay on the bed on his stomach. He cried so hard that the tears streamed down his face and off his chin.

  Brett’s parents, Bonnie and James Van Bortel, drove to his house and stayed with him as he kept dialing USAir on the car phone, trying to get confirmation that Joan was on the plane. It had been four hours since the crash, and the airline still couldn’t say if she had been killed.

  “I need confirmation!” Brett told his mother.

  “You know Joan would have gotten in touch with you if she was okay,” his mother said. “She’s gone.”

  But Brett kept calling. When he finally got through, he screamed at the USAir employee, “Goddamn it! My wife is dead and you can’t tell me anything!”

  “Hold on, please,” the USAir employee said.

  Minutes went by. When the man finally came back on the line, he said, “We don’t have anything at this time. We’ll try and let you know as soon as possible.”

  In the Next-of-Kin Room, the USAir managers crowded around the TV every time CNN issued a new bulletin about the crash.

  JIM DEXTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: USAir Flight 427 from Chicago was just about to land in Pittsburgh before continuing on to West Palm Beach, Florida.

  FIRST WITNESS: I looked up and I seen a plane. I didn’t hear any sound with it and it started nose-diving. And it seemed like it was going to pull up a little bit and it went on one side of its wing and it went straight down into the ground and blew up.

  SECOND WITNESS: There was another couple with me and they said, “Oh my God, there’s a plane.” And we looked up and it looked like, you know, it was smoking and stuff and it just come down and exploded.

  THIRD WITNESS: As soon as it went down I seen a big puff of smoke come up and like, sparks and fire.

  DEXTER: The Boeing 737 went down seven miles from the Pittsburgh Airport in a wooded area behind a shopping center.

  FOURTH WITNESS: Well, the three of us got in the truck and we ran up there in the truck and the third driveway, I think it was, we turned to the right. We must have walked maybe fifty yards and we kept hollering, the plane was exploding, and we kept hollering, “Anybody alive?” because we seen bodies all over the place.

  FIFTH WITNESS: Couldn’t find anybody, didn’t hear nothing. Parts of the plane were laying all over the place. Little fires here and there. It was a bad scene.

  When the bulletins ended, the USAir employees shook their heads in disbelief. Why them? They had just been through this ordeal two months earlier with the Charlotte crash. Why again?

  The twenty-five phones in the room continued to ring with calls that had been forwarded from the airline’s reservation centers. The callers were crying and shouting, demanding to know who was on the plane. But the managers and vice presidents in the room were not allowed to say. USAir president Seth Schofield had insisted that no one be notified until the list was complete. Even if Ralph Miller had confirmed that Joan was on the plane when Brett called, the USAir managers who were answering the phones were not allowed to tell him. They could only take messages and place them in a box, where they were sorted by passenger name and prioritized so immediate family members would be called back first.

  USAir was in chaos. The company had more experience dealing with crashes than any other airline in the 1990s—five in five years!—and yet it was overwhelmed.

  There were communication foul-ups between the airline’s eleven reservation centers and the Next-of-Kin Room. Some family members were given the direct phone number to the room, others were not. Some USAir employees in the room had experience working on past crashes, but many others didn’t. And none of them had any formal training about what to do or what to say.

  Each employee in the room was assigned about seven victims. The employees marked a manila folder for each one and began to fill the folders with reservation records and phone messages from relatives.

  Posters were taped to the walls with the names of the passengers. Posters from previous crashes had a line beneath each name so the USAir employees could record where the person was hospitalized and what his or her status was—“critical” or “stable” or whatever. But the status lines were blank for the Flight 427 passengers because they were all dead.

  About 10:30 P.M., three and a half hours after the crash, Miller finally nailed down the names of the last few people on the plane. He now had a complete list of the people who had been on Flight 427, but he couldn’t do anything with it. Schofield had arranged a quick charter flight to Pittsburgh, but he’d ordered that no families be notified until he approved the list. Now he was en route and could not be reached. None of the sullen-faced executives in the conference room wanted to override their boss. And so the people in the Next-of-Kin Room could only sit and field angry calls, without saying what they knew.


  Finally Schofield landed in Pittsburgh, reviewed the list, and gave the go-ahead for the calls to begin. It was about midnight now, five hours after the crash.

  “We’re handing out a confirmed list,” Miller told the group. “Throw anything else away. If you get calls, you can find out the next of kin and notify them.”

  The managers in the gray room had a script that went something like this: “This is _____ from USAir. I’m sorry to confirm to you that _____ was on board Flight 427 and all passengers are presumed to have died.”

  Some of the employees retreated to private offices so they could be alone when they delivered the news. They took frequent breaks, walking around the deserted hallways of the USAir legal department.

  In the jargon of the airline industry, the count of passengers and crew on a plane is known as “souls on board,” or SOBS. It refers to the complete count of crew and passengers, to eliminate confusion of whether crew members were included. The USAir managers now had to deliver the horrible news about the souls on Flight 427.

  Brett had ended up at his parents’ house, awaiting the official word that his wife was dead. He drank a glass of red wine and then fell asleep on the couch. When he woke up, there was a brief moment when everything seemed okay. Then it hit him. The plane crash. Joan was gone.

  USAir had tried to reach Brett throughout the night at his house on Riedy Road. When the callers had trouble getting him, they apparently contacted the police department in Lisle to make sure he was okay. About 7 A.M., USAir finally tracked him down at his parents’ house.

  “Mr. Van Bortel,” the airline representative said, “this is absolutely confirmed, sir. Your wife was on the plane last night.” The USAir guy sounded weird, almost excited about it, like an announcer telling Brett he had just won a sweepstakes.