The Mystery of Flight 427 Read online

  Flowers began to arrive. Friends started dropping by to console him, bringing big trays of cold cuts and baked goods. After a while, Brett felt as though the walls were closing in. He took a walk across the road to a nature preserve with a close friend who had been one of Joan’s bridesmaids. It seemed to him as if days had passed since the crash, but it had not even been a full day yet.

  A woman from USAir called and said she would be Brett’s family coordinator. She asked what Joan looked like and what clothes, shoes, and jewelry she was wearing. Brett thought the jewelry might provide some clues, especially since her engagement ring was one of a kind. The woman also asked him to send dental records to help identify Joan’s body. When Brett called the dentist to ask for the records, the magnitude of the devastation struck him. There was no body.

  The flowers kept coming, filling every room in his parents’ house. Brett needed to get out again, so he went for a run in the forest preserve. He and Joan had often hiked through the preserve and played touch football there with friends. He ran a five-mile loop, cut through the woods, and then sprinted up Mount Trashmore. Up and back, up and back he sprinted, trying to burn off the anger and despair.

  He wondered what life would be like without Joan. He had always thought they were meant for each other. He often quoted that old country-western song, that the right woman can make you and the wrong woman can break you. She was the right one for him.

  That night he talked to his uncle, who was a pilot, and asked him about the crash and whether the government would figure out what happened.

  “The NTSB is the best in the world at what they do,” his uncle said. “If it’s possible to find out what happened, they will find out.”

  4. TIN KICKER

  The phone rang just as Tom Haueter was sitting down with a bowl of popcorn to watch The Forbidden Planet. He loved sci-fi and was a big fan of the film, which set the standard for outer space movies when it was made in 1956. Haueter wasn’t supposed to be on call for the NTSB’s Go Team on this particular night, but he had switched with another investigator who wanted the week off. It would be Haueter’s job to figure out why Flight 427 fell from the sky.

  Within minutes he had two phone lines going, discussing arrangements with the FAA and his colleagues at the NTSB. “We’ve got a bad one,” he told his boss Ron Schleede. “USAir just lost a 737. It went off the radar near Pittsburgh.”

  Haueter’s first priority wasn’t to solve the mystery, it was to find a hotel. He needed beds for several dozen investigators, a meeting room to serve as a command center, and a room for press conferences. Finding a place was difficult because USAir had snatched all the hotel rooms in the area in the first hour after the crash.

  Haueter tried to call USAir’s accident coordinator, George Snyder, but kept getting a busy signal. When he finally got through, he persuaded Snyder to relinquish a Holiday Inn near the airport. Haueter then had to arrange for fax machines, copiers, and a dozen extra phone lines, including a special line that was for his use only, so he could receive calls from NTSB headquarters. He also had to worry about coffee. The agency’s rules were explicit: It would not pay for coffee. But hotels often provided regular and decaf on the big buffet tables without getting approval and then included the expense on the bill. He told a Holiday Inn employee, “We don’t want to see the big coffee bar set up.”

  Haueter was not a coffee drinker. He had an abundance of energy in his trim six-foot frame and had no need for the extra caffeine. He was always in motion—skiing in Colorado, hanging drywall in his basement, flying his open-cockpit Stearman biplane. The license plate frame on his sturdy old Datsun 280Z read, I’D RATHER BE FLYING.

  He had wavy blond hair, a moustache, blue eyes, and skin so fair that he wore a floppy hat when he investigated crashes in the hot sun. In a profession dominated by staid engineers, Haueter was a fresh voice. When he got excited, he was likely to use phrases that came from his boyhood in the small-town Midwest: “Holy mackerel!” “Gee whiz!”

  He grew up around airplanes in Enon, Ohio, a one-stoplight town of 2,600 people that was midway between Dayton and Springfield. The town was so small that residents joked it was “none” spelled backward. His father was a prominent helicopter and airplane designer who died when Tom was twelve. After that, Tom spent lots of time with his grandfather, Elmer Vivian Haueter, who introduced him to flying. Tom still has a photo in his office taken on the day he got his pilot’s license, showing him as a gawky seventeen-year-old shaking hands with his flight instructor. He named his biplane E. V. in honor of his grandfather. He preferred the initials—there was no way he was going to name his plane the Elmer Vivian.

  He got a degree in aeronautical engineering from Purdue University and then worked as an engineer and consultant for a string of aviation and energy companies. When one eliminated his job in 1984 and offered him a less desirable position, Haueter decided to find something more stable. He took a job at the NTSB reviewing safety recommendations. He was not enthusiastic about being a government bureaucrat, however, and figured he would bail out as soon as something better came along.

  Instead, he grew to love the job. He got promoted to accident investigator and enjoyed being a “tin kicker,” picking through wreckage of a plane to find what caused the crash. The job got him out the office and gave him a chance to climb mountains, ride in helicopters, and see the world. He also got to put his curiosity to work solving mysteries, figuring out how things worked—or why they didn’t.

  He discovered that the NTSB was surprisingly powerful. His recommendations to the FAA actually got results. He could look proudly at certain airplanes and know they were safer because of his work. The propeller system in Embraer 120 commuter planes was improved after his investigation found a flaw that caused the 1991 crash that killed Senator John Tower. The landing gear on thousands of Piper airplanes was fixed because Haueter discovered that a crucial bolt was prone to crack.

  Seeing those changes was the reward of working for the safety board that didn’t show up in any paycheck. Every day Haueter could wake up and muse about how many lives he had saved that day.

  He was a closet Trekkie. He didn’t dress up like a Klingon or hide a phaser in his underwear drawer, but he enjoyed the way Star Trek explored issues like race relations and the hazards of technology. He liked how everyone on the spaceship worked together. The people in the NTSB could learn a thing or two from the crew of the Enterprise.

  Haueter met his wife, Trisha Dedik, in a carpool. They both lived in Great Falls, Virginia, and commuted thirty minutes to the concrete valley of federal buildings along Independence Avenue in Washington. Dedik, who had been divorced for a few years, liked the fact that Haueter could put aside his career to have fun on weekends. He wasn’t married to his job like so many Washington men. They began dating in 1988 and were married in 1993.

  Dedik also had a fast-lane government job, as director of export controls and nonproliferation for the U.S. Department of Energy. That meant she was in charge of The List, the countries that were allowed to get nuclear fuel and technology to make bombs. As she put it, her job was “to make sure the Husseins of the world can’t get their hands on nuclear weapons.” Haueter and Dedik weren’t Washington celebrities, but they both had unsung government jobs that made the world safer. Haueter’s work led to better airplanes. Dedik’s kept the world from getting nuked.

  As one of the rotating Go Team leaders, Haueter had grown accustomed to wearing a pager, carrying a cellular phone, and being called at home in the middle of the night. His Go Bag was perpetually packed with the tools of an accident investigator—an NTSB baseball cap, a first aid kit, gloves, and government forms. An avid juggler, he often took along a set of juggling balls to relieve his stress—although he forgot to pack them for this trip.

  Haueter was a mechanical wizard who loved solving mysteries big and small. On one of his early dates with Dedik, he waited in her kitchen as she was upstairs getting ready. When she came down, her kitchen f
aucet was lying in pieces in the sink and Haueter was examining the inner workings.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I just wanted to figure out how it worked,” Haueter said.

  He could build or fix practically anything. He built the interior walls in his basement and transformed a bare patch of concrete into a fancy bathroom. He often overbuilt, using an extra two-by-four when one would suffice. “Don’t give him a project you ever want to take apart,” Dedik said.

  When he bought a vintage Stearman biplane in 1984, it arrived as a pile of rubble. For six years, he painstakingly reassembled the plane, replacing the rotten wing spars, covering the wings and fuselage with fabric and stitching it together with a special needle and thread. The result was a spectacular aircraft that he took for weekend hops around the Virginia countryside.

  His bosses considered him one of their best investigators. He was a smart engineer who understood an airplane’s complex systems, a cautious detective who did not jump to conclusions, and a good manager who could deal with the egos involved in a big investigation. “If two 747s collide over New York,” said Schleede, “Tom can do it.” The only complaint that the top NTSB officials had about Haueter was that he could sometimes be too nice. He needed “to bare his teeth a little more,” Schleede said.

  Haueter was forty-two but still showed a trace of the gawky teenager in the photograph of his first solo. His boyish looks and friendly demeanor occasionally made people question whether he was in charge. A Continental Airlines pilot once balked at Haueter’s request to ship a flight recorder, even after he flashed his NTSB badge. At crash sites, Haueter often wore a shirt and tie so people would realize that he was in charge—in contrast to other investigators, who wore their NTSB jumpsuits.

  The problem had bugged Haueter for years. He felt the old tough-guy approach of running an investigation wasn’t effective anymore. You had to be open to suggestions and new ideas. Employees needed to feel free to express their thoughts. Yet he occasionally felt out of step at the safety board, which had the macho air of a men’s locker room. Any guy who was prone to use “Holy mackerel!” as an expletive had to prove himself.

  By the time Haueter and the FAA were ready to dispatch investigators to Pittsburgh, the last airline flights had already departed. The pilots of the FAA’s Gulfstream jet, which was frequently used by the safety board, had run out of flying time for the day and needed a mandatory night of rest. So the NTSB and FAA officials agreed to wait until early the next morning.

  Haueter got about two hours of sleep, scarfed down a granola bar and a glass of orange juice, and then drove his old VW station wagon to Hangar 6 at Washington National Airport, where the FAA and the Coast Guard kept their planes. As the team members from the FAA and the NTSB began arriving in the hangar lounge, Haueter could see that he was going to have more people than the plane had seats. He asked Ed Kittel, the FAA’s bomb expert, if he would take a commercial flight. Kittel agreed, and everyone else piled their stuff in the plane and climbed inside.

  The passengers included NTSB chairman Carl Vogt, one of the five political appointees who ran the agency and voted on the probable cause of each accident. The board members took turns on Go Team rotation and led the nightly press briefings at crash sites.

  Also on board was Greg Phillips, a frizzy-haired engineer. No one at the NTSB knew more about 737s than Phillips. He had worked with Haueter on a Copa Airlines 737 crash in Panama in 1992 and had spent months analyzing the rudder system of one that crashed in Colorado Springs in 1991. He had kept close tabs on 737 problems ever since. He maintained a list of suspicious incidents in his file drawer, like a detective tracking a killer.

  As the FAA jet rumbled through the sky toward Pittsburgh, Haueter and several other Go Team members sat at a conference table in the back and discussed what they knew about the crash. Haueter flipped through the NTSB’s report on the Colorado Springs accident and read the board’s previous safety recommendations for the 737. He told Vogt about the problems making arrangements in Pittsburgh and the difficulty getting rooms from USAir.

  “Carl, when we get there it will be complete chaos,” Haueter said. “But don’t assume I’m fucking up on the first day. It will get better.”

  When the plane landed in Pittsburgh, FAA employees were waiting at the airport with the flight and voice recorders found in the wreckage. After the FAA jet was refueled, the recorders were flown back to Washington, where NTSB lab employees were waiting.

  The line of rental cars carrying the Go Team snaked out of the Pittsburgh airport and along Route 60 toward Hopewell Township, a hilly suburb about ten miles away. It was 7:30 A.M., twelve hours since the crash. Haueter wanted a look at the site before his first meeting with people from Boeing, USAir, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), and other groups that would be participating.

  Crash investigations are like political campaigns—they throw together a diverse group of people for a few weeks of twelve-hour days under extreme pressure. Everything has a temporary feel because so much of the manpower and equipment is borrowed. So it didn’t seem odd to Haueter that his first stop was at the showroom of a Chevy dealer, which was being used as a command post for the local emergency response. He introduced himself to the Hopewell Township officials and then accepted a ride up the hill in a Jeep Cherokee.

  The sunny weather from the previous day had given way to a thick morning fog. A creepy mist rose from the asphalt. The woods along Green Garden Road were usually a popular place to see deer, but the animals had been scared away by the crash and the invasion of rescuers. Police and state troopers who guarded the site overnight heard pieces of wreckage falling from trees, but there were no sounds of life.

  As his Jeep Cherokee climbed a driveway from Green Garden Road, Haueter noticed pieces of airplane insulation in the trees. The team climbed out of the Cherokee and walked into the woods. They saw more wreckage and the first body parts. Haueter saw a leg bone hanging in a tree. He stepped around a wing panel and glanced up. A dismembered arm was hanging from a branch, a wedding ring on one of the fingers.

  He walked carefully around the edge of the debris. “Take a look,” he told the group, “but don’t move anything.”

  The first goal in every crash investigation is to find the plane’s “four corners”—the nose, wingtips, and tail. If they are found miles apart, it means the plane broke up in the air and then rained to the ground, which suggests an explosion or sudden decompression. But if the pieces are all together, it means the plane was largely intact when it hit the ground. As he walked around the site, Haueter saw all four corners. They were horribly mangled, especially the nose of the plane, and he knew it was possible that other parts had broken off the aircraft before it crashed. But so far, the wreckage told him that the plane did not break up until it struck the hill.

  Nobody spoke as they absorbed the horror. The woods now had a slight aroma of jet fuel—the plane apparently did have fuel on board when it crashed—and the stench of burned flesh. Haueter found that crash sites had unforgettable smells, slightly sweet and sickening. The investigators looked at the spot on the dirt road where the plane had apparently hit and then walked around to see the debris scattered in the woods. Surely this couldn’t be everything from the fifty-tons plane. Somebody asked, “Where’s the airplane?”

  “It’s here,” said NTSB engine expert Jerome Frechette. “It’s all around us.”

  Most federal agencies decorate their lobbies with color photos of their leaders or tacky paintings from a starving artists’ sale. But the NTSB lobby was different. Color photos of burning planes and twisted trains covered the walls. Airline and railroad executives cringed when they saw their mangled planes on public display, but the pictures were a perfect illustration of the NTSB’s job: to determine the probable cause of an accident and recommend changes so it would not happen again.

  The agency’s roots went back to 1908, when the nation had its first fatal plane crash. The army was testing a W
right brothers’ plane at Fort Myer, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Orville Wright had offered to take Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge of the Army Signal Corps for a demonstration ride. Selfridge was thrilled to get a chance to fly, waving merrily to friends on the ground as the plane circled the Fort Myer parade grounds. The plane was finishing its third loop when Orville heard two thumps. The plane lurched and plunged seventy-five feet into the field. “Instantly the dust arose in a yellow, choking cloud that spread a dull pall over the great white man-made bird that had dashed to its death,” the New York Times reported the next day. Selfridge was killed and Orville was seriously injured.

  When Wilbur Wright first heard about the crash, he was sure that his reckless brother had been at fault. But after he and Orville analyzed the wreckage, they found it was a mechanical problem. The propeller cracked and cut through a wire that held the tail in place, which caused Orville to lose control. Their investigation was remarkably advanced for 1908, uncovering mistakes that they had made months earlier in stress tests for a bolt on the propeller. Wilbur’s explanation of the crash was quite similar to the NTSB probable cause statements ninety years later: “The splitting of the propeller was the occasion of the accident; the uncontrollability of the tail was the cause.”

  As airlines began carrying mail and passengers in the late 1920s, a branch of the Commerce Department was given the responsibility for regulating aviation and investigating crashes. It was a risky time. Of the 268 airplanes in domestic airline service in 1928, about one-third were in accidents.

  The government investigated all major crashes, but those involving famous people had more hoopla and greater significance. The 1931 crash that killed Knute Rockne, the legendary Notre Dame football coach, was especially important in establishing the cautious approach that the NTSB uses today.