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.
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.