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 Wright 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.
The trimotored Fokker F-10A carrying Rockne was flying from Kansas City to Wichita when witnesses saw a wing break off. The plane crashed on a farm, killing Rockne and the seven other people on board.
Because the nation was eager to hear how Rockne had died, the Commerce Department’s Aeronautics Branch scrambled to tell what had happened. That was a dramatic change for the agency, which had always been secretive about its investigations.
Investigators initially blamed the crash on pilot error. They said the pilot had pulled out of a dive too sharply, which put too much strain on the wing. But then they found an engine with a missing propeller. They reversed themselves and said that ice had come off the plane and broken a propeller blade, causing severe vibration that snapped the wing. Five days later, the investigators changed their minds yet again when they found the missing propeller in one piece. They said the ice had “rendered inoperative certain of [the plane’s] instruments” and caused the plane to go into a steep descent. The wing snapped off as the plane came out of the dive. The embarrassing flip-flops prompted the New York Times to question in an April 9, 1931, editorial whether accident investigators could truly find the cause: “Who can tell from a mass of tangled wreckage what actually occurred?”
But eventually investigators found yet another cause: structural failure in the wings. The discovery was especially tragic because the Aeronautics Branch had known of the problem with Fokker planes before the crash and was considering grounding them.
The lessons of the Rockne investigation can be seen in the methodical, cautious approach that the NTSB uses today. The board is usually open about what it finds, describing each discovery at nightly press briefings, but investigators are careful never to speculate publicly about the cause of a crash. The probable cause is not announced until the five board members vote, about one year later.