Bud Laynor, the NTSB’s deputy director of aviation safety, called Haueter in Pittsburgh and told him, “This crew had no idea what happened. They never realized what was going on.”
The other orange box, the flight data recorder, takes constant measurements such as altitude, airspeed, and heading, allowing investigators to find out how the plane was behaving shortly before the crash. Primitive recorders were used on the first airplanes. The Wright brothers used one to keep track of airspeed, time, and the engine. Charles Lindbergh had one on the Spirit of St. Louis that measured altitude and time, to make sure he didn’t cheat on the world’s first nonstop flight from New York to Paris.
The government issued its first requirement for planes to have recorders in 1941, but the order was rescinded because of maintenance problems and poor reliability with the early boxes. The pilots union, ALPA, fought against having them on commercial planes because of fears that the recorders would be used as mechanical spies. But finally the union relented, partly because a recorder cleared an ALPA pilot who was falsely accused of flying too low. In 1957 the government issued another mandate that planes be equipped with recorders measuring airspeed, altitude, heading, and vertical acceleration. The boxes were primitive—a stylus moved up and down, scratching continuous lines on a strip of foil—but many of them survived crashes and provided valuable clues.
Today, modern recorders store their data on a durable computer chip that can take hundreds of measurements. It records basic parameters such as airspeed and altitude, and it shows what the pilots were doing—whether they were pushing on the rudder pedals or turning the wheel. That information can be especially valuable because it answers the man-or-machine riddle of many crashes.
The recorder on the USAir plane had only thirteen parameters—altitude, airspeed, heading, pitch (whether the nose was pointing up or down), roll (whether the wings were level or rolling down to the left or right), and engine power. It had only two measurements that told what the pilots were doing in the cockpit. One showed when they were pushing the button to talk with air traffic controllers, which allowed investigators to synchronize the flight data recorder with tapes from the CVR and the Pittsburgh control tower. The other showed whether they were pulling or pushing on the control column, the “stick” that made the plane climb or descend. The recorder did not measure what was happening with the rudder or whether the pilots were pushing on the rudder pedals. Haueter’s investigators would have to figure that out by themselves.
The labs of the NTSB are messy places. In the metals lab, twisted pieces of airplane wreckage are spread on a countertop like body parts awaiting an autopsy. In the flight recorder lab, mangled orange boxes are piled on a table, many still caked with mud. On a nearby wall is a bank of gadgets that look like a dozen VCRS—computers used to download the information from flight recorders. Another computer can convert the data into a color animation, to show a plane crash like a Saturday morning cartoon.
Technicians in the lab could see that the data recorder from the USAir plane was badly damaged. Dirt and yellow insulation from the plane had gotten inside the box when the 737 struck the hill. The steel cocoon that protected the computer chip had broken away from its mounts and smashed the circuit boards inside the recorder. But the cocoon had done its job. The data were fine. The technicians transferred the data into a computer, converted the raw numbers into rows and columns that were easier to read, and zapped it all by modem to the Pittsburgh command center at the Holiday Inn.
The command center had become a chaotic place. The phones rang constantly with calls from witnesses and others with theories about the crash. A swarm of people converged on Haueter every time he walked into the room, bombarding him with questions about computers, meeting times, phone calls, logistical arrangements. He wondered if he would ever get a chance to actually investigate the crash.
The first person at the Holiday Inn to see the data from Flight 427 was John Clark, a white-haired NTSB engineer. He sat cross-legged on the floor in a corner of the room, studying the results on his laptop computer. The numbers showed the plane was descending from an altitude of 5,984 feet when the left wing dipped. The wing stayed down for about fourteen seconds, then started to level off, then rolled down again. The nose had been up slightly when the wing dipped, but the nose quickly plunged toward the ground. The vertical Gs—the forces of gravity on the plane—told a frightening story. As the plane spiraled toward the rocky hill, the centrifugal force on the passengers and crew reached nearly 4 Gs. That meant a two-hundred-pound person like Emmett would have felt like he weighed eight hundred pounds. The numbers showed how quickly the pilots lost control. Just twenty-eight seconds elapsed from the first hint of trouble until impact.
As Clark looked down the column for the plane’s heading, he saw something unusual—an abrupt change, which meant the big 737 had suddenly yawed to the left like a car beginning to skid sideways on a wet road. Other measurements showed that a split second later the left wing rolled toward the ground and the plane plunged nose down. Clark knew many things could make a plane yaw and roll like that, but the most likely was a sudden move by the rudder.
He walked over to Haueter. The data were still rough, he said, but the big shift in heading was significant. “There is something going on here with the yaw,” he told Haueter. “It looks like this airplane had some type of rudder event.”
It was an encouraging lead. But NTSB investigators have an old saying: Never believe anything you hear in the first forty-eight hours. Early clues can be overrun by new evidence. The first few theories about a crash—known affectionately as the causes du jour—often don’t pan out.
Still, Haueter felt confident that he would be able to solve the mystery. It was only Day 1. They had good data and a clear CVR. They were making progress.
Before the crash, the hill off Green Garden Road had been a peaceful retreat from city life. It was a thirty-minute drive from downtown Pittsburgh, with thick woods separating it from the steady traffic on Route 60. Children often picked wildflowers in the meadows. Deer wandered through the woods and drank from a creek at the bottom of the hill. The only signs of urban life were the USAir jets that flew overhead, making their final approach to the Pittsburgh airport.
Flight 427 crashed on secluded land owned by George and Mildred Pecoraro, who had lived there for nearly thirty years. They had been displaced before. They lost access to the land when Route 60 was built in the early 1970s, but they moved back after they bought right-of-way and built a dirt road in 1981. They lived in a two-story house at the top of the hill, about one-fourth of a mile from where the 737 crashed. The night of the tragedy, they ended up in a nearby Hampton Inn and weren’t fazed by the fact that they were assigned to Room 427. Mildred said they weren’t superstitious.
Thousands of fragments from the big plane were blown hundreds of yards away, into fields owned by George David, a police officer in nearby Aliquippa. David grew hay on his 61 acres and loved the solitude of the place. The deer were so friendly they would eat apples right out of his hand. But now, the day after the crash, his peaceful hill looked like the site of a military invasion. Yellow and red police tape was strung around the trees. Helicopters pounded overhead as trucks from the National Guard, the Salvation Army, USAir, and Allegheny County brought supplies and volunteers. Tents were set up along the dirt road as field offices for the Beaver County coroner.