Down the hill, the Green Garden Plaza shopping center had become the nerve center for the crash, with TV satellite trucks parked bumper to bumper and more than two hundred reporters crowding around the command center. The Green Garden merchants all pitched in. The Hills department store gave blankets and other supplies. The Chevy dealer became a temporary headquarters for the Hopewell government. Stress debriefing was available at the New York Pizza Shop.
When Haueter saw the body parts scattered around the hill, he decided to treat the site as a biohazard area. Investigators had rarely worried about diseases before, but he had just taken the government’s training on biohazards and felt there was enough danger from blood and fluids to justify employing the full OSHA protections. The investigators would have to wear plastic suits.
Several local officials disagreed. Beaver County coroner Wayne Tatalovich told Haueter the plastic suits weren’t necessary. Sure, there were lots of fragmented bodies, Tatalovich said, but there wasn’t much blood. He felt the site would not be any more dangerous than a morgue. They argued for a while, but Tatalovich wouldn’t budge. He said Haueter’s team could wear the suits, but the coroners would not. Haueter warned everyone at the first meeting, “This is a biohazard zone. All safety board employees will have to respect that. I can’t force anyone else to wear them, but it’s a good idea.”
When the USAir plane plowed into the gravel road at 300 miles per hour, it shattered like a crystal vase thrown on a concrete driveway. The 109-foot plane splintered into hundreds of thousands of tiny fragments, many no larger than a plane ticket. The USAir logo was usually found on hundreds of items in the plane, but one of the airline’s mechanics noticed an odd pattern to the logos he found in the wreckage. They said “US” or “USA” or “Air,” but he could not find any logos that were intact. Everywhere he looked, USAir had been torn apart.
The site was littered with seat cushions, hundreds of shoes, and thousands of Business Week with the headline THE GLOBAL INVESTOR on the cover. The magazines were everywhere.
Passengers’ belongings were scattered through the woods and on the road. It was as if the crash had taken a snapshot of each person’s life, revealing that person through his or her possessions. There were plaid boxer shorts and another pair with red diamonds; sweatshirts from Purdue University and the New York Renaissance Festival; T-shirts for Hooters, Soldier Field, the Chicago Bears, Harley-Davidson, and Bugs Bunny. There were lots of mangled and burned books: Forrest Gump, the Pocket Prayer Book, Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be, The Chamber, by John Grisham, a management training manual called Tiring Up Commitments During Organizational Change, and a copy of the Bible. Investigators also found lots of everyday stuff: a garage door opener, family snapshots, a Swiss Army knife, pocket calculators, Kodak film, a rosary, and a teddy bear.
While many of the local volunteers were vomiting in the woods or sobbing at the horror, Cox remained unfazed. He had been to many crash sites as an investigator for the pilots union, and he knew the smells and didn’t dwell on the body parts. He was there to look at wreckage, not people. He had been appointed the ALPA representative on the systems group, which was shaping up as the most important group in Haueter’s investigation. The systems members would examine the plane’s flight controls and hydraulics to see if they had caused the crash.
Each morning Cox joined the other members at Green Garden Plaza to be sealed inside his rubber suit. It was like getting dressed for surgery. They had latex gloves, boots, and surgical masks. The boots and gloves had to be taped to the suits, which made the outfits unbearably hot. With everyone wearing an identical white rubber suit, it was also difficult to tell people apart. They eventually wrote their names across their backs, as if they were wearing football jerseys. Everyone involved in the investigation also had to wear a colored bracelet to get access to the site. To foil trespassers, the color changed every day. Several people had been arrested trying to sneak onto the hill to take pictures of the wreckage and the body parts.
Cox’s first assignment was to pick through the flattened wreckage of the cockpit. Getting to it was difficult because of the trees and hilly terrain, so the systems group enlisted the help of the Allegheny County Delta Team, a paramilitary group of public works employees who responded to the crash like they were invading Kuwait. “You want a road? We’ll build you a road,” said one Delta member cheerfully. A few hours later, there was a gravel road straight to the cockpit.
Cox found that picking through the wreckage wasn’t easy. The investigators had to use a pulley on a big metal frame to lift the largest pieces. Some were buried several feet underground. Others had been flattened like aluminum cans. Much of the wreckage was buried beneath a thick layer of wire that looked like burned spaghetti. Their first priority was to see what they could learn from the gauges and switches. Cox was especially interested in finding bulbs from the cockpit warning lights. Lightbulb filaments stretch when they get hot, so the investigators could tell if a warning light had been on by measuring the filament. But Cox discovered that every light had been shattered.
The softest things in Ship 513 had survived with the least damage—seat cushions, handbags, and hundreds of shoes looked fine. But the rest of the plane was torn apart and hard to identify.
“That looks like junk,” said one of the Delta Team members, pointing to some twisted metal.
“It’s a nose-gear strut,” said Cox.
The gauges provided a few clues. The captain’s airspeed indicator was covered with mud, but when Cox cleaned it off, he saw the needle had stopped at 264 knots—the plane’s speed when it hit. A needle on the hydraulic pressure gauge indicated that the B system was at 3,100 pounds, which told Cox that it had full power when the plane crashed. The plane’s hydraulics are crucial because they move the landing gear and flight controls such as the rudder, elevator, ailerons, and spoilers. The needle for the second hydraulic system—the A system, which moved the landing gear—was missing.
Elsewhere on the hill, other teams were finding more clues. The 737’s engines were badly damaged, but the members of the power plant group could see that the fan blades were bent opposite to the way they rotated. That meant the engines were running at impact, which ruled out the possibility that engine failure had caused the crash. Everyone looked for parts from another plane, on the theory that the big 737 might have collided with a Cessna or a Piper. But so far, none had been found.
Cox was perfect for the systems group. He was a 737 pilot who knew every inch of the cockpit and, like Haueter, he loved dissecting the mechanical and electrical systems that made the plane fly. He was not a do-it-yourselfer as Haueter was—Cox was away from home too much to have time to build things—but they shared a fascination with solving mechanical mysteries.
Cox was a meticulous guy who kept his life and cockpit carefully organized. His bookshelf was a reflection of his personality: All the Tom Clancy hardbacks were on one shelf, all the books about flying on another. Paperbacks were together, separated from the hardbacks. An errant copy of his wife’s Martha Stewart Weddings put in an appearance on the maritime shelf, but it didn’t stay long. Cox kept their finances on their home computer, and he maintained precise records about where their money went. When his wife, Jean, came back from shopping, she had to separate the expenses into categories such as Household and Gifts.