Whether he was flying a difficult approach into O’Hare on a stormy night, driving 100 miles per hour in his sports car, or just balancing his checkbook, Cox was in control. On his business card he was “Captain John Cox.” He had 8,000 hours flying 737s, and he loved the plane. He had flown lots of others in his twenty-four-year career, but he had always preferred the 737. He liked its smooth landings and the solid way it handled a crosswind. “The airplane tends to make you look good,” he said. He loved the challenge of mastering a machine, maneuvering the fifty-ton bird through winds and clouds and heavy rain and still managing to touch down so gently that the passengers in back could barely feel it.
Cox also craved speed. The speedometer on his fire-engine-red Acura NSX went to 180 miles per hour. He had gotten the needle up to 125. He referred to the $80,000 sports car as “the toy,” but he treated it with reverence. When he parked at a store or restaurant, he put it in a remote corner of the lot, parked at an angle across two spaces so no one would nick his doors. He kept a cloth cover on the car, even when it was inside his garage. When he removed the cover, he folded it up carefully, one side at a time, as if he was folding a flag.
The son of a Birmingham banker, he grew up in a family that had no connection to aviation. But he got interested in airplanes as a toddler. One of his first words, uttered when he was two, was “Constellation,” the big plane that he watched taking off from the Birmingham airport. He got his private pilot’s license at age seventeen, flew charters and corporate planes at eighteen, and then joined Piedmont Airlines at twenty-six. He became a USAir pilot when the two airlines merged in 1989.
Cox was trim, with the graying hair, silver moustache, and tanned good looks that seemed standard issue for an airline pilot. He was one of ALPA’s technical experts, a rare pilot who understood the complex engineering of the planes he flew. Even his doodling was intricate. The margins of his notepads were filled with complex geometric figures that looked like M. C. Escher drawings.
His union had a Jekyll-and-Hyde reputation in aviation safety. C. O. Miller, a former NTSB official, often said that ALPA had done more to promote safety in the skies than any group except the federal government. The union had helped design the national air traffic control network and the instrument landing systems that guide planes toward a runway. It played a big role in changing cockpit design to reduce pilot mistakes (the easy-to-read T design on the instrument panel is one of its legacies), and it was a strong proponent of crew resource management, which has improved communication in the cockpit.
But so far as some critics were concerned, ALPA had a reputation as a union that used safety as an excuse to get more money and generous work rules. Najeeb Halaby, a well-respected FAA administrator from the early 1960s, once said there were two ALPAS—the one that made substantial contributions to safety and the one that masked its economic demands “under the guise of safety.” The problem, Halaby said, was that he could never be sure which ALPA he was dealing with.
Among accident investigators, ALPA had a reputation for sometimes making excuses for pilots when there was overwhelming evidence that they had screwed up. The union would claim the pilots were influenced by the design of the plane or try to blame air traffic controllers or some mechanical problem. In some crashes, it was obvious that the pilots had made a stupid mistake—they simply forgot to set the flaps for takeoff or they flew into a bad storm. But ALPA would throw up smoke screens and make excuses.
Cox, however, was respected at the NTSB because he was not a strident unionist. He was regarded as one of the Young Turks at ALPA who were more like accident investigators than defenders of the pilot brotherhood. He had taken the highly regarded accident investigation course at the University of Southern California and followed its open-minded approach. “The evidence leads you where it leads you,” he often said. If that meant a pilot was at fault, so be it.
There had long been a culture clash between Boeing and ALPA that was rooted in the starkly different styles of engineers and pilots. Boeing engineers existed in a black-and-white world of data. In their view, if you got enough data, you could do anything—build a perfect wing, design a better engine, or fix a faulty part. But they were perplexed by the macho personalities of the pilots who flew their creations. It didn’t help that in 1955 test pilot Tex Johnston shocked Boeing’s top brass by making a risky barrel roll in a prototype of the 707 in front of thousands of people. Boeing president William Allen was furious that a pilot had endangered the plane and so many people with such a daredevil maneuver. The engineers also resented ALPA’s long fight to get a third pilot in the 737 cockpit. The union said the third pilot was needed for safety, but officials at Boeing and the airlines saw it as a blatant attempt to get more people on the payroll.
On the other hand, pilots complained that the Boeing engineers didn’t appreciate them. The pilots felt they had a trait that couldn’t be measured on any chart: courage. They—not some beady-eyed engineer with a slide rule in his pocket—were responsible for hundreds of lives every day. When a pilot shot a tight approach into La Guardia on a snowy night, all the data in the world would not make the wheels touch down safely unless the pilot knew what he was doing. The engineers had no equations that mentioned guts.
In Hopewell, it was clear that Boeing and ALPA were rival teams. They were cordial with each other, but they didn’t mix much. Cox found that the Boeing investigators rarely spoke up and always traveled in packs. When everybody else got together for breakfast or dinner, the Boeing guys would go off on their own. Cox jokingly called Boeing a black hole—information went in, but it didn’t come out.
6. THE GLOW FROM THE HILL
In the first few days after the crash, members of the CVR team listened to the cockpit tape many times. The team quickly identified most of the sounds on the tape, such as the snap of a shoulder harness, clicks from the elevator trim wheel, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the stickshaker. But there were a few thumps they could not identify. They listened to the sounds hundreds of times but could not recognize them. The thumps were muted and did not seem to originate from the metal fixtures of the cockpit. It was time for some experiments.
On September 11, three days after the crash, members of the CVR team arrived at Washington National Airport and walked to a gate where a silver USAir plane was parked. Their goal was to record a variety of sounds on the plane’s CVR to see if they matched the thumps from Flight 427.
Sounds on cockpit tapes were often as valuable as the pilots’ words. Investigators could calculate engine thrust from the distinctive hum of a jet engine. They could determine runway speed by counting clicks heard as the plane’s nose wheel ran over embedded lights. Sounds could be displayed on a graph like a fingerprint, with squiggly lines representing volume or pitch. By taking a fingerprint of a mysterious sound and comparing it with one from a known sound, investigators could look for a match.
Al Reitan, a voice recorder specialist with the NTSB, came to the airport with Mike Carriker, a Boeing test pilot, and Paul Sturpe, a USAir pilot. The silver plane at the gate was the same model as the accident airplane, a 737–300, with the same type of cockpit voice recorder. They turned on the plane’s auxiliary power unit to provide electricity to the CVR and began a series of tests.
They tried to imagine what might have happened in the cockpit to cause the thumps. They flipped switches and yanked on levers. They dropped notebooks on the floor and turned the trim wheel. They fiddled with the clip that held pilot checklists. They pulled on the flap handle and triggered the stick-shaker. They stomped their feet in the doorway and in the first-class galley.