Then they returned to the NTSB offices at L’Enfant Plaza and used a computer to draw the fingerprints. The strange thumps from the original Flight 427 tape showed up as dark spikes, like a fingerprint of a burglar. All they needed was a match.
They ran the new tape through the computer. The stomps and slams from the test also showed up on the screen as spikes. But they were distinctly different from the mysterious thumps on Flight 427. The fingerprints did not match.
Brett felt restless and overwhelmed by all the people who had stopped by to offer their condolences. At one point there were thirty or forty people crowded in his parents’ house, all with good intentions, but Brett couldn’t take it anymore. He needed to get out of there. He wanted to visit the crash site and say a final farewell to Joan.
USAir had said he could probably see the site and that he might be needed to identify Joan’s body. So Brett, his mother Bonnie Van Bortel, Joan’s brother Dan Lahart, and Brett’s friend Craig Wheatley had piled into his mother’s Jeep Cherokee and driven to Pittsburgh. Brett couldn’t concentrate on the road, so his mom and Craig took over the driving. As they arrived in Hopewell Township, the hill where Joan had died now glowed a brilliant white, lights ringing it like a crown. It almost looked beautiful.
“Craig, can you pull over?” he asked. They stopped about two hundred yards from the exit for Green Garden Road. Brett got out, knelt in the asphalt by the guardrail, and said a long prayer.
He was numb that weekend, still trying to make sense of the fact that Joan was gone. Everywhere he went, he carried a crystal frame with their wedding photograph that he had picked up on the way out of the house. Joan looked beautiful in the photo, with her hair pulled back, a perfect smile, and her hand resting gently on Brett’s arm. But the picture called attention to his loss. When he checked into a downtown hotel where USAir had rooms for the families, the bellman saw the picture.
“Did you know someone in the crash?” he asked.
“My wife.”
Suddenly Brett was a celebrity, but for all the wrong reasons.
USAir was paying for the hotel rooms, meals, and other expenses. The company had offered to fly Brett and his family to Pittsburgh, but the last thing he wanted to do was fly, especially in a USAir plane. At the hotel, he met the airline employee who was assigned to be his liaison during his stay. A saleswoman for USAir, she seemed poorly trained and unprepared for the job. When they met, she broke down and cried.
Brett told her that he respected anyone who would volunteer for such a difficult job, but over the next two days, he realized that she was clueless. She rode around in a white limo and couldn’t remember the hotel where she was staying. She had a cellular phone so Brett could get in touch with her anytime, but the battery was dead and she did not know how to charge it. She kept flipping through legal pads, reciting directions from her bosses, but she was unable to answer his most basic questions if they weren’t addressed by the instructions on the pads. She seemed more interested in the airline’s needs than in Brett’s. The only time she seemed animated was when he mentioned talking to the media. “You can talk to the media,” she told him, “but we’d advise against it because you’re going through a period of grieving.”
She tried to explain how they were going to identify the bodies, using a grid system to locate the body parts. But Brett didn’t want to hear about it. “Great,” he said. “I’m glad you’re getting a little science lesson out of it while there are pieces of my wife laying up in that hillside.”
USAir had reversed itself. There would be no visit to the site and no opportunity to look at Joan’s body. Instead, USAir asked him to send books and perfume bottles that might have her fingerprints.
Airlines had a long tradition of helping families after a crash. The companies believed it was the compassionate thing to do and also was good for public relations. Most airlines assigned an employee to be a liaison with each family and paid for the family’s travel, funeral expenses, and many other costs. The airlines bought meals, made mortgage payments, and occasionally even paid a speeding ticket for a grieving family member.
Critics said there was an ulterior motive for the corporate kindness. The airlines could collect a dossier on the victims that could be used in court to fight for smaller awards. If the airline learned that a victim had a drug problem, for example, it might convince a jury to reduce the amount of the award because the victim would have had a shorter life expectancy. But the airlines insisted that their family coordinators were to help grieving relatives, not to ferret out details about the victim.
Some airlines were better prepared for a crash than others were. They had thick notebooks that spelled out how they should respond minute by minute, and they offered special training for employees who worked with the victim’s family. But not USAir. It was caught unprepared for the Hopewell crash, even though it had just handled the Charlotte accident two months earlier and had had three other crashes within the previous five years. No airline had as much experience with crashes in the 1990s as USAir did, but the company still seemed bewildered about what to do. USAir’s director of consumer affairs had written a plan to revamp the response for families and establish special training for the airline coordinators, but the plan had not yet been approved by top executives when the Hopewell crash occurred. As a result, Flight 427 families experienced a wide range of responses from the airline. Some said their USAir coordinators were compassionate and organized. Others, like Brett, thought they were ill prepared and insensitive.
To make matters worse, Brett and his family had to deal with the news media. They had been badgered by reporters the day after the crash, but Brett had refused to talk. A TV news crew tailed him as he drove from his parents’ house to his home in Lisle and then ran up to him in his yard. He told the reporter to leave. “I can’t do this right now,” he said. Another reporter was rude when the family declined to talk, but he eventually left.
The reporters were engaged in a painful ritual that follows a tragic death, whether the death results from a plane crash, a car accident, or a tornado. Reporters disliked the practice as much as the families did, but the stories were an expected part of news coverage after any disaster. They put a face on the tragedy. In newsrooms all over the country, editors studied the Flight 427 passenger list for anyone from their area. If they found someone, it gave them a stake in the crash.
A reporter was then assigned to find out everything possible about that victim. The assignment meant checking clips in the newspaper’s library to see if the victim had been in the news, looking at land records to see what the victim owned, and researching court records to see if the victim had ever been arrested or sued. Such inquiries might sound insensitive, but those sources were all public records, and they spoke volumes about the victim’s life. The reporters used city directories and called neighbors, who usually had nice things to say about the victim. The Chicago Tribune’s story was headlined CHICAGOANS MOURN THEIR OWN. It quoted an unnamed relative of Joan’s saying that she “loved life. She was only going to be gone for a day. Just a day.”
Most reporters dreaded knocking on the door of a widower’s house and handled the task with sensitivity. Many families were willing to talk. It was their chance to commemorate the person they loved. If families preferred not to say anything, most reporters left politely. A few, however, were so intent on getting a tearjerker of a story and beating the competition that they were rude. After the ValuJet crash in 1996, TV camera crews hid in the bushes in a hotel parking lot and then jumped out when they spotted a distraught family. After the crash of TWA Flight 800, a reporter for a New York tabloid posed as a relative of a victim to get inside the hotel where the families were staying.