On Sunday, September 11, Brett sat in a front pew at St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church in Moon, Pennsylvania, for a service to honor the victims. One hundred thirty-two candles burned on the altar, one for each person on the plane. Brett’s mother gave his hand a comforting squeeze. He clutched the wedding picture to his chest through much of the service, but occasionally tipped it down to look at Joan. At one point, a tear streamed from his cheek and splashed on the picture.
TV cameras were clustered at the back of the church, trying to capture the grief, but Brett didn’t give them much thought. Then, midway through the service, the priest encouraged the congregation to greet people sitting nearby. When Brett turned to a woman sitting behind him, she shook his hand but looked away nervously.
When the service ended, a different woman sitting beside Brett introduced herself and said her brother was killed in the crash.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, hugging her. “It’s so easy to forget about everybody else who lost, too.”
“I’ll pray for you, if you’ll pray for me,” she said.
“I will, I will pray for you,” Brett said. “I won’t forget.”
As Brett left, he stopped and did an interview with a TV reporter. But he never spoke to the woman behind him, who had turned away when he went to greet her. The next day, when he picked up the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he was amazed to see the paper had printed his entire conversation with the sister of the victim. The woman behind Brett had been a reporter, writing down every word, yet she never identified herself.
The next day, Monday, September 12, was Brett’s birthday. Days earlier, he and Joan had talked about going out to dinner to celebrate. But now he was in Market Square in downtown Pittsburgh for another memorial service. About five thousand people packed into the square, a big turnout that was a testament to USAir’s large presence in the city. Brett sat in one of the front rows, beside a man from the Salvation Army. As they sang hymns, Brett couldn’t help but notice the guy’s voice. He had the worst singing voice Brett had ever heard. Brett chuckled a little and for just a moment felt a break from the relentless sadness.
Brett had never been much of a churchgoer—he believed you did not have to go to church to have religious faith—but he was comforted by the two services. He believed that God occasionally sent you a sign. During the service, a big jet passed overhead, its shadow racing over the crowd. Brett thought it was a sign that Joan was going to be okay.
Within minutes of the crash, reporters began calling USAir’s Arlington headquarters to ask if the airline was unsafe. The company seemed to have all the warning signs. It had been in deep financial trouble, losing $2.5 billion since its merger with Piedmont Airlines in 1989. It was under pressure to cut costs to compete with more efficient airlines that were charging rock-bottom fares. And now it had had its fifth crash in five years.
“For USAir, this is Apocalypse Now,” Gerald Myers, author of a book on corporate crises, told the Charlotte Observer. “This is more than a slippery slope for them; it’s a cliff. They’re getting themselves in the same position that Exxon got in with the Valdez or A. H. Robins with the Dalkon Shield.”
USAir’s financial problems had prompted the FAA to beef up inspections two years earlier. But the day after the Flight 427 crash, FAA administrator David Hinson said his agency had not found any serious problems. “We deem [the airline] to be safe,” Hinson said. “In fact, this afternoon I will be flying on USAir.”
At a press conference in Pittsburgh, USAir chairman Seth Schofield was swamped with questions about the airline’s safety record. He said the five crashes were not connected in any way.
“If I thought USAir was an unsafe airline, I would put the entire fleet on the ground until any problems were corrected,” Schofield said. (That is the standard response from an airline chief when his company’s safety record is challenged. ValuJet president Lewis Jordan used nearly identical words after the 1996 crash in the Everglades.)
In a message posted on company bulletin boards, Schofield warned his employees to be ready for rough times. “In the coming days, you will surely hear and read comments in the media and elsewhere that will offend and hurt you. I encourage you to lean on each other for support and, in doing so, you will strengthen each other.”
The New York Times asked statisticians if USAir’s safety record was worse than those of other airlines. Most agreed that plane crashes were random events that had no connection with a particular airline. But Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was quoted as saying, “If you got on a random USAir flight in the 1990s, your chances of being killed are nine times as high as if you got on a flight of any other airline.”
The hemorrhage had begun. USAir’s bookings fell drastically over the weekend.
The dream of every accident investigator was to find the Golden BB. That was the NTSB nickname for some tiny piece of wreckage that instantly explained why a plane crashed. There were just a few Golden BBs in aviation history—a disk from a jet engine that broke apart and caused the crash of a United Airlines jet in 1989, and a latch on a DC-10 cargo door that caused a Paris crash in 1974. But usually investigators had to be plodding and methodical, eliminating one theory after another until they zeroed in on the real culprit. It typically took several weeks before investigators knew the cause, but the NTSB usually took twelve to eighteen months to officially complete a case.
That wasn’t fast enough for the news media. Reporters were ruthlessly competitive and eager for scoops, which meant they couldn’t wait until the safety board completed its report. In the Flight 427 case, they began speculating about the cause before the NTSB even got to the scene, calling pilots, trial lawyers, and former safety board members and asking them about previous accidents involving the plane. The Seattle Times and the Dallas Morning News both pointed out that the 737’s rudder system had been under scrutiny because of a possible flaw in a hydraulic valve that could make the rudder go the wrong direction. The NTSB frowned on that kind of speculation, preferring to make its own pronouncements as it discovered the evidence, but reporters were merely doing in public what Haueter and his team were doing behind closed doors.
The hunger for information about a crash dates back to the first aviation fatality involving the Wright brothers’ plane. Reporters swarmed onto the field at Fort Myer seconds after the crash and ignored requests to move back until the army sent in soldiers on horses that practically trampled the reporters. As recently as the 1980s, reporters were allowed to visit crash sites, stepping over wreckage and dead bodies. But the proliferation of Action News and Eyewitness News and twenty-four-hour cable news channels led to such intense coverage that crash sites are now quickly roped off and reporters are herded as far away as possible. The NTSB typically gives only one or two briefings a day, a short one in the early afternoon and a more detailed one about 7 or 8 P.M.
The NTSB briefings were like a high-stakes game of Twenty Questions. The NTSB stuck to the facts, explaining the evidence without putting it in context. Reporters had to read between the lines and figure out which tidbits were truly important. The game was especially difficult for new reporters, because the NTSB representatives often spoke in jargon, leaving many journalists dumbfounded about what it meant. A handful of aviation reporters from the major newspapers and TV networks knew how to play the game, but most people at the nightly briefings were local journalists who had never dealt with the safety board.