The NTSB’s Aviation Investigation Manual warned about the press. It said investigators should be careful about using cellular phones because reporters might intercept the calls. It said the investigator in charge “should be aware that reporters will be looking to him/her for body language or facial expressions during the Member’s briefing and should, therefore, maintain as neutral an expression as possible.” The manual also gave advice on what to say when reporters asked speculative questions: “Rely on tried and true phrases such as ‘That is one of the many things we will be looking at’; ‘It is much too early to tell as this point’; ‘Right now we are not ruling anything out.’”
The first day in Hopewell, someone had leaked to reporters a copy of the air traffic control transcript. Haueter was angry that it was leaked, because it was not the FAA’s official transcript (which would not be done for days, after every voice had been identified), and it might contain errors. But as he expected, the transcript dominated the news coverage, along with the preliminary information he released from the flight data recorder.
The second day, investigators on the hill found suspicious parts from the thrust reversers, the engine doors that open when a plane lands. These devices reverse the jet blast to slow the plane on the runway. If a thrust reverser opened in flight, it would be catastrophic, like slamming on the brakes on one side of a car. The 737’s engines had safety locks that were supposed to prevent the reversers from activating until the plane was on the runway, but workers on the hill had found evidence that they might have deployed. Also, the workers could not find key pieces that usually locked the reversers in place. At his nightly meeting with investigators at the Holiday Inn, Haueter recounted the findings but warned them not to jump to conclusions.
“Let’s not focus just on this thrust reverser,” he said. He was skeptical about the theory because it did not match the flight recorder, which showed the plane’s engines at idle just before it plunged from 6,000 feet. Also, the fact that it was the right reverser did not match the data that showed the plane rolling to the left. The Boeing investigators urged Haueter not to tell the press because the evidence was incomplete. But Haueter and Vogt decided they should tell reporters everything they had, regardless of whether it was incomplete. If they didn’t mention the reversers at the briefing, the news would probably leak out anyway. (The NTSB was notorious for leaking to the press. Peter Goelz, the agency’s managing director in the late 1990s, joked that the NTSB’s official seal should have an eagle clutching a sieve.)
That night at the briefing, Vogt explained the discovery but cautioned reporters that the reversers could have popped out when the plane struck the ground. The press dove for the story, THE CAUSE? MAYBE THE ENGINE, said a headline in the St. Petersburg Times, THRUST REVERSER SUSPECTED IN USAIR JETLINER CRASH/DEVICE COULD HAVE CAUSED NOSE DIVE, said the Houston Chronicle.
But the next day the thrust reverser theory unraveled. Investigators found locks that showed the reverser doors were closed when the plane hit. The first cause du jour had been ruled out.
Amid all the chaos, Haueter tried to account for every piece of the plane. Nearly all of the wreckage seemed to be on the hill, but a few pieces were turning up elsewhere. A passenger’s business card and some light insulation from the plane were found two and a half miles downwind from the hill. Could that mean the plane had exploded in flight? Clark, an expert on airplane performance, sat down with his laptop computer and launched a program he’d written called WINDFALL. The program used information about wind and the plane’s flight path to estimate where wreckage might have fallen. It said that if pieces had fallen from the plane, they would probably be behind the shopping center.
On September 14, an army of more than 150 volunteers, search-and-rescue team members, and NTSB employees gathered in the parking lot at Green Garden Plaza to start a massive search in the triangle-shaped area that WINDFALL had identified. For several hours, the team members crawled through bushes, waded through creeks, and peeked in backyards.
One volunteer, a USAir flight attendant, paddled a rowboat to the middle of a pond to investigate a mysterious object floating on the water, only to find it was insulation from a building. Another volunteer found something that looked like a rocket in someone’s backyard. It was rushed back to the FAA’s bomb expert, who determined that it was a spare part for a home furnace. Searchers in a helicopter spotted a suspicious panel hanging in a tree and a ground team hurried to find it, but it turned out to be a “DuckTales” kite.
When the search ended, the only items found away from the hill were insulation and light debris that had been carried in the hot plume of smoke. Once again, it looked as if the big jet was intact until it struck the hill.
At his press briefing, Haueter recounted the search. He said USAir employees in Chicago reported nothing unusual about the flight. Engine bolts in the wreckage were cracked, but those cracks probably occurred when the plane hit the ground. The plane’s logbook showed no problems with Ship 513. They had not found the Golden BB.
7. ZIPLOC BAGS
Dave Supplee was accustomed to seeing 737s taken apart. A USAir mechanic on the overnight shift in Tampa, Florida, he could fix anything on a plane—radios, hydraulic pumps, even the cranky APU generators that always seemed to be breaking down. Supplee, thirty-six, was a safety official with his union, the International Association of Machinists, and was on call anytime there was an accident involving a USAir plane. An hour after the Hopewell crash, he got a call from John Goglia, the union’s accident coordinator. “Let me warn you now,” Goglia said in his thick Boston accent, “this one is not pretty. There is total destruction of the aircraft.” Two years earlier, Supplee had worked on another USAir crash, Flight 405 at LaGuardia, but that scene wasn’t nearly as gruesome as the one in Hopewell.
Supplee was an ideal member for the NTSB’s structures group because he could identify the mangled parts lying on the ground and hanging in the trees. “Yeah, this is your air-conditioning bypass valve,” he said. “This is your hydraulic pump.” His group painted lines for a grid to keep track of the wreckage, so they could look for patterns in where the items landed.
When he first arrived at the scene, dressed in his white rubber suit, Supplee felt a sudden emptiness, as if all the life had been drained from the area. He tried not to think about the carnage around him. When he saw a hand or a foot lying on the ground, he called the coroner’s team over. They tagged it, noted the location with a colored flag, and then put it in a one-gallon Ziploc freezer bag. As the week wore on, the foot-high red and yellow flags sprouted everywhere, like survey markers at a construction site. Initially, red flags were supposed to designate body parts and yellow ones, wreckage. But there were so many body parts that they quickly ran out of red and had to use flags of all colors. It was a strange sight—a rainbow of flags flapping in the wind, an unintended memorial to one of the most gruesome air crashes in U.S. history.
Late one afternoon Supplee was assigned to find the plane’s cargo doors. There was a theory that one of them might have blown out in flight, so Haueter wanted to know if they were all on the hill. A coroner’s team had been working with Supplee’s group, picking up body parts, but the coroners had stopped for the day. Just after the team walked away, Supplee discovered pieces of door trim. Figuring that the rest of the door was buried just below the surface, he and other members of the structures group dug into the rocky soil.