Reporters kept badgering Haueter with questions about Olson, even though the FBI had said publicly that there was no evidence that anyone had tried to kill him. Finally Haueter got frustrated and called the FBI again. Was there more to the Olson story than he had been told?
No, the agent said. “He’s nobody.”
The early clues from the crash argued against a bomb. The plane’s wreckage, including the four thousand copies of Business Week, was concentrated in a tight area on the hill. If a bomb had gone off in midair, Business Week would have rained from the sky for miles. They would still be finding copies in Cleveland. But Haueter couldn’t be sure. He needed to rule out every possibility, no matter how silly it was. So he asked Ed Kittel, the FAA’s bomb expert, to do a thorough examination of the wreckage.
Kittel was one of the world’s premier experts on airplane explosions. He spent twenty years as a bomb disposal officer for the navy, including time that he vaguely refers to as “working with the intelligence community.” He had intense blue eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, and short hair that was still cut to navy standards. On his desk in the FAA’s Washington headquarters was a picture of his two-year-old son with an antique detonator. His computer’s screen saver read, “There’s no problem that cannot be solved by the proper amount of high explosives.”
Kittel knew that bombs left a calling card. If one had exploded inside the USAir plane, hot gas from the bomb would have spread quickly, deforming everything it touched. The wreckage would be pitted with tiny holes that resembled craters on the moon. It would also have black streaks that would radiate from the origin of the blast and would not wipe away with a finger. By comparison, a fire after the plane hit the ground would be cooler and slower. The metal would not get pitted. The soot would wipe away with a finger. The problem for Kittel was that the 737 was in tens of thousands of pieces. He had to check every one.
So he positioned himself on the hill at the place where wreckage was sprayed with Clorox and checked each piece of wreckage like a supermarket cashier in a moon suit. For days, he kept at it, inspecting virtually every piece. He held them, turned them over, and searched for the telltale pockmarks. He found no sign of a bomb.
The wreckage was then trucked to a USAir hangar at the Pittsburgh airport and spread out on the floor in the rough shape of the plane. The idea was to look for burn patterns and broken metal that might indicate an in-flight fire or bomb. But once again, Kittel saw no evidence of either. The burn marks were randomly scattered around the plane, which meant the pieces had not caught fire until the plane struck the ground and the parts mixed together.
At the makeshift morgue at the Air Force Reserve hangar, Kittel’s partner Cal Walbert examined body parts for evidence. If a bomb had gone off in the cargo compartment, pieces of it would have been captured in the passengers’ legs and buttocks. The coroners X-rayed every Ziploc bag, removed any foreign matter, and placed it in recycling bins. Walbert sifted through twenty bins and found fragments from seats, plastic trays, and overhead bins, but nothing to indicate a bomb.
Kittel told Haueter that he was positive: A bomb had not brought down Flight 427. But that night at the Holiday Inn, a reporter ambushed Haueter as he came out of the press conference.
“I know this is a bomb,” the reporter said.
Haueter grabbed Kittel, introduced him to the reporter, and said, “Ed, is there any doubt in your mind that this was not a bomb?”
“None,” Kittel said. “We have no indication of a bomb of any kind.”
The crackpots had started calling on September 9, blaming the crash on the devil, Russian death rays, and the Prince of Darkness. The calls were dutifully forwarded to the NTSB witness group. The group had two purposes: to field calls from people with theories about the crash and to interview anyone who had seen Ship 513 fall out of the sky.
Witnesses to plane crashes were notoriously unreliable. They often confused the order of events and embellished their stories. But interviewing them was a standard part of every investigation, and occasionally someone actually saw something important. The 427 group got names of witnesses from newspapers and TV news reports and then tracked them down, taking a plastic model of a USAir plane so people could demonstrate what they had seen. Most said the plane had rolled left and then plunged nose down toward the hill, as the flight data recorder indicated. But they could not agree on whether it made an unusual noise. Some heard a growling sound. A kindergartner thought it sounded “funny.” Others heard nothing out of the ordinary. A USAir utility worker who happened to be on the soccer field behind Green Garden Plaza was sure that he saw smoke coming from the front of the right wing. Others saw no smoke. One man saw a mist and believed the plane might be dumping fuel. A food service employee said one of the engines looked like it was cocked to the side. Other witnesses said the engine was fine.
The witness group got lots of calls from retired airline pilots and well-meaning frequent fliers who said the crash reminded them of problems they’d experienced on other flights—some that were years earlier. One man said an electromagnetic field from power plants might have harmed the 737’s “fly-by-wire” system (he apparently did not know the 737 was not a fly-by-wire plane). A retired pilot from Stuart, Florida, faxed an elaborate scenario suggesting that a flap failure surprised the pilots. He ended his scenario with “Precious little time and mind frozen with fear.”
Another caller said he had a dream that a flight attendant was standing in the cockpit and fell on the captain when the plane banked, causing the captain to lose control. The man said only pilots should be allowed in the cockpit. If that wasn’t feasible, others in the cockpit should wear a restraining belt to keep them from falling into the pilots. The NTSB witness group kept a log of each interview, noting whether a follow-up was recommended. In the follow-up column for the man with the cockpit theory, one of the witness team members wrote, “Possible psychiatric help.”
Haueter got a postcard that read, “Give me $50,000 and I’ll ask the Prince of Darkness for no more plane crashes.” Haueter joked that it was a risky investment. The guy wasn’t promising the crashes would stop. All he said was that he would ask.
Witness group member Kimberly Petrone, a USAir flight attendant, took a call from a man who said he was a psychic and had a dream about the accident. He had envisioned a clear blue sky and then the word “hydraulic” written in the clouds.
Petrone couldn’t take the guy seriously. “What’s the lottery number going to be tomorrow?” she asked.
“I’m not that kind of psychic,” he said. “I just sense things.”
This is the paradox of aviation history: Birds inspired us to build the first airplanes a century ago, but an errant flock could bring a 737 crashing to the ground and give us a humble reminder that humans were not meant to fly. Birds and planes had an uneasy coexistence from the start. Calbraith Rodgers, the first man to fly across the United States, was also the first to be killed by a bird collision. His Wright brothers plane struck a gull in 1912 and crashed in the surf at Long Beach, California. Since then, bird-plane collisions have killed more than one hundred people in the United States and countless others around the world. The 1960 crash of a Lockheed Electra in Boston, which killed sixty-two people, was caused by a flock of starlings and gulls, and a 737 crash in Ethiopia that killed thirty-five people was blamed on speckled pigeons.