A few birds of modest size could do serious damage to a $40 million plane, breaking through the nose or the windshield or crippling the engines. When a four-pound bird hit a plane going 260 knots the bird had the force of fourteen tons.
The FAA gets two thousand “bird strike” reports in a typical year, but an estimated eight thousand strikes never get reported. Gulls account for one-third of the collisions, followed by ducks/geese/swans, blackbirds, doves, and raptors. (The FAA also keeps track of ground collisions with other wildlife. In a typical year, deer are struck by planes forty-three times. Other collisions involve coyotes, dogs, skunks, muskrats, and possums. Reptiles are a smaller risk, although planes struck two alligators from 1992 to 1996.)
At the airports with the worst bird problems, employees drive around in trucks playing tapes of screeching birds over loudspeakers. The tapes sound like a flock of starlings being tortured. If that doesn’t scare the birds away, the workers pull out shotguns and fire blanks into the air. With stubborn birds, the employees occasionally shoot to kill. The world experts on bird-plane problems work for an air force unit called the Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH) Team. The BASH Team visits air force bases to warn pilots about the problem and make sure airfields are not attractive to birds. They tell fighter pilots that a single turkey vulture can be as dangerous to an F-16 as a round of artillery.
The FAA sets standards to make civilian planes bird-resistant, saying they must withstand the impact of birds as heavy as eight pounds. Tests to certify the engines look like a bizarre stunt from a David Letterman show. The engineers put dead birds in a cannon and shoot them into the spinning fan of a jet engine.
At the crash site, theories about birds emerged in the first few days. A bird collision might account for the mysterious thump on the cockpit tape, and it might explain why the plane suddenly rolled to the left. Maybe a big goose broke through the skin of the plane and jammed the rudder system. Or maybe it got lodged in the slats, the movable panels on the front of the wings.
John Cox was skeptical. In his twenty-year career as a pilot he had collided with several birds, and he knew they could be dangerous. But he doubted that birds had caused this crash. He kept saying, “Have to be a hell of a bird to bring down a 737.”
No feathers were found in the wreckage, and air traffic controllers said they saw no birds on radar at the time of the crash. But five witnesses said they had seen birds in the area the previous evening or the morning of the accident. A retired army colonel called to say that he had seen “thousands” flying over Hopewell three nights earlier. The operations group checked with a bird expert at the University of Illinois, who said it was unlikely but possible for birds to be at 6,000 feet.
At the hangar where the wreckage was being assembled, investigators walked up and down the makeshift aisles, looking for anything birdlike. They paid special attention to the wings and the nose, where birds were most likely to hit. But the only evidence they found was a pair of feet from a goose that someone had left in one of the engines as a prank—a stunt that infuriated Haueter. Dozens of people studied the wreckage, but no one saw any sign of a bird.
That didn’t satisfy the team from Boeing, which was especially interested in the bird theory. (Haueter noticed that Boeing was always keenly interested in theories that shifted blame away from its airplane.) Rick Howes, Boeing’s coordinator, reminded Haueter of the destructive power of buzzards and how they had caused several crashes. Howes said he was interested in the left wing slats, where a broken hinge might have been caused by a bird. He thought the NTSB should do a full-scale reconstruction of the leading edges of the wings and the area just behind the nose, known as the forward pressure bulkhead. Once those sections were reassembled, the investigators could examine them with a special black light that would make bird residue glow.
Haueter was pretty sure birds weren’t a factor, but he wanted to be positive. He agreed to do the reconstruction. “Let’s bring the theory up now and bury it,” he said. “I don’t want to have it haunting me a year from now.”
Greg Phillips was nearly killed investigating a 737 crash. A flight controls specialist with the NTSB, he had been sent with Haueter to Panama in 1992 to figure out why a Copa Airlines 737 had suddenly twisted out of the sky at 25,000 feet and crashed. As he searched the jungle for wreckage, Phillips felt a sting on his arm and slapped away what he thought was a caterpillar. Back in his hotel room, he began to feel ill. His stomach ached, his fever rose, he shook with chills. He felt like he was falling down a long, dark hole. Lying there naked, he thought he was going to die. He crawled out of bed and put on some pants. If he was going to die, he was going to go wearing pants. He recovered sufficiently to take the first flight home to Washington, and blood tests showed he had been bitten by a black scorpion, which was often fatal.
Phillips got interested in accident investigation as an engineering student at the University of Evansville in Indiana. In 1977 the school’s basketball team had been killed in the crash of a DC-3 because of a problem with the plane’s rudder. Phillips read everything he could about the crash and decided he wanted to be an investigator. After he graduated, he designed airplane components for Cessna in Wichita, Kansas, and for Northrop in Los Angeles until he saw an ad for an NTSB job in Aviation Week and Space Technology in late 1987.
He had frizzy brown hair, button eyes, and a dimple on his chin. He always sounded happy, even when he was buried in work and about to be sent on a fifteen-hour flight to yet another crash. Like his friend Haueter, Phillips loved to put things together. He was building an RV-8, a lightning-fast experimental plane that could be used for aerobatics. He drove a Porsche 944 and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and brewed his own beer. Phillips had the perfect personality for the safety board’s culture of caution. He was thorough and always skeptical. When other investigators were convinced about some kind of malfunction, Phillips was often the last holdout, constantly looking for more evidence.
Many investigators came across as dispassionate. They were like homicide detectives. They didn’t get wrapped up in the tragedies they saw because every day brought a new one. But Phillips wasn’t afraid to discuss his feelings about what he saw in the field. He said his job reminded him how fragile life is. “There’s no guarantee for the next day,” he said. “You can’t put off expressing emotions to people you love.” After an accident he often spent extra time with his wife, Debbie, and his two teenage boys, savoring each moment with them.
Phillips was blunt about the limits of technology. “You can’t have a perfect airplane,” he said. “I don’t think perfection exists.” The systems on modern jetliners were so complex that no human being could possibly account for the myriad ways in which things might fail. Yet he never worried about his own safety when he flew. He felt that the manufacturers built solid airplanes, that pilots were well trained, and that the government did a good job of regulating the airlines and the manufacturers. “The system works,” he said.
When he arrived on the hill in his rubber suit, the largest piece of wreckage he saw was the tail. On the wreckage map, the tail was piece No. 1, right at the center, like a big X on a treasure map. The rest of the plane had been squashed and shredded by the impact, but the tail was in surprisingly good shape. That was good news to Phillips because two of the primary flight controls were on the taiclass="underline" the rudder (the movable vertical panel that made the plane’s nose go right or left) and the elevators (the horizontal panels that made the nose go up or down). Fire had devoured an eleven-by-four-foot section of the vertical stabilizer, which was the big fin area in front of the rudder, and there was a chunk missing from the top portion of the rudder panel itself. But inside the tail, the hydraulic devices that moved the rudder were in good condition.