On a Saturday in January 1995, Haueter drove to his office in L’Enfant Plaza to finish some paperwork in preparation for the public hearing on the crash. The office was like a ghost town, dark and lonely on weekends. Haueter didn’t like the silence, but he could get a lot of work done with no interruptions. He worked for several hours and then put on his jacket to leave. As he walked out, he went by a conference room and noticed some posters on the walls. He stepped inside.
The posters were tacked up on three walls of the cramped room. Each of them represented a second or half-second increment of Flight 427. The thirty-two posters showed the view that Germano would have had from the captain’s seat, coupled with Boeing’s estimates of how the wheel and rudder pedals had moved. Boeing had used footprints to show how the rudder moved, a subtle dig at ALPA that suggested the pilots moved the rudder with their feet.
Haueter had seen the same data hundreds of times—in charts, video animations, computer spreadsheets, and M-Cab—but this suddenly brought everything together. He walked along the wall, studying where the rudder pedals had supposedly moved. The USAir 737 had been jostled by the wake of the Delta plane and then rolled to the left. That made sense. Then one of the pilots tried to stop the roll by turning the wheel to the right. That made sense. Then the left rudder pedal went in briefly and came out. That made sense. One of the pilots probably tried to slow the plane as it was rolling back to the right. But then the left pedal went in again, almost all the way.
That made NO sense.
Why would a pilot keep applying left rudder when the plane already was rolling left? That would be like a driver realizing his car was veering toward a cliff and then turning the wheel to go over the cliff sooner.
Haueter kept studying the drawings and the rudder estimates, checking when the rudder came in and when the wheel moved. It all seemed out of sync. Then a light went on in his head. What if the rudder drawings were reversed? Instead of pushing on the left pedal, maybe the pilot was pushing on the right pedal, but there was some malfunction in the power control unit that caused a reversal and made the rudder go the wrong way.
Suddenly it all made sense. The pilot had been stomping on the right pedal, trying to stop the big plane from rolling left, but the rudder wasn’t responding. In fact, he was actually pushing the rudder the opposite way, causing the plane to roll out of control. That would match the grunts and confusion on the cockpit tape. When Germano said, “What the hell is this?” maybe he was referring to rudder pedals that were not responding the way they should.
Haueter left the room, took the elevator downstairs, and went outside. He walked down the stairs beside the subway station and took a shortcut beneath the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a beehive-shaped building beside L’Enfant Plaza. As he crossed D Street in the brisk winter weather, he thought about what he had seen.
He didn’t know what could have made the rudder reverse. Phillips had subjected the power control unit to every malfunction they could dream up and it had withstood every one. And there were no marks showing that the valve had jammed or reversed.
He jaywalked across Seventh Street and walked beneath the railroad tracks, where a platoon of pigeons had found shelter from the cold January weather. He turned right on Maryland Avenue, saw the dome of the U.S. Capitol looming in front of him, and then crossed Independence Avenue to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. This was Haueter’s secret retreat, the place where he went to escape his worries. He occasionally sneaked over on workdays when he needed to clear his head and get inspiration from the world’s greatest collection of historical planes. He was always impressed at how much progress had occurred in such a short time, from the Wright brothers to the moon landing in one lifetime. There was still a little boy inside Haueter who marveled at the beautiful planes. Even if he couldn’t fly them, he would love to just sit in them.
He walked in the main doors, beneath the Voyager plane that had circled the globe, and headed for the west end of the building. He walked up the stairs to the second floor beneath a silver DC-3. FLY EASTERN AIR LINES, THE GREAT SILVER FLEET, it said on the side. He browsed in the World War I gallery and then went to the Pioneers of Flight room. He stopped in front of the Lockheed Sirius, a red two-seater with big silver pontoons that Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had flown to the Far East. Charles Lindbergh had always been one of Haueter’s heroes. A picture of the Spirit of St. Louis hung on his office wall.
As Haueter admired the plane, his thoughts circled back to the investigation. He felt more confident than ever that the rudder had reversed. It made perfect sense. Now he just had to figure out why.
12. GREMLIN
It didn’t take long for nasty jokes about USAir to show up on the Internet. One list suggested new advertising slogans for the airline: “When you just can’t wait for the world to come to you”; “Complimentary champagne during free-fair”; and “The kids will love our inflatable slides.” Another list claimed to have the cockpit tape with the final words of Flight 427’s pilots:
“Pittsburgh will be our final destination.”
“Let’s see if this baby can do 300!”
“Oh stewardess! Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh no…”
“Assume the position.”
USAir was an easy target for wisecracks not just because of the five crashes but also because it had never been considered a big-time airline. American and United had been major carriers since the early days of commercial aviation, serving big cities across the country. But USAir’s roots were a hodgepodge of regional airlines that served the blue-collar towns the big airlines didn’t care about.
USAir began in 1939 as a quirky little company called All American Aviation that went dive-bombing for airmail packages in the Allegheny Mountains. Most of the towns were too small or remote to justify full air mail service, so All American’s planes dove toward a contraption that looked like a football goalpost, dropped a container of mail, and then snagged the outgoing package with a hook. A clerk inside the plane reeled in the package as they flew to the next town.
The years when All American was grabbing packages in Punxsutawney and Oil City and Slippery Rock helped it develop an image of a gritty regional airline serving the Rust Belt. And while All American was becoming famous for the drudgery of picking up envelopes, carriers such as Pan Am and United were flying wealthy business travelers to the nation’s biggest cities, earning reputations for pampering them with luxurious service.
By 1953, All American had changed its name to Allegheny Airlines and had begun carrying passengers. It had a fleet of thirteen DC-3s serving such cities as Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Newark. Over the next twenty-five years, Allegheny grew steadily by merging with Lake Central and Mohawk to become the main regional carrier in the Northeast. But it still was not in the same league as the big guys. Passengers complained about mediocre service and dubbed it “Agony Airlines.”