The impact was swift and powerful. The airline’s bookings plummeted again. Airline analysts said they were increasingly worried about the possibility of a bankruptcy filing. Employee morale sank to new depths, as ticket agents suffered through wisecracks from customers. Three days after the story was published, Schofield sent a bulletin-board message that tried to give everyone a boost. “I salute you for your patience and professionalism in handling these pointed conversations calmly and with confidence,” he wrote. He quoted aviation expert John Nance from a TV appearance saying, “You can take any airline in the country and find examples of things that sound this bad when taken out of context, in isolation, raise them into scrutiny, and scare everybody to death. But when you really look at this airline’s heart and soul of operations, they’re no less safe than any other major carrier.”
Schofield urged employees not to be bitter. “I know that it is painful to see and hear negative and distorted media coverage. Our best response, however, is to prove critics wrong by action, not words. We know we’re a safe and reliable airline. We must continue to demonstrate that to our customers in every action we take and every contact we have with them.”
Five days later, USAir launched a major public relations campaign to try to rescue its reputation. It appointed retired U.S. Air Force general Robert C. Oaks as vice president for corporate safety and regulatory compliance. USAir also said it was hiring PRC Aviation of Tucson, Arizona, “a respected and experienced aviation consulting company,” to conduct a thirty-day audit of the airline’s safety policies and procedures. Schofield said the auditors “can go anywhere, ask anyone anything, can look at any records, manuals, bulletins, letters or messages they think are germane to safety at USAir. There are no limits.”
The airline then bought full-page ads in major newspapers to publish messages from the company’s employees and unions. The ALPA chairman’s letter said safety was the pilots’ first priority. The head of the flight attendants union said USAir was totally dedicated to “operational integrity.” Two mechanics said they would not hesitate to ground any plane if it was unsafe. A customer service supervisor said passengers’ well-being was foremost in the minds of USAir employees. Schofield concluded the series with a message that said safety “is the foundation for all we do.”
John Cox sat down at the conference table in the NTSB listening room and put on a set of headphones. He and USAir pilot Ed Bular had come to hear the cockpit tape from Flight 427 to see if they could identify the mysterious thumps that had baffled the investigators for months. Cox had heard tapes from other crashes before, and he could never erase them from his memory—the routine of the cockpit quickly deteriorating into shouts, screams, and death. But listening to the tapes was a necessary part of an accident investigation and, as a pilot with eight thousand hours in 737s, he might recognize something that others did not.
He and Bular sat across from each other at the small table. Al Reitan, an NTSB sound technician, sat at the head of the table so he could control the tape player. They began by listening to all the cockpit sounds for the final ten to fifteen minutes of the flight. That was a necessary step for Cox, to listen to the entire tape so he could get over the drama of the event, the fact that he was listening to two fellow pilots scream and die. He was amazed by the sound of the plane being buffeted, a violent shaking caused by insufficient air crossing the wings to keep the plane flying.
“The buffeting sounds like a goddamn freight train,” Cox said.
Reitan then isolated each of the four channels on the tape—Germano’s microphone, Emmett’s, the jump seat microphone, and the mike in the ceiling above the pilots’ heads. Both pilots sounded cool and confident, Cox thought. There was good rapport between them, and they were flying by the book. Emmett said very little in the final thirty seconds. His most expressive comment was a worried “Ohhh shiiiiit.” But Cox thought that was understandable because he was the flying pilot and was trying to figure out what was happening to his airplane. Germano was more expressive, but he never said what he believed was happening. His most telling comment was when the plane stalled, when he asked, “What the hell is this?”
Reitan used filters to block out the extraneous noise so the pilots could focus better on the voices. He used a computer to trap snippets of sounds and play them repeatedly. He trapped the thump and played it back again and again. Sheez Zuh Thump Clickety-click. Sheez Zuh Thump Clickety-click. Sheez Zuh Thump Clickety-click. Over and over the pilots listened to it, like an old record album with a scratch on it. But after hearing it dozens of times, they could not identify the sound. “Beats the hell out of me,” Cox told Bular. He thought it sounded like a briefcase falling over on a carpeted floor. But cockpits were not carpeted, and there was not much space for a briefcase to fall over.
Several hours later when Cox walked out of the room, he was convinced that the pilots had been caught by surprise by something they hadn’t encountered before. He believed the tape proved the pilots had not done anything wrong. It offered no evidence that one of them stomped on the left rudder pedal and held it down. To the contrary, it showed the airplane was doing something the pilots did not expect.
Cox said later, “There is a gremlin in that airplane.”
McGrew, Boeing’s chief engineer for the 737, listened to the same tape and came to the opposite conclusion. He had to fight for months to get the NTSB to allow him to listen to it, because he was not officially part of the investigation. When he finally heard it, he used the same cool approach that he used for everything else. He concentrated on gathering data, hearing every sound he could, and didn’t think much about the screaming.
McGrew came away convinced that the pilots were startled by something and then overreacted. He heard it in the tone of their voices when they said “Sheez!” and “Zuh!” They had no idea what hit them. McGrew heard nothing to indicate that the pilots believed the plane was malfunctioning. There was no mention of the rudder pedal or anything else not working properly. He noticed they never communicated about the fact that they were twisting out of the sky. When Germano shouted, “Pull! Pull!” McGrew knew it was the wrong thing to do. They should have pushed the stick forward to gain speed.
The tape made it all clear to him: the pilots got startled, stomped on the pedal by mistake, and then pulled back on the stick, stalling the airplane. The crash was clearly caused by pilot error. He wanted others to listen to the tape because he was convinced they would have the same reaction he did.
Months after hearing the tape, McGrew awoke in the middle of the night, haunted by the sounds he had heard. He wondered what the passengers felt as the plane was spinning toward the earth. What do you think about when you know you’re about to die?