The different interpretations of the tape showed how the rivalry between ALPA and Boeing was increasing. As the investigation wound into its fifth month with no conclusive evidence as to why the rudder had moved, the two groups were beginning to disagree more often. In the absence of solid facts, both sides retreated to positions that protected their turf. It was as if Boeing and the pilots union had a default setting, like computer software. Until they got proof to the contrary, they didn’t budge.
The two sides remained cordial, but the rivalry was apparent. Cox enjoyed taking friendly jabs at the Boeing team. He tapped McGrew on the shoulder at their first meeting and said, “I know what did it.” Cox held up a copy of the Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid that had this headline: USAIR FLIGHT 427 COLLIDED WITH A UFO! The article reported: “Federal investigators are looking into the possibility that the crash of USAir Flight 427 was caused by a collision with a UFO—a possibility supported by the discovery of a passenger’s hastily scribbled note that says, ‘Massive, glowing, as big as a house. Oh my God! It’s going to hit!’”
McGrew got a chuckle out of it, but he and the other Boeing investigators were wary about Cox and the rest of the ALPA guys. They felt that ALPA was overprotective of the pilot brotherhood and would go to great lengths to protect a fallen pilot, even when he was to blame.
Brett decided to go back to Pittsburgh for the January 1995 public hearings on the crash, where the safety board would lay out the evidence it had amassed. He chose to fly because it simply wasn’t practical to drive from San Diego, where he had spent several weeks staying with his brother. But he had been very careful about choosing how to get there. He picked American Airlines because it was the only major carrier that flew to Pittsburgh and did not have any 737s.
As the plane prepared for takeoff, the man sitting beside him noticed Brett was clenching his seat.
“Nervous flier, huh?” the man asked.
“Yeah,” Brett said.
“They say your odds of dying in a plane crash are higher than winning the lottery.”
Brett couldn’t let that go. He reached into his wallet and pulled out the card about the scholarship fund he had started in honor of Joan.
“That plane that crashed in Pittsburgh,” Brett said, “my wife was on it.”
“Oh my God,” the man said.
Then the man told Brett about his own personal tragedy, that his daughter had been molested by his ex-wife’s new husband. Brett had heard lots of those sad stories since Joan died. When people found out about his tragedy, they wanted to share their own horrible tales, reassuring him that he wasn’t alone in suffering. A Newsweek photographer told Brett that his brother took a drug overdose. A cab driver said his parents died when he was twelve. A woman who handled Joan’s pension said her brother and his wife were in an accident with a drunk driver, which had killed their child and put them both in comas. Tragedies everywhere. Until this happened, Brett had no idea that life could be so miserable for so many.
The man beside him said he was a born-again Christian and that he had decided to forgive the guy who had molested his daughter. “I’ve realized that if I want to be forgiven by God, I’ve got to forgive the people who harm me.” That really struck a chord with Brett. He had never really bought all the hype about being born again, but the guy was right. Brett realized that he couldn’t stay angry forever.
The next day he took a cab from his downtown hotel out to Hopewell to visit the crash site again. He brought a video camera so he could record the scene for Joan’s family. He had talked with them often in the five months since the crash. He hired an artist to do an oil painting of Joan from a photograph and gave it to her parents for Christmas.
He trudged through the snow, narrating while he described the site. He took a wide shot of the spot where the nose of the plane struck the road. “You can see it’s not very big at all,” he said. “It’s not much bigger than a family room, really.”
He walked to the plastic wreath, which sat on a big easel with American flags on one side. “This is that wreath I was telling you guys about, where Joan’s rose blew off just as the guy from the Salvation Army was walking up to it. There are still a lot of them on there. They are glued on there pretty good. It’s still kind of an amazing thing to me.”
He then visited the Sewickley Cemetery, where USAir had built a memorial that listed all 132 victims. He zoomed in on Joan’s name and then read the inscription on the headstone very quickly, as if he was in a hurry to leave: “Strengthen our course with every prayer, let Heaven’s breezes speed us there, and grant us mercy evermore as we sail to Heaven’s shore.”
13. PILOT ERROR
Pittsburgh was brutally cold the week of the public hearing. Several inches of snow covered the lawn outside the Pittsburgh Hilton and Towers, and the roads were filled with an ugly gray slush. The hearing was conducted in the hotel’s ballroom, a cavernous space with nineteen-foot ceilings that was set up like a giant courtroom. Haueter and his investigators sat at raised tables on one side, as if they were the prosecutors in the case. The parties—Boeing, the pilots union, the FAA—were positioned just below Haueter, huddled at tables as though they were the defendants. The meeting was run by NTSB chairman Jim Hall, who presided like a judge. In the audience were several hundred spectators, including about one hundred relatives of the victims. Some of them clutched photographs of Flight 427’s passengers. Others had photos pinned to their jackets and sweaters.
The NTSB called it a public hearing, but that was a misnomer. Many families had the impression that they would be able to stand up at a microphone and ask questions, just as they would at a city council meeting. But at an NTSB hearing, the public was to be seen and not heard. This meeting was the agency’s chance to show its work and explain the evidence. There would be no time for questions from the crowd.
There would be no breakthroughs, either. Haueter and his investigators had spent the past five months talking with the people who would testify, so it was unlikely that the NTSB would learn anything new. If a break in the investigation ever occurred, it would be in a lab somewhere, not in a big ballroom in Pittsburgh.
On the first day of the hearing, the board released the docket, a foot-high stack of reports, memos, letters, charts, and graphs. Much of it was technical gibberish—details about dual-concentric servo valves, rudder blowdown, and chip-shear strength. There were pages and pages of data from the flight recorder and photocopies of federal aviation regulations. Nowhere in the big package was there any guidance to understanding what it all meant—no underlined words, no comments in the margins, no Post-it notes. It looked like Haueter had emptied his file cabinet and ordered somebody to make copies. But it was consistent with the cryptic way the NTSB operated. It released hundreds of thousands of facts and allowed the public to decide which ones were important.
Haueter began the hearing by reading an account of the five-month investigation: “On September 8, 1994, at about 7:03 Eastern Daylight Time, USAir Flight 427, a Boeing 737–300, registration N513AU, crashed while descending to land at the Pittsburgh International Airport.” He played a video animation of the moments right before the crash. The video showed a plain white 737 (USAir had balked at putting the airline’s logo on the animated plane) that bobbled a bit, rolled smoothly to the left, and then plunged nose down. The video ended while the plane was still at an altitude of 4,000 feet. (A Boeing video played later in the day was more dramatic. It showed the view Emmett and Germano would have seen, with the ground spinning closer and closer until impact.)