The NTSB had spent weeks studying and testing the PCU, but McGrew felt the investigation had barely looked at Emmett and Germano. What kind of training had they had? What did previous incidents tell about how they responded to wake turbulence? The NTSB had not explored these areas very much.
McGrew kept using the word “startled.” There was plenty of evidence that the pilots had been surprised by something—maybe a bird, the wake turbulence, or another plane—at the moment that Germano said “Sheeez!” The surprise could have caused Emmett to jerk the wheel too far to the right. When the plane quickly rolled in that direction, Emmett might have tried to stop the roll by slamming his foot on the left pedal and continuing to press on it without realizing what he was doing. There also was no question that the pilots had made a huge blunder by pulling back on the control column. That stalled the airplane and gave them virtually no chance to recover. Yet that mistake got virtually no attention from the safety board.
On February 15, 1995, Boeing went on the offensive and faxed Haueter a seven-page letter that said the NTSB should take a closer look at the pilots. It cited a British report that attributed many military accidents to “overarousal,” when pilots were so surprised by an alarming situation that they could not recover. The letter said a perceived emergency was all it took to startle the pilots (a subtle reference to the moment when Flight 427 was jostled by the wake turbulence). The Boeing letter also cited an FAA study that said a pilot might take up to ten seconds to respond after being startled. “The NTSB should explore, from a review of the literature and all available databases and records, whether the Flight 427 flight crew could have responded to the unexpected and startling encounter with significant wake turbulence by (1) making an inadvertent application of left rudder, or (2) having an accidental or cognitive failure that led to an application of left rudder,” the letter said.
Cognitive failure. That was a delicate way of saying the pilots screwed up.
The letter said there were numerous examples of accidents caused by pilots stomping on the wrong pedal. The 1985 crash of a Midwest Express DC-9 was caused by pilots who responded to an engine failure by pushing the rudder the wrong direction. A 1992 Air National Guard crash of a C-130 was caused by the same mistake. The letter asked Haueter to explore Emmett’s and Germano’s backgrounds to see if they had been trained to use the rudder or had flown other planes in which they would have used it more heavily. The letter said Haueter also should look into the fact that the pilots pulled back on the control column.
Haueter had mixed feelings about whether they would have stomped on the rudder pedal. His ride in M-Cab had made him doubt that two seasoned pilots would have made such an obvious error. But like the Boeing engineers, he was concerned about pilots becoming too complacent in modern cockpits. Unlike the “stick-and-rudder” pilots of the old days, modern crews had become too much like computer programmers. They relied heavily on the autopilot and flight-management computers, which could practically fly an entire trip. So Haueter agreed to delve more deeply into Emmett’s and Germano’s training. Besides, the investigation had sunk into a lull and he had been looking for something to get everybody thinking again. The letter was just the jolt he needed. He faxed a copy to the pilots union.
It didn’t take long to get the predictable response. ALPA went ballistic. Suggesting that pilots screwed up was akin to shouting a racial slur at them. Herb LeGrow, ALPA’s coordinator for the crash investigation, thought that Boeing was looking for a scapegoat. “We don’t want to see the reputations of the pilots compromised because [the safety board] can’t find an answer to what caused the accident,” he said in an interview in his Clearwater, Florida, home. LeGrow, a USAir 767 pilot who had worked on more than a dozen accident investigations, was also worried that Boeing would use its Washington clout to pressure the NTSB into blaming the pilots. He said ALPA might be small, but it was not afraid to go head to head with Boeing. “It’s David and Goliath at this point. If it gets down and dirty, I’m willing to fight. We’ll sharpen up our slingshots and fight them.”
LeGrow and Cox fired off a letter to the safety board saying that Boeing was trying to raise doubts about the pilots and divert the investigation. The letter countered each point that Boeing had made. It said the cockpit tape showed that the pilots were not overreacting to the wake turbulence but were “struggling in an attempt to gain control of an uncontrollable aircraft.” The letter said it was unfair to make a comparison with military crews because airline pilots fly considerably more hours. In ALPA’s view, there was no need for a further exploration of Emmett’s and Germano’s backgrounds because the investigation so far “revealed that these individuals were fully qualified and had exemplary records.”
LeGrow and Cox said there was no connection between the USAir crash and the pilot-error accidents cited by Boeing. The Midwest Express and C-130 crashes were engine failures at low altitude. “In USAir 427, there is no evidence that the flight crew applied an inappropriate flight control input. In fact, there is a significant amount of evidence which could lead to the conclusion that the aircraft experienced a mechanical malfunction.” The ALPA letter also defended the pilots for pulling back on the control column: “It should be noted that at the onset of the event, traffic beneath USAir 427 was a real issue. At that point, maintenance of altitude was, in fact, critical. No action by the crew could have stopped the roll…. By the time control column position became an issue, ground impact was inevitable.”
LeGrow concluded the letter by saying that the pilots “fought for the lives of their passengers” and suggested that Boeing’s letter was written by its lawyers: “Everyone recognizes the manufacturer’s product liability problem. The issues of civil litigation should not be allowed to infiltrate an NTSB investigation. The traveling public deserves the answers to what truly caused this accident.”
McGrew was not surprised that ALPA had a near meltdown over the Boeing letter. That was typical of the union, he thought. It always seemed to want to protect the brotherhood, even when the facts might suggest otherwise. It seemed as if ALPA wanted to perpetuate a myth that every pilot was perfect and never made mistakes.
The roots of ALPA’s defensiveness about pilot error dated back to the late 1920s and early 1930s, when airline managers pushed pilots to fly long hours and take risks in dangerous weather. Pilots who tried to be safe often got fired. At least twelve of ALPA’s twenty-four founders were killed in accidents. But when a plane crashed, “pilot error” seemed to be the government’s automatic response. Rarely, if ever, did the airline get blamed, even if it had ordered the pilot to fly into a snowstorm. It was easy to blame dead pilots because they could not defend themselves. Ever since then, one of ALPA’s fundamental principles has been to clear the names of dead pilots.