Dedik was livid. The crash had consumed her husband’s life. It interrupted dinners and dates and weekend plans. It kept him at the office late and sent him out of town. He was obsessed by it. They would be having a perfectly nice conversation, and then she would see his mind drift away as he contemplated some damn theory about the damn accident. And then, right in the middle of their conversation, he’d say something about the crash, as if he had not been listening to a word she said.
She would reply, “I don’t care.” She was afraid the investigation was going to destroy little bits and pieces of the man she loved until there was nothing left.
People from the NTSB and Boeing called him at home, day or night. Everything was an emergency, even when it really wasn’t. It reminded Dedik of the story of the little boy who cried wolf. These guys—and they were nearly all guys—were always crying wolf. Worse, they treated her like she was Haueter’s secretary. It infuriated her. “I don’t care about the office, I don’t care about 427, I don’t care about anything,” she told him one night. “The victims are dead. There is nothing you can do about it. You know what? It’s not going to make any difference whether you solve this today or tomorrow. There is nothing that is so important that you have to deal with it right now.”
She had an important job, too, keeping the world safe from a nuclear disaster. She worked hard and traveled the globe to negotiate with other countries and make sure they were complying with international agreements. But she didn’t obsess about her job, and she knew how to draw a line between work and the rest of her life. When she left the office, she left her job behind. That was one of the things that she had liked about Haueter when they met—he had a life outside his job. He was different from the other Washington men. But Flight 427 had changed him.
Some nights when he arrived home, she would tell him not to say a word about the investigation. Other nights she would give him ten minutes to talk and then make him promise not to bring it up again.
She asked him once, “Is it so awful to have an investigation unsolved? Does that mean you’re a failure?”
“Yes,” he said.
Some people in aviation, and a few at the board, thought that too much emphasis was being put on coming up with the probable cause. To them, the NTSB frequently got tied in knots trying to find the precise cause of a crash and did not focus enough on preventing future accidents. The reformers, led by retired NTSB aviation safety chief C. O. Miller, wanted the board to issue “findings” after each crash, with the emphasis on preventing accidents and reducing hazards.
But to Haueter and most others at the NTSB, it was important to name the probable cause. They thought that the public needed answers about why a plane crashed. It gave everyone a sense of closure, and it gave people confidence that it was safe to fly. If the board didn’t name a probable cause in USAir 427, people would wonder for years whether the 737 was safe.
Haueter was a long way from solving the mystery, however. It was nine months after the crash, and the investigation had stalled. They’d done hundreds of tests on the rudder system and come up empty. Many other theories had fizzled. Several colleagues at the safety board thought Haueter should admit he was stumped and give up.
With no new leads, Haueter went back to old theories that had been ruled out. It was a sign of how desperate he had become. Leads that had been dismissed nine months earlier were alive again. He was willing to consider anything, even if it did not involve the rudder.
Brenner and operations group chairman Chuck Leonard conducted a second interview with Fred Piccirilli, a witness on the soccer field who thought he saw smoke coming from the plane before it hit the ground. The wreckage showed no sign of an in-flight fire, but Piccirilli had credibility because he was a USAir maintenance employee. He had come up to Hall at the hearing in Pittsburgh and told him about the smoke, so Hall asked the investigators to talk to him one more time. In the second interview, he again said the smoke was “orangish-reddish-brownish” and was coming from a spot in front of the right wing. He saw no fire but said the smoke remained in the air after impact and dissipated slowly. His account hadn’t changed much from the first time. The problem was, there was not a single piece of evidence that backed up what he said.
The bird theory had also been born again. Never mind that no one had found a single feather in the wreckage or that Roxie Laybourne had conclusively ruled out the suspicious clump. The Boeing investigators had persisted about the theory, saying it was possible a bird had broken through the nose of the plane and hit a rudder cable. They wanted to do one final check of the wreckage with a black light to look for bird remains. This would be their last chance because the NTSB was about to release control of the wreckage to AAU, USAir’s insurance company, which planned to put the pieces in crates and move them to a warehouse.
Supplee, the USAir mechanic, had been summoned back to the Pittsburgh hangar to help conduct the final bird check. He thought the whole exercise was a waste of time. They had already ruled out birds, yet Boeing persisted with any theory, no matter how absurd, that would clear the airplane.
When he walked into the hangar, Supplee noticed that the musty smell of chlorine and jet fuel had faded since his last visit six months earlier. The windows had again been covered so his team could work in darkness. They donned the ridiculous-looking yellow-orange glasses that supposedly made it easier to see the glow from bird remains. They had two black lights, so they split into teams and started on different sides of the wreckage. Supplee and a forensic expert from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology went to the place where the leading edge of the wings had been partially reassembled and waved the light over it. Nothing glowed. They moved to other piles of wreckage. Supplee picked up each piece, and the guy from AFIP waved the light over it. Still no glow. They checked hundreds of pieces and did not see anything glow.
Suddenly they heard a shout from across the hangar, where a Boeing team member had a second black light.
“Guys! Look at this!”
Everyone hurried over. They could see a piece of wreckage glowing like a Jimi Hendrix poster in a dorm room. If this was a bird, it must have been a big one. How could they have missed it before? Then they removed their glasses and shone a flashlight on the wreckage. It wasn’t a bird. It was the fluorescent paint they had used to draw grid lines at the crash site. They must have painted the wreckage by mistake.
They laughed and went back to the tedious job of inspecting each piece. A little while later, the AFIP expert noticed a slight glow on one piece. “Might have something here,” he said. It was shaped like an X, about one and a half inches long and half an inch wide. Supplee could see it clearly through his glasses. They took a Q-tip and a solution and swabbed the area gently to get a sample. When they added a solution to test for organic materials, it glowed slightly.
But lab tests were negative. Once again, birds had been ruled out.
Some days for Haueter went like this:
9 A.M. Boeing calls and whines about the investigation.
10 A.M. ALPA calls and whines.
11 A.M. It is USAir’s turn, followed by a second Boeing whining session after lunch. Haueter wanted to shout: “Give me a break!”
He believed in the party system, but on many days the parties behaved like children. In the absence of solid answers, they had retreated to positions that protected their own interests. Boeing and Parker Hannifin, the manufacturer of the PCU, saw no evidence that the rudder system had malfunctioned. They still wanted Haueter to spend more time scrutinizing the pilots. But ALPA and USAir saw no evidence that the pilots had made a mistake. They wanted Haueter to conduct more tests on the rudder system.