The plane leveled off, and Haueter breathed a sigh of relief—but he vowed to get a window seat in the future.
A big reason for his jitters was that he felt the 737 needed immediate safety fixes. They had not come up with the probable cause, but he and Phillips felt they had found enough problems with the rudder system to ask the FAA to mandate some improvements. That was typical in a high-profile investigation. The NTSB often made safety recommendations long before it determined the probable cause. Phillips had written a fifty-page memo calling for eighteen safety improvements, most involving the rudder. The memo said the FAA should immediately require Boeing to devise a procedure for pilots to handle a rudder hardover. Phillips was concerned that pilots would be caught by surprise if they had an incident and wouldn’t know how to respond. The memo also called for long-term design changes to the PCU to prevent a hardover.
In response to Boeing’s inability to track rudder problems with its databases, Phillips also called for a joint program between government and industry to keep a database on maintenance and operational problems. He had been surprised that a company as sophisticated as Boeing could not easily list 737 rudder incidents.
Haueter thought the memo made a good case for the changes. He also wanted to get a jump on the FAA, which was writing its own safety study on the 737 and relying heavily on what Phillips had learned. Haueter did not want the FAA to get credit for the NTSB’s work. “These guys are going to beat us to the punch with our data,” Haueter told Bud Laynor, the NTSB’s deputy chief of aviation safety.
Laynor was a navy-trained pilot and engineer who had designed flight control systems on airplanes and NASA spaceships. At sixty-one years of age, he was in great physical shape, with short brown hair cut like he was still at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station and a thin, leathery face with creases in the cheeks. Laynor was the most respected technical expert at the board, so his approval for Phillips’s memo was crucial. Without it, the memo would go nowhere.
When Phillips wrote it in the spring of 1995, he figured it would go through the usual editing by NTSB managers and would emerge essentially intact. But after a few weeks he was surprised that nothing had happened. The memo seemed to be stuck on Laynor’s desk. When he saw Laynor in the hallway one day, Phillips mentioned the memo. “What about those recs?” Phillips asked.
“I’ll get to them,” Laynor said.
But when he did get to them, Laynor decided the memo was premature. The 737 had more than 60 million flight hours, and not even one crash had been linked to the alleged rudder problem. The NTSB had no evidence that anything in the PCU had malfunctioned. Without proof, he felt it was premature to say there was a problem with it. Besides, the valve had a built-in backup. If one slide jammed, there was a second slide to oppose the jam so the rudder could still move or return to neutral.
Laynor didn’t argue much against Phillips’s memo, he just sat on it. The memo stayed on his desk, gathering dust. Phillips, normally one of the NTSB’s most cautious, gentle investigators, complained loudly to everyone that the fixes were crucial. These were not a bunch of crackpot recommendations, he said. There were persuasive arguments for each of them.
Haueter agreed. He felt so strongly about the safety fixes that he went over Laynor’s head to Hall. But Hall was unwilling to get involved. If Laynor wasn’t ready for the recommendations, no one was. The 737 safety fixes would have to wait.
Laynor was still interested in theories about the wake turbulence from the Delta plane. He said it was too much of a coincidence that Flight 427 had flown through the precise spot where the Delta plane had been seventy seconds earlier. He figured the wake had to play some role in the pilots’ loss of control. He kept pushing for a flight test with a 737 and a 727 to show whether the wake was strong enough to flip a plane.
To Haueter, it was ridiculous to think that a wake could flip a 737. He repeatedly said that planes would be falling out of the sky every day if that were true. But he knew that he had to test Laynor’s hypothesis. If he didn’t, the wake turbulence theory would haunt them for years.
The FAA had its own 727 that could be used for the tests, but Haueter found it surprisingly hard to get a 737. They were the best-selling jets in the history of aviation, so he figured that some owner somewhere would be willing to lease one for a month. But he kept getting turned down. The 737s owned by the major airlines were all booked, and they couldn’t spare one for a month, even though the NTSB was going to pay. Leasing companies had some available, but they didn’t want to help. They were afraid the plane might be damaged by the test and did not want the publicity linking their plane to one that killed 132 people. Haueter offered to paint it white so that no one would know the owner, but he still couldn’t get any takers.
Finally, he went to Hall and said he needed help. The test was worthwhile, Haueter said, but no one wanted to participate. Could Hall exercise some leverage and find a plane?
Hall got on the phone with FAA administrator David Hinson, and they jointly called USAir chairman Seth Schofield. Suddenly USAir changed its tune. The airline would loan a 737.
Everyone agreed that the $1 million cost of the tests would be split by the NTSB, the FAA, Boeing, and USAir. ALPA decided it could not afford to contribute, which Haueter thought was a bit cheap. Here’s a bunch of guys making $160,000 a year, but they couldn’t afford to support the tests?
16. THUMPS
Jim Cash had the creepiest job in aviation. As the NTSB’s expert on cockpit tapes, he listened to pilots die every day. He estimated that he had heard about three hundred die horrible deaths, plus several hundred more who had been fortunate enough to survive. It was fitting that Cash was shy and soft-spoken. He heard pilots hollering and screaming every day, but when he talked, his voice was so quiet that you had to strain to hear him. He was forty-three, with rosy cheeks and a boyish face. There were no aviators in the Cash family when he grew up in upstate New York—his dad had a blue-collar job at a power plant, his mom was a housewife—but Cash built model airplanes and got interested in flying. He was awarded an ROTC scholarship to Syracuse University and studied electrical engineering. It wasn’t that he really wanted to be an engineer, it was a matter of survival. He hated writing and liberal arts and figured his best hope for graduating was to be an engineer. He joined the air force and flew F-4 fighter planes, but you would never know it by talking with him. He had none of the ego or bluster of a fighter pilot. He was in the air force for eight years but chose to leave when he was due for a desk job.
He couldn’t find anything he liked at an aerospace company and stumbled across an opening in the NTSB sound lab. He had no experience listening to cockpit tapes (air force planes usually do not have them because the military does not want the tapes to fall into enemy hands), but his experience as a pilot and his skills as an electrical engineer made him ideal for the job. Like Haueter and Phillips and seemingly everyone else at the safety board, Cash loved to build and fix things. He built a pool in his backyard and spent four years restoring a ’72 Porsche 914.