David and the two other families that owned the crash site felt they had been considerate for a whole year, allowing hundreds of people to visit and leave crosses and wreaths on their property. But they were ready to reclaim their peace and quiet. They decided no more visitors would be allowed after the anniversary. “I’ve got to get my life back,” David said.
Brett met David during a visit to the crash site a few hours before the candlelight memorial service. “I’m sorry about your loss,” David told him.
Brett had never spoken with anyone who had seen or heard the crash, and he was curious about what David remembered. He wanted to know what the plane had sounded like, whether David had seen it, how soon he’d gotten to the wreckage.
“It was roaring,” David said. “It sounded like a Mack truck coming down a hill.”
The small clearing that had been littered with airplane wreckage and body parts a year earlier was coming back to life. Grass was sprouting. Leaves had grown back on many of the trees, although some remained scarred by the crash and the fire, stripped of any sign of life for fifteen or twenty feet up the trunk. More than a dozen wreaths and mementos had been placed around the site. A crucifix was tacked on a blackened tree trunk. A cross was planted in the hill like a tombstone for passenger Leonard Grasso. Joanne Shortley had left a love message for her husband, Stephen, that said, “JS + SS” with a big heart, like something she would have written on a locker in junior high. Brett walked around the crash site searching the ground for the diamond from Joan’s engagement ring. He knew it was silly to think that it might still be lying out in the open after a year, but stranger things had happened. This was the place where Joan’s rose had been blown off the wreath, after all. Brett looked up several times at the USAir planes that flew over the crash site, about one per minute. They were probably at the same altitude as Joan’s plane had been, filled with people who never considered that life might suddenly end.
He and Dan returned to the hotel to get dressed and then went back to Green Garden Plaza to get a ride to the memorial service. They were in one of the first buses that crunched up the gravel road and stopped near the site. Brett got out and walked down toward the place he called ground zero, where the plane’s nose had hit the road. A few people crouched along the road arranging candles in the shape of hearts. Brett walked back up the hill as several hundred family members gathered around the Reverend Thaddeus Barnum, the leader of the service. Brett stood right behind a tree where a baseball cap had been posted in honor of one of the passengers. The hat was labeled SUPER GRANDPA.
A 737 happened to fly overhead at 7 P.M., just as the service began. Brett looked up at it. “Let there be silence among us,” said the pastor as the plane’s roar faded in the distance. At 7:03, the precise moment of the crash, church bells rang throughout Pittsburgh in honor of the victims. Everyone at the service said the Lord’s Prayer and recited the Twenty-third Psalm. Then the pastor said, “I know many people could not come back to this site. I am very glad that you did, to come and know and feel and remember and touch and taste and to feel again, the memory of those you’ve lost.”
That night, as he ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant near the hotel, Brett felt relief that he had gotten through the anniversary. He had experienced a lot of anxiety leading up the ceremony, and now he was glad to move on. But the next day the sadness returned. Life seemed a dull gray once again. At times he would forget about the crash, when he would be having fun with his brothers or his mom or his friends. But then he would suddenly think, How can I be sitting here having a good time when Joan is dead? A friend called them “grief bombs.” When one exploded inside him, he lost track of what he was saying. He became quiet and often excused himself to get some fresh air.
Three days before the anniversary, USAir surprised Wall Street analysts by announcing that it would make a pre-tax profit for the year. That was a remarkable turnaround for a company that had seemed so close to filing for bankruptcy a year earlier. The company’s stock, which had sunk to 3% after the crash, had rebounded as high as 14 in June 1995.
The rebound had less to do with what USAir did than what others had done. Continental Airlines, which had invaded USAir’s East Coast stronghold a year earlier with its low-cost “Cal-Lite” service, pulled out in the spring, which allowed USAir to raise ticket prices enough to be profitable again. Most important, the public forgot about the airline’s crashes and safety problems. They were old news by the summer of 1995. With no new crashes or incidents, people again were content to put their lives in the hands of USAir.
18. THE HOLE IN THE FLIGHT ENVELOPE
As John Cox walked up the stairs to the USAir plane at Boeing Field in Seattle, he saw the word “EXPERIMENTAL” in big letters over the door. The sign beneath it read, THIS AIRCRAFT DOES NOT COMPLY WITH FEDERAL SAFETY REGULATIONS FOR STANDARD AIRCRAFT. The USAir plane had been specially equipped for the tests. It had a flight data recorder that took thirty measurements, more than twice as many as the box on Flight 427. First-class seats had been removed and replaced with computers and video equipment. Seven tiny video cameras were installed in the cockpit, in the windows overlooking the wings, on the wingtips, and on the tail. The plane had been loaded with several tons of sand to simulate the weight of passengers and luggage.
Haueter did not expect any breakthroughs from the flight tests. He was doing them just to appease the parties and put to rest Laynor’s questions about the wake. Yes, the wake had jostled the plane and may have initiated whatever went wrong on Ship 513. But it surely didn’t flip the plane out of the sky. He was confident the tests would show that.
There would be two sets of tests, one in Seattle and one in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Seattle flights were called the simulator validation tests, which was an effort to keep M-Cab honest. Much of the investigation had been based on M-Cab’s computer estimates about how 737s behave. Some people—most notably the head of the FAA, David Hinson—wanted to be sure that M-Cab accurately portrayed real 737s. The tests would also give the investigators a chance to learn about the crossover point, the precarious moment in flight when the plane was at the mercy of the rudder. It was an aerodynamic quirk that Cox called “the hole in the flight envelope.”
At higher speeds, a plane would be going fast enough that the ailerons on the wings could easily counteract a sudden movement by the rudder. The pilots simply turned the wheel. But if the rudder suddenly went hardover at speeds slower than the crossover point, the plane would roll out of control unless the pilots knew exactly what to do. They had to gain airspeed quickly and turn the wheel fully the opposite way of the rudder. But pilots of 737s were largely unaware of the phenomenon.
When the plane was certified in 1967, Boeing told the FAA that if a pilot lost control of the plane because of a failure in the rudder valve, the problem could be countered by using the ailerons. The company later discovered that there were speeds at which that wasn’t true, but the discovery was not regarded as critical. Boeing did not mention the crossover point in its flight manuals or alert airlines or pilots about it. The company did not believe the crossover point was a big deal.
Members of the NTSB aircraft performance group had noticed the crossover point during tests in M-Cab, but they needed data from a real 737 to determine precisely where it was. That information could help to settle the debate between Boeing and ALPA about whether the pilots could have prevented the crash.