Bishop glanced out the window, looking for an area with no lights. If he had to put the plane down, he wanted to do it away from homes and buildings. Suddenly the rudder seemed to release and the wings leveled off. Bishop told the first officer to start the emergency checklist for a sudden roll.
“Autopilot off,” the first officer said.
“Off,” Bishop said.
“Yaw damper off.” One of them reached to the switch on the ceiling.
“Off,” Bishop said.
But then there was another thump, and the right wing dipped again. It seemed as if the pilots were losing control.
“Declare an emergency,” Bishop said. “Tell them we’ve got a flight control problem.”
The first officer relayed that message to the Richmond tower. A controller gave them a new heading to the airport, but Bishop was having trouble turning the airplane. He had the wheel cranked to the left and was putting most of his weight on the left rudder pedal, but he could not get the wings level. He was worried that he might not make it to the airport.
Then the rudder seemed to release again, allowing Bishop to level the wings. His first officer told the controller they could make the turn toward the airport. They were about five or six miles away now. They hurriedly went through the landing checklist. Bishop knew that a plane was more vulnerable to rudder problems when it flew low and slow, so he told the first officer, “I’m going to stay high and fast.” Bishop was afraid that if the strange problem happened again he would not be able to recover.
As they descended toward the runway, fire trucks were waiting with red lights flashing. The plane touched down and rolled almost to the end of the pavement. The first officer told controllers the plane was okay and asked that the fire trucks stay away so passengers would not be alarmed. As they taxied to the gate, Bishop realized that he was so scared his knees were shaking.
He picked up the microphone to make an announcement to the passengers, but then he wondered what he would say. Anything he said would just make it worse. He put the microphone back.
Haueter and Phillips heard about the incident the next day. At first they thought it was a minor malfunction unrelated to the USAir crash. But then they discovered that Bishop had reported earlier rudder problems with the same plane. They headed for Richmond.
Eastwind was a new airline based in Trenton, New Jersey. It had only two planes, both of them 737–200s formerly flown by USAir. The planes had been repainted with Eastwind’s logo, a squiggly line along the windows and, on the tail, a bumblebee wearing sunglasses. The airline had dubbed itself “the Bee Line.”
Three weeks before the Richmond incident, Bishop had felt a slight rudder kick in the same plane when he departed Trenton and leveled off at 10,000 feet. It felt like the copilot had tapped the rudder pedals. He circled back and landed. Mechanics inspected the power control unit and replaced a coupler for the yaw damper, a device that made tiny adjustments to the rudder to keep the plane flying straight. The 737 yaw damper had a reputation for frequent malfunctions, so that seemed to be a logical fix. (The yaw damper could move the rudder only 2 or 3 degrees, so Haueter and Phillips did not believe it could have caused the full 21-degree movement that led to the crash of Flight 427.) Bishop tested the plane the next day, and the rudder pedals felt fine. The plane went back in service.
Now it was on the ground again, being dissected by engineers from the NTSB, USAir, and Boeing. They discovered some curious things. When mechanics had hooked up the yaw damper, they rigged it wrong. Instead of being limited to 3 degrees either direction, the yaw damper could move the rudder 4.5 degrees right and 1.5 degrees left. (That had not been a problem on Flight 427, however. The PCU had been rigged correctly.)
The Eastwind flight data recorder was rushed back to the NTSB lab to see if the engineers could decipher what had happened. It showed the plane had some strange rudder movements. It had initially gone to 4.5 degrees, presumably because the device on the yaw damper had been rigged wrong. But there was a second movement when it went to about 7 degrees and stayed there for twelve to fourteen seconds. That big a movement could not be explained by any sort of misrigging. It looked like the rudder had gone hardover.
The thirty-nine-year-old Bishop was a wiry former commuter pilot who did not have the polish of the typical airline captain. He had stringy brown hair and was always dashing to airport smoking lounges for a quick cigarette before departure. He had had the misfortune of working for two airlines that went out of business, so he had driven an airport snowplow until he got the job with Eastwind. He had a gritty personality that Haueter liked. His experience in flying small commuter planes came in handy when the rudder kicked. He used asymmetric thrust—putting more power in one engine—to keep the plane flying straight. That was a common approach for a “throttle jockey” flying a small turboprop, but it was rare for a 737 captain.
Boeing officials said Bishop had overreacted. Sure, there had been a malfunction in the yaw damper, the company said, but pilots were notorious for exaggerating their accounts of a sudden roll. Boeing said there were problems with gyros feeding information to the Eastwind flight data recorder that raised doubts about whether the rudder had truly gone to 7 degrees.
Haueter thought that the incident gave him a unique opportunity to test an airplane that may have had a hardover. He knew Eastwind was crippled while the plane was grounded in Richmond—the plane was half of the airline’s fleet—but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try flight tests with a crew that might have encountered a hardover.
The parties agreed on two tests. One would measure how a 737 would react to a yaw damper problem. The other would see how a pilot would react to a sudden rudder movement. Bishop would be the guinea pig.
The day before the test, Michael Hewett, the Boeing test pilot, and several NTSB investigators arranged a conference call with Bishop to explain how the test would go. As usual, Hewett was brash—so brash that Haueter thought he was trying to bully Bishop into thinking he hadn’t responded the right way.
“Stop it!” Haueter said. “You’re trying to intimidate this guy.”
Hewett said he was just trying to get Bishop to understand what had happened that night. Hewett seemed to have doubts about Bishop’s competence. “When I put my wife and children on an airliner, I expect the people flying up front to be as good as I am.”
Haueter was furious. He thought that Boeing was trying to influence the test.
Hewett was equally angry. He thought the NTSB was acting like the Gestapo, limiting what questions he could ask. He wasn’t trying to influence Bishop; all he wanted was an accurate story from him.
The first test was done without Bishop. The Eastwind plane was configured exactly the way it had been when Bishop had his scary incident at 4,000 feet, with the same PCU, the same yaw damper. The only change was in the cabin, where seats had been removed so Boeing could install its flight-test computers. The mood was tense at a preflight briefing as Hewett and the NTSB went over the test plan. They didn’t know if there was a gremlin in the tail, and no one could be sure that Hewett would be able to control the plane if something went haywire. The route took the plane out to a restricted military area over the Atlantic Ocean so they could try maneuvers away from a populated area. If the rudder went hardover, they wouldn’t wipe out a neighborhood. But Hewett was not nervous at all. He thought the NTSB was overreacting by insisting that the plane fly over the ocean.