“We’re looking for the traffic, turning to one-zero-zero, USAir 427,” said Germano.
They started a gentle left turn. “Oh, yeah,” Emmett said, mocking a slight French accent, “I see zuh Jetstream.”
“Sheeez,” said Germano.
“Zuh,” said Emmett.
Thump. The plane suddenly rolled to the left. Thump.
“Whoa,” said Germano. The wings on the big 737 started to level off, but now the left wing rolled down again.
“Hang on, hang on,” Germano said. Emmett grunted.
One of them clicked off the autopilot, triggering the whoop-whoop-whoop of the autopilot warning horn.
“Hang on,” said Germano.
“Ohhh shiiiiit,” Emmett said in his slight Texas twang, sounding increasingly worried.
To passengers back in the cabin, the bumps initially felt like routine turbulence. But then the plane kept rolling left, and the nose pitched down toward the ground.
The pilots were desperately trying to figure out what was happening. One of them pulled back on the control column, trying to get the nose up.
“What the hell is this!!?” Germano exclaimed. Moments earlier, he had been able to see the horizon and a perfect blue sky. Now all he could see was the ground. Only twelve seconds had passed since the first hint of trouble.
The cockpit was chaotic. Stickshakers on the pilots’ control columns began rattling like jackhammers, warning them that the plane was stalling. The autopilot warning kept blaring whoop-whoop-whoop, notifying them that it had been disconnected. But that was the least of their problems. The plane’s traffic computer spotted the Jetstream a few miles away and its electronic voice shouted “TRAFFIC! TRAFFIC!”
“What the… !!!?” asked Germano.
The plane was still a mile up in the sky above the Green Garden Plaza shopping center, diving straight down at 240 miles per hour, twisting like a leaf and gaining speed. Out their front window, the pilots could see trees, roads, and the shopping center spinning closer and closer. As the plane corkscrewed down, passengers were pressed back in their seats by centrifugal force so strong that they had difficulty even lifting their hands off their laps. The wings had been robbed of their ability to fly, which made the plane shake violently, as if it were running over a thousand potholes.
“Oh!” said Emmett.
“Oh God! Oh God!” cried Germano.
The dials and gauges in the cockpit spun like clocks rushing forward in time. Germano shouted to controllers, “Four-twenty-seven emergency!”
The plane continued to dive toward a rocky hill.
“Shit!”
“Pull!”
They were only 700 feet above the hill and diving at 280 miles per hour.
“Oh shit!”
“Pull!”
“God!” cried Emmett.
Germano screamed, “Pulllllllll!”
It had been just twenty-eight seconds since the first inkling of trouble.
Just before impact, Emmett sounded resigned, almost pleading, as he said, “Noooo…”
In the eerie darkness of the Pittsburgh TRACON, a windowless room filled with glowing radar screens, Richard Fuga saw the plane’s altitude suddenly drop to 5,300 feet.
“USAir 427, maintain six thousand,” he told them. “Over.”
He heard “emergency” and the pilots’ final cries. Either Emmett or Germano had kept his finger on the radio button as the plane fell.
The altitude on Fuga’s radarscope suddenly changed to three Xs. That meant the plane was falling so fast that the FAA computer did not believe it. A moment later the plane disappeared from the screen.
Fuga called to them urgently. “USAir 427, Pittsburgh?”
No response.
“USAir 427, Pittsburgh?”
Still nothing.
Fuga gave rapid directions to another pilot and then called again for the missing plane. “USAir 427, Pittsburgh?”
Nothing.
He then said sadly, “USAir 427 radar contact lost.”
He asked other controllers to take over his flights and summoned a supervisor. He pointed to his screen. “Last radar and radio on 427, right here.”
Dozens of people saw the USAir plane fall. It was 7:03 P.M. in Hopewell Township, and the soccer games were in full swing on a field a few blocks from the hill. The 737 had flown over the soccer field and then rolled left and plunged toward earth.
“Look at that airplane!” shouted someone on the field.
In a car a mile south of the soccer field, Mike Price saw the plane twist out of the sky. “That airplane’s in trouble,” he told his father. It looked like someone had picked up the 737 by its tail and let it fall straight down. In the parking lot at Green Garden Plaza, Amy Giza had just climbed into her car and was reading the directions for a new set of math flash cards when her six-year-old son said, “Mommy, that airplane just fell out of the sky.”
George David, the owner of a 62-acre farm on Green Garden Road, was cutting flowers in his yard when he heard the roar of the plane’s engines. He thought it might be a truck racing out of control. Then he heard the explosion as the plane struck the gravel road that led to his neighbor’s house. Trees blocked everyone’s view of the actual impact, but lots of people saw the fireball erupt a moment later. Inside the Giant Eagle grocery store at Green Garden Plaza, the crash sounded like a huge crack of thunder.
A plume of smoke rose from the hill and drifted across Route 60, over the Beaver Lakes Golf Course. At least seventy-five people called 911. The first person to reach the Hopewell Township police department—entered into the log as “hysterical caller”—said a plane had crashed behind the shopping center. At fire stations throughout the Pittsburgh area, firefighters heard a series of tones and then “Zulu at Pittsburgh International Airport.” A Zulu call meant a disaster with at least twenty people killed.
More than forty fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars raced to the crash site, about ten miles west of the airport. When Engine 921 of the Hopewell Volunteer Fire Department reached the woods at the top of the hill, Captain James Rock hopped out and grabbed an ax and a pry bar. He was a professional firefighter at a nearby Air Force base and had taken part in many drills rescuing people from plane crashes. He dashed through the woods, ready to pry passengers out of the wreckage and save some lives.
He saw mangled luggage and airplane seats. He saw a man’s dismembered hand on the ground. He looked around feverishly. There was no one to save.
Firefighters pulled hoses into the woods and sprayed water on the wreckage and the trees to douse the flames. Others ran through the woods, shouting for survivors.
“Anybody here?!” they yelled. “Anybody need any help?!”
There was no reply.
A police officer stood at the center of the debris, right where the nose had hit, and asked, “Where’s the plane?”
Down the hill at the shopping center the scene quickly became chaotic. Dozens of fire trucks and ambulances showed up, even though Hopewell Township authorities had not requested them. When fire chiefs and ambulance drivers throughout the Pittsburgh area heard there had been a plane crash, they just piled into their trucks and drove to Hopewell, eager to help.
They were not needed. There were a few fires to put out, and there was plenty of need for police to direct traffic and protect the crash site, but rescuers in dozens of ambulances and advanced life support trucks had nothing to do. This would be a cleanup operation, not a rescue call.
At FAA headquarters in Washington, a phone rang in the operations center on the tenth floor. It was the FAA nerve center for crashes, terrorism, and other mayhem, a place that looked like a remnant from the Cold War. In one room was a sophisticated TV-computer system that allowed the ops officer to watch all four major TV networks simultaneously. In another corner was a big radio panel with microphones and dials that looked like something out of Dr. Strangelove. It let the FAA communicate with airports and air traffic controllers if telephones got knocked out in a hurricane or a military attack.