That was the final piece of evidence that Haueter had waited for. At last he had proved that the USAir valve was unique. After three years and hundreds of tests, he now had a scenario for what had happened to Flight 427.
It went like this:
It was a smooth flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh, so there was not much movement by the yaw damper. That lack of movement might have allowed particles to build up in the hydraulic fluid. There could have been a modest thermal shock to the PCU because of a problem with a hydraulic pump—not enough to set off a warning to the pilots but enough to send hot fluid rushing into the cold valve, making it suddenly expand.
The PCUs on other 737s might have tolerated that without trouble. But the valve on this particular USAir plane was especially tight. The thermal shock and the contaminants caused a jam. And the jam happened when one slide inside the valve was slightly off center and more likely to reverse. The pilot or the yaw damper was commanding the rudder to go right, but it went hardover to the left.
All of this occurred at the most vulnerable speed for a 737, when the plane was flying at 190 knots—the crossover point when a rudder hardover could not be countered by turning the wheel. The pilots compounded the problem when they pulled back on the control column, which made the plane lose speed and stall. The plane spiraled down and crashed into the hill in Hopewell.
It always takes a chain of events to cause a crash. In this case, it took the wake turbulence, the startling of the pilots, the fact that the plane was flying at the crossover point, the uniqueness of the valve, the jam and reversal, and the mistake of pulling back on the stick. If any one of those things had been different, the crash would not have occurred.
What the hell is this? Haueter thought he finally knew the answer.
He had moles in Boeing who gave him inside information about the company’s strategy, alerting him when Boeing was preparing a full-court press to lobby the NTSB or when the company was softening its approach. The moles disagreed with the Boeing position of blaming the pilots, which Haueter found reassuring. He was glad that some Boeing employees had made their own decisions and believed the rudder had reversed. Haueter suspected there also were NTSB moles who told Boeing what he and Phillips were thinking. So he wasn’t surprised when Howes, the Boeing coordinator for the investigation, called shortly before Christmas 1996.
“We understand there are people at the NTSB who, if they wrote the report today, would find fault with the airplane,” Howes said. “We don’t know how you can possibly say that. We’d like to know who these people are so we can help straighten them out.”
“Rick,” Haueter said, “I don’t know how the report is going to go until it goes to the five board members. But many people have quite frankly told me that they think the airplane rudder system caused the accident—and several of those work for Boeing.”
The Boeing team realized it was facing long odds. Haueter was still holding weekly conference calls with the parties, but they had less to discuss each week. After one call in early 1997, McGrew, Howes, and aerodynamic expert Jim Kerrigan sat in the Boeing air safety conference room looking glum.
The “Boeing Contribution” had been a flop. M-Cab had not been convincing. Haueter and Phillips wanted to blame the plane. It looked like Boeing was about to lose.
“It’s a feeling of banging our heads against the wall,” sighed Kerrigan.
They could not understand why Haueter and Phillips had become so narrowly focused on the plane. There were no conclusive data that showed there had been a jam—no scrapes, no marks. Yes, they had discovered a new failure in the rudder system, but there was no proof it had occurred on 427. Haueter and Phillips had a purely circumstantial case and had not seriously considered the circumstances on the other side, which suggested the pilots had caused the crash.
“You would hope the management of the NTSB doesn’t form opinions ahead of time,” Howes said, but everyone in the room knew that was wishful thinking. All three engineers thought the NTSB was obsessed with finding a cause for the crash and making sure the board did not end up with another unsolved case.
McGrew acknowledged that Boeing had made a few strategic mistakes in the investigation. The whole episode had been an education for him about the politics of aviation safety. He had always believed that all you needed to prove a point was solid data, but this investigation showed that the NTSB was getting more and more political under Hall and that Boeing had to play the political game if it wanted to succeed. McGrew said he had not done a good job of communicating with Hall and other NTSB officials along the way.
The realization that Boeing was about to lose was especially painful because so many employees had invested so much time in the investigation over the past two years. “People have burned a lot of hours on this,” said Howes. “To have it come down to something we don’t think is right is very discouraging.”
Deep down, McGrew was convinced that the pilots caused the crash, but he didn’t think there was enough evidence to list that as the probable cause. “We still cannot say we know what made the rudder go in. We think we know, but we’ll never know for sure.”
A friend called Brett the day after Boeing’s announcement about the thermal shock discovery. “Hey, did you hear? They found the cause of Joan’s crash.”
Brett rushed out and bought the November 2 Chicago Tribune, but the paper did not have anything about the discovery. He found an item in the Wall Street Journal two days later, but it was a short story that did not capture the magnitude of the finding. He was losing hope that they would ever be able to prove what had happened. It was clear the rudder was to blame. Why couldn’t the NTSB finally pin it on Boeing and USAir?
“I feel like Nicole Brown Simpson’s relatives,” Brett said. “There’s this mass of information, but they can’t get a conviction.”
He had gotten a mixed response from entertainment companies when he made his pitch about T. Rex’s Dino World Cafe. Everyone seemed to like the concept, but nobody would commit any money for a prototype. After several rejections from big companies, Brett decided to raise the money himself. He would give it a year. If he didn’t succeed, he’d find a new job.
The possibility of getting rich from the restaurant was one of the driving forces for him, but he did not think of his lawsuit that way. It was a tool of vengeance. “The money doesn’t mean that much. I got a fair amount from life insurance and that hasn’t brought me any happiness.”
He said he had finally realized that Boeing and USAir were both so huge that even a multimillion-dollar payment would barely cause a ripple in their finances. “There isn’t enough money in the world to make them suffer,” he said. In his view, Boeing and USAir were ducking responsibility in their court filings and public statements about the crash. Brett told Demetrio that in order to settle the suit he wanted an admission of guilt from the companies.
“You and I will be a fossil on another planet before that happens,” Demetrio said.
On January 15, 1997, Brett happened to flip on the TV as he sat down to eat his lunch. A network was covering Vice President Al Gore’s speech to a conference on aviation safety and security.