The conference room next door served as a situation room, a place where FAA officials could plot strategy in a crisis and be in constant touch with people around the country. The phone system allowed elaborate conference calls for up to 240 people. That was especially useful after a crash, when the FAA wanted to link its accident investigators with their counterparts from the National Transportation Safety Board so they could make arrangements to travel to the site.
Ops officer Sharon Battle took the call about Flight 427 from someone in the FAA’s northeast regional office. She then pulled out the gray “Notification Record” that listed each office and government agency she needed to call. One by one, she went down the list, calling FAA administrator David Hinson and the rest of the FAA top brass, as well as the White House Situation Room, the FBI, and the CIA.
“We’d like to give you a briefing,” she told each of them. “USAir Flight 427, a Boeing 737, O’Hare to Pittsburgh at 6,000 feet. Radio and radar contact lost. Unknown fatalities or survivors at this time. Unknown if any ground injuries.”
She then made a round of calls to the accident investigators from the FAA and the NTSB. It was time to mobilize the Go Team.
John Cox and Bill Sorbie were in Pittsburgh for a USAir program called Operation Restore Confidence, a safety campaign about pilot mistakes and the need for pilots to follow procedures. The program had been in the works for months but had gotten new urgency because of the crash of USAir Flight 1016 in Charlotte two months earlier. It was USAir’s fourth fatal crash in five years, which had prompted the FAA to scrutinize the airline to make sure it had no systemic safety problems. Wind shear had thrown Flight 1016 to the ground, but NTSB investigators were likely to blame the pilots for flying into the storm.
Cox and Sorbie were USAir pilots and safety officials with their union, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA). The union had surprisingly good relations with the company, especially on safety issues. A recent joint program was a case in point. The airline was having repeated problems with pilots who strayed from their assigned altitude, which not only could be dangerous but also could lead to FAA fines. So ALPA and the company agreed on a new procedure in which both pilots were required to call out their assigned altitude and then point their index finger at the altitude number on the instrument panel. That simple routine had reduced the number of deviations by more than 90 percent. The union and the airline hoped that Operation Restore Confidence would have the same kind of dramatic effect. The six-hour program began with statistics about mistakes by USAir pilots and then discussed how they could improve and standardize their procedures.
Like many pilots, Cox and Sorbie had chosen to live in Florida, where taxes and housing prices were low, and commute to their crew base (Baltimore for Cox, Philadelphia for Sorbie) when they had to fly a trip. Cox and his wife, Jean, a USAir flight attendant, lived in a waterfront home in St. Petersburg. Sorbie lived on a houseboat a few miles away in Tierra Verde. The Operation Restore Confidence meeting ended in the late afternoon, but the pilots decided to stay and have dinner at Mario’s, their favorite Italian restaurant, instead of rushing back to Florida. They finished dinner and were heading to their hotel with Don McClure, another ALPA official, when Sorbie’s pager went off, followed by McClure’s and then Cox’s. Within a minute, the three pagers sounded again.
“Oh, shit,” Sorbie said.
They got back to their hotel, a Hampton Inn at the airport, and went to Sorbie’s room. He called the ALPA official who had paged them and got the news: A USAir plane was down.
“This cannot be,” said Cox, who was still a member of the investigation looking into the crash of 1016. “This cannot be happening again.” He figured it wasn’t really a USAir jet. It was probably a USAir Express commuter plane. People often got the facts wrong in the first few hours after a crash.
But as the details emerged over the next hour it was clear that the plane was indeed a USAir 737, the same type of plane that Cox piloted.
They drove to the ALPA office near the Pittsburgh airport and spent ninety minutes on the phone notifying other people from the union and talking about which accident investigators should be summoned to the crash site. They were about ten miles away themselves, so Cox, Sorbie, and another ALPA official arranged for a police escort and headed west on Route 60 toward Hopewell Township. They showed their USAir ID badges to police officers at several checkpoints and then drove up Green Garden Road and parked in a driveway. As they climbed out of their rental car, they saw smoke still coming from the hill. They borrowed flashlights from an officer, walked under a line of police tape, and picked their way through the trees. A firefighter came up to them and asked, “Who are you guys?”
“We’re accident investigators from the pilots union,” they said.
“There’s not much here,” the firefighter said.
The pilots asked if there were any survivors.
“No, nobody will get out of this one.”
The first things Cox and Sorbie saw were some of the lightest items from the plane—EXIT signs and life jackets. As they got closer, they began seeing body parts and then larger pieces of the plane. Sorbie was struck by the lack of smells. After a plane crashes, there’s usually the sweet aroma of jet fuel. Sorbie sniffed the air but couldn’t smell it. Geez, he thought, I hope the pilot didn’t run the damn thing out of gas.
It was a surreal scene. The plane appeared to have crashed on a long dirt road, but debris had been blasted in every direction. There were no lights on the road, so the fire department had brought in portable lamps that sprayed the trees with a harsh white light and cast long shadows in the woods. Fires were spontaneously popping up in the trees, and firefighters ran over to extinguish them.
As the pilots got closer to the road, they noticed larger and larger pieces of wreckage, but most were no bigger than a car door. It looked like the 109-foot-long plane had disintegrated. They walked all around the woods, shining their flashlights on the largest pieces of wreckage. The engines were battered but still whole. The biggest piece was the tail, but it was badly banged up. As they walked carefully around the road and through the woods, Cox kept looking for parts from a second airplane, figuring that the 737 had been in a midair collision. But as he aimed the flashlight at the hundreds of pieces on the ground and in the trees, he saw only fragments of the big silver jet.
“Seen enough?” asked Sorbie.
“Yeah,” Cox said. “I’ve seen way more than enough.”
3. NEXT-OF-KIN ROOM
Brett Van Bortel’s company, Reed Elsevier, depended on business travelers like his wife, Joan. The company published the Official Airline Guide, known in frequent flier shorthand as the OAG, which listed complete airline schedules for every city in the country. Brett wrote brochures and magazine ads that portrayed the OAG as the bible of frequent travelers. He had even stirred up trouble with a billboard he had written. It stood just outside the entrance to O’Hare and read, O’HARE AHEAD, CARRY PROTECTION, with a picture of the OAG Pocket Flight Guide. City officials were not amused at the implication that people might need protection in their beloved airport, so the sign came down.