In December 1985, Arrow Air wasn’t just moving soldiers; it also had contracts to transport high-explosive incendiary ammo and forty-millimeter shells and weapons, according to Richard Gadd, who coordinated the movement of weapons for the CIA.
“There were layers and layers of intrigue associated with the crash,” said Les Filotas, one of ten members of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board. There was evidence of mechanical, operational, and possible criminal elements in the accident. What Filotas found bizarre was that staff investigators at his agency didn’t seem too interested in pursuing these bewildering leads.
“There was a lot of transportation of weapons from Egypt to the U.S. or from the U.S. to Egypt,” Filotas told me, an allegation he made in Improbable Cause, his book about the bureaucracy and politicization of the Arrow Air crash investigation. Filotas couldn’t say if the plane’s flight history or the airline’s relationship to the CIA were relevant to what happened, but he thought both should be checked out.
Under international agreements, it was the responsibility of the Canadians to look into the circumstances, but on either side of the border it was obvious this was a sensitive case. The flight was a U.S. military charter on an airline associated with the CIA. The cargo included mysterious boxes whose contents were never identified. In the cargo hold and the passenger cabin—if past flights were any indication—there was a super-size collection of weapons and ammunition, as soldiers stashed these kinds of combat souvenirs in their bags. Furthermore, the plane had been left unattended during extended stopovers in Egypt and in Cologne, its intermediate stop on the way back to the United States.
All this was going on during a sensitive time in American and Iranian relations, as the United States was negotiating for the release of hostages held in Lebanon. National security aide Oliver North had ticked off Iran by selling it weapons that were not the ones the Iranians expected. In a memo to Robert McFarlane and Richard Poindexter, North’s bosses at the National Security Agency, he urged them to fix the problem. Failing to get the Iranians the missiles they wanted would “ignite Iran fire—the hostages would be our minimum losses.” Was the Arrow Air disaster a fulfillment of that warning?
What prevented a detour into the briar patch of spies and soured secret deals was the quick dismissal of terrorism, sabotage, or even an in-flight explosion on Arrow Air Flight 1285. After the disaster, claims of responsibility came from the group Islamic Jihad and the Independent Organization for the Liberation of Egypt, but the Canadian air accident investigator and a spokeswoman for the government were dismissive right away.
“A lot of groups will claim responsibility, and every claim will be looked into,” Helene Lafortune, from the Canadian Department of External Affairs, told The New York Times. “They use that to promote their cause. I don’t think it’s a lead on anything,” she said of the groups claiming responsibility.
Compare that to the October 2015 in-flight breakup of a Russian charter flight leaving the resort town of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt with a load of holidaymakers headed back to St. Petersburg. The Metrojet Airbus A321 came apart and crashed into the Sinai Desert, killing 224. While American, British, and Russian politicians were quick to say the plane was felled by a bomb, Egyptian investigators insisted that there was no evidence of this. The Islamic fundamentalist group ISIS claimed to have been responsible for the disaster. Despite Egypt’s reticence, news organizations reported as fact that the plane was bombed out of the sky.
In Canada thirty years earlier, however, all deference was paid to the official investigation. A team of thirty-two soldiers from the U.S. Army, under the command of Maj. Gen. John Crosby, arrived in Gander, as did a group of FBI agents. While the American soldiers were permitted to retrieve the victims, the FBI agents were confined to their hotel rooms by the Canadians. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police did not need the FBI’s help to search for evidence of a crime.
The Canadians were handling the air accident investigation without America’s help also, though the NTSB’s George Seidlein was on hand as a designated representative. Soon, however, he would be replaced by the agency’s chief of major investigations, Ron Schleede, who said he flew to Gander with someone from Pratt and Whitney at the request of NTSB chairman Jim Burnett. “Our chairman never trusted anybody,” Schleede told me. “He wanted a second set of eyes, and I was sent to sort that out.”
One early theory was that ice on the wings may have prevented the plane from climbing, sending it slamming into the trees less than a mile past the airport. Filotas wasn’t yet a member of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board (CASB), but he had some idea of how this theory might have been generated, even though no ice was seen on the wings by the six people who serviced the plane before its departure, and only a small quantity of snow grains was observed at weather observation sites at the airport.
“I can imagine how this huge accident happens in Gander, and our board chooses investigators who might have investigated small accidents. They go down there. They meet the engineers of Pratt & Whitney, and they all have a meeting,” he told me, describing the organizational session that kicks off any investigation. The airline, the airplane, engine makers, unions for the crew, and government aviation organizations are all represented.
“They’re swamped by experts with a point of view, and they come up and say, ‘It might have been an engine failure,’ and the engine maker says, ‘No, it’s impossible.’ And it goes around the room. ‘Could have been ice?’ And they all nod their heads [and] say, ‘Yeah, it could have been ice.’ Our investigators can be overwhelmed, and they convince each other.”
Schleede told me that when the crash happened, an FBI agent hurried out to his car to drive to the airport and discovered that his windshield wipers were frozen to the glass. To Schleede, this was notable; the ice theory wasn’t just a construct. Schleede told me, “I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong,” but when it came to supporting the Canadian ice theory, he insists he was right.
It was an opinion that had him in conflict with Seidlein, who didn’t think ice caused the crash. Seidlein, who died in 2008, was sent back to his office in Chicago, never to return to Gander, never more to champion the theory that contradicted that of Schleede and the tin kickers at CASB.
Filotas doesn’t know how the ice idea started, of course. His round-the-table “Yeah, it’s ice” scenario was speculation during one of several lengthy phone conversations about his book. Based on early news reports, ice on the wings at takeoff was mentioned as a possibility within hours of the crash, even before the first organizational meeting. Anyway, Filotas was being charitable about the initiation of the ice theory. On other matters, he was far more conspiratorial.
There were behind-the-scenes discussions between CASB and the Americans that he was not privy to, he tells me. He is politically savvy enough to conclude that “General Crosby was all over the crash site talking to investigators. And they don’t have to tell anybody to hide anything. Somebody from the Justice Department just has to phone the chairman and say, ‘It would be inconvenient for us if one of your board members starts shooting his mouth off about a bomb.’”
Filotas was so convinced that ice wasn’t the cause that he and three fellow board members wrote a dissent to CASB’s official probable cause. Filotas was an aeronautical engineer, as were members Norm Bobbitt and Dave Mussallem; member Ross Stevenson was a former DC-8 pilot with Air Canada. (A fourth man, Roger Lacroix, a former combat pilot and a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, disagreed with the ice theory but resigned from the board before the final report and dissent were released.) When these men received the preliminary staff report in 1987, they found an overreliance on the scant data from the flight recorder. The witness statements were missing, and recordkeeping from the engine inspections was shoddy.
This deep level of scrutiny by political appointees who were not air safety specialists cannot be called unprecedented, because CASB was too new to have much of a history. It was created only a year bef
ore the Arrow Air accident, in an attempt to separate safety from regulation. Ironically, the controversy over Arrow Air and another crash in 1989 would prompt a second overhaul of the way Canada handled air accidents.
In the second half of the eighties, however, CASB’s civil servants were not expecting to be cross-examined by board members over engineering minutiae such as engine teardown procedures and the limitations of data gathered from four channel flight data recorders.
“There was an ongoing dispute at the board level about what the role of the board member was,” Peter Boag, the man in charge of the CASB investigation, told me of Filotas and the others who challenged the staff view of the evidence. “They wanted to be investigators, but that wasn’t their role.”
There’s a lot of he said/he said at this point. Filotas claims to have begun a review of the staff’s findings only because he found misrepresentations in it. Perhaps the investigation was too large and complex for Boag to handle, Filotas thought. On that impression, he was not alone.
Peter Boag had a “very thin background, extremely thin,” the NTSB’s MacIntosh said, calling the investigator in charge of the Arrow Air crash overconfident to a fault. “I can’t imagine how you could approach him and get constructive suggestions going when his attitude toward everything was ‘I can handle it, and I’ve done a good job.’”
During one particularly testy exchange recounted in Improbable Cause, the members promoting a theory other than ice were asking Boag for the plane’s maintenance records from an earlier accident when Boag made it clear he had had enough. He stood up to leave, saying, “Frankly, gentlemen, the well is dry for me. I’ve done all I can do.”
“Once the idea [of ice] got permeated, it was convenient, and all the departments thought it was a good idea,” Filotas said. He was troubled that the official investigation had disregarded eyewitnesses’ accounts and toxicological exams that suggested a fire or explosion.
Four bystanders who saw the DC-8 in its brief flight across the sky said they saw fire or a glowing light on the aircraft before it slammed into the woods. Yet information from these witnesses was dismissed. When CASB chairman Ken Thorneycroft explained why to Lynn Sherr for ABC News’s 20/20, it sounded as if the board were cherry-picking witnesses.
“We have taken evidence from two hundred or three hundred witnesses; obviously we can’t call them all,” the board chairman told Sherr. “So let’s have a roundtable discussion, decide what evidence we want to have come out at the public hearing, and then select a group of witnesses who will provide that evidence.”
The most disturbing contradiction concerned the autopsies. The bodies were taken to the Armed Forces Pathology Lab in Dover, Delaware, and examined by Dr. Robert McMeekin. He declared the deaths instantaneous, but no separate determination of cause was given beyond “plane crash.” This misnomer was applied to all 256 victims, regardless of individual injuries.
The toxicology results produced by the Canadians showed that more than half the victims had carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide in their systems, which indicates smoke inhalation. This meant that “the soldiers were alive, and they breathed carbon monoxide. There was either a fire or something aboard the plane that emitted carbon monoxide prior to the plane crashing,” wrote Cyril Wecht in his book Tales from the Morgue after examining the medical records. “These soldiers had to breathe in the CO while still onboard the plane because the autopsies show that the soldiers were dead on impact.”
This is the “obvious evidence that this airplane was on fire and it came apart” that board member Roger Lacroix was talking about when he disparaged the ice-on-the-wings scenario in his interview with 20/20.
In the final report, however, Dr. McMeekin’s time-of-death determinations changed. They were no longer instantaneous. Now death was estimated to have occurred between within thirty seconds to five minutes of the crash for 125 of the victims, which explained the presence of fire-related chemicals in 62 of them. The investigators’ facts were changing to preserve the theory that there was no fire before the crash, Filotas said.
When he arrived in Gander for a private planning session with the CASB in the spring of 1986, the NTSB’s Schleede had been instructed by NTSB chairman Jim Burnett about what to focus on: Arrow Air and FAA oversight of the airline. It may have seemed like a small matter then, but a 1989 House Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing noted that of all the government agencies that should have been involved, it was left to the tiny and obscure NTSB to be the fig leaf for the U.S. position. “All the government agencies deferred to the NTSB. The NTSB deferred the question of terrorism to the Canadians,” the subcommittee concluded.
“I was told by Burnett to be a hard-ass on Arrow and FAA,” Schleede told me. Arrow Air was “a shabby operation,” and the FAA hadn’t been supervising it sufficiently. These issues appeared in CASB’s majority report in December 1988. This was the report that the U.S. congressional subcommittee claimed did not receive sufficient scrutiny by the NTSB.
It doesn’t take an overly active imagination to conclude that the United States was diverting attention away from the clues that the plane might have been lost because of a fire or explosion resulting from weapons or sabotage or a terrorist act. This paved the way for CASB’s majority report finding that the plane had stalled on takeoff, probably from ice on the wing and a loss of thrust on the number four engine. It was the position Boag and his investigators had taken almost from day one.
Like ice crystals on a windshield in a Newfoundland winter, the ice deniers clung to their position in a dissenting report that said that a fire broke out while the plane was in flight.
Seven months later, Willard Estey, a retired Supreme Court justice in Canada, reviewed the reports and found both of them incredible. “Surmise and speculation inside and outside these proceedings abound, factual evidence does not. Nothing indicates any hope of uncovering explanations of this accident in those areas.”
The judge’s finding didn’t dissuade Boag. A lawyer is looking for something different from an accident investigator, he told me. “I wasn’t there, and you weren’t there, and the people who were are dead,” Boag said. “There could have been complicating factors. The potential power loss from a compressor stall in the engine might have been a complicating factor. Ice represented the most likely, the best if not a definitive finding as to cause.”
Filotas called Estey’s conclusion that a cause would never be found circular logic. “We shouldn’t go on with the investigation because we wouldn’t be able to find the cause, and dropping the investigation would ensure that we never did,” he said.
And that’s the way it was left.
This airplane was not lost in the sea or downed in a global hotspot. It crashed in a First World nation less than a mile from the airport, carrying American servicemen and women home to their families.
The United States “had to know what happened,” Filotas said when we talked in 2015. He said it was only the second year since 1985 in which no journalist had been in touch to ask him about the case.
“The military had this tragic loss, and here we were bumbling along. If the U.S. didn’t know [what happened to the plane] would they have let this controversy ‘ice/no ice’ alone or would they have tried to get involved?” He insisted, “They don’t care what we do here because they knew what happened.”
Judge Estey seems to have been correct in his dim prediction for finding the truth about Arrow Air. Filotas was equally convincing when he said that what the congressional subcommittee hearing called “a near total absence” of a U.S. investigation can only be seen as willful. Why wouldn’t a country pull out all the stops in trying to uncover every detail of an accident with such a high toll unless the truth threatened some great scandal?
When Eastern Airlines captain George Jehn first delved into the controversy over the Arrow Air disaster, he was stunned by the similarities with an accident earlier that same year. “The Reagan administration had a definite modus operandi f
or handling potentially embarrassing air disasters,” he told me. Jehn is convinced the mysterious crash of a Boeing 727 in Bolivia was another disaster the U.S. government didn’t want to solve.
Eastern Airlines Flight 980 crashed on a mountain just outside La Paz, Bolivia, on New Year’s Day 1985, killing twenty-nine people. By international agreement, the country where an accident occurs is in charge, which is why Canada handled the Arrow Air case. For Eastern Flight 980, it was a Bolivian investigation. Still, because everything about the accident except the location was American, people from the NTSB, Boeing, Eastern, and the airline’s unions had a right to participate, and to some extent they did. A number of them went to Bolivia, but little of what they learned there shed light on what happened.
Barry Trotter, Eastern’s then accident investigator, flew down to South America along with the airline’s chief pilot and the VP of flight operations.
“We didn’t sit around,” Trotter told me. “We went to where the aircraft departed from to get information from ATC and the radar people, the en route radar people. I had a rep with me from the NTSB who was specialized in ATC centers and towers and so forth.”
Trotter was talking about Michael O’Rourke, the NTSB’s air traffic control expert. What O’Rourke found on visiting the tower at La Paz was a post–World War II–era setup. He was very concerned about the age of the equipment and the lack of maintenance.
“I insisted the FAA come down and flight-check all the nav aids,” O’Rourke told me, remembering the on-site visit quite clearly. The equipment had been installed nearly forty years earlier and had never been checked. “It blew my mind,” O’Rourke recalled.
In a story in The New York Times after the accident, reporter Richard Witkin zeroed in on this issue, writing that immediate attention would be paid to the “accuracy of navigation aids” on which the crew would have relied during the plane’s descent over the mountains and on its approach to the airport. Witkin was partially correct. The FAA did test the airport with a specially equipped Boeing 727 and found everything in order, but there was no report on whether the equipment was accurate on the night of the accident.
The Crash Detectives Page 9