Wally Funk's Race for Space

by Sue Nelson

  Wally was qualified to fly all manner of aircraft, from seaplanes to gliders. The most important rating was the Airline Transport Pilot license or ATP, which she gained in 1970, and was often referred to by others as ‘the crown jewels’ for a pilot. ‘That is the highest rating anyone can get, because you can be hired by an airline,’ said Wally. ‘You know me, I want the highest, biggest, best.’

  Wally had continued flying during her travels, viewing many of those fifty-nine countries from the air as well as the ground. ‘When I came back I started instructing right away at Hawthorn airport in California and did that for a couple of years. Then I wrote a letter to the boss of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), John Glenn.’

  ‘The astronaut?’

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Different one. I wrote and said I wanted to go to Alaska and be a bush pilot, and would he give me a commendation letter. He said, “Wally, you be in my office on Monday for a meeting.”’

  That Monday deadline felt awfully familiar. She’d often used the Monday line for Dr Lovelace too, even though the timings were longer. Call it poetic licence.

  ‘For some reason I knew I had to be dressed up in hose, heels, the whole bunch. He interviewed me for two or three hours and at the end he said, “I want to put you up with the FAA in Washington to be our first girl FAA safety inspector.” I said, “Holy cow, really? I don’t know that much about a lot of things.” He said, “We will teach you, we will send you to schools.”’

  Wally completed her General Aviation Operations Indoctrination Course for FAA inspectors in Oklahoma City in 1971, the first woman to qualify. The Los Angeles Times, on 28 November 1971, wrote a short piece on her achievement entitled ‘Wally Funk: Success is the Name of Her Game’.

  That qualification allowed her to ‘investigate accidents, test applicants for pilot licenses and apply aviation law to whatever circumstances may arise’. The article also noted that, while teaching five aeronautical science classes at Redondo Union High School in California the year before, she was the first teacher in twenty-three years to reach a ‘69 per cent success in having students pass the FAA private pilot and basic ground school written examinations’.

  She also became the first woman in the FAA’s System Airworthiness Analysis Program two years later. ‘It was great fun. It was kind of a desk job, when needed, I would go to different schools and give written tests for private pilots, or give check rides to see if they would get their private licence. Then I would be checking schools and aircraft. Whenever I would have my paperwork ready I handed it to the secretary, Helen. She would type it up and Glenn always liked it.’

  While an FAA inspector, she had also worked on a couple of accidents with the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB), but as an observer. In 1974 the NTSB asked her to become a full-time investigator. Wally was genuinely surprised. ‘I didn’t believe it,’ she said, and told them she wasn’t qualified enough. ‘But the guy said: “You will go to every aircraft manufacturing school, every engine school, or any other school we want you to go to. When you have an accident out in California, Arizona, Nevada or Hawaii and you have to take that wreckage and put it in a place and inspect it, as well as the inspection you’ve done on ground or on site, you will have help and you will have a place to do this work in.”’

  She accepted and completed her training. Her first assignment was the Whittier mid-air collision in January 1975. A Cessna 150 and a small DeHavilland commuter aircraft had crashed into each other above Whittier, California. Fourteen people died. She was quoted as saying: ‘I found the tragedy hanging with me. Since then I’ve learned that an investigator can’t let emotion get in the way – not if the job is to be done right.’ The 15 January article about the crash in the the Los Angeles Times referred to Wally as ‘NTSB’s only woman crash investigator.’

  A later article, on 21 July 1975, in the same newspaper but about a different crash, described Wally, then aged thirty-six, as the NTSB’S ‘newest and only woman investigator’. According to the current US Department of Transportation website, however, Wally was ‘one of the first’ inspectors.

  ‘I was the first woman,’ said Wally. Either way, she broke more boundaries and delighted in her new role. ‘It was great. I loved being an investigator.’

  When asked about her job for the newspaper in the July edition, barely six months after she had started her new role, she admitted that it was a ‘tough, hard job at times’, but also rewarding. ‘You pursue an end result that hopefully will prevent another crash and save other lives.’ The article showed a black-and-white photograph of Wally with shoulder-length hair in a centre parting, doing her job framed by plane debris, and described as an ‘air crash detective’.

  She wore what looked like a cross between workmen’s overalls and a flight suit. ‘That was our uniform,’ Wally said. ‘I wore a regular uniform with my name on one side and NTSB on the back. It was either blue or grey, I think. It was a bit like a flight suit.’

  Forty years later, perched on a bench in the Parisian sunshine, Wally outlined the main reasons for air crashes. The biggest causes, she said, were usually pilot error, weather, gas – ‘Many people that crashed did not have enough fuel’ – or an engine malfunction. Wally then outlined the procedure for me after a plane had crashed.

  ‘Okay, we’re sitting here. Let’s say we have an accident in front of us. Let’s say the guy wasn’t paying attention and the aircraft stalled. He doesn’t know how to get out of a spin and crashes. When an airplane comes down, if it hits the ground back and forth several times, part of the aircraft comes apart and gets buried. So knowing that, I have to dig around looking around for parts. If it crashes straight and level it’s no big deal. If it comes straight down then holy cow, that’s a mess.’

  Based in the Los Angeles office as a five-member team, everyone carried electronic beepers for crash alerts and was on rotation – twenty-four-hour ‘on call’ duty. Through covering four states, Wally would travel to an accident site by all forms of transport. Sometimes she flew her own plane there, or travelled in the jump seat of another. If they were closer, she drove. On one occasion, when there was an accident in the San Fernando Valley close to the NTSB Los Angeles office, Wally drove her Rolls-Royce – the one that had once belonged to the Queen Mother – to the crash scene. ‘They all loved it,’ she said, but Glenn told her: ‘I think you need to take the government car next time.’

  Once the police had left the accident, Wally would then take command of the site. ‘The first thing I do is take pictures all around – photographs were very, very important – and then I start with the engine. I don’t really start pulling things apart yet. I want to investigate all the way around the aircraft, the wings, the elevator, the rudder.’

  It certainly sounded like being a detective. ‘Exactly like a detective. Then it was up to me to let people know what I needed. If it was out in the boonies, out in the middle of nowhere, I needed to have a truck come and take the wreckage to a hangar or a garage. When an aircraft crashes at a forty-five degree angle …’ She hesitated, as if to reformulate her words, and then continued. ‘Well, if four people are on-board they’re all going to die and the front two people are going to be all smashed up. The coroner wouldn’t always get there for a while, and sometimes they would leave stuff and I would have to get it out myself.’ I realised that by ‘stuff’ and ‘it’ she meant body parts. ‘I’ve pulled bodies out when coroners didn’t do a good job.’

  The aircraft’s manufacturer would usually send a representative to the site as well. ‘If it was a Cessna, then the Cessna man would come and we would work together and I would learn from all this. Every month I had an accident to go to. The way our office worked was you were on call every other weekend. If I was number two on a Friday, by Saturday night I was number one.’

  Her job also involved interviewing and investigating what went on away from the crash site in order to get a fuller picture of events. ‘You have the tower, ATC, the air traffic con
trol, the radar people, the weather people and you need to check what they know of that aircraft’s number. So I had to get all of that data that goes with my report.’

  These reports were meticulously detailed. ‘A report could be anything from three to four inches thick.’

  What was it like, yet again, working as a woman in a man’s world? ‘You have to remember they’re working with a girl. They don’t think I know what I’m doing,’ she said. ‘But I got the confidence of all those people in those states within three years because I made a name for myself as a good investigator. And the men never spoke bad language to me either. I said if you’re going to speak that way, I’m going to excuse myself.’

  To begin with, as a field investigator on smaller crashes involving light aircraft, she was on her own. ‘I didn’t get a team from NTSB in Washington DC until later in my career. They even had people that would travel to help an investigator in the field out. The only people on the site would be firemen and police officers and people who would help move the aircraft. When I come upon an accident and there’s been a fire, the fire department is in charge. I am not in charge until the fire department says the accident is mine. Then I start in and by that time phone calls are coming in.’

  Despite the nature of investigating what was usually a fatal accident with lives lost, Wally enjoyed her work. ‘It was great. Never a dull moment,’ she stated. ‘I enjoyed my job. Many of the guys I was working with at NTSB were retired military and they just wanted to get it over with.’

  She also had an advantage when it came to dealing with civilian air crashes. ‘I had a one-upmanship over these guys civilian-wise because I flew general aviation aircraft. I did very few jets because jets weren’t in vogue. People didn’t have that kind of money back then. I was very lucky, honey. The men didn’t know if I knew my beans. But within two or three years I was on top of the heap and my boss, John Glenn, said, “Wally you’re doing a great job”.’

  Wally would go on to investigate hundreds of accidents covering the three mainland states and Hawaii. Most of them took about a week. Some planes crashed into trees, buildings, mountains or even a volcano.

  Her childhood outdoors helped her to detach herself from the reality of these crashes. ‘I dealt with dead animals and buried them,’ she said, ‘so for me to pick up a body or part of a body was like picking up a frog.’

  Wally’s attitude, thoroughness, knowledge of different aircraft and attention to detail aided her work. But there was the emotional aspect to deal with, too. ‘I had all the people who talked to me who had lost their loved ones.’

  Relatives of those killed were not allowed onto or near the scene of the accident. ‘I met them later but not on the site. They were still so much in shock.’

  I asked her how she dealt with it. During difficult situations Wally said she would ‘talk to them just as natural as you and I are talking. I certainly didn’t show them pictures. I’d just gently say it was weather and they got into cloud … or they probably didn’t pay attention to instruments and the aircraft wasn’t capable of continuing flying … something like that.’

  Wally needed to draw on all her reserves of strength and professional detachment a few years later with a crash that made headline news on 25 September 1978. ‘That was the longest and hardest investigation I’ve ever had to do.’

  Flight PSA 182 was a popular morning commuter flight for Pacific Southwest Airlines from Sacramento via Los Angeles to San Diego. At 9.01 am, the Boeing 727 was descending towards Lindbergh Field airport in downtown San Diego preparing to land. Airborne at the same time, a flight instructor was helping his student with instrument training in a private Cessna 172. This was a small popular plane, the same type Wally had taken me flying in the year before in Dallas.

  As the passenger jet approached the runway just a few miles away at 2,600 feet, the PSA 182 collided with the Cessna. The light aircraft exploded immediately. The larger aircraft was fatally damaged. A county photographer attending a news conference caught the PSA flight with his camera. Fire and smoke poured from the right wing as it plunged at an angle towards the middle of a residential area. Witnesses watched horrified as bodies plummeted to the ground. According to the flight recorder on-board the jet, the time between the mid-air collision and hitting the ground was just thirteen seconds. This was the first crash in Pacific Southwest Airline’s twenty-nine-year existence. But it was the worst recorded aircraft disaster in California and US aviation history.

  The wreckage destroyed twenty-two homes and 144 people died, including all 135 on the passenger flight, the two on-board the Cessna, and five adults and two children on the ground. Wally, the lead NTSB investigator on duty that day, arrived on the site two hours after the crash.

  Even decades later, basking in the Paris sunshine, it remained at the forefront of Wally’s memory. ‘It was horrendous. The PSA overtook a Cessna 172 coming from its right. The people in 172 never knew because the PSA was descending. The PSA took about twenty blocks of homes out when it was skimming along and crashing. Where the 172 crashed was about four or five blocks away.’

  Wally compiled photographic evidence of the wreckage to help piece together what had happened, and also recorded witness statements. She collected what remained of the Cessna 172 plane into a hangar to document all of its parts. She then started documenting the much larger passenger jet plane remains on site. ‘It was scattered for miles, and we finally had to have help getting it out of the area and into a hangar. It took me weeks out there getting all the airplane pieces in different hangars and seeing what happened.’

  The investigation even involved measuring the angles of treetops, since the jet had sliced some of the trees on its fatal decline.

  It was a test of Wally’s fearsome will not to let emotion get in the way of doing her job. She wanted to help others by performing the investigation to the best of her ability. Body parts were everywhere: on streets, in people’s backyards, in trees. A flight attendant’s body had fallen through a car windshield, injuring a woman and baby inside with flying glass. The authorities placed pieces of human flesh and bone in plastic bags that were taken to St Augustine High School gym, which was being used as a temporary morgue.

  The investigation involved more than collecting physical pieces of wreckage. It was a puzzle to be solved from all aspects of the accident. ‘I listened to the ATC – air traffic control, ground control, radar control.’

  In the flight recorder transcriptions released to the press, four voices were heard in the cockpit: all male. The last words to be heard from the cockpit were, ‘Mom, I love you.’

  Wally insisted that at least one stewardess was also in the cockpit. ‘I flew PSA from time to time. They always had a party in the cockpit. I knew this because I always rode in the cockpit so we always had a good time. So they were having too much of a good time. I heard the woman laughing.’

  It was difficult to square this contradictory information or corroborate her claims. The presence of anyone else in the cockpit was never reported in the press. The transcripts did not feature any female voice. Wally was adamant that she was telling the truth. ‘I don’t know what’s out there, but you could hear four or five boys and the girls laughing. I know it was in there.’

  She wasn’t happy with her portrayal in a Canadian TV series, that documents air crashes, which re-enacted the aftermath and showed lessons learned. ‘The film people came to me and I told them everything just like I’m telling you. I listened to all the ATC stuff, and when this movie came out they had a stupid girl instead of a good-looking girl in uniform like I was. And she talked stupid,’ said Wally unhappily. ‘I was in charge. When the fire department left I was in charge. She was not in charge. They said that there were only four people in the cockpit. They listened to the ATC and nobody answered. The PSA came down a little too quick. They did not tell the truth to the public how that accident really happened.’

  When I watched the relevant episode of Air Crash Investigation on YouTub
e, also known as Mayday or Air Accident in other countries, I scrutinised the re-enactment. The woman who took photographs and represented Wally as an NTSB inspector asked ‘Any survivors yet?’ and was not in a uniform. She wore a pale peach trouser suit and her long dark brown hair was tied back in a ponytail. She resembled a fashion photographer more than an air crash investigator. No wonder Wally was critical. Later, when an older, male NTSB investigator arrived, presumably from Washington, he was shown taking control. Wally’s TV re-enactment role was depicted as minimal from then on, although her youthful non-doppelgänger was present around the discussion table.

  The crew in the cockpit were shown joking and laughing before landing. ‘Even though they were fun and laid back, they were highly professional,’ a contributor said. ‘“Catch our Smile” was their motto. It was an experience. It was fun.’

  There’s no doubt that this was a complicated and controversial case. The location of San Diego’s Lindbergh airport, in close proximity to housing, had long caused objections from concerned residents. In February 1980, as reported in the 27 February Los Angeles Times, PSA captain Robert Chapman had just resigned, aged forty, over safety issues. He cited ‘dangerously high’ levels of fatigue due to short turnarounds on flights. He blamed tiredness for the air crash, and put the blame for the accident on the PSA 182 cockpit crew. The organisation, which lost thirty-seven crew members and employees in the crash, dismissed Chapman as a ‘disgruntled former employee’. There had certainly been issues with communication between air traffic control and the PSA 182. There had also been reports of a third plane in the vicinity of the crash, but this theory was dismissed due to lack of evidence.

  The official NTSB report concluded that the probable cause of the accident was the failure of the PSA flight crew to follow proper air traffic control procedures, alongside a number of other contributing factors. Later I examined the transcriptions again. There were only four voices listed from inside the cockpit, but, I realised from the time-codes, these were only partial transcripts from the minute just before the crash, ending with the crash itself. Wally must have been mistaken about the presence of a stewardess in the cockpit as the official report did not include this either.