The Mystery of Flight 427

by Bill Adair

  “We’re coming back to two-one-zero,” Germano replied to Fuga. “One-sixty heading down to ten, USAir 427 and, uh, we have Yankee.”

  A minute later, Fuga told them to descend to 6,000 feet. Germano acknowledged it, saying, “Cleared to six, USAir 427.” The pilots went through a preliminary checklist, making sure that the altimeters and other flight instruments were set properly.

  “Shoulder harness?” Germano asked.

  “On,” replied Emmett.

  “Approach brief?”

  “Plan two-eight-right, two-seven-nine inbound, one-eleven-seven.” They had set the navigation radios to align the plane with the runway.

  Ship 513 was the last plane from the northwest in a big wave of arrivals. After landing in Pittsburgh, it would continue to West Palm Beach. But Emmett and Germano would switch to yet another 737 and fly the final leg of their trip across Pennsylvania to their home base, Philadelphia.

  Fuga told Germano to slow the plane to 190 knots and begin turning toward the Pittsburgh airport at a compass heading of 140.

  Germano acknowledged, saying, “Okay, one-four-zero heading and one-nine-zero on the speed, USAir 427.”

  One of the pilots switched on the seat belt sign, but then Emmett realized he hadn’t told the passengers to prepare for landing. “Oops, I didn’t kiss ’em ’bye. What was the temperature, ’member?”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Folks, from the flight deck, we should be on the ground in ’bout ten more minutes,” Emmett announced over the PA system. “Uh, sunny skies, little hazy. Temperatures, temperatures ah, seventy-five degrees. Wind’s out of the west around ten miles per hour. Certainly appreciate you choosing USAir for your travel needs this evening, hope you’ve enjoyed the flight. Hope you come back and travel with us again. At this time we’d like to ask our flight attendants, please prepare the cabin for arrival. We’d ask you to check the security of your seat belts. Thank you.”

  Germano was confused about the runway assignment. “Did you say two-eight Left for USAir 427?” he asked the controller.

  “Uh, USAir 427, it’ll be two-eight Right,” Fuga said.

  “Two-eight Right, thank you.”

  Germano then listened to Fuga slow other planes to 190 knots, the equivalent of 218 miles per hour. “Boy, they always slow you up so bad here,” he said to Emmett.

  “That sun is gonna be just like it was takin’ off in Cleveland yesterday, too.” Emmett said, laughing. “I’m just gonna close my eyes. You holler when it looks like we’re close.”

  Germano chuckled. “Okay.”

  They were about four miles behind Delta Air Lines Flight 1183, a Boeing 727 that was going to land ahead of them. Another plane, an Atlantic Coast Airlines Jetstream commuter plane, had just taken off and was about to enter their area.

  “USAir 427, turn left heading one-zero-zero. Traffic will be one to two o’clock, six miles, northbound Jetstream climbing out of thirty-three for five thousand,” Fuga told them. The commuter plane was headed from 3,300 feet to 5,000, but it would stay miles away.

  “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.”

  Georg
e 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.

  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.