The Mystery of Flight 427

by Bill Adair

  Genetic code known as DNA, which is unique in every human being, had been used to identify murderers and war victims. But DNA testing was relatively new in the early 1990s and had not been widely used for plane crashes. It seemed to be a perfect solution to Haueter’s dilemma, however, because the tests could positively identify the pilots’ remains.

  The coroners from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology who were helping with the investigation had body tissue that they believed came from the pilots—part of the upper left arm and back muscle for Germano and the back muscle for Emmett. But they had to find other blood or tissue from each pilot or a relative so they could match the sample with one that was known to have his DNA. Emmett had no children, but his mother was still alive and her DNA would be similar to his. She agreed to give a blood sample to a local doctor. When the experts compared her blood with the DNA from the back muscle, it matched well enough that the experts were sure the muscle had come from Emmett.

  The NTSB ran into difficulty getting a match for Germano, however. His parents were no longer alive, and his wife did not want to provide blood samples from their children. Then someone in the investigation remembered a foot that had been found in the cockpit area. The FBI could match it with a footprint taken of Germano when he was in the air force. Unfortunately, by the time the pathologists realized it could be used for DNA, the foot had been placed in a casket to be sent to Germano’s family. Haueter quickly called Tatalovich.

  “I need a piece of the foot,” he said.

  They just closed the casket, Tatalovich told him.

  “I need a piece of that foot. Open it and clip off whatever the AFIP guys need and take it to them.” Haueter could not believe his own words. He was making decisions about a dead man’s foot.

  Tatalovich was concerned that he wouldn’t have much to send back in the casket to the family.

  “Don’t take out the whole foot, just take off a little chunk,” Haueter said. Tatalovich agreed.

  When they compared Germano’s foot with the footprint, it matched. Then they compared the DNA from the foot with the muscle. It matched.

  The muscle specimens for both pilots were then sent to the FAA’s Civil Aeromedical Institute in Oklahoma City for analysis; no drugs were found. The tests disclosed a small amount of alcohol in both samples, but that would have been caused by the natural chemical changes in the muscle since the crash. Haueter was now sure that the pilots had not been intoxicated at the time of the crash.

  8. THE PSYCHIC AND THE DRUG DEALER

  Paul Olson, the man who sat in Seat 17F, was a convicted drug dealer. He had started selling marijuana as a teenager and then switched to cocaine when marijuana sales declined. He was a smart businessman in the thriving South Florida market, adjusting his product line when demand changed. He was a wholesaler. Suppliers dropped bundles of marijuana or cocaine a few miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, and Olson fished them out and sold them to other dealers. He was said to have been a millionaire by age twenty-one.

  But the lavish life came to an end. Olson got caught, was convicted, and had to serve five years in federal prison. When he got out, he said he had turned over a new leaf and had become a law-abiding citizen. He took a job as a driver with a seafood company. His only link to the past was a requirement that he testify against other drug dealers.

  When federal prosecutors called him in the summer about testifying against the alleged leader of a notorious Chicago drug ring, Olson told his fiancée that he was nervous about it. “I thought that part of my life was behind me,” he said. Yet he seemed relaxed when he arrived at the Chicago offices of the U.S. attorney on September 8. He wore a T-shirt and a baseball cap. He had a good tan. He and the prosecutors talked for a few hours, discussing his possible testimony, but they decided he wouldn’t be much help. The meeting ended early, and Olson, who had been scheduled on another flight, was rebooked on Flight 427.

  After the crash, an assistant U.S. attorney called USAir and told them about Olson. Haueter got the news a day or two later but was assured by the FBI that Olson would not have been a target for a hit man. He was small potatoes. He was never part of the Witness Protection Program, in which the federal government finds new homes and identities for key witnesses. It was simply that the terms of his drug conviction required him to testify in other cases.

  But Olson made for a great conspiracy theory. Maybe someone had blown up the plane to silence him! As the week wore on without the NTSB finding an apparent cause, the conspiracy theories picked up steam. That’s how a small but vocal segment of people deals with uncertainty. In the absence of concrete answers, they blame the forces of evil—the Mob, the Trilateral Commission, the CIA. And just for good measure, they say the federal government covered up the whole thing.

  The press, which was getting less and less from the nightly NTSB briefings, pounced on the story, FLIGHT 427 VICTIM LINKED TO DRUG CASH, read the headline in the Chicago Tribune. The Gannett News Service called him a “mystery federal witness” and quoted attorney F. Lee Bailey as saying, “I believe a bomb caused it, particularly after I found out what went on in the cockpit. In my view, in the totality of what we know so far, the scenario is consistent with a bomb. I think two bombs might have gone off in sequence.” The bomb theory was fueled by a New York Times story the same day that quoted an unnamed “aviation official in Washington” who described a mysterious “whoomp, whoomp” sound followed by a surprised grunt from one of the pilots and a voice in the cockpit asking, “Jeez, what was that?” (That mistake in the Times story—Germano actually asked, “What the hell is this?”—was typical of press coverage in the early days after a crash. Reporters were so eager to get scoops that they relied on anonymous sources—in this case someone with a secondhand account of the tape who got important facts wrong.)

  Reporters kept badgering Haueter with questions about Olson, even though the FBI had said publicly that there was no evidence that anyone had tried to kill him. Finally Haueter got frustrated and called the FBI again. Was there more to the Olson story than he had been told?

  No, the agent said. “He’s nobody.”

  The early clues from the crash argued against a bomb. The plane’s wreckage, including the four thousand copies of Business Week, was concentrated in a tight area on the hill. If a bomb had gone off in midair, Business Week would have rained from the sky for miles. They would still be finding copies in Cleveland. But Haueter couldn’t be sure. He needed to rule out every possibility, no matter how silly it was. So he asked Ed Kittel, the FAA’s bomb expert, to do a thorough examination of the wreckage.

  Kittel was one of the world’s premier experts on airplane explosions. He spent twenty years as a bomb disposal officer for the navy, including time that he vaguely refers to as “working with the intelligence community.” He had intense blue eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, and short hair that was still cut to navy standards. On his desk in the FAA’s Washington headquarters was a picture of his two-year-old son with an antique detonator. His computer’s screen saver read, “There’s no problem that cannot be solved by the proper amount of high explosives.”

  Kittel knew that bombs left a calling card. If one had exploded inside the USAir plane, hot gas from the bomb would have spread quickly, deforming everything it touched. The wreckage would be pitted with tiny holes that resembled craters on the moon. It would also have black streaks that would radiate from the origin of the blast and would not wipe away with a finger. By comparison, a fire after the plane hit the ground would be cooler and slower. The metal would not get pitted. The soot would wipe away with a finger. The problem for Kittel was that the 737 was in tens of thousands of pieces. He had to check every one.

  So he positioned himself on the hill at the place where wreckage was sprayed with Clorox and checked each piece of wreckage like a supermarket cashier in a moon suit. For days, he kept at it, inspecting virtually every piece. He held them, turned them over, and searched for the telltale pockmarks. He found no sign of a bom
b.

  The wreckage was then trucked to a USAir hangar at the Pittsburgh airport and spread out on the floor in the rough shape of the plane. The idea was to look for burn patterns and broken metal that might indicate an in-flight fire or bomb. But once again, Kittel saw no evidence of either. The burn marks were randomly scattered around the plane, which meant the pieces had not caught fire until the plane struck the ground and the parts mixed together.

  At the makeshift morgue at the Air Force Reserve hangar, Kittel’s partner Cal Walbert examined body parts for evidence. If a bomb had gone off in the cargo compartment, pieces of it would have been captured in the passengers’ legs and buttocks. The coroners X-rayed every Ziploc bag, removed any foreign matter, and placed it in recycling bins. Walbert sifted through twenty bins and found fragments from seats, plastic trays, and overhead bins, but nothing to indicate a bomb.

  Kittel told Haueter that he was positive: A bomb had not brought down Flight 427. But that night at the Holiday Inn, a reporter ambushed Haueter as he came out of the press conference.

  “I know this is a bomb,” the reporter said.

  Haueter grabbed Kittel, introduced him to the reporter, and said, “Ed, is there any doubt in your mind that this was not a bomb?”

  “None,” Kittel said. “We have no indication of a bomb of any kind.”

  The crackpots had started calling on September 9, blaming the crash on the devil, Russian death rays, and the Prince of Darkness. The calls were dutifully forwarded to the NTSB witness group. The group had two purposes: to field calls from people with theories about the crash and to interview anyone who had seen Ship 513 fall out of the sky.

  Witnesses to plane crashes were notoriously unreliable. They often confused the order of events and embellished their stories. But interviewing them was a standard part of every investigation, and occasionally someone actually saw something important. The 427 group got names of witnesses from newspapers and TV news reports and then tracked them down, taking a plastic model of a USAir plane so people could demonstrate what they had seen. Most said the plane had rolled left and then plunged nose down toward the hill, as the flight data recorder indicated. But they could not agree on whether it made an unusual noise. Some heard a growling sound. A kindergartner thought it sounded “funny.” Others heard nothing out of the ordinary. A USAir utility worker who happened to be on the soccer field behind Green Garden Plaza was sure that he saw smoke coming from the front of the right wing. Others saw no smoke. One man saw a mist and believed the plane might be dumping fuel. A food service employee said one of the engines looked like it was cocked to the side. Other witnesses said the engine was fine.

  The witness group got lots of calls from retired airline pilots and well-meaning frequent fliers who said the crash reminded them of problems they’d experienced on other flights—some that were years earlier. One man said an electromagnetic field from power plants might have harmed the 737’s “fly-by-wire” system (he apparently did not know the 737 was not a fly-by-wire plane). A retired pilot from Stuart, Florida, faxed an elaborate scenario suggesting that a flap failure surprised the pilots. He ended his scenario with “Precious little time and mind frozen with fear.”

  Another caller said he had a dream that a flight attendant was standing in the cockpit and fell on the captain when the plane banked, causing the captain to lose control. The man said only pilots should be allowed in the cockpit. If that wasn’t feasible, others in the cockpit should wear a restraining belt to keep them from falling into the pilots. The NTSB witness group kept a log of each interview, noting whether a follow-up was recommended. In the follow-up column for the man with the cockpit theory, one of the witness team members wrote, “Possible psychiatric help.”

  Haueter got a postcard that read, “Give me $50,000 and I’ll ask the Prince of Darkness for no more plane crashes.” Haueter joked that it was a risky investment. The guy wasn’t promising the crashes would stop. All he said was that he would ask.

  Witness group member Kimberly Petrone, a USAir flight attendant, took a call from a man who said he was a psychic and had a dream about the accident. He had envisioned a clear blue sky and then the word “hydraulic” written in the clouds.

  Petrone couldn’t take the guy seriously. “What’s the lottery number going to be tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I’m not that kind of psychic,” he said. “I just sense things.”

  This is the paradox of aviation history: Birds inspired us to build the first airplanes a century ago, but an errant flock could bring a 737 crashing to the ground and give us a humble reminder that humans were not meant to fly. Birds and planes had an uneasy coexistence from the start. Calbraith Rodgers, the first man to fly across the United States, was also the first to be killed by a bird collision. His Wright brothers plane struck a gull in 1912 and crashed in the surf at Long Beach, California. Since then, bird-plane collisions have killed more than one hundred people in the United States and countless others around the world. The 1960 crash of a Lockheed Electra in Boston, which killed sixty-two people, was caused by a flock of starlings and gulls, and a 737 crash in Ethiopia that killed thirty-five people was blamed on speckled pigeons.

  A few birds of modest size could do serious damage to a $40 million plane, breaking through the nose or the windshield or crippling the engines. When a four-pound bird hit a plane going 260 knots the bird had the force of fourteen tons.

  The FAA gets two thousand “bird strike” reports in a typical year, but an estimated eight thousand strikes never get reported. Gulls account for one-third of the collisions, followed by ducks/geese/swans, blackbirds, doves, and raptors. (The FAA also keeps track of ground collisions with other wildlife. In a typical year, deer are struck by planes forty-three times. Other collisions involve coyotes, dogs, skunks, muskrats, and possums. Reptiles are a smaller risk, although planes struck two alligators from 1992 to 1996.)

  At the airports with the worst bird problems, employees drive around in trucks playing tapes of screeching birds over loudspeakers. The tapes sound like a flock of starlings being tortured. If that doesn’t scare the birds away, the workers pull out shotguns and fire blanks into the air. With stubborn birds, the employees occasionally shoot to kill. The world experts on bird-plane problems work for an air force unit called the Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH) Team. The BASH Team visits air force bases to warn pilots about the problem and make sure airfields are not attractive to birds. They tell fighter pilots that a single turkey vulture can be as dangerous to an F-16 as a round of artillery.

  The FAA sets standards to make civilian planes bird-resistant, saying they must withstand the impact of birds as heavy as eight pounds. Tests to certify the engines look like a bizarre stunt from a David Letterman show. The engineers put dead birds in a cannon and shoot them into the spinning fan of a jet engine.

  At the crash site, theories about birds emerged in the first few days. A bird collision might account for the mysterious thump on the cockpit tape, and it might explain why the plane suddenly rolled to the left. Maybe a big goose broke through the skin of the plane and jammed the rudder system. Or maybe it got lodged in the slats, the movable panels on the front of the wings.

  John Cox was skeptical. In his twenty-year career as a pilot he had collided with several birds, and he knew they could be dangerous. But he doubted that birds had caused this crash. He kept saying, “Have to be a hell of a bird to bring down a 737.”

  No feathers were found in the wreckage, and air traffic controllers said they saw no birds on radar at the time of the crash. But five witnesses said they had seen birds in the area the previous evening or the morning of the accident. A retired army colonel called to say that he had seen “thousands” flying over Hopewell three nights earlier. The operations group checked with a bird expert at the University of Illinois, who said it was unlikely but possible for birds to be at 6,000 feet.

  At the hangar where the wreckage was being assembled, investigators walked up and down the makeshift
aisles, looking for anything birdlike. They paid special attention to the wings and the nose, where birds were most likely to hit. But the only evidence they found was a pair of feet from a goose that someone had left in one of the engines as a prank—a stunt that infuriated Haueter. Dozens of people studied the wreckage, but no one saw any sign of a bird.

  That didn’t satisfy the team from Boeing, which was especially interested in the bird theory. (Haueter noticed that Boeing was always keenly interested in theories that shifted blame away from its airplane.) Rick Howes, Boeing’s coordinator, reminded Haueter of the destructive power of buzzards and how they had caused several crashes. Howes said he was interested in the left wing slats, where a broken hinge might have been caused by a bird. He thought the NTSB should do a full-scale reconstruction of the leading edges of the wings and the area just behind the nose, known as the forward pressure bulkhead. Once those sections were reassembled, the investigators could examine them with a special black light that would make bird residue glow.

  Haueter was pretty sure birds weren’t a factor, but he wanted to be positive. He agreed to do the reconstruction. “Let’s bring the theory up now and bury it,” he said. “I don’t want to have it haunting me a year from now.”

  Greg Phillips was nearly killed investigating a 737 crash. A flight controls specialist with the NTSB, he had been sent with Haueter to Panama in 1992 to figure out why a Copa Airlines 737 had suddenly twisted out of the sky at 25,000 feet and crashed. As he searched the jungle for wreckage, Phillips felt a sting on his arm and slapped away what he thought was a caterpillar. Back in his hotel room, he began to feel ill. His stomach ached, his fever rose, he shook with chills. He felt like he was falling down a long, dark hole. Lying there naked, he thought he was going to die. He crawled out of bed and put on some pants. If he was going to die, he was going to go wearing pants. He recovered sufficiently to take the first flight home to Washington, and blood tests showed he had been bitten by a black scorpion, which was often fatal.