Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  But the pilots didn’t think about it that way. They felt bruised and probably a little deflated. Sure they wanted to fly, but they worked for Valujet for lack of choice. And they were not the only ones; the flight attendants, ramp agents, and mechanics made a lot less than they would have for a more traditional airline. So much work was farmed out to temporary employees and independent contractors that Valujet was sometimes called a ‘virtual airline.’ But why not? FAA regulators had begun to worry that the company was moving too fast and not keeping up on the paperwork, but there was no evidence that the people involved were as individuals inadequate. Many of the pilots were refugees from the labor wars at the old Eastern Airlines, and they were generally as competent and experienced as their higher-paid friends at United, American, and Delta. Valujet was helping the entire industry understand just how far the cost-cutting could be pushed. Its flights were cheap and full, and its stock was strong on Wall Street.

  But six minutes out of Miami, while climbing northwest through 11,000 feet, the copilot Richard Hazen radioed, ‘Ah, 592 needs an immediate return to Miami.’

  In the deliberate calm of pilot-talk, this was strong language. The time was thirty-two seconds after 2:10 in the afternoon, and the sun was shining. Something had gone wrong with the airplane.

  The radar controller at Miami Departure answered immediately. Using Valujet’s radio name ‘Critter’ (for the company’s cartoonish tail-logo – a smiling airplane) he gave the flight a clearance to turn initially toward the west, away from Miami and conflicting traffic flows, and to begin a descent to the airport. ‘Critter 592, ah roger, turn left heading two-seven-zero, descend and maintain seven thousand.’

  Hazen said, ‘Two-seven-zero, seven thousand, Critter 592.’

  The controller was Jesse Fisher, age thirty-six, a seven-year veteran, who had twice handled the successful returns of airliners that had lost cabin pressurization. He had worked the night before and had gone home, fed his cat, and slept well. He felt alert and rested. He said, ‘What kind of problem are you having?’

  Hazen said, ‘Ah, smoke in the cockpit. Smoke in the cabin.’ His tone was urgent.

  Fisher kept his own tone flat. He said, ‘Roger.’ Over his shoulder he called, ‘I need a supervisor here!’

  The supervisor plugged in beside him. Flight 592 tracked across Fisher’s radar screen, dragging its data tag, which included the automatic readout of the airplane’s altitude. Fisher noticed that the pilots had not yet started to turn and descend, and this surprised him. He gave them another heading, farther to the left, and cleared them down to 5,000 feet.

  Aboard the airplane, Hazen acknowledged the new heading but misheard the altitude assignment. It didn’t matter. Flight 592 was burning, and the situation in the cockpit was rapidly getting out of hand. One minute into the emergency, the pilots were still tracking away from Miami and had not begun their return.

  Hazen said, ‘Critter 592, we need the, ah, closest airport available.’

  The transmission was garbled or blocked, or Fisher was distracted by competing voices within the radar room. For whatever reason, he did not hear Hazen’s request. When investigators later asked him if in retrospect he would have done anything differently, he admitted that he kept asking himself the same question. Even without hearing Hazen’s request, he might have suggested some slightly closer airport. But from the airplane’s position only twenty-five miles to the northwest of the big airport, Miami International still seemed like the best choice because of the emergency equipment there. In any case ‘Miami’ was the request he had heard, and he had intended to deliver it.

  To Hazen he said, ‘Critter 592, they’re gonna be standing, standing by for you.’ He meant the crash crews at Miami. ‘You can plan Runway 12. When able, direct to Dolphin now.’

  Hazen said,… need radar vectors.’ His transmission was garbled by loud background noises. Fisher thought he sounded ‘shaky.’

  Fisher answered, ‘Critter 592, turn left heading one-four-zero.’

  Hazen said, ‘One-four-zero.’ It was his last coherent response.

  The flight had only now begun to move through a gradual left turn. Fisher watched the target on his screen as it tracked through the heading changes: The turn tightened, then slowed again. With each sweep of the radar beam, the altitude readouts showed a gradual descent – 8,800, 8,500, 8,100. Two minutes into the crisis, Fisher said, ‘Critter 592, keep the turn around, heading one-two-zero.’

  Flight 592 may have tried to respond – someone keyed a microphone and transmitted a ‘carrier’ only, without voice.

  Fisher said, ‘Critter 592, contact Miami Approach on – correction, no, you just keep on my frequency.’

  Two and a half minutes had gone by. It was 2:13 in the afternoon. The airplane was passing through 7,500 feet when suddenly it tightened the left turn and entered a steep dive. Fisher’s radar showed the turn and an altitude readout of XXX – code for such a rapid altitude change that the computer could not keep up. Investigators later calculated that the airplane rolled to a sixty-degree left bank and dived 6,400 feet in thirty-two seconds. During that loss of control, Fisher radioed mechanically, ‘Critter 592, you can, uh, turn left, heading one-zero-zero, and join the Runway 12 localizer at Miami.’ He also radioed, ‘Critter 592, descend and maintain three-thousand.’

  Then the incredible happened. The airplane rolled wings-level again and pulled sharply out of its spiral dive. Despite what McDonnell-Douglas later claimed about the amazing stability of the DC-9, the airplane would not have done this on its own. It is remotely possible that the autopilot kicked in, that having been disabled by shorting wires, it temporarily re-engaged itself, but it seems more likely from the vigor of the recovery that one of the pilots, having been incapacitated by smoke or defeated by melting control-cables, somehow momentarily regained control. Fisher watched the radar target straighten toward the southeast and again read out a nearly level altitude – however of now merely a thousand feet. The airplane’s speed was nearly 500 miles an hour.

  The frequency crackled with another unintelligible transmission. Shocked into the realization that the airplane would be unable to make Miami, Fisher said, ‘Critter 592, Opa Locka Airport’s about twelve o’clock at fifteen miles.’

  Walton Little, in his bass boat, spotted the airplane then, as it rolled steeply to the right. The radar, too, noticed that last quick turn toward the south, just before the final noseover. On the next sweep of the radar, the flight’s data block went into ‘coast’ on Fisher’s screen, indicating that radar contact had been lost. The supervisor marked the spot electronically, and launched rescue procedures.

  Fisher continued to work the other airplanes in his sector. Five minutes after the impact, another low-paid pilot, this one for American Eagle, radioed, ‘Ah, how did Critter make out?’ Fisher did not answer.

  It was known from the start that fire took the airplane down. The federal investigation began within hours, with the arrival that evening of a National Transportation Safety Board team from Washington. The investigators set up shop in an airport hotel, which they began to refer to without embarrassment as the ‘command center.’ The English is important. Similar forms of linguistic stiff ness, specifically of engineer-speak, ultimately proved to have been involved in the downing of Flight 592 – and this was a factor that the NTSB investigators, because of their own verbal awkwardness, were unable quite to recognize.

  It is not reasonable to blame them for this, though. The NTSB is a technical agency, staffed by technicians, and though it makes much of its independence, it occupies a central position in the stilted world of aviation. Its job is to examine important accidents and to issue nonbinding safety recommendations – opinions, really – to industry and government. Because the investigators have no regulatory authority and must rely on persuasion to influence the turn of events, it may even be necessary for them to use impressive, official-sounding language. Even among its opponents, who often feel that its recommendatio
ns are impractical, the NTSB has a reputation as a branch of government done right. It is technically competent, and in a world built on compromise, it manages to play the old-fashioned unambiguous role of the public’s defender.

  The press has a classically symbiotic relationship with the NTSB, relying on the investigators for information while at the same time providing them with their only effective voice. Nonetheless, in times of crisis immediately after an accident, a tension exists between the two. Working under pressure to get the story right, investigators for their part resent the reporters’ incessant demands during the difficult first days of an accident probe – the recovery of human remains and aiplane parts. By the time I got to Miami, nineteen hours after Flight 592 hit the swamp, the two camps were passing each other warily in the hotel lobby.

  Twenty miles to the west, deep in the Everglades, the recovery operation was already under way. The NTSB had set up a staging area – a ‘forward ops base,’ one official called it – beside the Tamiami Trail, a two-lane highway that traverses the watery grasslands of southern Florida. Within two days this staging area blossomed into a chaotic encampment of excited officials – local, state, and federal – with their tents and air-conditioned trailers, their helicopters, their cars and flashing lights. I quit counting the agencies. The NTSB had politely excluded most of them from the actual accident site, which lay seven miles to the north, along a narrow levee road.

  The press was excluded even from the staging area but was provided with two news conferences a day, during which the investigators warily doled out tidbits of information. One NTSB official said to me, ‘We’ve got to feed them or we’ll lose control.’ But the reporters were well behaved and if anything a bit overcivilized. Beside the staging area they settled in to their own little town of television trucks, tents, and lawn chairs. For camera work the location gave them good Everglade backdrops and shots of alligators swimming by; the viewing public could not have guessed that they stood so far from the action. They acted cynical and impatient, but in truth this was not a bad assignment; at its peak their little town boasted pay phones and pizza delivery.

  Maybe it was because of my obvious lack of deadlines that the investigators made an exception in my case. They slipped me into the front seat of a Florida Game helicopter whose pilot, in a fraternal gesture, invited me to take the controls for the run out to the crash site. From the staging area, we skimmed north across the swamped grasslands, loosely following the levee road, until swinging wide to circle over the impact zone – a new pond defined by a ring of turned mud and surrounded by a larger area of grass and water and accident debris. Searchers in white protective suits waded line-abreast through the muck, piling pieces of people and airplane into flat-bottomed boats. It was hot and unpleasant work performed in a contained little hell, a place which one investigator later described to me as reeking of jet fuel, earth, and rotting flesh – the special smell of an airplane accident. We descended overhead to touch down on the levee, about 300 yards away from the crash site, where an American flag and a few tents and trucks constituted the recovery base.

  The mood there was quiet and purposeful, with no sign among the workers of the emotional trauma that officials had been worriedly predicting since the operation began. The workers on break sat in the shade of an awning, sipping cold drinks and chatting. They were policemen and firemen – not heroes, but straightforward guys accustomed to confronting death as a matter of fact.

  It was of course a somber place to be. Human remains lay bagged in a refrigerated truck for later transport to the morgue. A decontamination crew washed down torn and twisted pieces of airplane, none longer than a few feet. Investigators tagged the most promising wreckage to be trucked immediately to a hangar at an outlying Miami airport, where specialists could study it. Farther down the levee I came upon a soiled photograph of a young woman with a small-town face and a head of teased hair. A white-suited crew arrived on an airboat and clambered up the embankment to be washed down. Another crew set off. A boatload of muddy wreckage arrived. The next day, the families of the dead came out from Miami on buses, and laid flowers and cried. After they left, pieces of the airplane kept arriving for nearly another month.

  Much was made of this recovery, which – prior to the offshore retrieval of TWA’s Flight 800 – the NTSB called the most challenging in its history. The swamp did make the search slow and difficult, and the violence of the impact meant that meticulous work was required during the reconstruction of the critical forward cargo hold. However, in truth the Herculean physical part of the investigation served merely to confirm what a simple look at a shipping ticket had already shown – that Valujet Flight 592 burned and crashed not because the airplane failed but because the airline did.

  For me the most impressive aspect of the investigation was the speed with which it worked through the false pursuit of an electrical fire – an explanation supported by my own experiences in flight, and made all the more plausible here because the Valujet DC-9 was old and had experienced a variety of electrical failures earlier the same day, including a tripped circuit breaker (for a redundant pump) that had resisted the attentions of a mechanic in Atlanta and then mysteriously had fixed itself. I was impressed also by the instincts of the reporters, who for all their technical ignorance seized upon the news that Flight 592 had been loaded with a potentially dangerous cargo of chemical oxygen generators – scores of little firebombs which could have caused this accident, and indeed did.

  Flight 592 crashed on a Saturday afternoon. By Sunday the recovery teams were pulling up scorched and soot-stained pieces. On Monday a searcher happened to step on the flight data recorder, one of the ‘black boxes’ meant to help with accident investigations. The NTSB took the recorder to its Washington laboratory and found there that six minutes after Flight 592’s takeoff there had been a blip in the flight data consistent with a momentary rise in air pressure. Immediately afterward the recorder began to fail intermittently, apparently because of electrical power interruptions. On Tuesday night at the hotel press conference, Robert Francis, the vice-chairman of the NTSB and the senior official on the scene, announced in a deliberate monotone, ‘There could have been an explosion.’ A hazardous materials team would be joining the investigation. The investigation was focusing on the airplane’s forward cargo hold, which was located just below and behind the cockpit and was unequipped with fire detection or extinguishing systems. Routine paperwork indicated that the Miami ground crew had loaded it with homeward-bound Valujet ‘company material,’ a witch’s brew of three mounted tires and five cardboard boxes of old oxygen generators.

  Oxygen generators are safety devices. They are small steel canisters mounted in airplane ceilings and seatbacks and linked to the flimsy oxygen masks that dangle in front of the passengers when a cabin loses pressurization. To activate an oxygen flow, the passenger pulls a lanyard, which slides a retaining pin from a spring-loaded hammer, which falls on a minute explosive charge, which in turn sparks a chemical reaction that liberates the oxygen within the sodium chlorate core. This reaction produces heat, which may cause the surface temperature of the canister to rise to 500 degrees Fahrenheit when it is mounted correctly in a ventilated bracket and much higher if the canister is sealed into a box with other canisters, which may themselves be heating up. If the materials surrounding the canister catch fire, the presence of pure oxygen will cause them to burn furiously. If those materials are rubber tires, they will provide a particularly rich source of fuel. Was there an explosion? Perhaps. In any event, Flight 592 was blow-torched into the ground.

  It is ironic that the airplane’s own emergency oxygen system was different – a set of simple oxygen tanks, similar to those used in hospitals, that grow colder during use. The oxygen generators in Flight 592’s forward cargo hold came from three MD-80s, a more modern kind of twin-jet, which Valujet had recently purchased and was having refurbished at a hanger across the airport in Miami. As was its practice for most of its maintenance, Valujet ha
d hired an outside company to do the job, in this case a large firm called Sabretech, owned by Sabreliner of St Louis and licensed by the FAA to perform the often critical work. Sabretech, in turn, had hired other companies to supply contract mechanics on an as-needed basis. It later turned out that three-fourths of the people on the Valujet project were just such temporary outsiders. Many of them held second temporary jobs as well. After the accident, the vulnerability of American wage workers could be seen in their testimonies. They inhabited a world of boss-men and sudden firings, with few protections or guarantees for the future. As the Valujet deadline approached they worked in shifts, day and night, and sometimes through their weekends as well. It was their contribution to our cheap flying.

  We will never know everyone at fault in this story. Valujet gave the order to replace the MD-80s’ oxygen generators, which had come to the end of their licensed lifetimes. It provided Sabretech with explicit removal procedures and general warnings about the dangers of fire. Over several weeks Sebretech workers extracted the old oxygen generators and tied or cut off their lanyards before stacking them in five cardboard boxes that happened to be lying around the hangar. Apparently they believed that the securing of the lanyards would keep the generators from inadvertently firing off.

  What they did not do was place the required plastic safety caps over the firing pins – a precaution spelled out on the second line of Valujet’s written work order. The problem for Sabretech was that no one had such caps or cared much about finding them. Ultimately, the caps were forgotten or ignored. At the end of the job, in the rush to complete batches of paperwork on all three airplanes, two of the mechanics routinely ‘pencil-whipped’ the problem by fraudulently signing off the safety cap line along with the others certifying that the work had been done. Sabretech inspectors and supervisors signed off on the work, too, apparently without giving the caps much thought.