Fuga didn’t see the 737 plunge to earth–but 6-year-old David Giza did. “Mommy, that airplane just fell out of the sky,” he said. Mar-Jean Zamperini, who was leading high-school marching-band practice nearby, heard a loud, low noise and smelled a disturbing odor–“like grease on an electric burner.” Robert Cellini, the manager of an auto dealership, was close enough to see the USAir logo on the side of the plane as it fell–and feel the force of the explosion. He and two co-workers jumped into an Olds Bravada that was sitting in the lot and drove to the forest where they saw the plume of black smoke rising. Forging in on foot, they started calling out to anyone who might heat. They gave up as they came nearer. “I could see there were no survivors,” said Cellini, whose face was seared from the heat of the blaze.
Beaver County Coroner Wayne Tatalovich had been playing golf about a half a mile away and raced over in his Jeep. Eight years of practicing mortuary, science did not prepare him for what he found: no intact bodies, just scattered teeth, severed hands, scorched limbs. There was nothing that even looked like a plane. The 53-ton aircraft had hit the ground at nearly 300 mph and shattered into hundreds of thousands of smoldering pieces. Over the next two weeks. as 2,000 volunteers helped experts from the National Transportation Safety Board pick through the gruesome wreck-age, they ran out of red and yellow flags to mark human and aircraft parts. “We ran out of everything,” Tatalovich says. “Notebooks, pencils, film, body bags . . .”
Now government investigators are running out of answers, too. One year after the USAir 427 crash, the NTSB still can’t explain why the Boeing 757 suddenly rolled over and nose-dived into the ground, and the mystery haunts the aviation industry more than ever. In the last 20 years, the NTSB has been unable to pinpoint the probable cause of only one other major air accident–the eerily similar crash of United Air Lines Flight 585 in Colorado Springs in 1991. That also was a 787, which suddenly rolled over and plunged to earth at high speed, killing all 25 on board. The unsettling parallels, and the lack of explanations, worry some aviation experts. There’s even a fear– though no proof– that a rare defect exists in the rudder control system of the 737.
If so, the repercussions for the airline industry would be staggering. The Boeing 787, which debuted in 1967, is the most widely flown commercial jetliner in the world, the workhorse of the short-haul fleet. A 787 takes off somewhere around the globe every five seconds; at any given moment, there are some 700 in the air. “Collectively, the cost of the fleet dwarfs some nations’ GNP,” says former NTSB chairman Jim Burnett. An official finding of a design flaw in the 737 would also undermine public confidence in the Federal Aviation Administration, which certified the aircraft as safe. As it is, the FAA is having a bad year–with a series of terrorist threats and power outages at air-traffic-control facilities snarling air operations in recent weeks.
The Boeing Corp. insists that the 757’s impressive safety record is proof that the aircraft is sound (chart). “If there were a design flaw, it seems odd that it pops up only once in 10 million flights,” says Mike Rioux of the Air Transport Association, which represents major airlines. FAA chief David Hinson concurs: “I would say to the traveling public that there is no evidence that the airplane isn’t anything but perfectly safe.” Still, some critics wonder if that confidence isn’t premature. “Until we can say with certainty what caused the crash of USAir 427. we can neither fix the problem nor assure the traveling public that there isn’t one.” says Paul McCarthy of the Air Line Pilots Association.
That may take a long time. Some government experts are beginning to think that they may never know for certain what downed USAir 427, or its sister crash, United 585. Meanwhile, weary investigators continue to puzzle over complex rudder “failure modes.” Plaintiffs’ attorneys are deposing engineers and pilots, dreaming of big damages. And families who lost loved ones in Pittsburgh are trying to get on with their lives. Together, their stories weave a compelling tale of an industry struggling to come to terms with a mysterious tragedy.
Some members of the NTSB’s investigative crew–the “go-team”–had a bad feeling about Flight 427 fight from the start. They are trained not to make snap judgments. But even as they scrambled to the scene in. Pittsburgh, donning their white biohazard suits and Wellingtons, the first sketchy reports of the crash couldn’t help but remind them of the Colorado Springs case, the one the NTSB hadn’t solved. Hopes era quick resolution faded further when they recovered the flight-data recorder, and saw that it was wired to collect only the most basic information. Modern “black boxes” can record 100 or more measurements of an aircraft’s operations in flight, which often helps investigators quickly pinpoint what went wrong. Flight 427’s data recorder measured only 11, the FANs minimum requirement. “I could tell we were in for a long haul,” says Tom Haueter, who is leading the NTSB investigation.
The “tin-kickers,” as they call themselves, were able to rule out many possible explanations in a matter of days. FBI bomb experts helped determine there were no traces of explosives or other signs of sabotage. Meteorologists confirmed that wind shear wasn’t a factor. Ornithologists from the Smithsonian Institution helped rule out birdstrikes; they said feathers found in the wreckage came from a bird that flies no higher than 100 feet off the ground.
Investigators’ real suspicions soon narrowed to just two possible culprits: a rudder malfunction or turbulence from another plane. A Boeing 727 had passed through just 70 seconds earlier. But NASA experts consulted by the NTSB said they doubted the wake from that plane could have been strong enough to flip a 737. At most, it would have caused a minor bobble. “You could put your hands in your lap and let the plane fly itself,” says one pilot. “You might have some spilled coffee in the back of the plane, but that’s all.”
The NTSB has tried to duplicate USAir 427’s movements in more than 200 FAA flight-simulator tests. They concluded that the only thing that could account, aerodynamically, for the plane’s death roll and dive was what they call a “rudder hard-over”–in which the rudder suddenly moves as far as it can to one side. When test pilots did that deliberately in the simulations, the motion forced one wing up and the other down in a matter of seconds–well beyond the pilot’s ability to correct. But what would cause such a drastic move in the rudder? Without more information from the flight-data recorder, investigators can only speculate, and even then, their theories don’t fit the findings of the crash investigation perfectly. For example: the rudder was almost in its normal position when the plane hit the ground. “So many things are upside down and backwards in this case, says FAA test pilot Lester Berven. “You make a presumption of what happened, then you can’t find any evidence of it. That’s what’s so discouraging. This crash can’t possibly have happened. And yet . . .”
Is the rudder the culprit? Boeing says in 65 million flight hours, there’s no evidence that a 737 rudder has ever moved so drastically on its own as to cause an accident. And even if one would, a spokesman says, the pilot acting promptly and correctly should he able to recover under normal flight conditions. “It’s a Boeing design requirement,” says spokesman Steve Theime. (The FAA requires that jets be designed this way. If there’s a problem with one part of the plane, another part must be able to help the pilot steady the aircraft.)
Still, it is no secret in the industry that the 737 has had its share of rudder problems–or “anomalies,” as Boeing calls them. Airlines have filed 80 reports of rudder-service difficulties with the FAA since 1986–14 of them involving emergency landings. Many more were reported to Boeing instead: the company has given the NTSB a list of 250 incidents involving sudden rolls by the plane–called “yaw and roll upsets”-in the last 25 years. Boeing says many of these were insignificant, and that pilots often exaggerate. But some pilots were clearly unnerved when the 737 didn’t do as they expected. In one report, veteran Continental Airlines Capt. Ray Miller described how he struggled for 18 minutes to control a violent yaw at 30,000 feet over the Gulf of Honduras in April 1994. The aircraft, the pilot said, mysteriously righted itself again. But not before Miller had radioed controllers to “listen up” in case they had to recover the black boxes from the sea. He remarked later how cramped his hand was from struggling with the plane’s controls,
As dramatic as that sounds, some experts say that a minor incident at Chicago’s O’Hare in 1992 provides more insight into what might be wrong with the 787 rudders. United Air Lines Capt. Mack Moore was conducting preflight checks on the runway when he found he could depress his fight rudder pedal only a fraction of the way. Hetaxied back to the gate, and sent the rudder assembly in for repairs. Boeing and subcontractor Parker Hannifin, which makes the rudder-control unit, traced the problem to the “servo valve”–a mechanism that directs the rudder’s hydraulic fluid. In some poorly assembled units, a rare series of events could command the rudder to go in the opposite direction. “It’s as if you’re driving down the street and you go to make a right turn, but the cars turns left,” explains aviation consultant Leo Janssens. The FAA was concerned enough about the problem that in 1994, it ordered airlines to make modifications on the rudder-control units. But it gave airlines five years to comply. Flight 427’s rudder-control unit had not yet been modified. But Boeing says that post-crash tests on the units from both Flight 427 and Flight 585 show they were perfectly assembled and couldn’t possibly reverse.
At the NTSB’s public hearing on USAir 427 last January, Boeing engineers offered a second theory: even in a perfectly assembled rudder-control unit. the servo valve could jam in two places, sending the rudder all the way over. But Boeing insists that it has never actually seen this happen. And if it did occur, investigators say, such jams would leave visible marks behind.
NTSB investigators say they will continue to explore the rudder mysteries. They also want to learn more about how wake vortex may affect aircraft at low altitudes. Later this month, they plan to run tests flying a 787 borrowed from USAir into the wake of a 727 belonging to the FAA. Hall said last month that the board might hold another public hearing late in the year. He also vowed “we won’t rest until we are certain that we have pursued all possible avenues of investigation.”
The government investigation into USAir 427 may be stalled–but that hasn’t stopped the plaintiffs’ lawyers. A small group of legal eagles representing family members from both USAir 427 and United 585 have mounted a parallel investigation–and they claim, of course, that Boeing can be held for damages. They don’t actually have to prove their theories beyond a reasonable doubt, just come up with an explanation that will convince a jury. In the meantime, they aren’t pulling any punches–and they aren’t at all shy about blasting the government’s efforts. Flamboyant Philadelphia lawyer Arthur Wolk calls the wake-vortex theory, for example, “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever heard.” And he insists that the Feds know more than they’re saying. “How [NTSB chairman] Jim Hall can stand there and say ‘We’re still baffled’ is beyond me. Everybody on the inside of the investigation knows–not believe s, knows–it’s the rudder.”
For attorney Richard Schaden, pinpointing the exact cause of the rudder maLfunction has become an obsession. Last February, he bought the tail section of a Boeing 787 and had it trucked from Tucson, Ariz., to his private hangar outside Denver. He’d already bought a 787 rudder-control unit from Peru. A pilot and aeronautical engineer, Schaden has scrutinized every training manual and technical report on 737 rudders he can get his hands on. and even obtained Boeing’s computer data, which he’s used to program his own flight simulator. He believes that he knows where the rudder problem lies. “This is the troublesome part, the servo valve,” he says, pulling a cylinder the size of a juice can out of his rudder-control unit. He doesn’t buy the official explanation that jams would leave telltale marks on the unit. “Some problems are like the icicle murder-they’re deadly, but they leave no evidence,” he says. (Independent air-safety experts with no stake in the case agree,) The NTSB stands by its test results.
It’s not clear when Schaden and the other lawyers will meet Boeing in court. The attorneys are still in the discovery phase of the United 585 lawsuits. Some USAir cases are still being filed. Schaden says Boeing is dragging the ease out. “They want to grind us down till it’s so expensive we can’t go on,” contends Schaden. But he insists he will–no matter what it costs. “This is a holy war,” he says.
With so much attention focused on why USAir 427 crashed, it has sometimes been overlooked that 132 people lost their lives. One year later, friends and families of the victims are still struggling to come to terms with the tragedy, which haunts them in many ways. Take John Kretz. He still finds himself drawn to the crash site, where he walks for hours thinking of his wife, Janet: once he found part of a skull there. Marita Brunner, who lost her brother-in-law, formed the fledgling Flight 427 Air Disaster Support League. Its quarterly newsletter shares information on litigation and how to get government reports on the investigation. Friends of Jon Hamley, whose wife. Sarah, was a flight attendant on 427, mounted a “Jon watch” for him all year long to help him through the tough times. Now he’s afraid the second year may be even harder. “Everyone thinks you should be back to normal,” he says.“But I don’t want to get on wit h my life. I liked the way it was.”
With so much unsettled and uncertain, seemingly small matters have taken on outsize significance–like the mass coffins. Most families got back only fragmentary remains of their loved ones. Seven families got nothing at all, and last October, USAir invited them to attend the burial of two symbolic coffins at a cemetery at Sewickley, Pa., near the crash site. Brunner says her chair sunk into the freshly dug earth near the graves. Just days later Kretz learned that USAir had quietly buried hundreds more pounds of other unidentified remains in 38 mass steel containers there two weeks before. “We sat on top of those graves, not knowing,” Brunner says. “If you only got seven teeth back and find that the majority of your husband is buried in Sewickley without you being there, it’s upsetting.”
USAir has been the focus of much of the family bitterness over the past year. Some family members say they couldn’t get confirmation for as long as seven hours that a loved one was dead. Their latest beef concerns the monument USAir erected at the Sewickley cemetery. The inscription lists all 132 names and says simply “in loving mentory of our family members and friends interred here who died September 8, 1994.” Nowhere does it mention a plane crash.
USAir spokesman Paul Turk says that airline officials wanted to memorialize the individuals, not the event. When family members complained, the airline placed a plaque mentioning the crash on a bench 40 feet away. Kretz and other family members consider the small marker “insulting.” Turk is baffled by their complaints. “We’ve gone to extraordinary, effort to meet with them when we could. We firmly believe we did everything we could. Was it perfect? No. We all lost friends as well.”
This Friday, Brunner’s support league will hold a series of ceremonies marking the anniversary–including one at the crash site at 7:03 pm, the time the plane went down. Other families are marking the day with quiet, private memorials. In Washington, meanwhile. NTSB officials are seeking a tribute of their own to the USAir 427 victims. They are trying to prod the FAA into requiring that all 757s be refitted by the end of the year with better flight-data recorders that could help pinpoint the causes of any further crashes.
In fact, the NTSB has had a similar request on its “most wanted” list of safety changes for years. Airlines have traditionally begged for more time, citing the cost of rewiring planes (as much as $100,000 each) and the inconvenience of interrupting schedules. “We haven’t said ‘No, never’-just let us do it on a regular maintenance schedule,” says Turk of USAir.
FAA chief Hinson is still weighing the NTSB’s most recent plea to require immediate upgrades. But he has urged airlines to upgrade their flight-data recorders voluntarily. Southwest Airlines, which flies 737s exclusively, has already fitted a third of its fleet with state-of-the-art equipment. Passengers can only hope that others will follow its lead. Because if anything is clear from United 585 and USAir 427, it is that information can help save lives.
The 737 has been involved in some controversial crashes. But the jet’s worldwide safety record has been solid.
ACCIDENTS[*] PER MILLION DEPARTURES McDonnell Douglas DC-10 2.52 Airbus A320 and A321 1.73 McDonnell Douglas DC-9 1.21 Boeing 747-400 1.19 Boeing 757-100/200 1.15 Lockheed L1011 .91 Boeing 787-800/400/500 .62 McDonnell Douglas MD-80 .51
- ACCIDENTS INVOLVING LOSS OF AIRCRAFT, EXCLUDING SABOTAGE OR MILITARY INCIDENTS, SOURCE: BOEING
Investigators still don’t know why Flight 427 rolled over and plunged to the ground. But after ruling out almost everything else, they agree that the only logical explanation is a movement of the plane’s rudder.
Thrust reversers are used during landing to push jets of hot air from the engines forward. which slows down the plane. But they were found in the wreckage of Flight 427 in the normal rather than the reverse position.
An engine dropped off a DC-10 that crashed in Chicago in 1982. But 427 crash witnesses saw no parts fall from the plane.
Bird strikes were ruled out when an examination of the wings under black lights revealed no microscopic traces of blood.
The cockpit voice recorder revealed no sounds of an explosion. Nor did investigators find any chemical residues of explosives.
The yaw damper makes thousands of tiny adjustments to the rudder position. But when 427 passed through the wake of another jet, the swirling air may have caused it to move the rudder too fast.
The rudder was only 2 degrees off center at impact. Simulator tests by Boeing and the FAA could only duplicate 427’s dramatic roll through a much greater rudder movement. What happened in the seconds prior to impact is still under investigation.
Spoilers are used during landing to help hold the plane down and reduce speed. They were found in the retracted position. normal for an initial landing approach.
The cargo door blew open on a 1974 Turkish Airlines jet near Paris. But Flight 427’s forward cargo door was found with its pins in place.
title: “Unsolved Mystery” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Bethany Herrera”
He was commander of a DeKalb police narcotics unit and rose to the rank of captain before his activism led him into politics. Crusading against alleged corruption in the incumbent’s regime, Brown won a bitter run-off election last August and ran without Republican opposition in the heavily Democratic county in November.
The future could have hardly looked brighter on Dec. 15, when Brown arrived at his home in a white rental car, flush from celebrating his graduation earlier in the day from the Sheriff’s Academy in Forsyth, Ga. Inside, a few friends and political supporters had gathered for a birthday party for his wife, Phyllis. She had pinned the Sheriff’s badge to his new uniform and hung it near the door of their brick ranch home so that Brown would see it as he entered. But Brown never made it inside.
Unarmed and laden with bags, Brown stepped from the car. As he started up the driveway, an assailant fired at him with a high-powered machine pistol, striking Brown 11 times in a hail of 13 bullets. The murder, characterized by local authorities as an assassination, has stunned DeKalb County and touched off the largest homicide investigation since the Atlanta Child Murders spree of the 1980s.
That Brown, who was 46 and the father of five, the county’s second most powerful political leader, could be gunned down with impunity on his front lawn has added to the urgency to get the crime solved quickly. “It was a bold, murderous act by someone who didn’t fear anything,” says Stone Mountain, Ga., Mayor Chuck Burris.
IDENTIFYING THE MURDER WEAPON
Police have assembled a task force of 34 investigators made up of local, state and federal agencies to work the case. They released the first bit of detail about the investigation this week, identifying the murder weapon as an automatic 9mm handgun, known on the street as a Tec-9.
The gun was banned by federal authorities as an assault weapon in 1994. It is larger than a standard-issue police handgun, according to DeKalb police spokeswoman Mikki Jones, with a 12-inch barrel, a 4 ½-inch handle and a multiple-shot magazine.
Though the gun is outlawed, two American manufacturers produced the weapon in a variety of configurations, and DeKalb District Attorney J. Tom Morgan says police confiscate a lot of Tec 9s.
Morgan will ask the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit next week to seat a special grand jury to investigate Brown’s murder along with allegations of corruption in the sheriff’s office first raised during the campaign. “You can certainly rule out a random act of violence or a domestic homicide,” Morgan tells NEWSWEEK. “It makes the investigation difficult because your witnesses will say, ‘My gosh, if these people are crazy enough to kill the sheriff they’ll be crazy enough to kill me.’ "
The list of potential suspects is long. “Obviously a lot of people stood to lose by Derwin taking office,” Morgan says. Brown had initially announced the firing of 38 sheriff’s employees, but had cut that list in half, top officials on his transition team tell NEWSWEEK. He had also asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to audit all contracts at the jail, which houses over 3,000 inmates, before he took office. A $71,000 reward is being offered for information about the murder.
RUMORS OF THREATS
Police are also looking into reports that Brown had been followed during the campaign. One aide, Michael Murphy, told NEWSWEEK that rumors had surfaced last summer during a runoff campaign about threats to Brown’s safety. “The comment was made that there was a contract out,” says Murphy, a member of Brown’s transition team.
But Brown never expressed any concern about his safety to his wife or to long-time friend Robert Crowder, who had formed a community group called the Father’s’ Foundation with Brown that was featured in NEWSWEEK several years ago. “Derwin would talk about being followed but it was never taken that seriously,” says Crowder, whom Brown had named as his chief deputy. “He thought it was people watching us put out flyers, almost like it was intelligence to see if we were pulling up the other guy’s sign. But then there may be some things that he didn’t share with me.”
Brown’s widow, Phyllis, believes the list of suspects should be even wider. “The corruption was not just with the current administration. It’s been going on for a long time,” she told NEWSWEEK. “If Derwin had taken office, the investigation was going to reach higher, and somebody just did not want that out there. It was going to touch somebody far higher [than sheriff].”
Veteran homicide investigators are intrigued by the precise nature of what Morgan labels a “professional hit.” A Tec-9 is not a gun easily handled, one police official points out. And while investigators have not released any forensic evidence about the shooting, the fact that Brown was struck 11 times in the barrage suggests the shooter aimed at what homicide detectives call the “kill 5 area”-right in the center of the target.
“If the shooter grouped his firing in patterns, he’s a professional guy or a police officer,” says former Atlanta police chief Eldrin Bell, a friend of Brown’s who visited the crime scene on the night of the shooting.“Somebody who’s well-trained with this gun, not running down to the [shooting] range every now and then.”
The man selected to replace Brown as sheriff, interim Sheriff Thomas Brown (no relation), has promised to carry on Derwin Brown’s crusade to clean up the department, firing four deputies that had been among the employees targeted for dismissal by the sheriff-elect. Brown’s family and friends continue to mourn their loss. “He was the people’s candidate,” says Crowder, who has helped organize a memorial fund for his friend. “Everybody loved him. He was all about helping others, especially kids.”
