Bill Adair: The Mystery of Flight 427

When he complained to a friend about the pressure, NTSB chairman Jim Hall got wind of it and intercepted Haueter one day as he was walking out of the office.

“Can you follow me down for a minute?” Hall asked.

They walked through the lobby, past the NTSB’s Most Wanted List of safety recommendations, and entered an elevator.

“You know, you don’t have to solve it,” Hall said.

“Jim, I appreciate that, but yeah, we do,” Haueter replied. “Greg and I need to know what happened. We don’t want this thing hanging over us. We’ve got four unsolved accidents. The safety board can’t afford a fifth.”

Haueter felt that he could solve it. He just needed time. But he worried about what might happen in the meantime.

In his nightmare, another 737 had crashed, which prompted Congress to launch a massive inquiry to find out why the NTSB had bungled the case.

Suddenly he was in a giant hearing room, facing a panel of angry congressmen. The TV cameras were zooming in on him. It seemed there were thousands of people in the room, and all of them had decided he was guilty. He was at the witness table, all alone .

“What happened?” a congressman demanded. “Why didn’t you do something sooner? Why didn’t you ground the fleet?”

Brett and Joan Van Bortel pulled into the parking lot shortly after sunrise, with a few minutes to spare before Joan’s 6:20 train. She was a marketing manager for Akzo Nobel, a big chemical company, and liked to get to work early, even when it meant a twelve- or fourteen-hour day. This would be one of those days. She was flying to Pittsburgh for a dinner meeting.

Joan took a trip nearly every week and had become a seasoned business traveler. She carried the same suitcase-on-wheels that pilots and flight attendants used, and she traveled light, taking only the bare essentials for each trip. Unfortunately, the prime spots for the chemical business were not the nation’s most glamorous cities. She spent a lot of time in Akron, Ohio, the rubber capital of the world.

Joan was an ambitious person. Her goal was to become Akzo Nobel’s highest-ranking woman. She was one of the first people to arrive in the office each morning and usually ate lunch at her desk so she could keep working. She told her employees that every call should be picked up by the third ring. She was not a chemist, but she took time to learn about the company’s products. She held training sessions to teach employees how to pronounce the chemical names and made them take written quizzes with questions like “How is rubber cured?” and “Name one of our products that has zinc in it.” When Joan stopped at a gas station, she got into long conversations with auto mechanics about the chemistry of tires.

As she and Brett kissed good-bye, Joan looked very professional in a stylish green-and-white suit, with her briefcase in hand. She wore her engagement ring, which had a distinctive marquise diamond surrounded by other diamonds. Brett had given her lots of jewelry, but this ring was her favorite.

She was five feet two—almost a foot shorter than Brett—with shoulder-length honey-brown hair, sparkling brown eyes, and a flawless smile. With her hair up, she resembled the actress Jessica Lange. Brett loved the way Joan was comfortable with a grunge look—big glasses, a baseball cap, and messy hair—and the way she could transform herself into a knockout. She exercised every day and was in great shape, which allowed her to indulge in an occasional bag of Skittles from the office snack machine.

While Joan was in Pittsburgh that night, Brett planned to stay home and install a tile floor in their kitchen. He had promised her the floor would be finished before she came home the following day.

Captain Peter Germano and First Officer Charles B. Emmett III first saw Ship 513 in Jacksonville, Florida. They had spent the previous two days flying to Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Toronto, Cleveland, Charlotte, and then down to Jacksonville, a trip that involved three different 737s. Switching planes during a trip was standard procedure for most airline pilots. Because of union work rules and government time limits, USAir pilots flew no more than eight hours per day, followed by a mandatory nine hours and fifteen minutes of rest. A typical USAir 737 was in the air for ten hours every day, however. That timing mismatch led to a complex and confusing schedule, as the airline tried to maximize productivity by switching crews on and off different aircraft throughout the day.

Ship 513 had spent the night in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where mechanics performed a “transit check” on the plane, inspecting the hydraulic system for leaks, examining the wheels and tires, and checking the engine oil. There were no significant maintenance problems or pilot “squawks” that needed to be fixed. On the morning of September 8, a different set of pilots had flown the plane from Windsor Locks to Syracuse, Rochester, Charlotte, and then Jacksonville. Emmett and Germano were scheduled to take the aircraft to Charlotte, Chicago, and Pittsburgh.

Ship 513 was identical to the 220 other 737s that USAir flew. It had a shiny silver fuselage (painted planes were heavier, which meant higher fuel costs) and a pair of stripes, red and blue, running the length of the plane just below the windows. The tail was navy blue with red pinstripes and the airline’s simple logo in white letters. The company colors were also featured on the inside—the seats were navy blue with red and white decorations. The bulkhead that separated coach from first class was covered in a carpet that looked like a sunset. It was supposed to absorb sound so that people talking in coach wouldn’t bother the first-class passengers.

The first-class section had 8 leather seats, and coach had 118 fabric-covered ones, each designed to be as thin and lightweight as possible and still comply with federal safety standards to withstand a forward force of nine times the force of gravity, or 9 Gs. It was a sharp-looking plane, a big improvement over USAir’s previous colors, frumpy 1970s earth tones that one USAir official had described as “red on brown on red on brown.”

Ship 513 was seven years old, which made it a relatively new plane in the USAir fleet. Purchased in October 1987 for about $24 million, the plane had logged 23,800 hours—the equivalent of flying continuously for nearly three years. It had made almost 14,500 flights or “cycles”—the most critical measurement of a plane’s age. Each time an aircraft is pressurized for a flight, the airframe is subjected to stress.

The plane was part of the 300 series, which meant it was the third generation of 737s. The first generation, the 100 series, was introduced in 1967. Boeing designed the 737–300 to be in service for at least 75,000 cycles, but many planes continued to fly long after that. The life span was economic, ending when it became too costly to maintain the planes. Airlines typically kept jets for twenty to thirty years before trading them in for new models.

Emmett, Germano, and the flight attendants had arrived in Jacksonville about 11 P.M. on September 7 and checked in to the Omni Jacksonville Hotel, a downtown high-rise overlooking the St. John’s River. Germano ordered a turkey croissant sandwich from room service shortly before midnight and called his wife, Christine, back in Moorestown, New Jersey. He and his crew would be able to sleep late the next morning; they didn’t have to be back at the Jacksonville airport for their next trip until noon.