Bill Adair - The Mystery of Flight 427

Their flight to Charlotte was uneventful.

On the next leg, to Chicago, a USAir pilot named Bill Jackson rode in the cockpit jump seat, a fold-down seat behind the pilots. It was common practice in the airline industry to allow pilots to ride for free so they could commute from their home city to their crew base. Many pilots preferred riding in the jump seat so they did not have to listen to annoying chatter from passengers.

About thirty minutes into the flight to Chicago, Andrew McKenna Sr., a passenger in first class, heard a strange gurgling sound. He was a seasoned traveler, the head of a major paper and packaging company, so he was accustomed to the noises inside big jets. But this was unusual, like water being forced out of a sink. It seemed to be coming from just above his head.

McKenna summoned the flight attendant and described the noise. He flew a lot, he told her, and he had never heard anything like it. She listened for a moment and then said she thought the sound was coming from the PA speaker. McKenna wasn’t sure that she was right, but he went back to his reading. He didn’t give the sound another thought.

The flight attendant picked up the intercom phone, called Germano in the cockpit, and reported that a passenger was hearing an unusual noise that seemed to be coming from the PA system. Germano turned to Jackson behind him in the jump seat and noticed that his knee was pressing on a microphone button. Jackson moved his knee, and the flight continued to Chicago without further complaints.

But after the plane landed at O’Hare and parked at Gate F6, passengers were still talking about the noise. The gate was packed with people waiting to board the plane for its next trip, Flight 427 to Pittsburgh. As the arriving passengers walked off, a woman whose husband was booked on Flight 427 overheard someone discussing the noise. She decided to call USAir to make sure her husband’s plane was safe.

The phone rang in the mechanics lounge beneath the F gates just as USAir maintenance foreman Gerald Fox walked in the door. He listened as the woman explained what she had overheard. She said she was concerned because her husband was on the Pittsburgh flight.

“I have two good mechanics on duty,” Fox told her. “If there is a problem with the airplane, it will be taken care of before leaving.” He hung up and walked outside to look for his mechanics. After searching for a few minutes, he walked up the metal stairs to Ship 513, which was being loaded for the trip to Pittsburgh. He found Germano in the covered Jetway just outside the plane and explained the woman’s complaint about the strange noise. Germano did not mention the microphone incident from the previous flight, but he did not seem concerned.

Germano said, “I have a good airplane.”

At the Akzo Nobel office in downtown Chicago, Joan had gotten busy with meetings and phone calls, so she was running late when she grabbed her bags at 3:45 P.M. and ran out of the office to catch the El train to O’Hare. She had only an hour and fifteen minutes to get to the airport, and several people at the office thought she would miss her flight. She had decided to take along a laptop computer so she could work on a report at her Pittsburgh hotel. This was the first time she’d carried a laptop, and she was worried that it might get zapped by the airport metal detector, but her coworkers assured her it would be fine.

Joan got off the train at O’Hare and dashed through the underground tunnels and up the escalator to Terminal 2. She tossed her suitcase and briefcase on the X-ray belt, walked through the metal detector, and grabbed her bags. She hurried past the shoeshine stand and the snack bar to Gate F6. She would have preferred to fly American or United—where she had most of her frequent flier miles—but neither of those airlines had many flights to Pittsburgh. Her travel agent had booked her on USAir, which had a big hub there.

At O’Hare, however, USAir was a bit player. The airline’s gates in the F wing looked like they hadn’t been improved since the days of the first Mayor Daley. Under yellowed ceiling tiles, passengers sat in cramped gray chairs and watched the CNN Airport Network on a blaring TV. The hallway echoed with the sound of footsteps and the clickety-clickety-clickety of suitcase wheels. The PA system kept telling passengers: “May I have your attention, please. For security reasons, keep your baggage with you at all times. Unattended baggage will be removed by the Chicago Police Department.” A red cardboard sign told passengers to watch for suspicious activity and to refuse packages from “anyone you do not know very well.”

Joan handed her ticket to the agent and walked down the Jetway toward Ship 513. She was in 14E, a middle seat just behind the wing. Though she preferred to sit on the aisle, nothing was available there. Flight 427 was packed. In the seat on her right was Robert Connolly, a financial consultant headed home to Pittsburgh. In the one on her left was a man from Virginia named John T. Dickens. The plane was so full that the Weavers, a family of five from Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, had to sit in middle seats scattered around the cabin. Seven-year-old Scott Weaver was one row ahead of Joan, and his eleven-year-old sister, Lindsay, was one row back. The family was returning from a funeral for a nine-year-old cousin.

It was primarily a business flight. Eight U.S. Department of Energy employees were returning to Pittsburgh from a coal conference. Several of them had initially booked seats on later USAir flights but had switched to this one so they could get home earlier. Also on board were four people from US Steel, a lawyer from Westinghouse, and an account executive from a Chicago radio station. The man in 20C was a neuroscientist from the Scripps Institute for Oceanography. The grad student in 16A was flying to Pittsburgh for a job interview. The well-tanned guy with the baseball cap in 17F was a convicted drug dealer.

At the gate, Captain Germano was given the flight plan, the weather forecast, and the cargo manifest on a computer printout that stretched four feet long. Pilots often joked about the big stack of paperwork for each flight, saying that when the weight of the paper exceeded the weight of the airplane, it was safe to fly. The papers told Germano that Flight 427 was scheduled to leave at 4:50 P.M. Chicago time and land in Pittsburgh 55 minutes later. The plane would have a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet and would get a gentle push from a 31-knot tailwind. The plane would need 6,400 pounds of jet fuel, but it would carry more than twice that amount in case Germano had to divert to another city or go into a holding pattern.

The plane’s route looked like gibberish: ORD … GIJ … J146 … J34 … DJB … ACO … CUTTA1 … PIT, but Germano could read it like simple street directions. The three-letter codes stood for airports and navigation markers between Chicago and Pittsburgh. Flight 427 would climb away from O’Hare (ORD), over a point known as Gipper east of Gary, Indiana, and then up to jet routes J146 and J34. They were like interstate freeways in the sky, carrying high-altitude east-west traffic along the Indiana-Michigan border and then southeast toward Pittsburgh. Flight 427 would cross over a navigation point known as Dryer near Cleveland and then begin to descend near Akron, Ohio. It would follow a standard arrival route known as “CUTTA,” which was like a big funnel for planes from the northwest converging on the Pittsburgh airport.

Several pages of Germano’s paperwork dealt with the weather. There were SIGMETS—significant meteorological conditions—for Georgia and Florida, but none that would affect his brief flight over the Midwest. The weather in Pittsburgh looked perfect, sunny skies with temperatures in the mid-seventies. All of the Pittsburgh runways were dry.