The Crash Detectives Read online

  THE CRASH DETECTIVES

  CHRISTINE NEGRONI is a journalist specializing in air travel and aviation for The New York Times, ABC News, Air & Space, The Huffington Post, and many other news organizations. She began her career in broadcasting as an anchorwoman in local television and rose to become a network correspondent at CBS News and CNN. While working in CNN’s New York bureau, she covered the crash of TWA Flight 800 and went on to write the book Deadly Departure, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Neither a pilot nor an engineer, she was nonetheless asked by the Federal Aviation Administration to represent the traveling public and present a fresh-eyed perspective on a five-year advisory committee formed to address problems exposed by the crash of TWA Flight 800 and the 1998 in-flight fire on Swissair Flight 111, which killed all on board.

  Following the attacks against America on September 11, 2001, she joined the aviation law firm Kreindler & Kreindler, directing its investigation into sponsorship of terror and other aviation disasters on behalf of victims’ families. During this time she qualified for membership in the International Society of Air Safety Investigators.

  She is considered a thought leader in the aviation industry and contributes insight, analysis, and advocacy on the subjects of safety and civility in air travel.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Mystery

  PART TWO

  Conspiracy

  PART THREE

  Fallibility

  PART FOUR

  Humanity

  PART FIVE

  Resiliency

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  O Trinity of love and power

  All travelers guard in danger’s hour;

  From rock and tempest, fire and foe,

  Protect them whereso e’er they go;

  Thus evermore shall rise to Thee

  Glad praise from air and land and sea.

  —WILLIAM WHITING, 1860

  PRESBYTERIAN HYMNAL

  INTRODUCTION

  This I can say about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: there is little to suggest the pilots were involved in hijacking or crashing the plane they were flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. One need only look at the shocking, intentional crash of a GermanWings1 flight one year later to see how quickly, and how many, clues emerge when a pilot plots to bring down an airliner. My theory about what happened to MH-370 began to form within a week of arriving in Malaysia to help ABC News cover the story.

  When I first heard about the missing flight, I was at sea in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin. The fact that the news reached me in such a remote place was a new high in communications technology. That years later we do not know what happened to the airliner and its passengers demonstrates the shallows.

  I hurried to Kuala Lumpur and spent five weeks there. Each night, I went to bed pretty sure I’d wake up to hear that the airliner had been found. When it was not, I was swept along with everyone else in believing that this was “unprecedented,” as Malaysia’s transportation and defense minister was fond of saying.

  In fact, over the past century of commercial aviation, more than a dozen airliners have disappeared without a trace. And even when a missing plane is found, it is sometimes impossible to determine what went wrong.

  When I returned to the United States and started the research for this book, I came across the trailer for a documentary produced by Guy Noffsinger, a media specialist at NASA. “What happened to the most high-tech commercial airliner in the world and those people aboard it?” the narrator asked ominously. Was it structural failure, pilot error, or something more sinister?

  In a similar vein, author Edgar Haine in Disaster in the Air, writes, “Of particular concern to everyone was the sudden termination of normal radio contact” and “the absence of subsequent communications.”

  Yet Noffsinger and Haine weren’t referring to MH-370; they were talking about the Pan American Airways flying boat the Hawaii Clipper.2 It disappeared seventy-six years before MH-370 and was one of the first mysteries in commercial aviation. It remains a subject of fascination to this day.

  After two decades writing about air safety and working as an accident investigator, I have learned that most accidents are variations on a limited number of themes, and in this book I explore some of them: communication failures, overreliance on or misunderstanding of technology, errors in the design of airplanes and engines, and lapses in the performance of flight crews, operators, and mechanics. The tie that binds the accidents (and incidents3) in this book is that they confounded the crash detectives looking for answers.

  Why conduct investigations anyway? It is not to provide “closure” for families of victims, though that’s a compassionate side benefit. It is not to assign blame so people can be prosecuted and lawyers can sue. Investigations help illuminate how machines and humans fail, which in turn shows us how to prevent similar events. Because the aviation community has been so conscientious about this over the years, hurtling through the air at five hundred miles an hour and seven miles high is far less likely to kill you than almost any other type of transportation.

  From pilot training and airplane and engine design to dropping crash test dummies on their rubberized and sensor-equipped bottoms to the floor of a test lab, every decision in commercial aviation is based on lessons learned from disaster. That’s why it is so important to discover what happened to Malaysia 370, even if the plane is never found.

  An unsuccessful search is still not the end of the story; thinking through scenarios of what might have happened can identify hazards that need to be fixed. So while it is possible that one or both of the pilots—in an uncharacteristic act of hostility and without any of their friends or family noticing anything amiss—purposefully took the plane on a flight into oblivion, other theories better fit the available facts.

  My theory is that an electrical malfunction knocked out systems on the Boeing 777 and that the plane lost pressurization, incapacitating the pilots. Whatever happened, it could not have caused damage serious enough to affect the airworthiness of the plane, since it flew on until running out of fuel many hours later. Likely, the men in the cockpit were overcome by the altitude sickness known as hypoxia, which robbed them of the ability to think clearly and land the plane safely. Many of the links in the bizarre chain of events that night can be explained by hypoxia because past cases have shown how rapidly those who fall victim to it turn imbecilic.

  As soon as a plane crashes, people begin to speculate about what happened. Horace Brock, who became a Pan Am pilot shortly after the Hawaii Clipper disappeared, noted in his book, Flying the Oceans, “The public will not tolerate a mystery. They always sense a conspiracy. They will never believe in coincidence or even a predictable tragedy.”

  Alternative theories abound in many notable accidents, including the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937, the death of United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld in Northern Rhodesia4 in 1961, and the 1996 in-flight explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York.

  Questioning the official version of events can be a good thing. The loss of an Air New Zealand DC-10 on a sightseeing flight over Mount Erebus in Antarctica in 1979 was first attributed to pilot error. Only after people outside the investigation presented their own evidence did a special court of inquiry discover what it called “a litany of lies” by an airline and a government trying to hide their culpability. More on that crash later.

  The tradition of doubt in aviation goes back to Orville and Wilbur Wright’s successful first flights, which prompted an editorial writer to say of the brothers three years later, “They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is diffic
ult to fly. It is easy to say, ‘We have flown.’”

  If skepticism was a gnawing mouse in flying’s early days, it is a roaring lion now that anyone with an Internet connection can access information and review the evidence. Invited or not, independent analysts and armchair investigators are contributing to the discussion on TV news, blogs, and pop-up crowdsourcing sites. For the first time in history, technology is connecting hyperspecialists with geeks, skeptics, and advocates. Information can be scrutinized and analyzed in ways not previously possible, and this Internet-enhanced coalescing of the world’s brain power will certainly continue to grow.

  This book is a part of that evolution as I hypothesize about MH-370 and other disasters that have mystified the world.

  1 A subsidiary of Lufthansa, GermanWings became Eurowings in 2016.

  2 Pan American Airways became Pan American World Airways in 1950.

  3 Incidents do not involve serious injury, loss of life, or substantial damage to the airplane.

  4 Now Zambia.

  PART ONE

  Mystery

  I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things.

  — NOBEL PRIZE–WINNING THEORETICAL

  PHYSICIST RICHARD FEYNMAN

  The Clipper

  On the last leg of a journey halfway around the world, Pan American Airways captain Leo Terletsky began to worry. And when Captain Terletsky worried, everybody else on the flight deck worried, too. “His anxiety caused him to shout at copilots, issue orders and immediately countermand them. He infected his crews with his own anxiety,” wrote Horace Brock, who flew a few times with Terletsky and didn’t much like it.

  At noon on July 29, 1938, there was plenty to be anxious about. Having spent fifty-six hours over five days flying Pan Am passengers from San Francisco to the Far East, Terletsky and his nine-man crew were deep into bad weather as the Martin 130 flying boat approached the Philippine archipelago.

  The plane was “sandwiched between two layers of clouds,” explained Pete Frey, a captain with a large American carrier and a safety investigator with his union, who reviewed for me the weather reports submitted by the crew on that miserable summer morning. The stratocumulus clouds that Terletsky encountered are often at the beginning or end of worse weather, including rain and turbulence. Terletsky was dealing with both as he threaded the four-engine plane through the bands of clouds above and below where he was flying at 9,100 feet, 586 miles east of Manila. As Frey explained it to me, the rocky ride was not the crew’s biggest problem.

  “They are inside the clouds half the time, flying on instruments. This would make navigating by observing landmarks below impossible. It would also make getting a fix from the sun or other celestial object impossible as well.

  “They are navigating with dead reckoning,” Frey said. Dead reckoning is the most basic form of navigation: essentially a mathematical calculation involving weather, wind, time, speed, and direction. “You make an assumption of wind correction and simply hold a heading and course for a fixed period of time. At the end, you hope to be where you planned,” Frey explained. Yet considering their inability to see the earth below, the crew would have had little on which to base their position; or as Frey imagined flying under the circumstances, “You are lost.”

  Around noon local time, radio operator William McCarty, thirty-three, sat at his desk behind the copilot, tapping the keys of his Morse code machine. He was sending a message to the Pan Am ground station on the Philippine island of Panay. Even if the crew was uncertain of its position, Pan Am’s ground personnel would try to use radio wave direction finding to pinpoint the flying boat’s location. They could also provide the crew with information about the weather ahead.

  McCarty reported the weather and the winds, the temperature, and the crew’s approximation of where they were, along with their speed. Morse code could get through even when the plane’s radio signal was not strong enough to transmit a voice. By the time McCarty was done, about ten minutes had passed, and Edouard Fernandez, the operator at Panay, wanted to pass the weather news on to the crew. McCarty asked him to wait. “Stand by for one minute before sending as I am having trouble with rain static.” When Fernandez tried later to contact the Clipper, there was no reply.

  Nothing was ever again heard from the Hawaii Clipper. No piece of the plane, no human remains, no luggage or cargo, and no airplane fluid or fuel would show up. As with Malaysia 370 seventy-six years later, only the evidence still on the ground would be available for investigators to consider. They could scour the maintenance records and operational history of the plane and review the performance and training of the crew along with the information sent by McCarty during the flight, but it might not be enough to determine conclusively what happened. It could be illuminating; it might be baffling. It turned out to be both.

  Thin Air

  No one knows for sure what happened aboard Malaysia 370. The scenario I am about to describe is based on a framework of events put forward by Malaysian and Australian investigators and other sources who participated in gathering or analyzing the known data. To this I have applied Occam’s razor, the principle that suggests that if there are many possible explanations for something, the simplest is the most likely.

  Shortly after midnight on March 8, 2014, and seemingly without warning, what had been an entirely normal flight devolved into an illogical series of events. That kind of wacky has been seen before when pilots are afflicted with altitude sickness, known as hypoxia.

  An inability to get enough oxygen into the lungs to sustain cogent thought happens when planes lose pressurization, and that can happen for a variety of reasons. It can be triggered by an electrical problem or some mechanical difficulty. Pilots sometimes fail to turn the pressurization on at the beginning of the flight, but even when the pressurization is working as it should, there’s no way to keep a plane pressurized if there is a hole in the fuselage or if leaks at the seals of doorways, windows, or drains from the galley and bathrooms allow the denser air to escape.

  If the pilots on Malaysia Flight 370 experienced oxygen deprivation because something happened to cause the plane to lose pressurization, they would have behaved irrationally, perhaps turning a moderate problem into a catastrophic one. The passengers and crew would have become feebleminded and helpless.

  At the time of the MH-370 disaster, people were boarding airplanes around the world at a rate of eight million a day. Few air travelers then (or now) gave a thought to the fact that outside those aluminum walls the air is too thin to sustain coherent thought for more than a few seconds. Life itself is extinguished in minutes. While the percentage of oxygen in the air (21 percent) is the same as on the ground, the volume of air expands at higher altitudes. We rely on air density for the pressure that drives oxygen into our bodies. Miles above the earth and absent this pressure, oxygen will rush out like air racing out of a balloon.

  What keeps us air travelers alive and, for the most part, in our right minds is a relatively simple process that pumps air into the plane as it ascends, like air filling a bicycle tire. The air comes off the engines and is distributed via ducts throughout the plane. In most airliners, the cabin pressure is set to mimic the pressure density of about eight thousand feet. So to your body, flying is like being in Aspen, Colorado, or Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

  When it is time to land, the valves that closed on takeoff to maintain that air density in the cabin begin to open, allowing it to escape gradually until the inside of the plane is equalized with the outside, or generally, to 190 feet above the altitude of the airport. You’ll know this process is happening when your ears start to pop in the last twenty to thirty minutes of your flight. If this extra pressure weren’t allowed to vent, the door of the plane might explode outward. It happened as recently as 2000, when an American Airlines Airbus A300 made an emergency landing at Miami International. Insulation blankets blocked the outflow valves, so the differential pressure inside the cabin was stil
l high even after landing. It is not clear if the flight attendants realized it, because they had other problems. A smoke alarm had triggered, and they were worried about a fire. So they were trying to evacuate the plane, but the doors would not budge. Finally, thirty-four-year-old senior flight attendant José Chiu pushed hard enough, and the door blew out. Chiu was jettisoned off the airplane and killed.

  On most flights the automated system works as designed. Still, at least forty to fifty times a year, an airliner somewhere in the world will encounter a rapid decompression, according to a study for the Aviation Medical Society of Australia and New Zealand. James Stabile Jr., whose company, Aeronautical Data Systems, provides oxygen-related technology, said that when slow depressurizations are figured in, the rate increases even more. And because not all events require that regulators be notified, the problem is “grossly underreported.”

  When planes fail to pressurize after takeoff or lose cabin altitude in flight, it is potentially life-threatening. The reason we don’t see tragedies more often is because pilots are taught what to do. First, they put on their emergency oxygen masks. Then they verify that the system is on. There are numerous cases of pilots discovering that they failed to set cabin altitude upon takeoff, which I liken to finding the laundry I loaded in the washer unwashed hours later because I forgot to start the machine.

  If pressurization was set correctly and is still not working, pilots immediately begin a rapid descent to an altitude where supplemental oxygen is not necessary. When pilots do not follow these steps, the situation spins out of control quickly.

  To be clear, pilots don’t intentionally ignore the procedures. When they do, it is usually because their mental processes are already compromised by oxygen starvation. Sometimes the effect is unfathomable; pilots faced with an alert that the cabin altitude is exceeding twelve thousand feet have been known to mistakenly open the outflow valves, completely depressurizing the cabin and ratcheting up the problem.