On a beautifully clear and warm evening in Western Pennsylvania, USAir Flight 427 began its approach to Pittsburgh International Airport.
The Boeing 737, carrying 127 passengers and a crew of five, was making a routine trip from Chicago and was due to land in Pittsburgh around 7:15 p.m. It never got there.
At about 7 p.m., First Officer Charles Emmett and Capt. Peter Germano chatted in the cockpit about the bright sun they’d have to deal with and grumbled about the heavy air traffic around Pittsburgh International that invariably caused delays.
The banter gave way quickly to exclamations of surprise and then horror, as their jetliner suddenly and inexplicably yawed to the left, rolled over and began to spiral downward. In 23 terrifying seconds, the 737 plummeted 6,000 feet and struck the ground at 300 mph into a ravine near the Green Garden Plaza in Hopewell, a few miles away from the airport.
The plane disintegrated on impact. In a flash, 132 lives were snuffed out.
It has been 20 years since USAir Flight 427 crashed on Sept. 8, 1994.
The National Transportation Safety Board would not determine the cause of the crash until 4 1/2 years later, making it the longest investigation in the history of the NTSB. The lengthy investigation only added to anguish of the families of the victims and raised questions about the safety of the most widely used airliner in the world.
On Monday evening, the families of the passengers and crew that perished in the crash will gather privately once again to remember that awful day and their loved ones.
The 6 p.m. memorial service at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Moon will be hosted by the Flight 427 Air Disaster Support League, an organization that was formed by the surviving families in the aftermath of the crash.
Donna Kazan Weaver, the president of the organization, said she and others struggled for years to cope with the sudden loss of family members, but said the friendships and camaraderie that developed over the years among the surviving families have been invaluable. Ms. Weaver, 55, of Carneige, said that was especially important in the months and early years after the crash when there were so many unanswered questions and their grief was still raw.
“I was the recipient of more love and support because of this tragedy. I feel bad that other people who lose someone suddenly don’t have the support like we’ve had,” she said.
“After you go through something like this, you learn to focus on your blessings,” she said.
Monday’s private gathering will be the last memorial service sponsored by the League, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the League has run its course.
“For one thing, we’re out of money,” she said. “We don’t have the money to put these on. But for another, there was a more active membership before and we got a lot accomplished. We got laws passed,” she said.
She was referring to the Federal Aviation Reauthorization Act, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in October 1996. The legislation established an office within the National Transportation Safety Board that acts as an advocate for families of aviation accidents, like those from Flight 427.
“Unless you’ve been through something like this, you don’t know what’s going on or what questions to ask. You’re at the mercy of the airline. We changed all that. Now people have somewhere to go for help,” said Ms. Weaver, whose father, Lee Weaver of Upper St. Clair, died in the crash.
Tom Haueter, now retired from the NTSB as director of aviation safety, was the lead investigator of the crash of Flight 427 and recalled the pain that the families dealt with in the weeks and months after the accident.
Families complained that they could not get information about the crash, or had problems reclaiming the personal effects of their loved ones, and were delayed in getting notified about the crash itself. Mr. Haueter said when the NTSB holds a public hearing into a crash, the airline involved will typically provide discount airfares to families so they can attend the hearing.
“They did nothing like that. USAir, for one reason or another, did just about everything wrong,” said Mr. Haueter, who now runs his own aviation safety consulting business in Great Falls, Va.
Joanne Shortley-Lalonde, whose husband, Stephen Shortley, died in the crash, said the idea for the League grew out of a memorial service in October 1994, where many of the families met for the first time.
“We all had pictures of our loved ones and we started trading stories. Then we exchanged phone numbers and names,” she said.
They got together for a meeting at the Rivers Club and soon found that by forming an alliance, they could speak with a greater voice.
But many of them, wrought with grief, found something even more important: support for each other.
“Some of these people are my best friends,” said Ms. Shortley-Lalonde, who has since remarried and moved to Las Vegas.
“Sometimes, we’d just call each other in the middle of the night and say, ‘I can’t sleep.’ And we’d talk. There were days where I didn’t want to get out of my bed. I just wanted to hide in the closet. But you find a way to get through it. Now, these are people I’m so close to. I can’t wait to see some of these ladies.”
‘Seems like it was yesterday’
But not a day goes by that Ms. Shortley-Lalonde doesn’t think about Sept. 8 and how it changed her life forever.
“It’s been 20 years, but sometimes it still seems like it was yesterday,” she said.
Stephen Shortley worked for Ernst & Young and like many people on Flight 427, he was returning from a business trip to Chicago.
“He was supposed to come home at 9 that night, but he got done early and called me to say he was able to get on an earlier flight,” Ms. Shortley-Lalonde said. “Unfortunately, it was 427.”
She still wears the wedding band from her late husband. “I think about him every day. It doesn’t mean I love my second husband any less. It’s just a part of who I am.”
She kept a journal after the crash because she had a rush of different emotions and didn’t know what to do with them. It was part of her way of coping with her grief. She eventually turned that journal into a book about her struggles and learning to deal with her grief titled “Widowed Without Warning.”
Ms. Weaver said she expects about 120 to 150 people to attend the service Monday evening.
“It will be nice to see everyone and be together again. But we also know that it will be draining emotionally. But we’ll be in it together.”
For Mr. Haueter, the investigation into the crash of Flight 427 was a daunting task that involved many sleepless nights. The investigation team that he headed determined early on that something went wrong with the rudder, but figuring out the problem proved elusive.
And there was an added urgency. Three years before Flight 427 went down, another 737, United Airlines Flight 585, crashed in Colorado Springs, Colo., killing 25 people. A rudder problem also was suspected in that crash.
“The thing that kept me awake at night was that we might have another accident. If that happened, we would have to ground the entire fleet, and that would have been a disaster,” Mr. Haueter said.
Focusing on the rudder
Within weeks of the 427 crash, investigators focused on the rudder and the hydraulic power control unit that moves the rudder to the left or the right. The rudder is not used for steering the plane in flight but helps to keep it stable. The investigation determined that the rudder on Flight 427 moved to the left and stayed there, causing the plane to crash. They also knew that the pilots instinctively would push the rudder pedals to the right to correct the plane’s direction.
Further complicating the investigation was the plane’s flight data recorder, often called the black box, which records certain data about the plane’s functions. The black box on Flight 427 was an older model that recorded only 11 parameters of data, such as speed, direction and altitude, but nothing about the rudder movements.
“If we had a newer one, we would have solved it right away,” Mr. Haueter said.
Engineers ran repeated tests on the hydraulic system from the 737 that crashed in Hopewell and it worked every time. But in 1996, they ran tests that mimicked flying conditions by chilling the hydraulic unit and introducing heated hydraulic fluid, much as would have happened during flight. In those tests, the hydraulic system jammed, and it moved in the opposite direction it should have.
Although a final determination was still two years away, they had figured out the problem.
During 427’s approach to Pittsburgh, the 737 was jostled by the wake vortex from another airliner about 4 miles ahead of it. Although Mr. Haueter cannot say with complete certainty, it’s likely the pilots reacted to that by using the controls to right the airplane. When they used the rudder pedals, they got the opposite of what they wanted.
“The plane moved a bit to the left, so they gave a little right rudder, and instead they got left rudder. They tried to compensate, and it only made it worse.”
With only 6,000 feet of altitude, it was impossible for them to recover from the predicament, he said.
Boeing officials had long insisted there was nothing wrong with the device, suggesting the flight crew was to blame. But in 1997, the aerospace company announced it would significantly change the rudder controls on all 737s and retrofit the entire fleet at a cost of $120 million to $140 million.
Mr. Haueter said that during the course of the investigation, he would typically get five to 10 reports a week about rudder issues on 737s.
“Once we made the modifications, they stopped altogether. Those reports just went away.”
On March 24, 1999, the NTSB delivered its final report, blaming the crash of Flight 427 on the 737’s rudder, and recommended a redesign of the rudder controls and a backup system that would prevent a similar crash from occurring. It also called for updating all flight data recorders and called for new training for flight crews to help them deal with a jammed rudder.
Mr. Haueter said it was gratifying to finally solve the problem.
“It was a great investigation. We took what was an essentially safe airplane and we made it safer,” he said.
For the families of the victims of Flight 427, however, there may never be any closure.
“Women lost husbands,” said Ms. Shortley-Lalonde. “Husbands lost wives. Families lost siblings and children. You never get over it. You learn to live with it. And eventually it gets easier.”
First Published: September 7, 2014, 4:00 a.m.