The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters

268 Pages·2016·10.34 MB·English

by  Christine Negroni

PENGUIN BOOKS
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
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
Mystery
PART ONE
The Clipper
Thin Air
Emergency
A Fading Glimmer
Incomprehensible
Intermittent Power
Center of Confusion
Acausal Connections
Cover—Up
Lost at Sea
Conspiracy
PART TWO
A Little Mistrust
A Diplomat Dies
The Dodge
Snow Job
Fallibility
PART THREE
Progress and Unexpected Consequences
Unknown Unknowns
Deflection
Fever Dream
Powerhouse
Thermal Fratricide
Humanity
PART FOUR
The Right Stuff
Sole Responsibility
The Prevention System
Evolution
Resiliency
PART FIVE
The Control Metaphor
Photographs
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
T
his 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 GermanWings* 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.* 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 incidents*) 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 Rhodesia* 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 difficult 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.
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