The Crash Detectives

On the floor of a cavernous hangar at New York's Idlewild Airport, the ghost of a dead jetliner is slowly taking shape.

Around small cardboard signs reading "Right Wing," "Left Wing" and "Tail," a group of purposeful experts are arranging what is left of the American Airlines' Boeing 707 that crashed on take-off into Jamaica Bay, killing all 95 aboard (TIME. March 9).

Last week, as police recovered the last of the bodies (all but one have been found), the most vital piece of wreckage was dredged from nine feet of water--the 7O7s flight recorder, a basketball-sized sphere containing important information on the plane's flight path. The rest of the pieces--shattered engines, crumpled spars, smashed pumps and instrument panels--are not much larger.

The biggest chunk is an 8-ft. by 10-ft. section of the tail. Yet the skilled crash detectives of the U.S. Government's Civil Aeronautics Board can identify and check every tiny fragment. Out of the grim jigsaw puzzle, they will slowly and carefully extract the "probable cause" of the accident. Then other 707s, forewarned and perhaps modified, may be saved from making plunging turns into disaster.

The CAB is a small, independent agency created by Congress and charged, among other things, with watching over air safety. It has no connection with the powerful Federal Aviation Agency, which runs the airways and must, in fact, answer for its performance to CAB. Every accident of an aircraft weighing more than 12,500 lbs.

--and every fatal accident of any aircraft--is exhaustively investigated by the CAB's 171-man Bureau of Safety, which employs experts on practically everything having to do with flying. If even more expertise is needed, the bureau is empowered by law to call for help from all Government agencies, including the armed services, the Bureau of Standards and the FBI. Its technical detectives do not always "get their man." Yet, in the last ten years CAB has found the probable cause in 96% of all cases investigated.

Off the Radar. On the morning of the Idlewild crash, former Pilot George A. Van Epps, the bureau's northeastern chief, with headquarters at Idlewild, got a phone call from the tower: "This is an alert.

An American Airlines jet on take-off has dropped from the radar departure scope." Van Epps's first move was to call police to guard the wreckage from ghoulish souvenir hunters. Minutes later, he was over the wreck in a helicopter. By midafternoon, a specialist team from Washington had arrived to help, and a full-scale investigation was well under way.

When a big airplane crashes and the wreckage is badly chewed up, everyone goes to work--the plane and engine makers, the airline involved, representatives of the pilots' and engineers' unions. The CAB assigns eight groups of specialists to cover every phase of the flight. The structure is analyzed to see whether the plane was on fire before or after it hit.

whether something came off in the air or as a result of the impact. Every one of the power-driven devices that work the ailerons, flaps and other controls is studied for before-or after-crash damage. The engines are always suspect, and even though they may be thoroughly smashed --along with the instruments--the CAB men can often tell what power they were putting out when the plane hit.

All maintenance records, from the time that the plane came off the production line, are studied for signs of bugs. All eyewitnesses are interrogated, and what they saw--the angles and distances--is recorded by surveyor's transit so that the CAB will be able to plot the flight path with great accuracy. If bodies of the crew are found, they are examined for alcohol, carbon-monoxide poisoning, heart attack, stroke, even bullet holes or other inflicted wounds. And all recorded conversations between crew and ground stations are minutely studied for clues.

Mice & Alcohol. Sometimes the investi gation takes years. The CAB has been working for 14 months on the mid-air collision between a United Air Lines DC-8 and a TWA Constellation, history's worst air disaster with 134 dead, has still not issued a report. At other times, the CAB pinpoints the cause rapidly. It took only three months to discover why a Constella tion of nonsked Imperial Airlines crashed last November near Richmond; the cap tain survived, and his testimony helped the CAB to uncover an incredible story of incompetence in the cockpit.

Yet there are times when the CAB's sleuths clear the records of suspect pilots.

When a DC-3 crashed in New York's East River in 1947 and alcohol was found in the pilots' brains, the obvious conclusion was that the flyers had been drinking.

Still unsure, the CAB asked Yale Medical School's alcoholism experts to decide whether alcohol can get into a man's brain from the water in which he is drowned.

After drowning a number of rats in sea water spiked with alcohol, the Yale experts reported that considerable alcohol indeed entered their brains. The dead crewmen could have got their alcohol after the accident from smashed deicing tanks. The bureau vindicated them by reporting that the accident was caused by engine failure.

Flares & Heaters. One of the most ingenious campaigns was the 1947 study of a DC-6 crash near Bryce Canyon, Utah. Several minutes before the end, the pilot reported a fire burning out of control in the baggage compartment, and that his plane was coming apart in the air. Gathering the wreckage, which was strewn over 28 miles of rugged country, the CAB's investigators noticed traces of barium ash on some of the fragments. Since the only barium that could have burned was in flares carried in the baggage compartment, the bureau at once ordered all DC-6s to remove their flares. Eighteen days later, another DC-6 had a baggage-compartment fire, near Gallup, N. Mex., but with no explosive flares to feed it the crew got it under control and the airplane landed safely.

To explain why the baggage compartments were catching fire, the bureau men borrowed a DC-6, filled its No. 3 fuel tank with water dyed bright red and coated its belly with a material that will absorb dye. Taking it into the air, they pumped more water into the No. 3 tank, forcing it to overflow through a vent. When they landed, they found that the wind had whipped the overflowing water to the belly and dyed it red. Included in the reddened area was the air intake of the cabin heating system. Conclusion: gasoline sucked into the heater had started the fires.

High-Speed Stall? In the current Idlewild investigation, the CAB hopes for crash clues from the automatic flight recorder, which records time, compass heading, air speed, altitude and "g's" (acceleration) and is mandatory equipment on all jets. When found, it was flown to Washington for study at the Bureau of Standards, its aluminum tape hopefully undamaged. Interest was focused on the speed that it will show, because one theory points to what airmen call a "highspeed stall" as the cause of the accident.

The stalling speed of a 707 flying straight and level and loaded to 250,000 lbs. is about 196 m.p.h. with the flaps retracted. In a turn with the wings banked at 17 degrees, the kind that jets often make when climbing away from Idlewild's runway 31-L, the stalling speed goes up to about 215 m.p.h. A 707 flying below that speed is apt to lower a wing and dive toward the ground. According to competent eyewitnesses, this is what American's 707 did. The stall, if it was a stall, might have been caused by retracting the flaps, which give the wing extra lift, before the plane had reached flying speed. To be on the safe side, new regulations were issued telling pilots not to start raising their flaps until they have at least 400 ft. of altitude, and not to retract them completely during a climbing turn.

A stall caused by prematurely retracted flaps would be due to pilot error, and in the opinion of CAB men, the crew that died at Idlewild was unusually competent; Captain James Heist had 18,000 hours, of which 1,600 were in 707s. So other theorists suspect that the fatal plunge of the 707 may have been caused by misbehavior of its hydraulic control system. There have been many instances, both proved and suspected, when the hydraulic system has made the aircraft extremely difficult for the pilot to control. This seems to have happened when a Sabena (Belgian) Airlines 707 crashed at Brussels in February 1961, killing 18 members of the U.S. figure-skating team. Though the

Belgian government has said nothing, it is an open secret in Washington that when Sabena's 707 nosed up sharply and fell in a whirling stall, its controls were found locked in full nose-up position.

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