Riding the Whip

The evening skies near Carleton, Mich., were overcast with scattered clouds as the two jumbo jets sped toward each other. TWA Flight 37, a Lockheed L-1011 with 114 people aboard, was cruising on course at 35,000 ft. from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. American Airlines Flight 182, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 bound from Chicago to Newark with 194 passengers and crew, was climbing to an assigned altitude of 37,000 ft.

At 7:22 p.m., Air Traffic Controller Charles Hewitt at the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center relieved another controller. Scarcely a minute after he came on duty, Hewitt saw an alarming sight shaping up on his big, dimly lit radar surveillance scope. The two green phosphorescent data blocks --small, illuminated groups of numbers and letters giving the altitude and heading of each flight--were moving perilously close to one another at a combined speed of 1,000 m.p.h.

Hewitt: American 182. Cleveland.

What is your altitude?

Flight 182: Passing through 34.7 [34,700 ft.] at this time. We can see stars above us but we're still in the area of the clouds.

In five seconds Hewitt had discerned a collision for sure, and issued his urgent command: "American 182 descend immediately to 330 [33,000 ft.]!"

In an instant, the pilot of the American flight, traveling at 500 m.p.h., saw the blinking red and green lights of the TWA flight dead ahead of him. His view of the aircraft, he said later, "filled my whole windscreen." He plunged the wheel of his ascending DC-10 violently forward, sending the plane into a sudden 35DEG nosedive. He reached a recorded altitude only 47 ft. below the other aircraft's, and his tail may have come as close as 20 ft. to the TWA plane.

On board, the passengers and crew were hurled into chaos. "It was like riding the tail end of a snapping whip," said one passenger. Unbelted passengers, serving carts and dinner trays were flung into the air. "Everything went into a state of weightlessness," said John Ruffley, 51, a passenger from Summit, N.J. "Cocktail carts floated about the cabin along with people, plates, glasses and almost everything else. It was as if a mystic was at work. Then, when the plane pulled up [at 33,000 ft.], everything came crashing down."

Only one member of the TWA cockpit crew, the flight engineer, saw the lights of the American flight "descending under us," and TWA Flight 37 continued on uneventfully to Los Angeles.

When the lurch came aboard the American flight, Burt Herman, 44, a Chicago insurance executive traveling with his wife and three children, recalled: "We all had our seat belts on except Laurence. I grabbed him and held him down. There were screams and moans and stewardesses flying around. I exchanged looks with my wife--it was a knowing look in the eyes that this might be it. It seemed like an eternity."

American Flight 182 made an emergency landing at Detroit's Metropolitan Airport. There, 25 people, three of them seriously injured, were treated at a hospital. The remaining passengers continued on to Newark on another DC-10.

The near collision involved 308 "S.O.B.s," official parlance for souls on board, and had the two planes crashed it would have been the worst air collision ever. In 1971 a Japanese military plane struck an All Nippon Boeing 727 over Honshu, killing 162 people.

What went wrong over Michigan?

The National Transportation Safety Board investigation may take several weeks, but preliminary findings point to some computer error, perhaps because it was fed wrong information. The Federal Aviation Administration has centers at points along the path of every flight above 18,000 feet within the Golden Triangle--the Chicago, New York, Wash ington area--where computers assign airspace to planes. Somehow, the computer assigned Flight 37 and Flight 182 to the same airspace at the same moment. The error was theoretically impossible, but something like it happened again last week. Two Boeing 727s--a TWA craft with 77 passengers and a United Air Lines jet with 60 passengers --were in the same flight lane approaching Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. The TWA captain spotted the danger and banked to the left, passing within 300 feet of the United plane. Again an alert individual had averted a catastrophe that a supposedly fail-safe system was intended to prevent.

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