Ripped From the Sky

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

It was ideal flying weather. The twilight skies were clear, with only a few small clouds, and winds were a negligible 7 m.p.h. USAir Flight 427 was nearing Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after an uneventful flight from O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Right around 7 p.m. the pilot radioed approach control at Pittsburgh International Airport, set in heavily wooded, lightly populated hills 12 miles northwest of the Golden Triangle, that he was "in range," about to ask for landing clearance.

What happened next came so swiftly that people watching from the ground disagreed on the exact sequence. But as best their stories could be pieced together, the Boeing 737-300's two jet engines spooled down, and smoke trailed from the one on the left wing. The plane rolled belly-up, banked and fell nose first, almost vertically, through 6,000 ft. of sky. Witnesses could not agree whether it exploded before it plowed into a hillside or on impact.

But explode it did, with such hellish force as to eliminate almost immediately all hope that any of the 132 people aboard -- five crew, 127 passengers -- could have lived. Except for the tail, USAir 427 shattered into so many pieces that the twisted and burned shards of metal were unrecognizable as airplane wreckage.

The human remains horrified and sickened even experienced rescue workers. For the most part they found not bodies, just pieces of bodies. Lew Napolitan, who lives close by and ran to the scene, could not forget the sight of a thighbone covered with burned flesh. Monty Winchester, a member of the fire department in nearby South Heights, "came in this ((Friday)) morning after picking up parts of bodies all night, and he was pretty sick," said his friend Daniel Godich. "He had to take one guy out of a tree in pieces, and that was bad enough, but when he came across the lifeless body of a baby, he came home for a while to rest."

Such ghastly scenes raise again questions the U.S. had almost forgotten: Can air travel maintain its recent glowing safety record? Or are financially troubled airlines -- USAir in particular -- skimping dangerously on maintenance and crew training to cut losses? It is difficult to answer without some idea of what caused the crash of USAir 427, and there were few early clues. Though the black box of voice recordings from the crew was recovered, it revealed only uninformative cries of "Oh, God" and "Oh, s---" and the words "traffic emergency" followed by a scream. "We're all very much at a loss to explain this accident," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena, who hurried to the scene.

On the broader safety question, the figures are reassuring. Airline fatalities in the U.S., in proportion to miles flown, have been dropping for decades and lately have stabilized at levels so low that they are difficult even to express as a statistical risk. The National Transportation Safety Board counts 31 fatalities suffered by passengers aboard major U.S. carriers during 1992, which works out to 0.0006 deaths per million aircraft miles flown. Last year that number fell close to an irreducible minimum. As far as major U.S. airlines were concerned, there were no fatalities at all in the air, only one in a ground accident.

Despite the generally excellent U.S. safety record, some critics have long been worried about the effects of the heavy losses suffered by many major carriers in the era of chaotic price wars, mergers and bankruptcies that opened with fare and route deregulation in 1978. Their fear is that more carriers will cut corners on safety in order to save money, for which the now defunct Eastern Airlines was indicted in 1990. USAir is an obvious target for suspicion. It has lost money every year since 1989 -- $393 million last year, $183 million in the first half of 1994. And it has now suffered two fatal crashes in three months and five in just under five years. Total killed: 232.

USAir executives strongly deny that they are scanting safety. Though the line has announced a huge cost-cutting program and laid off 600 cargo handlers, most of its 8,300 maintenance people and 5,200 pilots have no-cut contracts and have to be kept. So why the crashes? A run of bad luck, says David Shipley, assistant vice president for public relations. "I hate like hell to say it's just chance, because that doesn't sell with the public, but that's what it is." In fact, there does not seem to be much of a common thread to the USAir disasters, and in at least one the line was absolved of responsibility; a 1991 collision between a USAir jet and a commuter plane on a Los Angeles runway that killed 34 people was blamed on air-traffic control. The International Airline Passengers Association classes USAir as one of five lines deserving a B, or "very good," rating for safety. (Five other lines get an honor roll A.)

Outsiders do raise one question about USAir that leads into a more general complaint about federal safety regulation. A safety expert for one of the biggest aircraft makers says that pilot training at USAir is not consistent, because the airline has grown by mergers that "sucked up these feeder airlines, like Piedmont and Pacific Southwest and others, each with a lot of pilots and systems that are different." More broadly, pilots themselves complain that the Federal Aviation Administration lets commuter airlines and air-taxi services get away with lower safety standards. In February testimony to Congress, Randall Babbitt, president of the International Air Line Pilots Association, declared that "the American public would be outraged if we prescribed two different sets of operating rules and safety equipment for automobiles, with the highest standards being reserved for big luxury sedans and a lesser standard imposed on compact cars, but that is exactly what we have in the airline industry."

Critics suggest other ways in which the safety record, good as it is, could be made better. The FAA, they say, should shift its focus from investigating what caused past crashes to identifying problems that could contribute to preventing future accidents. Crashes, they say, are the result of many factors in combination, some of which begin to show up well before they help cause a fatal accident. One possibility is that electronic pulses from laptop computers, compact-disc players and the like used by passengers can interfere with an aircraft's electronic devices. There is no conclusive evidence that they do, but American Airlines and all other major carriers impose restrictions during takeoffs and landings, when 70% or more of accidents occur, just to be safe.

Geraldine Frankoski, director of the Aviation Consumer Action Program, points out what she considers to be a built-in conflict of interest at the FAA that works to the detriment of safety. By law, she notes, the FAA is responsible for fostering and promoting civil aviation, a mandate that includes safeguarding the financial health of airlines, "while also administering and regulating safety. They can't honestly do both."

Maybe not; perhaps the law should be changed to make the FAA stress safety above everything else. Doubtless the airline-safety record, good as it is, could be improved in other ways. But all such discussions keep coming back to a point conceded by some of the sharpest critics: a passenger runs a far greater risk of injury or death getting into a car to drive to an airport than he or she does boarding a plane once there.

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CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: AP}]CAPTION: AIRLINE DEATHS

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CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: National Transportation Safety Board}]CAPTION: TEN MOST RECENT MAJOR CRASHES

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Washington and John Moody/New York