No Safe Harbor

By NADYA LABI

Peggy's Cove was born of a shipwreck. Legend has it that the tiny hamlet on the coast of Nova Scotia was named for a woman pulled back from death at sea by a local sailor. The only survivor of a doomed ship, she was nursed back to health by her rescuer. They fell in love and married. Such romances and heartening miracles are woven into the visions of the village. At St. John's Anglican Church, two paintings that frame the altar serve as fonts of meditation: in one, a fisherman clinging to a tattered sail searches for a lighthouse amid a storm; in the other, Christ walks on the waters not of the Sea of Galilee but of Peggy's Cove. Thus when a plane--not a ship--went down off the cove last week, the seamen of the area felt the old instincts of rescue stir in their veins. What they found, however, was neither romantic nor miraculous. And what moved in their blood was a chill.

Fishing boats, navy ships, even a passenger liner combed the waters off the Canadian coast. Visibility was poor, and in hindsight it was for the best. "We picked up women's purses all blown to pieces as if you put them in a meat grinder," said Eugene Young, who usually fishes the waters for pollock, hake and cod in September. "You had to go awfully slow, because if someone was in the water, you didn't want to run them over." His image of an abattoir was apt. "There was not one bit of hope. Someone's belly here. Intestines over there." Despite the comfort of cove legend, out of the wreck of Swissair Flight 111 came not even one survivor from the 229 people onboard.

What emerged instead was a fearsome slew of questions born of other disasters. As the slow search for debris, bodies and the telltale "black boxes" proceeded--a ritual so morbidly familiar from the TWA Flight 800 crash two years ago--speculation reached for existing paradigms that would explain the fate of a plane belonging to an airline of sterling reputation. What is known of the cockpit's communications with air-traffic controllers appears to rule out terrorism. But not the terror of mechanical failure. And so the questions were asked. Was it a problem akin to what most probably destroyed TWA 800--a stray spark igniting gases in a fuel tank? Or was it some hazardous, poorly packed cargo like the kind that destroyed ValuJet Flight 592 over the Florida Everglades? Or was it something else, some yet unknown and insidious little technicality?

Swissair Flight 111, an MD-11 jumbo jet built by McDonnell Douglas in 1991, left New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport en route to Geneva, Switzerland, promptly at 8:18 p.m. E.T. Not quite an hour later, at 9:14, the Swiss pilot, Urs Zimmermann, radioed, "Pan! Pan! Pan!...We have smoke in the cockpit" to the control tower in Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada. (Pan is an international distress signal less urgent than Mayday.) The pilot requested diversion to Boston, but when told that Halifax, only 70 miles away, was nearer, he responded, "Prefer Halifax." When the plane was about 30 miles away from the airport, Zimmermann advised that he needed more than that distance to land. He was told to turn left to lose altitude. Still descending, the pilot next reported, "We must dump some fuel." At 9:24 he declared an emergency, saying, "We are starting to vent now. We have to land immediately." The plane was cleared for dumping. Six minutes later, it disappeared from the radar.

There are 179 MD-11s currently in service, 119 of which are dedicated to passenger travel. The jet, a descendant of the DC-10, has technology that allows it to be steered during an emergency by alternating thrust on the two underwing engines even if the center engine in the tail explodes and severs all hydraulic control lines for the rudders and elevators--as in the case of a DC-10 that crash-landed in an Iowa cornfield in 1989. The Swissair MD-11 successfully underwent a thorough inspection just over a year ago, and Swissair's safety-and-maintenance record is solid. But did this model have a history of wiring problems? Since 1992, the FAA has issued a number of airworthiness directives expressing concerns with the electrical systems of MD-11s. Though A.D.s are not necessarily unusual--the FAA issues 400 a year for problems of varying degrees of urgency--several of those issued on the MD-11 refer to potential fire hazards. A 1996 advisory mandated the installation of an extra control-cable guard in response to "reports of burnt electrical wire cable in the cabin attendant console that was caused by the chafing of the wire cables." Another, in 1997, sought to correct "chafing of wire bundles" that could cause smoke in the cockpit.

"An airplane always telegraphs its intention to crash years before it actually does. If I'm right, this one did too," says Arthur Wolk, an aviation attorney who represents plaintiffs in airline crashes. "There have been fleetwide problems in wiring. If I were an investigator, I'd be looking for fire in the wiring bundle, which spread to the cockpit or to a critical flight control." Such speculation is perhaps inspired by the conclusion of the investigation into the crash of TWA 800 near Long Island on July 17, 1996. That disaster's likely cause: exhaust heat from the Boeing 747's air conditioners transformed its fuel into a hot vapor so combustible that a mere spark, possibly from a frayed wire, touched off the disaster.

Then there is the ValuJet theory. On May 11, 1996, spare oxygen-generating canisters stowed as freight aboard ValuJet Flight 592 ignited and sent the DC-9 plunging into the Everglades. The generators had been mistakenly marked empty, and the crew never knew that the plane was carrying hazardous material. Could similar undeclared baggage have doomed Swissair 111? In 1990, air personnel discovered undeclared hazardous cargo--usually because it leaked or emitted a smell--on 63 occasions; by last year, that number had ballooned to 349. Shippers are still not required to disclose to air carriers the contents of their parcels--not even if they contain hazardous materials.

Four months after the ValuJet plane went down, a Federal Express DC-10 was forced into an emergency landing at Newburgh, N.Y., because of fire in its cargo hold. The captain reported smoke at the same altitude as Swissair 111--33,000 ft.--and began to descend. Eighteen minutes later, the FedEx crew was sliding down ropes and chutes from the plane, which burned steadily for more than three hours after landing. The cause of the fire was never pinpointed, but investigators discovered such undeclared items as aerosol cans and plastic bottles containing acidic liquids, prompting the National Transportation Safety Board to warn that "the transportation of undeclared hazardous materials on airplanes remains a significant problem, and more aggressive measures are needed to address it." Lee Dickinson, an aviation engineer and a former NTSB member, cautions against premature comparisons. "We don't know yet whether or not the smoke cleared up in this case. We don't know how dense it was or where it came from." He adds, "Just because you see smoke doesn't necessarily mean there's fire." At week's end none of the 60 body parts recovered had burn marks.

There is luck and there is fate. Marc Rosset of Switzerland was eliminated from the U.S. Open tennis tournament in the first round. Ranked 47th in the world, Rosset, 27, decided to stay on in New York for practice with the best players in the world. He and his coach canceled their plan to fly to Geneva--on Swissair 111. That was luck.

Then there was Pierce Gerety, 56, a director of operations at the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, who was in charge of such trouble spots as Rwanda and Burundi. He was used to danger, had dodged bullets, and once negotiated the release of his staff when they were kidnapped in Somalia. "He was always ambivalent about being in safe places," says his younger brother Tom. "But we were relieved when he was transferred to Geneva." Then came fate. On Wednesday, Gerety, late for one flight to Geneva, was transferred to another. Finally he was bumped to a third. It was Swissair 111.

--Reported by Leigh Anne Williams/Peggy's Cove, Harriet Barovick/New York City, Mark Thompson/Washington, Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral, and Helena Bachmann/Geneva

With reporting by Leigh Anne Williams/Peggy''s Cove, Harriet Barovick/New York City, Mark Thompson/Washington, Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral, and Helena Bachmann/Geneva