ARROW AIR
THE LAST FORMATION
First of three parts
"The plane we fly on is really bad. But or Uncle Sam will get us back."
By ANDREW WOLFSON and DANIEL RUBIN
After five months standing sentry in the dust of the Sinai Desert, the Screaming Eagles were heading home for Christmas. The soldiers 245 men and three women bound for Fort Campbell, Ky. clambered up the steps of the chartered Arrow Air DC-8, toting an endless array of souvenirs and presents, attache cases and giant radios, duffel bags and disassembled M-16 rifles.
Pfc. Gregory Owens of Louisville hadn't expected to be leaving the Middle East so soon. But when his flight was moved up a week, he was so ecstatic, his father recalled, "He would probably have come home on a glider."
Sgt. Kevin "Gunner" Witt was racing for Sleepy Eye, Minn., to be with his wife and 2-year-old daughter and his father, a retired railroad worker who lay terminally ill with cancer.
Staff Sgt. Brian Lee Dumpert of Upland, Ind., was on his way to see his 9-week-old son for the first time.
Pfc. Wayne Vinson, an avid surfer and weightlifter, planned to celebrate his 21st birthday as soon as he made it back to Chesapeake, Va. And in two weeks, on Christmas Eve, he would marry his high school sweetheart just as his father had married his, 25 years before.
Because U.S. officials didn't want to invite any trouble, the troops, members of a multinational peacekeeping force, had been ordered not to wear their desert fatigues when they boarded the plane at Cairo International Airport. So the soldiers from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division marched aboard In jeans, T-shirts and pullovers.
Several called out to a cabin attendant whom they remembered from their flight into the Sinai almost a half year earlier. Some chanted a salty marching song, while others slipped on stereo headphones that would help get them through the long ride home.
Among their ranks, they counted 22 officers and career Army veterans, including engineers, pilots, a chaplain, mechanics, clerks and military police. Most, however, were enlisted men in their late teens and early 20s.
"They were in a high pitch of excitement," said Art Schoppaul, the pilot on the first leg of their journey. "With Christmas coming on, I'm sure they were really anxious to get out of there." But working in the rear of the cabin, flight attendant Nina Paccione noticed something about some of these soldiers that was different from those who had flown out of the Middle East before:
Their mood wasn't so jubilant. "The'y were a little bit annoyed because the flight was delayed and they wanted to be home," Ms. Paccione said. "They were tired. Some of them were nervous."
Two soldiers sitting by the galley pressed her on what kinds of mechanical problems bad caused the plane's delay in arriving at Cairo. "They complained about taking charter carriers home all the time," she said. Some soldiers expressed similar concerns to their families.
Capt Edward J. Manion had called his wife shortly before taking off and said he wondered if he'd ever get home. "We just both cried on the phone and said goodbye," she remembered.
And in a tape-recorded message. Spec. 4 Jeff Kee conveyed his mixed feelings to his fiancee In Pensacola, Fla. "I just hope the plane gets back all right, because damn, the plane we fly on is really bad," said Kee, who was making his fourth trip on the Arrow DC-8. "But ol' Uncle Sam will get us back."
Kee's trust was misplaced. Just before dawn on Dec. 12 13 hours and 35 minutes after it left Cairo the DC-8 fell into a rocky, wooded hillside at the desolate international airport at Gander, Newfoundland, where it had stopped for refueling. The 248 soldiers, along with eight Arrow crew, were killed instantly. It was the worst accident ever on Canadian soil.
It was the ninth worst plane crash of all time. And it was the worst air disaster involving U.S. military personnel during peacetime or war.
Canadian investigators may never pinpoint the cause of the disaster because of the virtual disintegration of the plane and the failure of the cockpit voice recorder to capture the crew's final words. But while the cause may be murky, two things are clear:
A series of blunders preceded the soldiers' deaths blunders by virtually every party involved. And the system that should have ensured the soldiers' safety and the safety of 750,000 other troops whom the military puts on chartered planes each year was riddled with holes.
The Kentucky-bound soldiers themselves could have known of only a few of those problems things they could see with their own eyes, such as the 16-year-old airplane's jury-rigged cabin, which a military commander later said had so many defects that "one could write home and say the plane was felling apart."
But the troops had no way of knowing about other problems with the Miami-based airline and the system that should have kept it in check. They could not have known:
That the Arrow crew who would fly them on the first leg of their journey would fail to calculate the actual weight aboard the plane despite a requirement that it do so and in the process, underestimate their payload by six tons.
That the same crew would fail to inform the pilots on the next leg of the trip about several serious problems with the plane, including the weight discrepancy and an instrument reading indicating that an engine was too hot in part, said a flight engineer, because "we were tired and I wanted to get to my hotel."
That the second crew, which would attempt to fly the plane out of Gander, had hopscotched across half the globe already in early December flying a schedule so grueling that it twice violated federal regulations, and so demanding that it may explain why the captain and flight engineer both had to take aspirin at some point during their final trip.
That the agencies and officials who should have been monitoring the safety of Arrow and other military charter carriers simply were not. The Multinational Force and Observers, the Mideast peacekeeping force known as the MFO, made no effort to ensure the safety of Arrow because it thought that U.S. military and civilian agencies were doing that job.
But the U.S. military unit that also used Arrow for overseas charter flights made no effort to obtain readily available information it could have used to compare the records of airlines and to choose the safest. For example, that unit, known as the Military Airlift Command, never acquired a report showing that in 1984, Arrow was found to have one of the worst safety and maintenance records of any U.S. airline.
The airlift command, in turn, depended in part on the Federal Aviation Administration to tell it about safety problems of airlines used to carry troops. But the FAA failed to do so despite an internal directive requiring it to.
A jammed cargo door was pried open with an axe
The journey began like many military operations. It was a classic case of hurry up and wait. " Early on Dec. 11, the men and women from the 101st Airborne Division were flown on two Egypt Air Boeing 737s from Ras Nasrani in the Sinai to 'Cairo International Airport.
Their baggage, already searched by U.S. and , Egyptian customs agents, was hauled to Cairo by truck. But their plane was nowhere in sight delayed in California while the starter on the left outboard engine was replaced. Fearing potential terrorist attacks, officials sent the troops to the Hyatt El Salaam, where they holed up for most of the day.
Since July, they had operated checkpoints, manned observation posts and conducted reconnaissance patrols in the parched and barren Sinai. They were the fourth group of soldiers from Fort Campbell to serve in the Multinational Force, which was molded in 1981 to enforce the historic Camp David accord. Now they were heading home.
Twelve hours late, the Arrow plane finally arrived in Cairo in the late afternoon, bearing replacement troops from the 9th Infantry at Fort Lewis, Wash.
But unloading took two hours, in part because of a jammed cargo door that crew members pried open with a fire axe and a pocket knife. As an armed Egyptian security officer stood guard, eight Egyptian laborers began cramming duffel bags into the four cargo holds in the plane's belly.
The Screaming Eagles as the division was nicknamed in 1923, in honor of a Civil War infantry regiment that marched into battle with a bald eagle perched on a shield were whisked to the plane as night descended.
Two-hundred and fifty were scheduled to travel, but two soldiers didn't make the flight. Lt. Christopher Carlin, of Keene, N. H., decided to stay behind to visit his Israeli girlfriend and his brother. At the Cairo airport, Pvt. Eric Harrington, of Lake City, Fla., realized he had lost his passport and was not allowed to board the Arrow plane.
By most accounts, the cabin of Arrow Flight 950 was stuffed to the brim. "I never saw an airplane packed like this," Arrow mechanic Harry Diehlmann later recalled. "There were bags and rifles all over the place."
Senior flight attendant Mona Oglesby who would fly with the Kentucky soldiers as far as Cologne, West Germany, later estimated that the Kentucky-bound troops hauled at least half again as much carry-on gear as had the troops from Fort Lewis.
It was so much that Oglesby complained to U.S. Army Maj. Ronald Carpenter, the MFO's liaison officer in Cairo, that "it just wasn't right." It was blocking the aisles, galleyways, an emergency equipment closet and one of the lavatories. S he later recalled that 43 duffel bags were moved from the cabin at her request, but Carpenter said Capt. Schoppaul and Flight Engineer Charles Alonso told me not to worry about it and that nothing more was done about the excessive gear on board.
The crowded cabin may have been the result of the MFO's insistence on squeezing as many as 250 soldiers onto the plane a policy it adopted to save money and allow more troops to be carried.
By contrast, to ensure the comfort of the passengers, the U.S. Military Airlift Command on flights it charters limits to 235 the number of soldiers who may be loaded on the DC-8. "These guys aren't on vacation," Arrow's vice president for planning, John Kempster, later said an MFO official told him. "They didn't join the Army for comfortable rides."
The result was that crowded cabins had become legend on MFO flights. It was said that when one soldier in the front reclined his seat, everybody behind him on that side of the plane had to do the same. Carpenter had observed such problems on a flight a week earlier. "In the event of an emergency," he wrote to his commander, "the passengers on this charter, like all the others I have observed, would have a tough time climbing over all the hand baggage to exit the aircraft quickly and safely."
On Arrow's "N950 Juliet Whiskey" about to leave Cairo, the jammed cabin was not the only problem. Although an Arrow pilot would later describe the plane as "the pride of the fleet," by most accounts it was in shoddy condition. For two months a coffee maker had been leaking from the rear galley, sending a virtual stream of water down the aisle.
Flight attendants later said the carpet felt "squishy" under foot, and passengers complained that their feet and bags were always wet. Duct tape had been placed around the edges of interior windows and an emergency exit door. Seats failed to stay upright, and slipped back into passengers' laps.
There was no running water inside the plane, and a latrine leaked. U.S. Army Lt. Bradley Clemmer recalled that on the trip from Washington state to Cairo, oxygen masks fell down during takeoffs and landings. He also remembered that a breeze of freezing air seemed to blow in through one emergency exit door. And during takeoff after a refueling stop, Clemmer heard a backfire and saw a flash shoot out of the plane's left inside engine.
"I thought the engine had caught fire," he said. "I'd never seen anything like that. But the stewardesses weren't alarmed, and I figured if they were willing to fly on the plane, so was I."
During his trip to Cairo, Clemmer talked to two flight attendants. One grumbled that she was going to be laid off in two weeks. The other said she was worried. Arrow operations were dangerous, she said: The airline simply forced its crew members to fly too long.
The plane was built in 1969 and had flown 27 million miles during 50,861 hours in the air, typical duty for an aircraft of that vintage. Originally delivered to Eastern Airlines, the plane later was sold into French hands in 1974, and then purchased in 1981 by IAL Aircraft Holding Co., a Miami-based firm operated by George Batchelor the owner of Arrow. IAL leased the aircraft in turn to four airlines, including, initially, to Batchelor-owned Capitol Airlines, and finally, in October 1984, to Arrow.
The plane was never grounded from flying, but it did meet with three near-disasters. In May 1981, as it waited for takeoff in Casablanca, Morocco, the two left side engines exploded, sending shrapnel into the left wing. The wing was repaired, but some parts that the plane's manufacturer Douglas Aircraft Co. recommended later be replaced were not.
In 1982, to control a loss of cabin pressure, a Capitol pilot threw the plane into a 14,000-foot, three-minute dive on a flight from New York to San Francisco. More recently, the plane had another scrape literally when an Arrow crew attempted to take off from Grand Rapids, Mich., last Nov. 15 with 126 Marine Corps reservists all loaded improperly, the FAA later found in the back. The plane's tail hit the ground and the crew aborted takeoff.
Because the incident was never reported, the FAA recommended suspending the licenses of the pilot for six months and of the crew members for 90 days. The case is pending. CAIRO He had never seen a plane so tightly loade.
The cabin was not all that was crowded on Arrow 950. Baggage handlers reported the same tight squeeze below, where they tried to stuff more and more duffel bags into the plane's four cargo bellies. F orty-one of the soldiers' 481 duffel bags simply would not fit and had to be left behind, much to the displeasure of the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Marvin Jeffcoat, who insisted on inspecting the cargo holds himself to see if more room could be found. Flight Engineer Alonso would later say that he had never seen a plane so tightly loaded.
Of the soldiers themselves, senior flight attendant Oglesby recalled: "These guys were big, maybe 180 to 190 pounds each. And their bags were stuffed." That seemed to be everyone's impression at Cairo except for the person who counted: First Officer Hans Bertelson, who was entrusted with determining the plane's load and figuring its takeoff speed accordingly.
Under federal air rules for both domestic and international flights, airlines must determine the actual weight of passengers when they are carrying any unusually heavy load, such as a planeful of athletes or soldiers. But Instead of calculating the actual weight of the troops, Bertelson simply copied figures from the previous flight when a different set of soldiers and baggage was on board. Even on that leg, he had not figured the actual weight of the passengers, but instead simply estimated that each soldier would weigh 165 pounds and tote five pounds of carry-on gear.
That is the estimate the FAA suggests using for routine flights with a cross-section of men, women and children. Canadian investigators later figured, after reviewing the actual weights of soldiers and baggage on previous flights, that the Fort Campbell troops, with their carry-on gear, weighed closer to 220 pounds each, or 50 pounds more than what Bertelson recorded.
The result, they said, was that the Arrow crew underestimated its payload by at least six tons. The Canadian Aviation Safety Board later blamed the mistake at least in part on Arrow's management, which, just two months earlier, had approved a new weight form that did not instruct flight crews on how to determine the actual weights of passengers.
But the FAA itself also bore part of the responsibility, because the agency's principal operations inspector assigned to Arrow in Miami approved the new form. The U.S. Army also shared some blame. Its procedures call for commanders to actually weigh soldiers before such flights. That was done on trips from the U.S., but not on those leaving the Middle East.
Under federal rules, however, the final burden lay with Arrow's flight crew. "At no time did Arrow ask the MFO to provide the weight of passengers and carry-on baggage," said James Williams Jr., the MFO's director of troop movements.
Despite the miscalculation, Arrow 950 still would have been under its capacity when it took off from Cairo and later, when it would try to take off from Gander. And Alonso later insisted that he compensated for Bertelson's error by "mentally" assuming the soldiers may have weighed 10,000 pounds more than Bertelson indicated and thus adding two knots of safety "cushion" to the plane's takeoff speed at Cairo.
But Alonso said he never told the successor crew in Cologne anything about a weight problem. "It was the middle of the night," he explained. "We were tired and I just wanted to get to the hotel."
A plane that 'flew like a dog"
As Arrow 950 took off from Cairo International Airport, "it felt like it took forever to get in the air," attendant Oglesby recalled. "It felt very heavy on takeoff, like it was strug gling," she said. The way Capt Schoppaul remembered it, though. the DC-8 took off in fine form and quickly climbed to a cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.
Schoppaul and crew had picked up the plane ear ly Wednesday morning in Cologne, after Capt. John Griffin's crew had flown the Fort Lewis troops there from McChord Air Force Base, Wash.
Schoppaul was bringing it back to Griffin in Cologne. "It was a normal flight," Schoppaul recalled. But Schoppaul's flight engineer, Alonso, found plenty wrong with the plane. For one thing, it was performing sluggishly, and burning about 800 pounds more fuel per hour than it should have. That wasn't unusual, Alonso said, because most Arrow pilots knew the plane "flew like a dog."
However, Alonso recalled some problems that were new. A panel was missing in the plane's fuselage, he said, that should have been protecting sensitive lines from being struck by moving baggage. Also, an exhaust gas temperature gauge showed that the No. 4 engine which was due to be replaced after just 88 more hours of flight was burning 40 degrees hotter than lt should have been. It read so hot, Alonso said, that he had to reduce power to that engine during takeoffs.
Schoppaul later acknowledged that he was a "little hard of hearing," but said that he didn't recall Alonso mentioning either problem or the fact that he had supposedly added speed on takeoff from Cairo because of his suspicions about the plane's extra weight. Schoppaul said he would have grounded the plane if he'd known about the missing cargo panel or the hot engine reading.
Asked why Alonso wouldn't have told his own captain about the problems, Schoppaul would later explain, "I'm used to him doing things without telling me. He was known around Arrow as a horse's ass." In any event, none of the problems Alonso said he detected were written up in the plane's log the document that Griffin and his crew would consult as they prepared to leave Cologne. Federal rules and Arrow's own policies re quire that if a crew member sees something wrong during flight, "you write it up," Schoppaul said. But Schoppaul himself didn't write up the one problem he said he observed a slight "ratcheting" and restriction in the movement of the flight control column, which regulates the plane's ascents and descents. The problem seemed "so minor it was hardly worth mentioning," he said.
Schoppaul did mention lt to Arrow's European manager, Julius Graber, who was traveling on board, and Graber reported It to Arrow's mechanic in Cologne, Harry Diehlmann. However, Diehlmann said he couldn't hear Graber over the noise of the plane. If the item had been written up in the plane's log, Diehlmann said, he would have tried to fix it and probably would have had to ground the plane to do so.
It was shortly after midnight local time when Arrow's plane set down at Cologne.
Anticipating a formal welcome-home ceremony at Fort Campbell, the troops began changing from their civilian clothes into military uniforms, much to the embarrassment of the flight attendants. So the went into the terminal to change. Meanwhile, Oglesby and her four stewardesses mlngled with their replacements: Jean Serafin, 37; Desiree McKay, 35; Stacey Cut, 61.
At the airport Holiday Inn, their check-in was delayed by a half-hour. And no more than 7 hours later. Griffin was up and starting to make a Hurry of phone calls to find out when his crew would be flying the plane out of Cologne.
If Griffin and crew were tired when they boarded the bus back to the airport, It would have been with good reason. They already had flown an extraordinary schedule in the first 10 days of December, putting in 51 hours In the air. They had flown from Washington state to West Germany and back to Kentucky, and from Florida to Alaska to California. Now they were preparing for a six-hour flight across the Atlantic, to cold and snowy Gander, the easternmost point in Canada.
After the plane had been on the ground for two hours in Cologne, Griffin pulled Arrow 950 away from the gate and prepared for takeoff. The troops still had one more stop before they would be home at Fort Campbell. But in six hours, they would be back in North America. Oglesby said goodbye to Ms. Matasovski, her replacement. "We talked, kissed, hugged, and said, 'See you next week.' "
At 4:04 a.m., after its night crossing of the Atlantic, Arrow 950 appeared on air traffic controller Glenn Bland-ford's radar screen. It had been quiet at Gander International Airport through the early morning hours.
Only two other planes had landed since midnight. And when Arrow 950 touched down at 4:04 a.m. on Runway No. 4, Blandford, working alone on the graveyard shift, didn't expect it would be anything special.
The Arrow plane would be one of more than 4,000 to pass through Gander in 1985. And there hadn't been a serious accident at the airport in nearly 20 years. GANDER More gifts and tragically ironic sweatshirts Griffin taxied Arrow 950 off Runway 4, parked it at position No. 8., and unloaded his passengers. Some soldiers rushed to call home, but most hit the airport's duty-free shop en masse.
Cynthia Goodyear was on duty. She remembers their jubilant voices rising over the Christmas carols that blared from airport loudspeakers. "They were singing along. They seemed to be really happy. "I guess they would be happy" because "they were going home. Everyone seemed to wear a smile on their face." The soldiers jammed the shop as they snatched up perfume and stuffed polar bears and postcards and Canadian maple leaf pins.
One young GI picked out a sculpture of two crystal love birds nestling in a tree and placed it on a counter. Then he announced that it was his anniversary that very day. "He seemed to want everyone to know," Ms. Goodyear said.
The soldier asked her to wrap the crystal birds carefully, and she put them in a box. "You have to handle this with care," Ms. Goodyear told him. "Oh, yes, I know," he replied. After 40 harried minutes, the troops' flight was announced, and the gift shop and terminal emptied. Many of the soldiers left with the same purchase: hooded green-and-whlte sweatshirts that bore the words: "I Survived Gander, Newfoundland."
For 32 years weather observer Clarence Bowring had recorded the elements at Gander International. On Dec. 12, he was working the midnight-to-8 shift for Environment Canada. For several days, a slow-moving low pressure system had been stalled over Greenland to the north, producing light freezing rain and snow in Newfoundland. The precipitation had been very light since Bow-ring came on duty, but it still had him concerned, and with good reason.
As one old saw goes, "The only suitable place for ice on a plane is in a beverage glass."
Seemingly insignificant amounts of ice on the top of a wing can dangerously diminish the wing's lifting ability by distorting the flow of air over its surface. Even chipped paint or crushed insects on the front edge of a wing can affect a plane's performance. Federal air rules flatly tell flight crews that "no person may take off an aircraft when frost, snow or ice is adhering to the wings."
A Boeing Co. manual, for example, advises: "MAKE IT CLEAN AND KEEP IT CLEAN."
And it adds, "When in doubt, follow recommended ice, frost and snow removal procedures." Deicing is accomplished by spraying a 200-degree solution of water and glycol on the plane a procedure that can take 15 to 75 minutes and can cost more than $3,500. On most airlines, it is the responsibility of the flight engineer to check for ice, and the pilot to decide if deicing is required.
The decision can mean the difference between life and death. The most common weather problems that cause aviation accidents are thunderstorms and wind shear. But between 1976 and 1984, the National Transportation Safety Board cited icy conditions as a cause or factor in six accidents involving large airlines.
The most dramatic one was on Jan. 13, 1982, when Air Florida's Flight 90 stalled seconds after taking off in a driving snowstorm and plunged into the icy Potomac River in Washington, D. C. The plane crashed into the 14th Street Bridge, about three quarters of a mile from the end of the runway. Despite dramatic rescue efforts, all but four of the 74 passengers were killed, as were four of five crew members and four people in cars on the bridge.
The crash was blamed on a number of errors, including the accumulation of snow on the plane's wings. The crew had elected to delce the aircraft, but a contract maintenance team sprayed on a weak solution of glycol and water, and didn't put protective covers over sensitive parts of the plane. Also, after sitting on the taxiway for 49 minutes while awaiting takeoff, the crew did not return to the gate for more deicing, even though its members were clearly aware that more snow and ice had accumulated on the plane.
The accident precipitated a host of safety reforms and recommendations. In letters marked "urgent," the NTSB and FAA warned every U.S. carrier of the dangers of ice buildup and that ice and snow can accumulate after deicing if the plane has to sit for a long time at the gate or on the taxiway. The FAA reviewed training manuals for every carrier to ensure they sufficiently emphasized the dangers of ice and what flight crews should do about it.
"Griffin never talked about icing and icing wasn't discussed
By all accounts, the turnaround of Arrow 950 seemed normal. Ground handlers removed trash and waste water from the plane, and loaded new catering supplies. Ray Foley, a refueler for Imperial Shell, chatted with one of Arrow's stewardesses, then helped pump 101,000 pounds of Type A jet fuel into the plane, 18,000 pounds less than was loaded at Cologne.
One flight crew member circled the plane with a flashlight, presumably inspecting for ice. Flight Engineer Fowler told another refueler for Imperial Shell, Paul Garrett, that the plane had flown through some icy weather on the way into Gander, but hadn't picked up much ice.
And when Capt. Griffin stopped in the office of ground dispatcher William Geange to pick up his flight plan and receive his weather briefing, he didn't request deicing. Because it had pulled into Cairo 12 hours late the day before, Arrow had been penalized $13,000 by the Multinational Force. But if time or money was a factor in Griffin's decision not to deice, he didn't mention it. "Griffin never talked about icing and icing wasn't discussed," Geange said. But it was still on the mind of Bowring, the weather observer.
Every few minutes he stepped outside his station to check how much Ice and snow were sticking to a small strip of jet-type aluminum he used to gauge the accumulation of ice at the airport.
At 4 a.m., just as the Arrow plane was landing, Bowring found that very light freezing drizzle and light grains of snow were falling and covering about 30 percent of the test strip, forming a coating about the thickness of medium-to-coarse sandpaper thick enough to reduce lift by 30 percent. It was 25 degrees.
Garrett said he didn't notice any ice on Arrow 950's wings, but he did see a glaze on the lower right of the cockpit windshield. And when the troops climbed down from the plane, they skidded across the ramp "as though they were cross-country skiing," Garrett said. At 4:45 a.m., 30 minutes before the Arrow plane would take off, the freezing rain had stopped, and the snow had tapered off to very light grains.
The precipitation then was covering only about 5 percent of the test strip, which Bowring had cleaned after he last checked it. Still, Capt. Walter Brown, who was preparing his Canadian Pacific Airlines Boeing 737 for a 4:45 takeoff, said deicing was "so obviously required" on his aircraft that his ground staff ordered it before he even arrived at the gate. But Brown's plane had been sitting on the ground, collecting ice and snow, for three hours almost two hours longer than Arrow 950. A bout 5 a.m., when truck driver Leonard Lough-ren pulled out of the town of Gander, about four miles from the airport, he did not have to scrape ice off his windshield, he recalled. GANDER "These pilots were exhausted when they took off." , Forty-five minutes before departure. Griffin spoke over the phone with Arrow's ground dispatcher in Miami. "I spoke to Capt. Griffin and asked how everything was," said Keith Colbert. "He said he had no problems. Everything was good."
Colbert said Griffin volunteered to ferry the plane past Fort Campbell to Oakland for repairs, rather than rest overnight in Kentucky, as planned. "He seemed to be in real good spirits and real alert and wanted to press right on," Colbert said. "He was in a better mood than I was." Geange also said the crew appeared to be rested and in good shape. "They seemed quite normal. And when they left, they wished me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."
But if Griffin and crew were well rested, they would have had to be supermen, according to aviation experts who study pilot fatigue.
Since they left Cologne, they had been flying for six hours and on duty for nine. Since they left McChord Air Force Base, Wash., 38 hours earlier, they had spent 18 hours in the air and 23 hours on duty. T hey had flown from the West Coast to West Germany and then back to North America. While that trip was within federal rules, it would have been exceptionally grueling, the experts agree. Flying from west to east alone, they had crossed nine time zones, and then tried to catch up on sleep during daylight hours in Cologne.
That is a classic recipe for jet lag, experts say. The Arrow crew would have been even more v taxed because they had flown all night two nights in a row.
And now they were attempting to take off just before dawn the lowest point in most people's body-clock rhythms. If they weren't tired from their work in the past two days, their schedule earlier in the month could have produced chronic exhaustion, the experts say. Starting on Dec. 3, Griffin, Fowler and First Officer Joseph Robert Connelly flew from Washington state through Gander to West Germany.
The next day, they flew from West Germany through Bangor, Maine, to Fort Campbell. The day after that they flew from Fort Campbell to a naval air station in Florida. Later the same day, they flew from Florida to Anchorage, Alaska.
The next day, they flew from Anchorage to a naval air station in California, and then to Oakland for repairs. Twice during that period they violated federal rules that limit flying time or require mandatory rest periods. In one case, after the crew had flown for 22 out of 48 hours, rules required it to rest for 18 hours, but it actually rested only seven. On Dec. 10, after a little less than three days off, they picked up the plane at McChord Air Force Base, Wash., and pushed on to West Germany again.
And now, after crossing the Atlantic for the fourth time in December, they were preparing for the four-hour flight to Fort Campbell, and the trip on to the West Coast with an empty plane. If they had completed that schedule, it would have meant that Griffin and crew would have been on duty for nearly a full day, and would have violated Arrow's unwritten rules that were intended to limit pilots to 18 hours on duty.
However, federal rules regulate only time aloft, not time on duty, and do not apply when pilots are ferrying an empty plane. Former Arrow pilots Daniel Hood and Michael Sanjenis would later tell Congress that small, financially strapped carriers such as Arrow routinely extend their crew's flying time to 18 or 20 hours at a stretch.
As a result, said Sanjenis, it is "quite common" for all three crew members to fall asleep on long international flights, while their plane is on automatic pilot, and have to be awakened by cabin attendants. Another Arrow pilot, Ronald D. Frink, told the FAA in a 1983 letter that there "was always an unspoken pressure from management to 'make the schedule." "
With jobs having been hard to come by in the previous few years, his letter said, "The saying, 'I can have 50 ex-Braniff men here in the morning' carried considerable weight in Arrow's cockpits." Flight Engineer Alonso said crew members either did what Arrow requested, or faced suspension or termination. Flight attendants were sometimes forced to stay on duty even longer than pilots, for up to 24 to 30 hours at a stretch, senior attendant Oglesby recalled. "We used to say we could fly till we dropped," she said. Fatigue is not a measurable phenomenon, and it doesn't show up in the bloodstream during an autopsy.
But Dr. Stanley Mohler, director of aerospace medicine at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and an expert on pilot fatigue and error, was later asked by Canadian Investigators to review the December schedule of Griffin's crew.
Considering the number of time zone changes, night flights and other factors, he rated their schedule based on its potential for fatigue. He concluded that the crew members had "dangerously depleted" their reserves by the time they took off from Gander. Griffin and crew had performed a more exhausting schedule during the first 12 days of December. Mohler said, than any of the hundreds of crews he'd ever looked at. "These pilots were exhausted when they took off," Mohler later concluded. "Their time zones were totally out of phase. They would have been at high risk of making errors. They would not have been alert enough to make safe corrections on flight controls."
Four of the six crew members on whom autopsies were later performed among them Griffin and Fowler were found to have taken aspirin sometime before they took off from Gander. And Mohler said that can be evidence of fatigue-induced headache.
Because of their tiredness, the crew may have "cut corners" in examining their aircraft to see whether it needed to be deiced, Mohler said. Mohler said he believes the crew may have been suffering from "go-home-itis" the desire to complete their schedule at any cost when they decided not to deice. "A tired crew wants to get the flight over with and get to bed," said Mohler. "They'll fly simply because they want to get home to rest."
And he said that once aloft, they may have been too slow in recognizing that their plane was headed for a stall.
At 5:04 a.m., exactly one hour after they had landed in Gander, Griffin radioed the tower and asked for permission to begin taxiing out on to the runway. Air traffic controller Blandford directed Arrow 950 down taxiway Delta to Runway 13 and toward the start of Runway 22, from which the plane would begin its takeoff.
The 10,200-foot Runway 22 was partially covered with ice, although pilots had reported that braking was good, and that the runway was clear down the centerline. If anything, the crew was expecting a smoother takeoff than out of Cologne seven hours earlier. For one thing, it was five degrees colder, which improves airplane performance. For another, the plane was carrying 18,000 fewer pounds of fuel, making the plane that much lighter.
At 5:14 a.m., Arrow 950 turned right off Runway 13 and on to Runway 22. Blandford read Griffin his Instrument Flight Rules clearance and Griffin read it back accurately. Blandford gave Griffin clearance to begin his runway roll, and Griffin acknowledged clearance. "We're ready for takeoff now," Griffin said. "Big A 950," Blandford replied. "Cleared for takeoff on 22."
Second of three parts
The last leg
By Andrew Wolfson and Daniel Rubin Second of three parts May 26, 1986
The sky was just starting to break at the edge, changing from dark to dawn. At 5:14 a.m., air traffic controller Glenn Bland-ford cleared Arrow 950 for takeoff.
Normally that would prompt a crew to start its plane rolling down the runway immediately. But the Arrow Air plane did not budge for 45 seconds, a delay that struck Blandford as a little peculiar.
Then, from a dead stop, Arrow 950 began to move south down Runway 22.
The 248 members of the 101st Airborne Division's Screaming Eagles were beginning the last leg of their journey home. In four hours, they were to arrive at Fort Campbell, Ky. to the pageantry of an Army welcome after five months of peacekeeping duty in the Sinai Desert.
At the controls of Arrow 950 was First Officer Joseph Robert Connelly, 45, a former Air Force navigator. As at most airlines, Arrow's captains and first officers frequently alternated in the lead pilot's seat on legs of longer flights.
Capt John Griffin, 45, had flown Arrow 950 into Gander. Connelly was to fly it out As captain, Griffin retained final authority over the flight including the power to abort takeoff or take over the controls in flight
At 5:15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Arrow 950 was barreling down the runway, gaining plenty of speed, it seemed, to launch a safe climb. It was 25 degrees, and very light snow grains had been falling.
After Connelly lifted the DC-8's nose, seven to 10 seconds elapsed before the plane got aloft more than twice the normal time, an analyst for Douglas Aircraft Co., the plane's manufacturer, would later say.
Still, Arrow 950 began to leave the ground with room to spare about 3,000 feet of the 10,200- foot runway was still ahead of it. But immediately, it was clear something was desperately wrong. The plane rose only between 60 and 100 feet and as it passed over the end of the runway about 12 seconds after it had left the ground its nose rose, its tail fell, and the aircraft stalled.
A plane stalls when it fails to maintain enough speed to keep air flowing properly around its wings. Arrow 950 reached a maximum speed of 171 knots, or about 196 miles per hour. That is about 30 mph faster than the speed at which the DC-8 in normal conditions and carrying the load estimated by the Canadian investigators would be expected to stall.
But Immediately after it passed over the end of the runway, the plane's speed declined, it began to veer to the right and it kept heading inexorably down.
Veteran weather observer Clarence Bowring had climbed to the roof of his shelter to take some readings when the thundering of the passing plane shook the windows of his building.
"What really drew my attention to the aircraft was the noise," he said. "It was quite loud. It sounded more like an aircraft landing." Air controller Blandford didn't watch the entire takeoff, and in the darkness, he could barely make out the outline of the plane. But he could see that after it rose about 100 feet, it leveled off and disappeared below the horizon.
William Mahoney, a security guard for Search and Rescue Canada, who watched from a hangar near Runway 22, said: "She almost leveled off after taking off. It seemed funny. She didn't gain any altitude. Toward the end of the runway, she seemed to Just sink."
Long-haul truck driver Cecil Mackey was beading home for Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, on the Trans Canada Highway when he passed a point about 900 feet from the end of Runway 22. He heard a rumbling noise and saw an orange glow overhead. The plane passed over so low that Mackey ducked his head in his cab.
The glow on the underside of the plane was bright enough to illuminate the cab of his truck. And Mackey thought it was too bright to be a light attached to the plane.
Truck driver Leonard Loughren was just ahead of Mackey when he heard the rumbling. "It was like when you're in a house when a freight train passes," he said. He looked up and saw the same bright light on the underside of the plane.
He also didn't think it could be one of the plane's lights because It wasn't clear or well-focused. To him, it seemed like the yellow glow of an explosion. But a third driver, Robert Lane, who'd operated a salt truck and snowplow near the airport for 13 years, said he assumed the glow was simply the reflection of orange runway obstruction lights that extended across the highway. He was certain that as the plane plummeted overhead, what he saw wasn't a fire or explosion.
"You seem to have an explosion off here to the west"
With its nose up in the air, its tail sinking, and its right wing also banked toward the ground, Arrow 950 plunged farther off course, seemingly heading toward Gander Lake.
If he was following standard procedures to pull out of a stall, First Officer Connelly would have been trying to push the plane's nose down and apply full power. But the DC-8 continued to fall out of the sky. About 24 seconds after it had left the ground and 2,973 feet beyond the end of the runway its tail began shearing fir trees 35 feet high and its right wing started to cut a wide swath through a stand of spruce and birch.
The fuselage struck a rocky, snow-covered downward slope, ripping off a section of the tail. The plane scraped and careened downhill, producing an awful grinding sound, until it met the first level stretch of ground. And then all hell broke loose. The impact tore both wings off the fuselage, and engines three and four immediately were shorn off the right wing. Most of the hull simply disintegrated and the rest burned and melted and burned again.
Fire erupted like a volcano, into a blaze that would take 21 hours to put out Most of the plane continued to plow forward, destroying a small, abandoned cabin and leaving a trail of wreckage 1,200 feet long.
The cockpit bounded to the end, stopping only 200 feet short of the lake. It was 5:16 a.m. EST 71 seconds after Arrow 950 had begun to roll down the runway. Except for the flames shooting from the wreckage, it was still dark.
Judy Parsons, a rental car agent at the airport who was scraping ice from cars less than a half- mile from the site, recalled, "There was sort of like an orange ball, and it just disintegrated. You could see pieces flying everywhere."
Capt. John Steeves, in an Eastern Provincial Airlines 737 approaching Gander, matter-of-factly reported the news to the tower: "You seem to have an explosion off here to the west."
At 5:19 a.m. controller Blandford called to report the accident to his boss, who in turn asked how he was feeling. "How do you think I feel?" Blandford replied.
Airport rescue teams and firefighters arrived within eight minutes, slipping and sliding down a snow-covered approach road. They were devastated by what they saw. The charred remains of a piece of the hull sat across a dirt road, and the rubber wheels lay nearby, burning. The wreckage everywhere was charred a crispy black.
Virtually the entire plane had crumbled into fragments. "On a scale of one to ten, this was a nine," said Peter Boag, the chief investigator for the Canadian Aviation Safety Board. Search parties combed through the site, but there was not an ounce of hope.
"There was no way anyone could have lived through this," said Inspector J. E. McGuire of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "Chances for survival were 100 percent nil."
Rescue teams recovered 14 emergency exit doors from the plane: There were no signs that anyone had tried to open them. Three hundred feet down the wreckage trail, they found the first human remains.
Volunteer firefighter Keith Head said some of the soldiers had been blown out of their uniforms.
Most of the bodies were badly burned, and only 10 were found intact.
"It was a real tragic sight," McGuire said. "We knew these boys were so young, some only 18 or 19 years old. You couldn't think about it if you wanted to do your job." But walking through the wreckage, surveying the personal effects strewn amid the carnage, police and firefighters found it hard to think about anything else. They saw neck chains and watches and dog tags. They saw cameras and weapons and medals reflecting the troops' service in the multinational peacekeeping force.
Among the twisted shards of metal lay photographs of spouses, parents and children. Most luggage was destroyed, but Sgt. Ronald Fra-zier, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said his men found some clothes at least partially intact.
The sweatshirts from the airport's gift shop read, "I Survived Gander?
Eighteen hundred miles away, at Fort Campbell, Ky., cake and coffee had been ordered for the 9 a.m. welcome-home party in the post's gymnasium. But by 9, most of the families had heard the news of the early-morning crash the hard way, on radio and TV. Still, 200 family members gathered at the gym, where a chaplain prayed, and where a brigade commander. Col. John Herrling, confirmed that the plane had crashed.
"There was no hysteria," said Maj. Jim Gleisberg, a Fort Campbell spokesman. "It was a kind of shock." From around the nation, hundreds of calls flooded into the family assistance center the Army established in the post's Eagles Conference Room. They all had the same question.
After checking the manifest, the Army gave unlucky ones the news that their son or daughter or husband or wife "was believed to have been a passenger on a military charter aircraft that went down after taking off from Gander, Newfoundland, Canada on 12 December 85.
"You will be advised as soon as additional information is available pending positive identification of remains," the Army said.
Third of three parts
By Andrew Wolfson and Daniel Rubin
The sudden deaths of 248 Kentucky-bound soldiers beside an icy Canadian lake exposed a system's fatal flaws
A top U.S. Defense Department official last month promised that the Pentagon was going to get-tough with chartered airlines that flout air-safety rules.
It was part of a new hard line the Pentagon said it was taking to ensure that U.S. servicemen would be flown safely on chartered airlines an approach enacted after the worst air accident In U.S. military history had claimed the lives of 248 soldiers, along with eight crew members, in December in Gander, Newfoundland.
Announcing the new policies on April 2, Assistant Secretary of Defense James P. Wade Jr. said the military was going to "be firm in dealing with carriers, both large and small, who violate air safety or principles of airworthiness."
His promise soon got its first test. The Federal Aviation Administration announced in March that it had inspected just 10 percent of the fleet of Eastern Airlines, which holds a large military charter contract, and uncovered what it said were 78,000 violations of federal air rules. The FAA proposed $9.5 million in fines.
On April 17, Deputy Secretary of Defense William H. Taft IV making good on Wade's words told the FAA that the military would suspend its use of Eastern, and would reinstate the airline only after he was assured that the problems had been corrected or that enough progress had been made to guarantee the carrier's safety.
Taft said the Defense Department had no choice but to suspend business with Eastern because both FAA and military inspectors found "serious" problems that "might affect airworthiness and flight safety."
But the same day as Taft's pronouncement, FAA administrator Donald D. Engen replied in a two-paragraph letter that the corrections had been made or were sufficiently under way and that Eastern was complying with federal air rules. By the end of the day, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger overruled Taft, and decided to continue using Eastern.
The Eastern case brings into sharp focus the question of whether the reforms that have followed December's Arrow Air crash in Canada are enough. In the view of some members of Congress and air-safety experts, they are not.
At issue is the safety of a huge number of U.S. troops and their families: last year alone, 746,000 servicemen and their dependants flew 3.29 billion miles on trips arranged by the military.
"I think that is proof of the pudding that we need to do something," said U.S. Sen. Wendell Ford, D-Ky., a member of the Senate Aviation subcommittee. "This incident shows that measures calling for voluntary and discretionary enforcement of safety regulations just aren't going to work," said U.S. Rep. Larry Hopkins, R-6th District, the ranking minority member of a House Armed Services Committee panel that has held hearings on military charters.
Both Ford and Hopkins said legislation is needed to give the military's policies the needed weight. "I think it's going to take the full force of law," Hopkins said.
U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Jr., D-Tenn., said the East-era case is further evidence that there is a need to strengthen the independence of those within the FAA who enforce safety regulations. He has asked for a six-month congressional study to pursue the idea of an independent enforcement authority within the FAA "that would insulate the individuals enforcing the law from political pressures of the kind that so frequently work to weaken enforcement in the present system."
John Nance, a military pilot and author of a book on airline deregulation's impact on safety, said it was "incredible" that the FAA could say that Eastern is safe to fly in light of the carrier's "horrendous list of violations." Nance said future decisions by the military, based on what the FAA tells it, about the use of a carrier should be "honored and be beyond review."
John Galipault, president of the Aviation Safety Institute, a non-profit research and consumer organization in Worthington, Ohio, praised the Defense Department for initially trying to do what it promised namely, "be tough on any carrier that was proven to be substandard." But Galipault said there was no way Eastern could have corrected all its problems by April 17.
"Not even by July 1," he said. "The problems were systemic. The FAA inspected only 10 percent of their fleet."
Fred Farrar, an FAA spokesman, disputed Galipault's charges, saying that the agency would have grounded Eastern if it were not safe to fly. Eastern has challenged the FAA's inspection findings and will challenge the fine in the courts.
Frank Borman, Eastern's chairman, has testified in Congress that many of the alleged violations could be traced to poor paperwork. In the 16-month period that ended Jan. 30, Eastern received $12.6 million for domestic military flights.
Glenn Flood, a Defense Department spokesman, disputed the view that Weinberger's decision has set back the Pentagon's promises of reform. The policy, be said, states that the military will not use carriers with questionable safety records until it receives written assurances from the FAA that the carrier is safe.
Once it received Engen's letter, the policy was followed, he said.
The policy was put into effect in response to the work of a civilian-military task force that was convened just eight days after the Arrow crash at Gander. Its goals were to shore up the military's charter safety system, and prevent future disasters.
On April 3, the task force recommended 14 changes in the way the Defense Department selects and inspects air carriers changes the Pentagon promised to implement, said a spokesman, "as soon as possible."
Some changes are already in place. The task force identified several of the same problems The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times reported on Feb. 5. in an examination of the military- charter system. Among the task force's findings were that:
The military's surveys of prospective charter carriers were simply "not adequate." Survey teams didn't bother to look at "readily available" safety, performance and financial data that would have allowed them to evaluate airlines. The study group found that before the Gander crash, the military teams surveyed airlines only when the carriers first applied for a contract. And additional surveys were made only "as required."
While the surveys were conducted by highly trained military pilots, they and other military personnel lacked "significant experience in commercial operations," the task force said. In their own review, the newspapers found that between 1981 and 1985, the military command responsible for overseas troop transport did not survey eight of the 17 airlines that flew military charter flights overseas during that period.
The Military Airlift Command the Air Force unit that arranges most overseas flights for servicemen refused to release the results of the surveys it did conduct, saying they contained information that would "reveal the deliberative process of the Air Force."
The newspaper has appealed the Air Force's decision. The study group recommended increasing surveys to every two years and analyzing a carrier's performance every six months. MAC already had exceeded the recommended survey schedule by deciding, after the crash, to conduct annual surveys of all its carriers under contract.
On the study group's recommendation, the military is finishing plans to begin inspecting one out of every four planes Immediately before takeoff from a variety of domestic and international airfields. Unlike a survey which is a general determination of whether an airline is financially and logistically able to fly for the military an inspection is a physical check of an airplane.
Before the crash the Military Airlift Command had been inspecting 10 percent of the international flights departing from seven major airfields. MAC also Inspected planes chartered by the Military Traffic Management Command the Army unit that charters airlines for domestic flights if they used those seven airfields. And those were the only inspections made of the Army-chartered planes.
After the crash the Military Airlift Command began inspecting about 40 percent of its charter planes. The military did not inspect the fatal Arrow flight because it was chartered by a multinational Middle East peacekeeping group.
The FAA turned over "little or no information" to the military about carriers' accidents, violations, fines or other penalties even though the military relied heavily on the FAA for the inside word about carriers' safety.
The FAA is required by its own rules to notify the Military Airlift Command of all potential problems it discovers with the carriers particularly those relating to safety. But the newspaper, and the task force, found that, aside from telling the military when a carrier was grounded, the FAA provided military officials "with little or no information."
Communication between the FAA and the military was simply "inadequate," the study group found.
When the newspapers first asked in February to inspect correspondence reflecting the required exchanges between the FAA and the Military Airlift Command, a spokesman for the command said the material was "too voluminous" to provide. But in April, in response to a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act, the command acknowledged it had no records whatsoever of any written correspondence from the FAA.
If there were any exchanges between the two agencies, it was only by telephone or in person, the Military Airlift Command said, anc1 no written records were kept to reflect them. The study group recommended that the FAA heed a 1976 order that directs it to share safety information with the military.
The military is now standardizing how this information is to be communicated. The FAA will follow the task force's recommendation that the FAA again base one of its officials at the Military Airlift Command in an effort to improve communications. The position was abolished in 1982 as a money-saving move.
The Pentagon had no standard procedure for determining if it should continue using a carrier even if the carrier has a major safety violation or accident. In fact, the task force found that the Military Airlift Command could use a carrier for overseas flights that had been barred from flying troops by the Military Traffic Management Command.
While the study group did not cite any specific instance in which this occurred, it is clear it did happen to Arrow two years ago. In 1984, Military Traffic Management Command disqualified Arrow for 90 days after delays on three Arrow flights and after torn and missing carpet and faulty refrigeration were found in an Arrow plane.
During that time, Arrow made 12 overseas trips for the Military Airlift Command, according to that unit's records. The study group recommended setting up a review board to decide if a carrier should be allowed to keep flying troops after an accident or charges of major safety violations.
The military is now determining the makeup of that board. Such a board certainly would have been a help in dealing with the case of Arrow Air. Following the crash at Gander, members of Congress tried to pressure the Air Force to suspend its $13.8 million contract with Arrow. But the Air Force insisted it had no cause to put Arrow's contract on hold, and in fact awarded the airline an additional $7.6 million in business.
When the FAA found in February that 10 of Arrow's 12 planes had unauthorized foreign- supplied parts, the Air Force finally suspended Arrow's contracts. But two months later, the Air Force announced it was using Arrow again, although only to fly cargo, pending completion of the Canadian probe of the accident.
"The FAA has determined that Arrow is airworthy," an Air Force spokesman said. "And there is no legal basis to withhold business from Arrow."
The Pentagon relied on the FAA to ensure the safety of airlines, even though It knew the FAA's resources were so "overextended" that its effectiveness was "suspect" In the four years ending in 1984, for example, the number of FAA inspectors for air carriers declined 24 percent, while the number of hours flown by scheduled carriers increased 24 percent.
During the same period, the hours flown on non-scheduled flights increased by 70 percent. Also during those years, some carriers weren't inspected by the FAA at all. And some carriers of equal size were subject to dramatically different numbers of inspections.
The FAA has announced Its plans to increase the number of Inspectors to 770 during the fiscal year that begins Sept 30, a 50 percent rise over 1984 levels. This year there are 652 inspectors. The military allowed charter operators to start flying American troops abroad even if the airline had never provided one day of international service for commercial passengers.
The significance of that practice was emphasized by the task force's finding that the quality of such commercial service is the best way to predict whether an airline will be able to safely transport troops. While the Army unit that contracts for most domestic flights for all branches of the service required air carriers to have flown commercially for at least six months, the Air Force unit that contracts for international flights had no such requirement. Upon the study group's recommendation, the military will now consider only those that have flown for a year for domestic or international contracts.
In many Instances, military personnel could fly on carriers that did not fall under the watch of the FAA or the Defense Department including flights arranged by the Multinational Force and Observers, the peacekeeping force that chartered the fatal Arrow flight The task force recommended that all such flights fall under the same guidelines to ensure a ser-vicewide standard of safety.
The military is in the process of following the recommendation. Congressional reaction The reforms promised by the Pentagon have not satisfied some critics in Congress.
Members of both the House and Senate have offered their own proposals to mend a military- charter safety system they insist is still in disrepair. Rep. Charles Bennett, D-Fla., has submitted the most dramatic proposal a bill that would require the military to inspect all flights within 48 hours before takeoff. Hopkins, of Kentucky, agrees that military charter carriers and their planes should be inspected more frequently, although he says Bennett's 48-hour proposal is "impractical."
"You would have had to fly (military inspectors) all over the world" under the bill, Hopkins said. Hopkins predicted that the bill will emerge with a requirement for more frequent inspections and with another wrinkle that would bar military carriers from postponing certain repairs that now can be delayed on commercial flights.
"The system failed rather badly," Gore said, "but it is hard to put the full blame on the military simply because they relied so heavily on the FAA and the larger failures were at the hand of the FAA."
Gore said the military's reforms "are good first steps," but that "more can be done." The military should have safety standards that are tougher than the FAA's, he said. The military also should not contract with carriers who employ former FAA inspectors, Gore said, because those airlines might get breaks from current inspectors. The b an would be an attempt "to try to improve the objectivity of present inspectors," he said. Ford has co-sponsored a bill to create a panel that would review the FAA's role in ensuring safety and study military air travel.
In another move, 12 House members have asked the U.S. General Accounting Office to develop a kind of scorecard that can be used to rate airlines for safety. The GAO is expected to provide the legislators with a sketch of its system within a few weeks.
"If we had had a rating system in place at the time of the (Arrow) crash, it would have been so much easier for government officials and the Military Airlift Command to know that the company had a history of violations and fines," said Loretta Robinson, a spokesman for Rep. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., one of the proponents of a rating system. "They might not have chartered Arrow in the first place."
Wayne Williams, president of the National Transportation Safety Association, a non-profit group based in Dania, Fla., said a well-publicized rating of carriers would prod the poorer airlines into cleaning up their acts.
"If we start chipping away at those on the bottom, pressure those in middle and make those on top feel good, everybody's going to want to be on the top," he said.
The GAO is also preparing a report for Tennessee's two U.S. senators, examining what safety standards were built into commercial airlines' contracts to fly military passengers. Larry Stein, press secretary for U.S. Sen. James Sasser, D-Tenn., said, "What they're probably going to say is that contractual procedures were lax at best, oversight was virtually non-existent and while there have been changes, clearly some of them for the better, they are not enough."
1961 charter crash also spurred promise of reform
The Arrow Air crash was not the first military charter disaster to spur promises for reform. The same thing happened in November 1961, after 74 freshly inducted Army recruits died aboard a Lockheed Constellation flown by an outfit called Imperial Airlines, which is now defunct. The plane went down near Richmond, Va., and the government later blamed the crash on the airline's substandard maintenance practices and the crew's "ignorance and misjudgment." Federal investigators found that the crew drained one fuel tank empty, then failed to switch to a second.
After members of Congress raised a storm of protest, then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara also ordered the military to begin conducting "capability surveys" on charter operators that wanted to carry U.S. troops.
Those surveys continue to this day, but after the Arrow accident, a civilian-military task force found that they were inadequate as were other aspects of the military-charter safety system. .
Christine Manion realized it was time to leave Fort Campbell a couple of months after the crash. "They all walk a certain way," she said. "Every time one turned around, I expected it to be Ed." Friends urged her to move back to Nashville, her home of 14 years, but instead, she bought the first house she saw in Clarksville, Tenn., a few miles south of the post where her husband, Capt Edward J. Manion, had been assigned. "I buried him here," she said. "I just felt I couldn't leave him. "It's a very strange feeling. It has something to do with the way they died."
The way her husband and 247 other soldiers died has caused anger to push aside sorrow and fuel Mrs. Manion's crusade for changes in the way soldiers are flown on charter airplanes. The Arrow Air jet taking them home after five months of duty in the Sinai crashed on takeoff in Gander, Newfoundland, Dec. 12.
Convinced that little was done to ensure the safety of the soldiers, Mrs. Manion has organized about 60 of their survivors into an army of their own an army that is waging a small war for air safety reform. They have written letters. They have pleaded on the phone. And in March, Mrs. Manion led them into a peaceful confrontation with members of Congress, Federal Aviation Administration bureaucrats and top brass from Fort Campbell to the Pentagon.
They wanted to know what the military had done before the flight to check if Arrow's plane was safe, and why soldiers were permitted to continue flying on the airline. Some pressed for information on more personal matters how their relatives were identified, how they could recover their watches, rings and wallets.
"Had it not been for her, you would have had 248 people wandering around wondering what to do," said Maynard Whiteman of Suitland, Md., whose son, Michael, also died in the crash. "She was quite Instrumental in getting us to start thinking again about what went on instead of grieving saying we can do something about it."
U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Jr., D-Tenn., who met with Mrs. Manion for more than an hour, called her "a tower of strength for the surviving families. . . . She is articulate, determined and very strong."
For her part, Mrs. Manion says she can't quite understand why she has emerged as a leader. "I don't know why they're counting on me. I'm a ballet teacher." Five months after the crash, she continues to spend the majority her days trading information long-distance and sharing grief with the parents and spouses of soldiers who died. Yet Christine Manion's cause has had a far steeper cost than her monthly phone bill, which averages $720.
Many friends and Army officers at Fort Campbell have told her that her pressing questions are not proper for a captain's wife. One officer told her she would be better served focusing on her husband's death. Another said it was a good thing her husband was not alive, because her actions would have damaged his career.
"They have to understand," she says. "I have to do what I feel Ed would want me to do.'’
She was sitting at the dining room table in her new house. Painters and carpenters were hauling supplies by two Siamese cats that nestled on a rocking chair. Mrs. Manion is 35, a sharp-featured women with dark eyes and hair that she has brushed back and fastened tautly behind her. Her voice is gentle, but her words are forceful. In addition to ballet, she teaches karate. They had been married less than a year when he left for the Sinai and she says that lends the events an unreal haze. "I can't believe that any of this happened that I ever got married or that he died," she said. "He went away and never came back."
She met him in spring 1984, when she was teaching dance and martial arts near Fort Campbell, and told a friend she needed a military adviser to help with some marching drills she was introducing to her students.
He was a West Point grad 6 feet 4 inches, organized and very serious, she recalls. She was a more of a free spirit. "I loved making somebody smile who rarely smiled," she said. They married that August in Springfield, Tenn., because it was close to the post and one could get married quickly there. But during their marriage, Manion had only seven days of leave, and the Manions not only didn't honeymoon, they couldn't even spend the weekend together after they got married.
"He didn't take me to Fort Campbell once before we were married," she said. Soon, however, they moved onto the base so her daughter from an earlier marriage could attend Fort Campbell High School.
Mrs. Manion says she was naive about Army life. She remembers talking with a major's wife at a dinner party. When they started walking into the dining room together, another woman tapped her arm and said she should wait to enter the room with the wives of men her husband's rank. Her bitterness about the service has grown, she acknowledges.
"I understand now why some of my friends warned me not to marry someone in the Army. It's so difficult and so little time to have a relationship. I just wish he had a chance to do something else with his life and find something fun to do."
Oddly, she said, they never talked much about their plans. "Even young boyfriends and girlfriends share their dreams. We just lived in the present" Now she is faced with what to do with his belongings.
A week after the crash she received a package he'd sent from the Sinai a package in which he'd enclosed some seashells, her letters and an article by Gen. Chuck Yeager, the famed Air Force test pilot Manion had
Pilots, Yeager wrote, never mention the word "crash." The Yeager piece also discussed not having any regrets when you die. And two religious pamphlets her husband included talked about being strong, not angry, when faced with death. Mrs. Manion often wonders what message he was sending home.
Barbara Kaufman of Portland, Ore., who lost a son in the disaster, said she is a great fan of Mrs Manion's stand. "How do you deal with grief properly?" she asked. She sais says he admires Mrs. Manion for continuing her fight for standing up to the Army and the Pentagon.
"The military has this old stupid tradition of thinking they can look out for their own," he said "Mrs. Manion has rubbed them wrong because she has taken this to the people where it belongs."
END