Experts Piece Together Cause of Crash in Cerritos

On a runway in Long Beach 17 years ago, a sleek DC-9 jetliner, the 470th ever built by Douglas Aircraft Co., thundered into the sky on her maiden flight. Wearing the red, white and blue of Delta Airlines, the plane would crisscross America for a decade, safely carrying thousands of passengers millions of miles.

In upgrading its fleet, Delta sold No. 470 to Aeromexico in 1979. The Mexican airline promptly stripped off Delta’s colors, repainted the jet on a burnt orange and re-christened her the “Hermosillo,” after the city in northwestern Mexico.

Just before noon one week ago, while on a landing approach southeast of Los Angeles International Airport, the Hermosillo turned from a sleek bird into a 100,000-pound bomb as she collided in midair with a four-seat Piper Cherokee Archer II. The tiny airplane and big jet plummeted out of the sky and slammed into a placid subdivision less than 15 miles from the cavernous hangers where DC-9 No. 470 had been riveted together.

And now, amid the remains of at least 70 people and two ill-fated flying machines, the invariable questions persist: How could it have happened? Who or what is to blame? Can future disaster in the skies above Los Angeles be averted?

The task of finding the answers has fallen on an eclectic group of about 80 private citizens and government officials, led by a 16-member “Go Team” from the National Transportation Safety Board. The team investigating the Cerritos crash is one of four maintained by the safety board. They are based in Washington and respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whenever there are major civilian air crashes.

Assisting the government’s team are commercial pilots, airplane makers, engine manufacturers, lobbyists and even a representative of a Mexican flight attendants union--all invited by the safety board to offer their expertise in helping piece together the puzzle of the catastrophe involving Aeromexico Flight 498 and Piper N4891F.

Some board members are old hands at sifting through the carnage left when winged things fall to Earth. One member helped piece together what could be found of the space shuttle Challenger after it exploded in January.

Others, including the team’s burly 43-year-old leader, safety board member John Lauber, have been to relatively few crash scenes. This was Lauber’s second. His first, near De Kalb, Tex., came on New Year’s Eve, 1985, after a fire in an aging DC-3 caused the plane to crash land, killing singer Rick Nelson and six others.

Mechanical failure has been all but ruled out as a possible cause behind Sunday’s catastrophe, and already most of Lauber’s investigators--experts in airframe strengths, stall speeds, lift coefficients and the like--have left Los Angeles, their fieldwork finished.

Still, it may take the safety board months to determine why death rained down on Cerritos.

The official search for a cause began within hours following the crash, when the safety board’s Go Team members began arriving aboard commercial flights.

Their strategy was not orchestrated in some high-tech office or sophisticated, radio-equipped command post, but from a tranquil conference room four miles from the crash site in the Holiday Inn on Beach Boulevard in Buena Park.

Every morning, team members huddled together in small groups over coffee, speaking in hushed tones, before going out to interview witnesses, question air traffic controllers or inspect thousands of chunks and fragmented bits of the two airplanes.

Every night, they met in a conference room or in the hotel lobby, comparing notes.

Seemed at Home

They seemed at home among the potted palms and earth tones, as well they should have: Holiday Inns are often where Go Teams stay when they are in the field.

Lauber arrived late Sunday, went to the crash site, made a brief appearance for the press, went to bed, got up, put on a blue blazer and button-down shirt and began a daily routine that included visits to the site, conferences with various investigative teams and press briefings.

President Reagan, whom he has never met, appointed Lauber to the five-member board last November. Rules require that three of the members have transportation or transportation-safety experience; the 6-foot-3 Lauber has both.

The safety board was created by Congress in 1974 as an independent agency, free to poke and pry and recommend changes in air traffic procedures without worrying about whose toes might be stepped on. In an effort to help assure that independence, regulations require that no more than three members be from the same political party; Lauber is one of two Democrats.

Of all the board members called upon to deal with the news media during times of chaos, Lauber--an experienced Boeing 727 jet pilot and former NASA employee with a doctorate in experimental psychology from Ohio State University--may be the calmest under fire. The often boisterous press corps seemed not to disturb him, nor, apparently, did his early visits to the crash site, where many human body parts had yet to be collected.

“I Love It . . .’

Throughout the week, he maintained a patient smile.

“I love it, I really do,” Lauber said when asked about his job.

If Lauber could be considered chairman of this Go Team, George Seidlein, 66, a veteran safety board investigator who is now the investigator in charge, would be its president. Seidlein, a squat and rumpled man, is responsible “for logistics, organization and assignments.”

Seidlein’s expertise has come from experience, rather than the classroom.

A veteran of 28 World War II B-17 bombing missions, he retired from the Air Force in 1964 after 23 years as a pilot and air safety investigator and that same year joined what would become the National Transportation Safety Board.

He estimates that over the course of his aviation career, he has participated in the investigation of about 500 air crashes--”every one of them a repeat of some earlier crash, but every one of them interesting. . . . “There has been no unique way to have an accident in a long time.”

Something Different

But to John White, a relative newcomer to the team, there was something decidedly different about this crash--it was the first time that he had seen one that had torn through a residential neighborhood.

“Normally you relate only to the people on the aircraft,” said White, the 34-year-old chief of the Go Team’s investigative groups. “This time I was in someone’s home. . . .

“In one house, in a child’s room, there was a canary cage, strewn all over the floor. A little while ago, I had bought a cage for my children’s hamster back home. That made it very personal.”

White, the only black group leader on the safety board’s Go Teams, went to work for the Navy as a flight test engineer in 1970 after graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in aerospace engineering. A decade later, he joined the safety board as an investigator.

“When the Challenger crashed, I was called in to help with the reconstruction of the wreckage,” he said. “We were able to help.”

White said he has participated in a wide variety of aircraft investigations--”involving everything from ultralights to 747s”--since 1980.

‘A Good Feeling’

“You learn to dismiss the gruesomeness,” he said. “There’s a good feeling you get when you know you are focusing on the right thing. It’s there because you know you’ve done something to contribute to aviation safety.”

White began Monday morning to assemble his structures group--the people who study the wreckage of aircraft fuselages for clues as to how and why they crashed.

“There were eight people in my group--pilots, maintenance inspectors, an engineer; people from the FAA, people who built the engines (Pratt and Whitney), people from Aeromexico. . . .

“You have to realize that some of them are very personally involved, that they have actually known someone (who died). . . . You have to be considerate of that, but at the same time, you’ve got a job to do. . . . “

Among the other group leaders were Richard Rodriguez, a former Marine pilot who headed up the people looking into the history of the airline, the flight and the crew; Ed Mudrowski, an experienced investigator working with local emergency personnel and pathologists to study the injuries of the victims; Jeff Rich, a local field office supervisor who oversaw the interviewing of witnesses, and Al Lebo, who was in charge of the interviews with the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers.

Phyllis Kayten, an experimental psychologist who serves as Lauber’s assistant, said sensitivity is required when dealing with governmental agencies whose performance is under scrutiny.

“You don’t just go marching in,” she said. “You tell the FAA what you want, and they set it up.

“In an accident like this, there may be 15 people in the room during an interview. . . . Sure, it’s intimidating.”

With the interviews, site and wreckage studies and other field phases of the investigation all but completed, groups members are returning to their homes this weekend or gathering for final report-writing meetings in the drab little conference room at the Holiday Inn.

Reports completed, the safety board personnel will regroup in Washington on the eighth floor of an office building five blocks from the Capitol, where the FAA is headquartered. In coming weeks, they will analyze the stacks of data, transcripts and summations that they have amassed.

The wreckage already has, in large measure, confirmed eyewitness accounts that the small plane struck the jet’s rear section: The Piper’s nose wheel left a rubber skid mark on the DC-9’s vertical stabilizer, or tail; other chunks of the Piper were found embedded along the left side of the horizontal stabilizer positioned at the top of the jet’s tail section.

By now, at least 93 self-proclaimed witnesses have been identified. But of 82 people contacted, the safety board has determined that only 15 actually witnessed the collision.

After reviewing their accounts, computer-recorded radar tracks of the two airplanes, radio communications records and data from the wreckage itself, White and others will re-create the tragic encounter in miniature, using models of the two planes.

Determine the Cause

“White can take meaningless pieces of junk and make sense out of them,” Lauber said.

In determining the cause--or causes--behind the Cerritos crash, White and the other team members will also have leaned heavily upon information gleaned from the jetliner’s cockpit voice and data recorders, recovered from the jetliner’s dismembered tail section.

Billy Hopper, a 22-year investigative veteran described by safety board spokesman Ira Furman as “the world’s foremost foil recorder expert,” will be using his special talents to extract information on the DC-9’s airspeed, heading, altitude and vertical acceleration from the flight data recorder.

“It’s precision work,” Furman said. “Tiny, pinprick scratches on a band of metal foil. He uses a binocular microscope and a TV screen.”

Jim Cash, another safety board veteran, will be attempting the difficult task of retrieving intelligible snatches of last-moment air crew conversation from the cockpit voice recorder, which, despite its stainless steel case, was severely damaged in the crash.

Records Sounds

There are four channels on the tape: The one of primary interest records sounds taken in by the cockpit area microphone located in the overhead panel between the two pilots. Two other channels are plugged into the pilot’s and co-pilot’s radio transmissions. The fourth records any intercom conversations in the jetliner.

Using sophisticated sound equipment, Cash will filter out background noises--the roar of engines, stall warning horns, fire alarms and such--in an effort to hear what was said by Capt. Arturo Valdez Prom and co-pilot Hector Valencia.

“He’ll have team members there who can recognize cockpit noise, like the sound of a switch being thrown,” Furman said. “They’ll have people who might recognize the voices of the individual crew members.”

If the board follows tradition, the transcripts of the fliers’ final words will be released in about 60 days, along with other periodic accident-investigation bulletins.

As is the safety board’s custom, any expletives captured on the voice tape will be edited from the transcripts before they are made public.

Public Hearings

Because of the enormity of the tragedy, public hearings probably will be scheduled eight to 10 weeks from now to take testimony from interested parties and witnesses. Several months after that, the safety board will make public a draft report summarizing findings, listing probable causes and making recommendations.

The government experts will be assisted along the entire investigative journey through the worst air disaster in local history.

Piper Aircraft Corp. of Vero Beach, Fla., which built the smaller of the two planes involved in the collision, sent an accident investigator from its three-member legal section to Los Angeles.

The four-seat Archer was among the first of about 3,400 built by Piper, the nation’s second largest manufacturer of light aircraft behind Cessna. White in color, with blue and gold trim, it rolled off Piper’s assembly line in 1976 and was believed to have been purchased by a now-defunct aircraft distributor in San Jose.

How it eventually wound up in the hands of its ultimate owner and pilot, William K. Kramer, is not clear. Kramer, 53, a quality controls executive for a Torrance-based manufacturer of metal parts, died at the little plane’s controls along with his wife and 26-year-old daughter.

Assist Investigation

McDonnell Douglas Corp. has assigned four employees to assist the safety board in finding out what caused the Hermosillo to fall to Earth. A company spokesman, Dave Eastman, declined to identify any of the participants to “preserve their privacy.”

Two are “accident investigation coordinators.” One is a veteran of these disasters; this will be his 50th crash probe. The second, an ex-Air Force fighter pilot, has been on only one other accident investigation--that involving last December’s crash of an Arrow Air DC-8 in Newfoundland, in which 248 U.S. soldiers and eight crew members died.

The other Douglas employees participating in the probe include a Spanish-speaking pilot who will assist the safety board in deciphering the cockpit voice recordings salvaged from the remains of Flight 498, and a young engineer with an in-depth knowledge of radar tracking methods who will help reconstruct the flight paths of the jet and the Piper Archer.

“We have, on occasion, sent larger teams to accidents, but when you’ve got something like this, there really isn’t as much mystery as say, other crashes,” Eastman said. “I don’t think the mechanical aspect is what’s at issue here.”

Indeed, aviation specialists with mechanical expertise, like those from Pratt and Whitney, may find their role somewhat tangential in the hunt for answers. The Connecticut-based engine manufacturer, whose JT8D-17 turbines powered the stricken DC-9, dispatched two of its California-based engineers “even though there was no apparent engine involvement” in the accident, said company spokesman David Long.

Offer Assistance

“We just want to be there to offer assistance,” he explained.

For the same reason, so too are people representing organizations from as far away as Eghan Surrey, England, where the International Federation of Airline Pilots Assns. is headquartered.

The federation, whose roster includes 60,000 pilots from 66 nations, has two accident analysis specialists participating in the investigation. When finished, they will prepare reports that will be distributed internationally.

“I think our presence there is not so much official as it is to provide the pilot’s viewpoint,” said Terry V. Middleton, the federation’s executive administrator.

Likewise, Capt. Arnoldo Reyes, a spokesman for the Mexico City-based Mexican Airline Pilots Assn., said 14 Aeromexico and Mexicana pilots left for Los Angeles on the day of the crash. Four others went to Washington.

Soon afterward, another group of about eight Aeromexico company officials and representatives of the Mexican secretary of commerce and transport arrived in the United States. The latter group plans to report back to Mexican aviation officials on what it learns of the circumstances leading to the collision.

Aeromexico owns 24 other DC-9s, according to Douglas company records.

Reyes hedged when asked if Mexican authorities will recommend procedural changes to their U.S. counterparts after the investigation. “We’ll take the results and see what’s needed,” Reyes said.

Stewardesses Killed

Because four stewardesses were among those killed on Flight 498, the Mexican Flight Attendants Assn. also has dispatched a representative, Berta Diaz, to Los Angeles to seek answers.

Various U.S. organizations representing both commercial and private pilots also sent experts to Los Angeles.

Representing the 265,000-member Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn. is consultant Paul Smith, described by organization officials as an expert in air traffic control.

In the end, as safety board investigator White put it, the primary objective is not to find the cause in order to assess blame. It’s to find some way to prevent a similar tragedy in the future.

Meanwhile, the scraps of aircraft that investigators carefully collected from Ashworth Place, Reva Circle and 183rd Street are spread out on the floor of a hangar in Long Beach. The burnt orange color of the once-sleek Aeromexico DC-9 still shows through on some of the charred pieces; other fragments bear the Piper name.

Insurance adjusters may soon have it all hauled away.

“I don’t really know what will happen to the pieces after that,” White said. “It’s their wreckage now.”