Controller Was Stricken by Grief, Tears After Crash : Disaster: Co-workers spent hours after the accident counseling her and hid her from publicity for days.

Trembling in shock and smoking a cigarette, Robin Lee Wascher sat in a Los Angeles International Airport control tower office after guiding airliners onto the same runway and seeing the ball of flame from the collision.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” the 38-year-old ground controller murmured over and over, tears spilling fitfully from her brown eyes.

Outside, firefighters were pumping flame-smothering foam into the smoldering wreck of a USAir Boeing 737 and pulling out victims. The Feb. 1 crash claimed 34 lives--all 12 people on a SkyWest Metroliner and 22 of the 89 aboard the larger USAir jet.

But in the minutes immediately after the accident, all Wascher knew was that there was a collision--and a fiery explosion. The eight-year veteran controller was so anguished over the safety of the This article was reported by Times staff writers Rich Connell, Eric Malnic, John Mitchell, Mark Stein and Tracy Wood. It was written by Stein.

passengers that no one could tell her that a third of them had died in the wreckage.

This picture of grief and remorse was painted by another Los Angeles airport controller, one of many of the woman’s colleagues who spent hours after the accident counseling her and days hiding her in hotels to protect her from publicity.

“To say that she’s remorseful is probably redundant,” said the colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “How would you feel if your worst nightmare had come true? An accident like that is our worst nightmare. . . . We all think about it. It’s what we’re trained not to do.”

The other controllers on duty that Friday night stayed in the 12-story tower and finished their regular shifts as Federal Aviation Administration investigators coursed through the building, gathering evidence.

Wascher was taken to an office one floor below her tower station immediately after the crash. Then, though only halfway through her swing shift, she was escorted home by other off-duty controllers. They spent the night comforting her.

“We wanted to make sure she wasn’t alone,” the colleague recalled. “We talked about people and events and what’s been going on in the tower. It was difficult, but we tried to find things to laugh about.”

That combination of camaraderie and stress-relieving gallows humor is the best way to cope with emotional trauma, said Alan Davidson, a San Diego psychologist and private pilot who has treated controllers who have been involved in accidents. Davidson also treated family members of victims of a 1978 PSA crash in San Diego and a 1986 AeroMexico crash in Cerritos.

“Gallows humor (is a) real good, healthy coping procedure,” he said. “It’s not laughing at it the way we might laugh at a comedian. . . . The humor infuses flexibility back into the personality and that’s what we want someone to do. The personality gets more rigid during the trauma and the humor adds flexibility to it.”

The next day, as news spread that controller error was a factor in the disaster, Wascher was moved by friends into the Radisson Hotel on Rosecrans Boulevard in Manhattan Beach, just south of the airport. Again, fellow controllers stayed with her and she met with a private mental health counselor provided by the FAA.

“They talked with her about the incident, helped her deal with it,” the colleague said. “I was impressed with Robin. If it had happened to me, I don’t know that I could have handled it as well. . . . She is a very strong person.”

Being interviewed for three hours Wednesday by National Transportation Safety Board officials was especially “tough” for Wascher, the colleague said.

“It was not necessarily an intimidating environment, but a very sterile environment,” the colleague said. “They (NTSB investigators) have been exemplary in this. Bent over backwards to make her as comfortable as possible. . . . Obviously they had to talk to her. But they told her that if there was anybody she wasn’t comfortable with, that she didn’t want in the room, they would go.”

In that interview, Wascher said she had confused the SkyWest plane with a similar commuter plane that was stuck behind a larger plane on a taxiway. Because another controller misplaced some paperwork, she said, she was unaware that the plane she saw on the taxiway was a Wings West craft--and not the SkyWest commuter.

As a result, she said, she cleared the USAir jet to land. It rear-ended the smaller craft, flattening it and dragging it in flames into the side of an abandoned fire station.

“This incident, this accident, could have happened to anybody, any of us,” said Wascher’s colleague. “We’re all put in the position of having to run airplanes as tightly as we can.”

It was only “bad luck” that the accident occurred this time to this controller, he said.

Wascher, described by friends as confident and strong, has even begun to allow herself to start thinking about what she will do after public hearings on the accident are held in three months.

“She’s made indications that she wants to come back,” the other controller said. “She’s on administrative leave. Obviously, she’s got some things she needs to work through. She needs some rest.”

Davidson, the psychologist, believes controllers can come back, but he suggests that no controller involved in a fatal accident should rush to return to the tower. As stressful as it is to cope with the disaster itself, he said that learning to live with it “is a hell of a lot tougher.”

“In general, the predictive response of anyone involved centrally in something such as this is to try to normalize themselves by going back to work,” he said. “The inclination for most people is to make it sooner rather than later and that probably is not well advised.”

Over the years, Davidson said, he has treated controllers who went back to work too soon. They were not able to resume their careers for long because they did not give their emotions enough time to cope.

After an accident, he said, “I think the consequences of their behavior becomes real, and they have trouble dealing with it. . . . Even a normal human mistake, for them it has a catastrophic impact.”

Investigators, meanwhile, were wrapping up their field examinations Friday and preparing to return to Washington to analyze their findings.

Ted Lopatkiewicz of the NTSB said blood tests were not done for anyone in the tower, even though the NTSB asked the FAA to draw blood for such tests.

“Those individuals (controllers) who were asked, refused” to give blood, he said. That is within their rights. “There is no law requiring them to give blood,” he said.

Tower personnel did give urine for analysis, but Lopatkiewicz said that will not help in testing for alcohol use. “They do not test for alcohol” with urine samples, he said. “They only test for drugs, certain drugs--four or five common drugs of abuse. But not alcohol, the most common drug of abuse.”

Other NTSB officials said there is no indication that alcohol was a factor, but without tests no one can know.

Lopatkiewicz also said Wascher was among the controllers who complained about their vision being impaired by glare from some overhead streetlight-style lights on the runway apron behind Terminal 2, which is between the control tower and the point of collision on Runway 24-Left.

“We have gotten consistent testimony from controllers working that night that there was glare,” he said. However, all of the controllers said “there was no consistent blind spot” because of the lights, he added.

When traffic permits and weather is similar, the safety board still plans to conduct a test to see how conspicuous a Metroliner is on the runway when seen from the tower and from the air, Lopatkiewicz said.

Times staff writers Rich Connell, John L. Mitchell and Tracy Wood contributed to this story.