THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 10, 1994 TAG: 9409100238
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TONY GERMANOTTA, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
The USAir pilot was preparing his plane for takeoff Thursday night when he heard the news of the devastating crash outside Pittsburgh.
The Chicago-Pittsburgh route was one he and his crew had flown many times.
``The copilot and I talked about it,'' he recalled Friday, asking that he not be identified.
They told each other to keep control and ``double-watch everything.''
Conscious that they might have been distracted by the news, he said, they slowed down everything they did on their last leg of their trip and tried to remain calm and relaxed.
The pilot phoned his family to reassure them: He was safe. It was another crew that had crashed.
Like most of America, the pilot can only wonder what happened in those final few seconds before the crash.
The crew was experienced, he said, the aircraft modern. Why did it just plummet a thousand feet into the earth?
It couldn't have been complacency, the pilot said - not when a flight is approaching an airport.
``At that stage of their flying, they weren't on autopilot,'' he said. ``They're flying the airplane, configuring the flaps, sequencing themselves with the airplanes in front of them.''
The weather was fine. There was no call for help, no indication of engine trouble or other obvious problems.
Had the crew received any warning, the pilot said, they would have tried to find an emergency landing site.
``If they lost their engine, then they're going to try to make a controlled ditch,'' he said. ``If they did, they'd say, `Hey, we're going into the trees, but we're going in level.' They're not going to stall the airplane and go straight down.''
USAir pilots routinely practice handling landing problems, he said.
If the plane comes in too slow on approach, he said, it can stall. When that happens, one wing generally loses lift before the other, sending the craft into a spin if not corrected.
``We practice simulator recoveries all the time,'' he said. ``If they get into it, it's not hard to get out of.''
So whatever happened must have occurred instantly, the pilot said.
``It makes sense to me that they were totally surprised,'' he said. ``Something out of the ordinary happened, and all they had time to do was deal with whatever the problem was. It wasn't something they could even report to the tower.
``If they lost those engines, they'd be screaming up there. . . . Something went out of control, and it happened fast.''
The pilot believes that the two ``black boxes'' recovered from the crash site will probably solve the mystery.
One contains the engine and airplane information: power settings, air speeds, altitude, descent rates.
The other holds a tape recording of the conversations in the cockpit and over the radios for the final 30 minutes.
The pilot has listened to such tapes after other accidents, has heard the words of friends as they prepared to die.
``It makes it sink in,'' he said. ``It could happen to you.''
KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT PLANE FATALITY USAIR by CNB