THE FRAGMENTS OF FLIGHT 427 -

Death shouldn't smell sweet, but it does. Jet fuel, flesh, fire. Every fatal airline crash smells the same.

Greg Phillips, aviation systems specialist, National Transportation Safety Board, surveys the wooded ravine seven miles from Pittsburgh International Airport. It is just after dawn, misty, and smoke is still rising from the wreckage of a USAir-owned Boeing 737 that fell to earth the night before. The sweet smell is everywhere.

One-hundred thirty-two people, gone.

Scanning, processing, Phillips and 13 other members of the disaster "go-team" soldier through the deathscape in their sky-blue biohazard suits. The pieces are so small this time. The plane hit nose-first at more than 300 mph and disintegrated on impact. "The accident was nonsurvivable," is the way they will write it in reports, "due to destructive forces beyond the level of human tolerances."

In other words: The fuselage is torn into one-inch chunks, laptop computers are reduced to circuitry chips, clothing is shredded, diamonds are dislodged from engagement rings. On the nightly news there will be euphemistic talk of "recovering bodies," but in this splintered patch of Pennsylvania forest there are no bodies, only pieces, hardly recognizable. A few hands and feet but no intact skulls. No faces. Beyond human tolerances.

For a few moments, nobody speaks. This isn't happening, Greg Phillips tells himself. I can't be experiencing this. Cindy Keegan, the structures expert, blinks and half-expects that it will all go away. Then Tom Haueter, the investigator in charge, points into the trees and says: "There's one engine."

The team regains its composure. Keegan spots the vertical stabilizer. Now everyone is searching hard for familiar pieces. There are clues here, clues to a great mystery.

"Something clicks when I can identify a piece of airplane structure," Phillips says. It's six months later, back in the Washington office. "If I can see an engine, if I can see a wheel, if I can see something that I relate to my job, then the fact that there are 132 people torn to pieces around there, it almost turns off. The focus shifts directly to the fact that you have to do the job."

The job -- it gives you purpose. It has meaning. It is something to hold on to when there are no good explanations. And if ever an accident didn't make sense, it is this one: USAir's Flight 427, which spiraled from a clear sky just past 7 p.m. on Sept. 8, 1994.

It was a routine 55-minute hop from Chicago. Then a gentle descent -- great visibility at 6,000 feet, autopilot on, laughter in the cockpit. "I'm just gonna close my eyes," the co-pilot jokes. "You holler when it looks like we're close."

A moment later, everything is out of control. "What the hell is this?" says the captain. There are screams, curses, desperate prayers. And 23 seconds later, silence.

If the investigators can figure out why this accident happened, they just might prevent the next one. At stake are the health of the airline industry and the safety of passengers worldwide, federal officials say. Is there a fatal flaw in the Boeing 737, the most popular commercial airplane on the planet?

Nobody knows, and everyone wants answers. The government. USAir. Boeing. The pilots' union. The insurers and the lawyers. And especially the families of the dead, who are left flailing for finality. Their grief is incomplete; it wasn't enough to mourn sealed caskets and battered pieces of jewelry. There will always be something missing.

But this isn't the story of what went wrong with Flight 427 -- the investigators are months away from writing a final report, and they may never fully know. Rather, it is about the search for an explanation, which is as close as the airline bureaucracy will come to a formal grieving process. The goals of both are very much the same: a rational effort to confront death, understand it, accept it. On one level, the search is pragmatic. But on another level, it is spiritual. Death is less terrifying if you are persuaded that it happens for a reason. A Bad Year

Last year, the crashes started to blur together. Charlotte. Pittsburgh. Roselawn. Raleigh-Durham. Every few months brought more footage of a smoking fuselage, the obligatory reports about misnamed "black boxes," and a renewed sense of mortality for anyone who got on an airplane. It was the deadliest year in aviation since 1988.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), a small and overworked agency, serves as the judge and jury when planes go down. With a 350-person staff and a budget of $35 million, the board investigates 2,100 aviation accidents a year -- not to mention highway, rail, pipeline and marine mishaps. The major ones require a "go-team," assembled from various specialists who arrive on the scene as swiftly as possible and can expect to spend up to a year focused on one disaster.

The NTSB considers itself an advocate for the traveling public, but its findings are non-binding. It's up to the Federal Aviation Administration to ground unsafe planes or implement new regulations -- and by law the FAA must consider the economic effect of its decisions on the airlines. It's a built-in conflict of interest.

Safety board investigators pride themselves on objectivity. They attempt to remain scientifically aloof from the fears of passengers and the raw grief of victims' families. They avoid memorial services. NTSB old-timers often advise newcomers not to watch television or read newspapers while working at a crash scene or attending hearings.

"I've really tried to stay away from any personal side of it," says Cynthia Keegan, 36, one of the few women in the fraternity of "tin-kickers," as the crash investigators call themselves. "I don't want to be on a personal level with the victims."

In recent weeks, that's become nearly impossible. The dead may have been anonymous at the Flight 427 crash site, but NTSB officials had to stare into the victims' faces, literally, at a public hearing in Pittsburgh, where 150 relatives and friends placed photographs in empty chairs or pinned snapshots of the deceased on their dresses or suits. At this month's hearings on the crash of an American Eagle commuter plane, family members went to the soybean field near Roselawn, Ind., and retrieved human bones to show to officials.

Such macabre displays are unprecedented at safety board hearings, which typically resemble engineering conferences as experts dissect, millimeter by millimeter, yaw dampers and servo valves. Catharsis isn't on the agenda. The Occurrence' Jan. 23-27, 1995: In testimony at the downtown Pittsburgh Hilton, experts from the NTSB, FAA, Boeing and USAir sanitize the disaster by referring to it as "the occurrence" or "the upset." Family members listen, but aren't invited to testify. Outside the grand ballroom, to the grim delight of the media, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters reopen fresh wounds.

The newly formed Flight 427 Air Disaster Support League issues a statement criticizing USAir's disaster planning. The words GREAT EMOTIONAL DISTRESS are boldfaced and centered on the first page. People tell of waiting seven hours for confirmation of a passenger's name on the Flight 427 manifest, and of ticket agents being pressed into service as crisis counselors.

They speak of "empowerment" for the victims. They urge the appointment of a federal advocate to help relatives through a crash aftermath. They persuade Jim Hall, the folksy new chairman of the NTSB, to grant them a private question-and-answer session. It's never happened before in the 28-year history of the agency.

At one news conference, a balding man with weather-rugged hands stands shyly off to the side, avoiding the TV cameras, uncomfortable in a pin-striped suit. His tie tack is a gold spud wrench. He gives his name as John Kretz, age 43, from Munhall, Pa. He reluctantly leans forward to display the snapshot pinned to his lapel. "It was taken here in the same ballroom, at the ironworkers' annual banquet, not that long ago," he says. It shows him with his arm around a sandy-haired, attractive, smiling woman.

"My wife," he mumbles, touching the photograph. "Janet." The Boeing 737

"The rudder guy," they call Greg Phillips, a 41-year-old aerospace engineer, pilot and father of two from Waldorf, Md. Like most NTSB technocrats, Phillips is cautious, deliberate, not prone to emotional displays. But this crash is different -- expectations and frustrations have been ratcheted to the breaking point. There are 2,600 Boeing 737s in service; they're the workhorse of many fleets.

"This affects more passengers, more people's lives, than any other airplane," Phillips says. Although months away from drafting a report, he and other investigators suspect the Pittsburgh disaster resulted from a defect in the 737's rudder control system, probably compounded by a pileup of other freak circumstances. But they're crippled by a lack of data about the flight's final moments.

The information is missing because USAir and other domestic airlines rely on outmoded flight data recording equipment. One direct result of the Pittsburgh crash is an "urgent" NTSB recommendation that the FAA require manufacturers and airlines to upgrade to digital recorders, which measure far more "parameters" explaining how an aircraft was operating. Boeing currently makes planes for British Airways with recorders that can measure up to 150 parameters; Flight 427's measured 11.

The FAA is now crunching numbers, working up the required "cost-benefit ratios" and "risk analysis" reports, to determine whether the cost of the safety board's proposal is worth the lives it might save. Retrofitting an old plane could cost up to $70,000. For ease of calculation, the government values a human life at roughly $2.6 million.

In many crashes, the final words of the pilots, retained on cockpit voice recordings, point investigators in the right direction. The Flight 427 tapes only deepen the mystery. Chief investigator Haueter enlisted 16 pilots to listen to the odd clicks and thumps on the tape while re-creating the flight's final moments in a Boeing simulator. Each pilot replayed the tape four times. The result: "A lot of personal opinions, but no more data," Haueter says.

All the investigators really know after six months of grinding work -- including one of the most extensive reconstructions of airplane debris in history -- is that they do not know.

The same deep frustration followed the mysterious 1991 crash of a United Airlines flight to Colorado Springs in which 25 people died. It too was a Boeing 737; it too rolled and pitched suddenly to earth; it too had an old flight recorder. Lacking evidence, the NTSB could not find a "probable cause" -- a first in the board's history and a professional embarrassment.

Phillips worked on that case too. He's possessed with finding similarities to Pittsburgh, and is trying to compare the meager data from both crashes and extrapolate scenarios. Some investigators believe that Pittsburgh could have been prevented, if only they had known the cause in Colorado.

"There's a responsibility felt by all the people involved in this," says Phillips. "Some people take it to the point that they physically feel bad. I've sat and watched one of the guys in my group at breakfast wringing his hands, saying, We've got to find it out, we've got to know. We can't not know on this one.' They feel like we let everyone down on Colorado Springs by saying we didn't know." Shards of Pain

A light snow is falling on the fields and forests of Hopewell, a hamlet on the flight path to the Pittsburgh airport. John Kretz has been to this spot 20 or 25 times now; he's lost count. "On days when I was really upset I just drove here and sat on the hillside for hours," he says. "It calmed me down. Things build up and you just want to run."

On this late January day he is moving through the trees with two Los Angeles attorneys, showing them the impact crater and occasionally finding a piece of wiring or insulation that fell from the maples and oaks when they lost their leaves. "I was up here last Friday, it had rained all week, there was stuff everywhere," he says.

Kretz has deep brown, deerlike eyes that moisten whenever he mentions his wife's name. He met Janet Stamos seven years ago in a neighborhood bar; both were divorced. He drank rum and Cokes, she drank screwdrivers. John was a partyer, but he mellowed in her comfortable company. They shared camping trips and hockey games. Their friendship became a marriage four years ago.

As an ironworker, Kretz erected the skeletons of some of Pittsburgh's tallest buildings. It's a dangerous job, but he never minded; that's part of the rush, being up there 17 stories, walking the iron. Janet, three years younger, worked as a bank officer, handling corporate transactions behind a desk.

"It was a business trip to Chicago for her bank," Kretz recalls. "She was going to look at some new computer system or something. It was a one-day thing. She was going out in the morning, coming back in the evening."

This is hard. Already tears are welling behind his photo-gray aviator glasses. He cuts it off, clambers up the hillside to be alone. Other mourners have put flowerpots and wreaths up there.

He seems to be searching for something near the overturned plastic pot where he's spent so many hours sitting and staring into the dark forest. After a moment he tosses a scrap of metal down to the lawyers standing on the gravel access road.

Jagged and twisted, it is a two-inch hunk of aluminum with an unmistakable row of rivets. It is a piece of the fuselage from Flight 427. A piece of pain.

Kretz doesn't want to keep it.

Is he angry? At USAir, at Boeing, at God?

"I don't see any sense in feeling angry," he says, adjusting his glasses. "Who do you direct it at? There's nothing you can do about it. It's a helpless feeling more than anything. It's final. There's nothing you can do to change it, there's nothing you can say."

No answers, no reasons. Just emptiness.

Share this articleShare

"I spent a long time finding her," Kretz says, his voice catching on her. "Then I finally find her, and I think I'll be spending the rest of my life with her, and she's gone."

When Kretz was young, his sister died of leukemia. She was only 13. At least somebody could explain why, though. "It was natural," says Kretz. "This wasn't natural."

A sound descends from the dull winter sky. It's a jet on initial approach. The sound is muffled, faraway, like the low roar of a furnace firing up. A Freak Accident? The Boeing 737 has a 28-year service history, some 65 million flight hours. By now, its operations manual is a worn-out book; engineers know its every design characteristic, every weak point. "This airplane is very, very basic," says Greg Phillips.

"All your reason and logic tell you this has to be something way outside the normal bounds of how this airplane operates. That's why we're into considering multiple failures, dynamic scenarios, where one failure plays into another thing that's a freak occurrence. Just to do that, you have to invent things that don't make sense."

Many people offer help. There's the local who was out hunting snakes that night and swears he saw the plane levitate in midair like a UFO; then the door opened and the craft exploded. Psychics have been phoning in regularly. Pilots, passengers and other folks have sent Tom Haueter hundreds of letters. In 11 years, through the dozens of high-profile crashes he's investigated (including the ones that killed former senator John Tower and Sen. John Heinz), this has never happened before.

A panicked flier recently got through the switchboard to Haueter. The man said that if he arrived at the airport and discovered the plane was a 737, he wouldn't board.

"What's your recommendation?" he asked.

An investigator isn't supposed to share such judgments with the public, so Haueter tried to reassure the caller with statistics. "It's the most reliable airplane in the fleet," he told him.

Haueter and Phillips, both engineers with Midwestern roots, have kicked tin together around the world: India, Norway, Panama. (The NTSB helps to investigate crashes of U.S.-built aircraft no matter where they come down.) Both came to the safety board after working for major aircraft manufacturers and say the job provides more challenge and adventure than any other in aviation. Both love to fly -- they soloed as soon as they were legally able, at age 16.

They share this quote: "The most dangerous part about flying is driving to the airport."

As a hobby, Haueter pilots a 1943 Stearman biplane, a Navy trainer he rebuilt from scratch. It has an open cockpit. "For relaxation after a stressful day at work, I do takeoffs and landings," he says.

Haueter doesn't wear a parachute. Unless he's practicing his aerobatics -- daredevil rolls, loops, spins.

Phillips is a daredevil too. When he worked for Cessna, he was an aerobatics flight instructor. He taught pilots the art of controlling a plane just as it appears to be pitching into a tailspin. The Invisible Line During the week of hearings in Pittsburgh, the NTSB investigators noticed a cold distance between themselves and the family members. They were staying in the same hotel, often riding back to their rooms on the same elevators, getting off at the same floors, yet they never spoke.

Tom Haueter, Greg Phillips and Cindy Keegan began to wish that someone from a family would just introduce himself. They'd been sitting at the front of the ballroom for days, asking questions, discussing the data. Certainly by now they were recognizable. Instead, in the elevators and the hallways, the relatives of the dead just stared at the floor. And so did the investigators. Nobody wanted to cross that line. Rain of Terror The NTSB team tries to get every piece, but this time the fragmentation was so severe, so widespread. The 53-ton plane splintered like a glass hurled to the kitchen floor in anger. Shards will always turn up in unexpected places later.

"That first morning I kept wondering where the huge fuselage was," says Keegan, who was in charge of the wreckage reconstruction. "There was none." The plane became hundreds of thousands of pieces. It was worse than Pan Am Flight 103, blown up in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland, experts from England later told her.

Keegan, an engineer and aircraft mechanic, worked for weeks to reassemble the wreckage on the floor of USAir Hangar A1. The safety board drafted 140 volunteers to help search the flight path. They walked in each direction 300 feet, over steep terrain. They used Bureau of Mines radar equipment and dug down eight feet. Trees had to be felled to recover airplane pieces -- and body parts. They were full of what used to be people. "Surreal," is how Keegan describes it.

For the go-team, tagging the wreckage was the most grisly job. Nearly every piece of the airplane was mixed with human remains. What looked like pale yellow cabin insulation turned out to be fatty tissue. Indistinguishable.

Emergency rescue crews and workers from the Beaver County coroner's office tagged and collected the thousands of body parts. They ran out of regulation red flags to mark where each was found. They had to use sewer-marker flags donated by the gas company. Ultimately the coroner sent out two "cadaver dogs" to sniff the ground for three days, a final sweep.

Everyone knew that identification would be difficult. Only two torsos were found among the remains of the 125 passengers and seven crew members. Keegan recalls digging into a hill alongside a coroner's official when he pulled out a hand with a ring on its finger. "Good, we can ID this one," he said.

The moment has stayed with Keegan for six months. She's had nightmares about body parts. She's thought about her husband's ring. The ring David wore the day he died. Why God Allows It

People often ask the Rev. George Donnelly, a Methodist minister, why God allows horrible tragedies to befall innocent human beings. A mental health therapist, Donnelly has helped to counsel the families of those who died on Flight 427.

He tells them, "I could never believe that anything this destructive could ever be God's will -- that God is arbitrary, that we're simply puppets, and for amusement, we die. I'm sorry, that's just incomprehensible."

The Creator, in fact, must feel "anguish" over such loss of life, says Donnelly. But God doesn't really get involved on a personal level. Bad things happen to atheists and to people of great faith. "Biblically, we recognize that it rains on the just and unjust," he says.

Donnelly also ministers to victims of violent crime. He offers the same comfort to the parents of a kid cut down in a drive-by shooting as he does to someone whose wife died in a plane crash. The dead have found peace, instantly, Donnelly says. They are with God.

The living must make their peace in other ways. Bombs and Lasers The official hearings bored John Kretz. He found more interesting theories about the crash among the people who gathered in the Hilton's bar. People who shared his grief and his suspicions.

By early February, Kretz was laid off. He decided his new work somehow had to involve Flight 427. In a few weeks, he went from being one of the 100 members of the Air Disaster Support League to taking over as executive director. "We've got to push air safety, because if we don't, nobody else will," Kretz began telling journalists.

The job made things easier. He could say his wife's name without being a few syllables from tears. "This brings meaning to Janet's death," he said.

Kretz has befriended a legendary pilot, Capt. H.G. "Hoot" Gibson, who is a veteran of airline mysteries. Gibson, who now lives in Costa Rica, came to talk to the Pittsburgh families about the harrowing night in 1979 when his TWA Boeing 727 inexplicably plunged six miles straight down over Michigan.

One of the few commercial pilots ever to survive the death spiral, Gibson and his crew evidently saved the lives of 82 passengers by deploying the plane's landing gear at 5,000 feet, regaining control and landing safely in Detroit. The captain became convinced that the rudder system went haywire while on autopilot.

"Flight control defects in the Boeing 727 and Boeing 737 have been carefully covered up for more than 17 years," says a brief that Gibson filed recently in federal court in Washington and has circulated to families. Gibson has been filing suits against the NTSB since the early 1980s, when investigators declared that he and his crew, in a reckless effort to increase cruising speed, precipitated the plunge.

NTSB officials dismiss Hoot Gibson as a crank. They say there's no similarity between the Boeing 727 and Boeing 737 rudder systems. And no connection to the malfunctions suspected in the Pittsburgh and Colorado crashes. But Kretz and other league members consider Gibson a hero.

"It's a snow job," Dennis Dickson says of the official investigation of Flight 427. Dickson is 41, a beer distributor; he lost his wife, Karen, who was his high school sweetheart, the mother of his two kids. "I also think there's more involved here than a faulty rudder system."

Like what?

"Look, the CIA has this laser beam," he says one night over drinks with Kretz. It can blast a plane right from the sky, according to Dickson, who also believes that the plane fell from 1,000 feet, not 6,000.

And another thing: "My brother-in-law was talking to this USAir pilot who says there were two chemical bombs used to take out a federal witness on that plane."

No way, says the FBI. There was a federally protected drug-case witness on Flight 427, but agents and other experts testified at the hearings that there was absolutely no evidence of conspiracy, terrorism or a bomb on board.

"Supposedly," insists Dickson, "it's a coverup bigger than JFK. And it goes the whole way to the White House."

Of course, this is completely plausible. When nothing makes sense, anything can. More Rumors

According to the rumors, USAir was withholding passengers' belongings. Dumpsters full of stuff. And it was all out at the airport, in a hangar, along with the rest of the wreckage. We have to get it, the families decided.

"This legend of dumpsters full of stuff is not true," said USAir spokesman Paul Turk. Anything of value that the airline had -- key rings, necklaces, a coin purse, broken watches -- would fit in a briefcase, he said.

Most family members had received either body parts for burial or personal effects. Kretz got back Janet's three rings and some of her remains. But others wanted to see more. The wreckage in the hangar. Photos from the coroner's office. Dumpsters.

The safety board started getting angry and anguished calls. Chairman Jim Hall, a political appointee and friend of Vice President Gore's, had already put out the word that the agency should do whatever it could to help the families. "What we have to do is put ourselves almost in the role of a loved one who lost somebody," Hall said.

In fact, there was a 20-foot-long construction refuse bin outside the USAir hangar. It held what Keegan calls "non-structural pieces," things that had no bearing on the investigation. Seat cushions, magazines, clothing, pieces of luggage and briefcases, maybe some pens or belt buckles. They were scooped up along with hunks of trees and dirt. The body parts had been removed, but it was still a mess.

We want to go through it, Kretz and the others decided. Keegan flew to Pittsburgh to help. She understood. This time, she was on a personal level with the victims. Personal Effects March 6: On a cold concrete hangar floor, they shovel mud and pick through debris for six hours. They scrutinize bloody rags, remnants of purses and suitcases. Anything is valuable -- a connection to those final moments.

Twenty volunteers -- from the pilots' union, the mechanics' union, USAir, the NTSB -- supply the muscle. Kretz directs the backhoe. Keegan helps to inventory mismatched shoes. A safety board official breaks down and cries when he sees a child's size 4, his daughter's size.

The sweet smell is gone. It's more earth and wood and mold now, the smell of a damp basement. The smell of a grave.

Dennis Dickson finds half a briefcase, badly charred. Inside are his wife's business cards.

Another league member finds the luggage tag for her brother-in-law's suitcase. "It means so much," she says. Her sister got nothing back, not even a body part.

The muck yields a hairbrush, a camera, a Tom Clancy paperback. Kretz thought he might see Janet's purse or wallet, but he didn't. And nobody found the missing diamond from the ring he'd bought her one Christmas.

But it was all right; he had done a good day's work as executive director. He wrote a list of what they salvaged, took photos and videos. Next he'd be helping to return it. Then planning a visit for families who wanted to come to the hangar and see the wreckage, painstakingly arranged in the shape of the doomed plane.

"I have to treat this as a job," Kretz says. Through the Wreckage When it was over, Cindy Keegan did something that wasn't part of her job. She walked Kretz through the wreckage. She explained how she examined the rudder cables and found no evidence that they had snapped or snagged. She patiently described this or that mechanism. He could see where Seat 11-B once was, where Janet died.

On her sweater, Keegan pinned a button that all the Flight 427 families wear, a tree enveloped by a rainbow. Kretz hugged her.

Standing near the plane's tail section, Keegan looked at his snapshots of Janet -- in his loose embrace at the ironworkers' banquet, posing girlishly at Niagara Falls, walking on a beach at sunset. Pictures of love and marriage. Of life.

She understood. Five years ago, Keegan's husband, David, was driving his car and hit a patch of black ice near Park City, Utah, where the couple had just moved. The car mounted the highway median and slammed into a bridge pillar.

David Keegan was 35, an airline first officer. He flew for Delta.

When Keegan went to the funeral home, she asked to see his wedding band. She just had to be sure that she would find their initials inside. The Search for Answers In Washington, the investigators gather again to discuss what they've learned so far. The data on Flight 427, as elusive as it is, can be processed. Parts of metal can be microscopically examined. Eventually all theories will be ruled out, except one. Eventually, they believe, the scientific method will provide an answer.

But the human parameters, those are always unknowable. Nobody expected the families to react this way. "Because of the closed caskets, it was real tough for them," Tom Haueter says.

"We want closure, just like the families," Greg Phillips says. "You want it finished."

Usually, Phillips doesn't notice the people with him on planes. But the other day, flying back to Washington on a USAir 737 after doing some tests in Tampa, he glanced up from his magazine and took a good long look at the living, breathing people surrounding him. The moms and dads, the boys playing their Nintendos, about the same age as his kids.

"It could be anybody," Cindy Keegan says. "You realize that."

Phillips: "When you walk on that airplane, you cede control. The minute they close that door, your control is gone. You're part of that machine." In Memoriam USAir thought it was doing the right thing when it erected a monument to the Flight 427 crash victims. It selected a quiet wooded setting in a cemetery near the airport. Forty caskets were buried there. They contained remains the coroners never were able to identify.

The memorial lists the 132 names of the dead. The inscription is simple: "In loving memory of our family members and friends interred here who died September 8, 1994."

Entirely inappropriate, Kretz and others decided. The monument doesn't mention an airplane crash. It conveniently excludes the name of the airline. "Years from now, people will see that marker and not even know why it's there," says Kretz. "It's meaningless."

USAir says it will change the inscription. The airline understands why the families would wish to see an explanation carved in stone. CAPTION:Top, John Kretz surveys parts of the plane on which his wife, Janet Stamos, above, and 131 others died. He now spends his time working for the support group for victims' families. CAPTION: National Transportation Safety Board investigator Greg Phillips with a flight recorder from a different plane crash. Right, the scattered shards at the crash site near Pittsburgh last September. CAPTION: In a hangar filled with wreckage from Flight 427, John Kretz shows NTSB investigator Cindy Keegan pictures of his wife, who was killed in the crash. CAPTION: Firemen douse flames from the wreckage of Flight 427 after its crash near Pittsburgh last September. CAPTION: NTSB investigator Tom Haueter with debris form another crash: The 737 "is the most reliable airplane in the fleet."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5nnJ6zpr%2FTsqOeZ2FuhnZ7j2xmbGhfqbWmecWrmKCllaPBtHnOn2SfpJmctbV5k2tuaGiSZYB1r49uZG5wkWZ6dYWQa2SbmpJoeqaAknFrnp1gan%2Bmg44%3D