The New York Review of Books

Second, it cannot be the case that the pilot, distracted by a meal or a book or a conversation or an extraordinary cloud formation, simply “forgot” that he was in the midst of a climb or that he was passing though one of the busiest corridors in the world. The voice of this pilot, both before the blackout and once his radio returns, is professional, crisp, quick: he consistently responds to each air controller’s call a split second after he receives it, and often recites back the information in the precise order in which it has been given. One Swissair official has said that of 450 pilots who fly the MD-11, this particular pilot was considered one of the top five.³⁹ Captain Urs Zimmermann’s professional reputation and voice signature alone should persuade us that he was incapable of “neglecting” air traffic communication. But if more evidence is needed, there is the MD-11’s sophisticated data recorder which registers whenever a pilot attempts to key into the communication system: it shows that during the thirteen-minute blackout, the pilots of Swissair 111 made repeated attempts to initiate radio contact.⁴⁰

Third, it cannot be the case that either United States or Swiss flight procedures permit such a blackout to pass with a complacent shrug or a bemused scratch of the head. In 1990, the US House of Representatives held a hearing on Pilot/Air Traffic Controllers Communication Issues. The hearings enumerated twelve kinds of communication error and the potentially fatal consequences of even the most seemingly minor of them (such as two people attempting to speak at the same time for several seconds). The twelve kinds of problem had earlier been outlined by a 1988 aviation industry report entitled A Call to Action. Included are such problems as an air controller using an abbreviation that could stand for two different planes; a pilot’s accent making it hard for the air controller to determine whether he has accurately understood the instruction; and a “blocked” line occurring when one pilot attempts to use a frequency shared with other pilots, one of whom is at that moment already speaking. At several points the report specifies with alarm the duration of a given problem, and it is never close to Swissair 111’s thirteen-minute blackout: frequency blockage “for several minutes” is cited as though a self-evidently alarming situation; a “stuck mike”⁴¹ that lasted for “five minutes” is a second example; radio contact lost for twenty miles (two or three minutes in a commercial plane) is a third example. If several minutes or two minutes or five minutes of lost communication requires an industry “call to action” and hearings before the House of Representatives, how can a thirteen-minute gap be considered a problem too minor even to mention in the press in the United States? How can it be too minor to mention when it—unlike the shorter communication blackouts cited in the congressional hearings—was prelude to a fatal plane crash?

3.

TWA 800 and Swissair 111, then, share at least five features: (1) a grave electrical accident, (2) a so far indecipherable cause, (3) a takeoff from the same airport and a route across the same geography, (4) a takeoff on the same minute of the day and day of the week, and (5) the malfunctioning of its radios beginning at almost the same time (somewhere in the three-minute interval between 8:31 and 8:34).⁴²

Should these five features be seen as extraneous, a set of interesting but ultimately insignificant coincidences? Or are they instead features that together expose the cause of the accidents? Either answer could be correct. The only way to learn which is accurate is to investigate the second possibility with the greatest possible rigor and speed. Has the United States investigative team (the American researchers who are assisting the primarily Canadian investigation) under-taken to reconstruct the external environment through which Swissair 111 flew? There is, to date, no public sign of any such reconstruction. If United States investigators wait until every possible internal cause has been explored before they begin to look at the external possibilities, will it be possible to construct an accurate and complete record of that external environment? The memories of air control-lers, pilots in the area, and seamen are clearer today than they will be in two years: their assistance in reconstructing the external environment should therefore be sought today, not two years from today. External explanations need to be pursued for exactly the same reasons that internal explanations are already being urgently pursued: because there is an absolute need to know the cause of these two isolated catastrophes and because there is an absolute need to prevent other planes from crashing.

From what we know about the external environment, a sixth feature shared by TWA 800 and Swissair 111 begins to come into view. The two planes attempted to make their flights on an evening when military craft were in the air or sea below. The route from JFK International Airport east along the southern coast of Long Island and north past the New England shoreline requires any plane on its way to northern Europe to thread its way through a ribbon of air that is skirted on one side or the other by military warning zones. The boundaries of each zone are marked on aviation maps and labeled with the letter “W” followed by a number.⁴³ Where the map has room, a printed sentence appears inside the zone: “Warning: National Defense Operations Area, Operations hazardous to the flight of aircraft conducted within this area.”⁴⁴

Such military warning zones are, of course, often unused by the military, and during such unused periods can be entered by civilian flights. But the record of scheduled military exercises shows plans for air and sea activities in the week during which Swissair 111 attempted its flight, just as the equivalent record from two years earlier shows planned exercises during the week of TWA 800’s flight. ⁴⁵ This may be why Swissair 111, like TWA 800 earlier, had been directed onto the Bette route in traveling east out of New York, for this route is assigned when the military exercise zones south and southeast of Long Island, called W-105 and W-106, are in use by the military.⁴⁶

The list of ships and planes in the external environment (along with the already-known location of all ground transmitters) needs to be reconstructed swiftly and accurately by those who have both the authority and obligation to carry out this task, the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board, and not by isolated citizens working through Freedom of Information inquiries. The Freedom of Information procedure is an inspired United States invention, but it allows only a piecemeal picture to come into place, and that only over many slow months. At present, however, Freedom of Information inquiries appear to be the only path of reconstruction available to us; so let us look at what they let us know about the September 2-September 3, 1998, period.

In or near the warning areas skirting the Swissair 111 flight were three submarines: USS Connecticut (SSN-22), USS Dallas (SSN-700), and USS Billfish (SSN-676). The commander of Submarine Group Two from the Naval Submarine Base in New London, whose office provided the names of the submarines, states that these craft were each acting in isolation and not in exercises with other craft and therefore “will not assist you in your stated goal of discovering ‘which exercises took place.’”⁴⁷ But at issue here is not armed exercises; at issue instead are electromagnetic transmissions (or any related phenomena such as radar decoys, or chaff): all communications between the submarines and both fixed and mobile transmitters need to be scrutinized, including, for example, the two-million-watt submarine transmitter at Corbett, Maine. Whether any submarine transmitters were close to the plane, and, if so, whether their signals were strong enough to adversely affect the plane are among the many questions that need to be answered.

Potentially important to the inquiry is the record of flights by the Navy P3 planes, which are stationed at Brunswick, Maine. On the earlier night when TWA 800 fell, a P3 had crossed the plane’s path fifteen seconds before TWA 800 lost its transponder, voice recorder, and data recorder. (The P3 itself, though it had a safe flight, reported on its return that it lost the use of various pieces of electrical equipment during the flight.) The record for the evening on which Swissair 111 flew has some similarity. According to written documents provided by the Commander Naval Air Forces, Atlantic Fleet, three P3s were in flight during the hour and fifteen minutes when Swissair 111 made its way east along Long Island and north along the New England coast.⁴⁸ Two of the three were from Patrol Squadron 26, a squadron called the Tridents (named after the three-pronged spear used by the sea god Neptune). The Navy P3 that flew within one mile of TWA 800 was also from Patrol Squadron 26.⁴⁹

The third P3 in the air on the night of Swissair 111’s passage was a P3 from Patrol Squadron 10, the Red Lancers, whose insignia is a pair of lightning bolts.⁵⁰ This type of P3 carries more high-powered transmitters than the Squadron 26 planes, and may be closer to an EP-3 or electronic warfare plane.⁵¹ (Its surveillance capacities were widely described during the Kosovo conflict: each time we heard that our planes could identify a plane sitting on the ground from an altitude of 27,000 feet, identify a bicycle leaning against a wall from 20,000 feet, and differentiate species of grass from 10,000 feet, it was Red Lancer P-3s from Squadron 10 in Brunswick, Maine, that were being described.⁵² )

The relation between the P3s from Squadron 26 and the P3s from Squadron 10 is perhaps illuminated by an incident that occurred on the afternoon of the day Swissair 111 attempted its evening flight. A regular P3 from Squadron 26 flying in military exercise zone W-104 (off the coast of Massachusetts) reports in its mission statement that it had to leave the exercise area one half hour earlier than planned because of the presence of a P3 from Squadron 10 (the warning zone covers hundreds of square miles so it is unclear why it could not accommodate two P3s). The pilot’s mission statement does not explain why the presence of the Red Lancer plane necessitated his own departure, but he does report that his plane “lost” its UHF and VHF radios, as well as an instrument that informs the crew when they are positioned over a particular sonobuoy. How it lost its two radios and its On Top Position Indicator (OTPI), and whether that loss is connected to its having operated near the P3 from Squadron 10, are matters that need to be clarified. It is, of course, the three P3s that were flying at the same time as Swissair 111, rather than these flights that took place a few hours earlier, that are of primary importance.