Air Disasters: Dramatic black box flight recordings. Malcolm MacPherson

thirteen-or fourteen-year-old kid—and I said, ‘Is anybody at home? Is anybody in the house?’ and he said he didn’t know, so I thought, ‘Okay, the next thing to do is to go into the house, because the aeroplane was too hot, there was too much fire and I wasn’t going to go inside the aeroplane.’

      I’m talking to that young kid in front of the house and I thought, ‘Well, if anybody’s home, we need to see about them.’ So I went to the front door and just as I was running to the front door, a passenger crawled out of the wreckage who said, ‘Somebody’s in the garage.’

      I thought, ‘Well, there are people home. There is somebody there who needs help!’ There were cars within the wreckage, from the driveway, so I went to open up the front door and I thought, because it was locked, there’s probably nobody home. So I kicked in the front door and just looked to the left a little bit and the captain followed me in and I think the young boy from the neighbourhood followed me in. There didn’t appear to be any damage to the left inside of the house.

      Then I looked right and I saw the living area or the dining room area with a set table. I remember seeing the [place] mats on the table, and then I looked and I saw the door that [opened onto] the garage. It was actually just a carport, and it opened to the inside and then there was a [storm] door, and [the door] opened to the outside. I couldn’t open up that door because of the debris within the garage area and—so then I just busted out the glass of the door.

      And then I heard a voice [in the carport], and then I started just speaking with the guy, yelling to him. He was yelling, ‘Help me! I can’t breathe.’ And I was yelling back to him, ‘Cover your mouth if you have anything to cover your mouth with, and breathe through that’, and he was yelling back, ‘I don’t have anything to cover my mouth with.’ I couldn’t see him because the smoke was very heavy.

      It was kind of—it was a greyish smell of, like, plastic burning, just very heavy. I couldn’t even breathe it in, and I was getting good air [from inside the house] with that bad air [in the carport], and I found it difficult to breathe.

      There was so much debris, and I remember one of the main-wheel tyres was standing right there next to the house, just within the debris, and I couldn’t see the guy. I couldn’t really make out anything in that area, and I yelled for him to cover his mouth if he had anything to cover his mouth with, and he said he didn’t, and then I shouted for him to stay calm, try to relax, breathe slowly, just to stay calm, that help was on its way. At that point I heard the fire trucks arriving. I said [to the man], ‘Somebody’s here to help.’

      I ran to tell [the rescuers] that somebody was in that carport area. The fire trucks couldn’t get in because we did crash in a residential neighbourhood, and [the aircraft had] sheared some telephone poles. [Another guy and I] moved the telephone poles so that [the fire trucks] could get out, or get back in to a closer area, and I told them that there was somebody [in the carport]. The gentleman did survive. He was a passenger.

      So the fire and the rescue trucks were arriving. [I] helped [the fire fighters] pull out some hose [from the fire trucks] and then was asked to get away. I was told, well, you know, ‘Your job’s done. Just get away.’

       PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, USA 8 September 1994

      USAir Flight 427, a Boeing 737-3B7, departed Chicago-O’Hare Airport for Pittsburgh at about 6.10 p.m. with two pilots, three flight attendants and 127 passengers. Flight 427 was approaching Pittsburgh for a landing on runway 28R when Pittsburgh air traffic control reported trafficin the area that Flight 427’s first officer confirmed by sight. The aircraft was levelling of at 6000 feet at a speed of 190 knots and rolling out of a 15 degree left turn with flaps at 1, with its gear still retracted and autopilot and auto throttle systems engaged, when the aircraft suddenly entered the wake vortex of a Delta Airlines Boeing 727 that preceded it by approximately 69 seconds and 4.2 miles. Over the next three seconds Flight 427 rolled left to an approximately 18 degree of bank. The autopilot initiated a roll back to the right as the aircraft went in and out of a wake vortex core, resulting in two loud ‘thumps’. But the first officer manually overrode the autopilot without disengaging it by making a large right-wheel turn. The aeroplane started rolling back to the right, but it never reached a wings-level attitude.