He got a degree in aeronautical engineering from Purdue University and then worked as an engineer and consultant for a string of aviation and energy companies. When one eliminated his job in 1984 and offered him a less desirable position, Haueter decided to find something more stable. He took a job at the NTSB reviewing safety recommendations. He was not enthusiastic about being a government bureaucrat, however, and figured he would bail out as soon as something better came along.
Instead, he grew to love the job. He got promoted to accident investigator and enjoyed being a “tin kicker,” picking through wreckage of a plane to find what caused the crash. The job got him out the office and gave him a chance to climb mountains, ride in helicopters, and see the world. He also got to put his curiosity to work solving mysteries, figuring out how things worked—or why they didn’t.
He discovered that the NTSB was surprisingly powerful. His recommendations to the FAA actually got results. He could look proudly at certain airplanes and know they were safer because of his work. The propeller system in Embraer 120 commuter planes was improved after his investigation found a flaw that caused the 1991 crash that killed Senator John Tower. The landing gear on thousands of Piper airplanes was fixed because Haueter discovered that a crucial bolt was prone to crack.
Seeing those changes was the reward of working for the safety board that didn’t show up in any paycheck. Every day Haueter could wake up and muse about how many lives he had saved that day.
He was a closet Trekkie. He didn’t dress up like a Klingon or hide a phaser in his underwear drawer, but he enjoyed the way Star Trek explored issues like race relations and the hazards of technology. He liked how everyone on the spaceship worked together. The people in the NTSB could learn a thing or two from the crew of the Enterprise.
Haueter met his wife, Trisha Dedik, in a carpool. They both lived in Great Falls, Virginia, and commuted thirty minutes to the concrete valley of federal buildings along Independence Avenue in Washington. Dedik, who had been divorced for a few years, liked the fact that Haueter could put aside his career to have fun on weekends. He wasn’t married to his job like so many Washington men. They began dating in 1988 and were married in 1993.
Dedik also had a fast-lane government job, as director of export controls and nonproliferation for the U.S. Department of Energy. That meant she was in charge of The List, the countries that were allowed to get nuclear fuel and technology to make bombs. As she put it, her job was “to make sure the Husseins of the world can’t get their hands on nuclear weapons.” Haueter and Dedik weren’t Washington celebrities, but they both had unsung government jobs that made the world safer. Haueter’s work led to better airplanes. Dedik’s kept the world from getting nuked.
As one of the rotating Go Team leaders, Haueter had grown accustomed to wearing a pager, carrying a cellular phone, and being called at home in the middle of the night. His Go Bag was perpetually packed with the tools of an accident investigator—an NTSB baseball cap, a first aid kit, gloves, and government forms. An avid juggler, he often took along a set of juggling balls to relieve his stress—although he forgot to pack them for this trip.
Haueter was a mechanical wizard who loved solving mysteries big and small. On one of his early dates with Dedik, he waited in her kitchen as she was upstairs getting ready. When she came down, her kitchen faucet was lying in pieces in the sink and Haueter was examining the inner workings.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I just wanted to figure out how it worked,” Haueter said.
He could build or fix practically anything. He built the interior walls in his basement and transformed a bare patch of concrete into a fancy bathroom. He often overbuilt, using an extra two-by-four when one would suffice. “Don’t give him a project you ever want to take apart,” Dedik said.
When he bought a vintage Stearman biplane in 1984, it arrived as a pile of rubble. For six years, he painstakingly reassembled the plane, replacing the rotten wing spars, covering the wings and fuselage with fabric and stitching it together with a special needle and thread. The result was a spectacular aircraft that he took for weekend hops around the Virginia countryside.
His bosses considered him one of their best investigators. He was a smart engineer who understood an airplane’s complex systems, a cautious detective who did not jump to conclusions, and a good manager who could deal with the egos involved in a big investigation. “If two 747s collide over New York,” said Schleede, “Tom can do it.” The only complaint that the top NTSB officials had about Haueter was that he could sometimes be too nice. He needed “to bare his teeth a little more,” Schleede said.
Haueter was forty-two but still showed a trace of the gawky teenager in the photograph of his first solo. His boyish looks and friendly demeanor occasionally made people question whether he was in charge. A Continental Airlines pilot once balked at Haueter’s request to ship a flight recorder, even after he flashed his NTSB badge. At crash sites, Haueter often wore a shirt and tie so people would realize that he was in charge—in contrast to other investigators, who wore their NTSB jumpsuits.
The problem had bugged Haueter for years. He felt the old tough-guy approach of running an investigation wasn’t effective anymore. You had to be open to suggestions and new ideas. Employees needed to feel free to express their thoughts. Yet he occasionally felt out of step at the safety board, which had the macho air of a men’s locker room. Any guy who was prone to use “Holy mackerel!” as an expletive had to prove himself.
By the time Haueter and the FAA were ready to dispatch investigators to Pittsburgh, the last airline flights had already departed. The pilots of the FAA’s Gulfstream jet, which was frequently used by the safety board, had run out of flying time for the day and needed a mandatory night of rest. So the NTSB and FAA officials agreed to wait until early the next morning.
Haueter got about two hours of sleep, scarfed down a granola bar and a glass of orange juice, and then drove his old VW station wagon to Hangar 6 at Washington National Airport, where the FAA and the Coast Guard kept their planes. As the team members from the FAA and the NTSB began arriving in the hangar lounge, Haueter could see that he was going to have more people than the plane had seats. He asked Ed Kittel, the FAA’s bomb expert, if he would take a commercial flight. Kittel agreed, and everyone else piled their stuff in the plane and climbed inside.
The passengers included NTSB chairman Carl Vogt, one of the five political appointees who ran the agency and voted on the probable cause of each accident. The board members took turns on Go Team rotation and led the nightly press briefings at crash sites.
Also on board was Greg Phillips, a frizzy-haired engineer. No one at the NTSB knew more about 737s than Phillips. He had worked with Haueter on a Copa Airlines 737 crash in Panama in 1992 and had spent months analyzing the rudder system of one that crashed in Colorado Springs in 1991. He had kept close tabs on 737 problems ever since. He maintained a list of suspicious incidents in his file drawer, like a detective tracking a killer.
As the FAA jet rumbled through the sky toward Pittsburgh, Haueter and several other Go Team members sat at a conference table in the back and discussed what they knew about the crash. Haueter flipped through the NTSB’s report on the Colorado Springs accident and read the board’s previous safety recommendations for the 737. He told Vogt about the problems making arrangements in Pittsburgh and the difficulty getting rooms from USAir.
“Carl, when we get there it will be complete chaos,” Haueter said. “But don’t assume I’m fucking up on the first day. It will get better.”