There was no legal requirement that an airline undertake this unpleasant task. After other sudden fatalities, such as car crashes or shootings, local police departments usually did the notification. They sent an officer or a chaplain to deliver the grim news in person. But when a plane crashed, one hundred to two hundred people were killed instantly, and only the airline readily knew their identities. With such an immediate need to inform so many people, it was impractical to alert police in the hometown of each victim. So it had become customary for airlines to deliver the news by phone.
It wasn’t fast enough, however. When you’re waiting to hear whether someone you love has died, any wait is too long. Television created unrealistic expectations. If the TV networks could cover crashes so quickly, it seemed reasonable to think that airlines could rapidly figure out who was on the plane.
But compiling a list of who actually boarded a plane was surprisingly hard. Many people made reservations and never showed up. Names got misspelled. First and last names got transposed. Long names got cut off by the limits of reservation computers. Babies didn’t need a ticket and often were not included on the passenger manifest. Occasionally people from other flights got on the wrong plane and didn’t realize it until they were in the air. There was an additional wrinkle: In 1994 the government had not yet begun requiring passengers to show photo ID, and people often traveled using someone else’s ticket.
Calls had already begun pouring in to USAir’s eleven reservation centers from friends and relatives who urgently wanted to know if their husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, or coworkers had been on Flight 427. The USAir agents could say if other flights had landed safely, but they had no information on 427. They could only promise to call back.
Ralph Miller, a USAir facilities manager and the office computer whiz, was in charge of the passenger list. It was his job to call the airline’s Pittsburgh situation room and the Chicago gate agents and go through the list person by person, comparing reservations with the actual tickets that had been collected at Gate F6 at O’Hare.
It was a slow process. The names weren’t alphabetized. Miller wasn’t sure if there were 125 or 126 passengers. There was confusion about five or six of them, including a two-year-old girl who was sitting with her mother and did not have a ticket. Several Department of Energy employees had been booked on later flights but were allowed to use their tickets on 427. The reservation and ticket totals didn’t match. Five or six people who turned in tickets at the gate were not on the reservation list. Another five or six were on the reservation list but had not turned in tickets. Names didn’t match. Joan’s credit card still had her maiden name, Lahart, so there was confusion about whether the person named on the card and Joan Van Bortel were two different people.
As Miller discussed the last few names for the list, he began to worry. Would he get the list right? Would he miss somebody? Would he put someone on the list who had not been on the plane?
Brett numbly walked outside to his car phone, intending to use it to keep calling the hotel and the airline. That would keep the house phone free in case USAir or Bob Henninger, the man Joan was meeting in Pittsburgh, called back. But as the night wore on, Brett became increasingly convinced that Joan had been on the plane.
When Henninger finally did call, Brett’s friend Craig Wheatley answered the phone. Henninger said he had gone to the Pittsburgh airport to meet Joan. At first, the flight was listed as fifteen minutes late. Then it was deleted from the TV monitors. When he went to the front counter, he was told that the plane had crashed.
Craig hung up the phone and came outside to tell Brett. He was a big burly guy who didn’t usually show emotions, but now he was shaking his head, crying.
He said, “I’m sorry, man.”
Brett just stood there, stunned. He felt like he was melting, like his shoulders could not bear the weight. At some point he wandered into his bedroom and lay on the bed on his stomach. He cried so hard that the tears streamed down his face and off his chin.
Brett’s parents, Bonnie and James Van Bortel, drove to his house and stayed with him as he kept dialing USAir on the car phone, trying to get confirmation that Joan was on the plane. It had been four hours since the crash, and the airline still couldn’t say if she had been killed.
“I need confirmation!” Brett told his mother.
“You know Joan would have gotten in touch with you if she was okay,” his mother said. “She’s gone.”
But Brett kept calling. When he finally got through, he screamed at the USAir employee, “Goddamn it! My wife is dead and you can’t tell me anything!”
“Hold on, please,” the USAir employee said.
Minutes went by. When the man finally came back on the line, he said, “We don’t have anything at this time. We’ll try and let you know as soon as possible.”
In the Next-of-Kin Room, the USAir managers crowded around the TV every time CNN issued a new bulletin about the crash.
JIM DEXTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: USAir Flight 427 from Chicago was just about to land in Pittsburgh before continuing on to West Palm Beach, Florida.
FIRST WITNESS: I looked up and I seen a plane. I didn’t hear any sound with it and it started nose-diving. And it seemed like it was going to pull up a little bit and it went on one side of its wing and it went straight down into the ground and blew up.
SECOND WITNESS: There was another couple with me and they said, “Oh my God, there’s a plane.” And we looked up and it looked like, you know, it was smoking and stuff and it just come down and exploded.
THIRD WITNESS: As soon as it went down I seen a big puff of smoke come up and like, sparks and fire.
DEXTER: The Boeing 737 went down seven miles from the Pittsburgh Airport in a wooded area behind a shopping center.
FOURTH WITNESS: Well, the three of us got in the truck and we ran up there in the truck and the third driveway, I think it was, we turned to the right. We must have walked maybe fifty yards and we kept hollering, the plane was exploding, and we kept hollering, “Anybody alive?” because we seen bodies all over the place.
FIFTH WITNESS: Couldn’t find anybody, didn’t hear nothing. Parts of the plane were laying all over the place. Little fires here and there. It was a bad scene.
When the bulletins ended, the USAir employees shook their heads in disbelief. Why them? They had just been through this ordeal two months earlier with the Charlotte crash. Why again?
The twenty-five phones in the room continued to ring with calls that had been forwarded from the airline’s reservation centers. The callers were crying and shouting, demanding to know who was on the plane. But the managers and vice presidents in the room were not allowed to say. USAir president Seth Schofield had insisted that no one be notified until the list was complete. Even if Ralph Miller had confirmed that Joan was on the plane when Brett called, the USAir managers who were answering the phones were not allowed to tell him. They could only take messages and place them in a box, where they were sorted by passenger name and prioritized so immediate family members would be called back first.
USAir was in chaos. The company had more experience dealing with crashes than any other airline in the 1990s—five in five years!—and yet it was overwhelmed.
There were communication foul-ups between the airline’s eleven reservation centers and the Next-of-Kin Room. Some family members were given the direct phone number to the room, others were not. Some USAir employees in the room had experience working on past crashes, but many others didn’t. And none of them had any formal training about what to do or what to say.