
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, September 15, 1994                   TAG: 9409150089
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

CRASH THEORY ELUSIVE, FOR NOW

Federal investigators have run out of solid leads on what caused USAir Flight 427 to nose dive into the woods near Pittsburgh and are turning to high-tech methods to try to explain the second mystery crash in three years of the world's most popular airliner, the Boeing 737.

The National Transportation Safety Board is using a radar metal detector - provided by the U.S. Bureau of Mines, which lost employees in the crash - to search for parts buried deep in the soft soil of last Thursday's crash site.

Board investigators and Boeing technicians will soon re-create the plane's movements in a simulator in an effort to backtrack to a possible cause, and the board has begun the unusual step of painstakingly reassembling the shattered airliner's pieces in a hangar.

Adding to their sense of urgency, investigators say, is their fear of what they don't know. The 737 has one of the world's best safety records. But it is also the most widely used airliner in the world with more than 2,600 in service, and investigators need to know if it has some hidden defect or if pilots are performing some maneuver that has unintended consequences.

``We're just kind of out of leads right now,'' Carl Vogt, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in an interview Wednesday. ``We'll be a long time on this one.''

The board's investigators have all but ruled out the two most promising early leads, determining that the engine thrust reverser, a braking device, did not deploy in flight and that an engine mount did not break before impact.

Now that the obvious has been eliminated, Vogt said, the board must consider every possibility, including whether something external caused the crash. Investigators have found no evidence of a bomb or a light plane that might have hit the jetliner.

Investigators may have had one significant break because a USAir mechanic witnessed the crash from a nearby soccer field. Eyewitness accounts are usually discounted by investigators, but an airline mechanic is considered a highly reliable observer.

The mechanic reported a puff of reddish-gray smoke coming from the plane's underbelly as it descended. Investigators searched the pieces they have recovered from that section of the plane but so far have found nothing. Vogt said the mechanic will be interviewed further.

Keywords:
FATALITY

by CNB