Mayday Over Wichita (16 page)

Their investigation, instead, would focus on maintenance records, the pilots' radio transmissions prior to impact and the charred wreckage at the bottom of a deep crater. The hardboiled air force and Boeing investigators lamented that determining the reason for the crash would require “considerable time but we are going to find the cause.”
³¹¹
They knew privately, however, that determining a cause might be impossible, given so little evidence.

Moreover, neither the air force nor Boeing was likely to budge an inch when it came to assigning blame for the accident. Boeing, of course, would be expected to blame the crash on
pilot error
and not equipment failure or malfunction. The air force, in turn, would deny pilot error and attribute the crash to
mechanical failure
. The investigators, then, were left with the laborious task of finding the cause of the accident, not just to salvage the reputation of either party, but also to appease the victims' families, who grew more and more frustrated as time passed. Chester I. Lewis exclaimed:

It's been right at three months ago January 16 and many people want to know what caused the crash. Naturally, if you receive causation, then one can suggest remedies. If they are overloaded, we can demand that they don't load
[KC-135s]
so heavily. If the personnel isn't experienced, we can demand that they recieve more training or the runway was too short for any reason. And many of the heirs of the deceased want to know what the cause was and I'm not sure the Air Force was going to disclose it. But I do know that they have these crack teams, they are about as expert and technical as any teams come, and I would think by now they would be able to render a report as to the cause…
³¹²

Close-up of wreckage.
Larry Hatteberg
, KAKE TV.

The longer it took to determine the cause, the more discontent and bitterness grew within the African American community. For the investigators, though, their job proved difficult. To assign a precipitous cause to the crash could have extreme effects on liability and the plane's safety record. Furthermore, they were fully aware that “KC-135s were involved in 15 accidents causing injury or death in the previous 7 years.”
³¹³
One such accident occurred just twelve days before the Piatt Street crash. Treading lightly in assigning a cause would have been in their best interest, as well as the victims'.

T
HE
R
UDDER

Close-up of a KC-135 rudder.
22
^nd
ARW History Office
.

By 1965, the rudder was hardly a new invention. It had been around for thousands of years. The ancient Romans used large wooden rudders to help steer their ships, and centuries later, the Wright brothers quickly figured out their usefulness and functionality on airplanes after several failed attempts.
³¹⁴
In aviation, the rudder is a vertically hinged structure on the tail of an aircraft attached to the vertical stabilizer. It helps to hold the plane straight, counteract crosswinds and control the nose of the aircraft. According to seasoned air force pilot Capt. Ben Jamison, who pilots the versatile B-1 long-range bomber, “The rudder is usually the largest control surface on the airplane, in terms of total surface area, and therefore requires only a small input to make a large aircraft movement.”
³¹⁵

Pilots control the movement of the rudder with two rudder pedals, which they can depress to produce the side-to-side motion of the rudder. When it is deflected (pushed to one side, either right or left), it changes the amount of lift in the opposite direction. With greater rudder deflection to the right, for example, the force would cause the aircraft to yaw (move from side-to-side) to the left.

The rudder is, therefore, critical to keeping the nose of the aircraft on the proposed flight path.
³¹⁶
Without the rudder, the plane would deviate radically from its set course. As the great aviation author Wolfgang Langewiesche stated in his 1944 publication
Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying
, the rudder is “merely a device for counteracting the adverse yaw effect.”
³¹⁷
Langewiesche also warned, “The important thing to understand about the rudder pedals is that they are unnecessary; like your wisdom teeth, they serve no very good purpose but can cause much trouble.”
³¹⁸

T
HE
A
UTOPILOT

The 1931 article “Inventions and Discoveries,” written by Clark Tibbitts in the
American Journal of Sociology
, praised several new inventions reported during 1930 that “were sure to change the world.”
³¹⁹
One such invention was the automatic pilot. Although the autopilot had been around several years by 1930 (first invented by the aviation genius Lawrence Sperry in 1914), the article detailed how the refined invention “keeps an airplane on an even keel in clouds or fog, the pilot merely having to guide right or left with his horizontal rudder.”
³²⁰
Ironically, Sperry died in a plane crash in 1924, but his sons and other inventors continued to make autopilots smaller, more advanced and reliable as the years progressed. The U.S. Army Air Corps and Air Force would eventually adopt the autopilot system on their aircraft.
³²¹

The autopilot system on KC-135s, however, was far from perfect by 1965. Since its inception, the KC-135 had struggled with mechanical issues, the autopilot listed among them. The authors of
Airlift Tanker: History of U.S. Airlift and Tanker Forces
explain some of the key mechanical difficulties:

The KC-135 development program was not trouble free. When the aircraft caught on, and orders for its sister 707s began to flow in, Boeing and the Air Force had considerable disagreement over priorities. Unreliable Lear MC-1 autopilots plagued the early production models. Stator vane welds in the early J-57 engines were faulty and the fuel tank contamination, because of poor housekeeping at Boeing caused some additional difficulties…Other development problems involved hydraulic system overheats and a severe flutter in the rudder assembly
.
³²²

Among the investigators' judgments, there is little doubt that the autopilot on Raggy 42 was malfunctioning. Based on eyewitness testimony and findings of the Collateral Investigation Board Report (finally released in October 1965), Captains Szmuc and Widseth experienced what is called “unscheduled rudder displacement,” referring to an unexpected, sustained deflection of the rudder. According to the official air force report, cited in court papers and leaked to the media, a combination of the autopilot and rudder malfunction was the most likely cause for the crash:

The plane's autopilot apparently forced the rudder to turn despite the efforts of the pilot to keep the plane under control. The plane yawed, meaning it traveled in one direction while the nose was pointed in another. The yaw forced the plane to roll over. In trying to keep the plane level, the pilot lost too much height and speed to pull out
.
³²³

The last four minutes of the flight, as recorded by eyewitnesses, corroborates a fatal flaw with the autopilot and rudder. Raggy 42 departed McConnell at 9:27 a.m. It began to yaw as it flew north over Oliver Street and then started a “flat shallow turn to the northwest.”
³²⁴
Fuel was jettisoned over WSU as the plane banked hard to the left. Witnesses then recalled, “All of a sudden it looked like something snapped. A piece of the tail fell off. When it fell off, the plane rolled over on its side. Then it went into a nose-dive and crashed.”
³²⁵
The time was 9:31 a.m.

Piatt Street captured through the window of a burned-out truck.
Larry Hatteberg
, KAKE TV.

Without question, unscheduled rudder deflection can be dangerous—even deadly. As Capt. Ben Jamison noted, having such a malfunction can quickly lead to a perilous situation for pilots:

The rudder is typically used to control the aircraft in the “yaw” axis, but when it is fully deflected, it can also cause a rolling motion in the aircraft. If the aircraft does not have enough roll authority, usually controlled with ailerons and/or spoilers, the aircraft will roll into an uncontrollable situation…the rudder is a critically important control surface…an un-commanded and uncontrollable full-scale rudder deflection would most likely result in the airplane departing controlled flight
.
³²⁶

If a plane's rudder is severely deflected, the odds of salvaging the flight are dismal.

M
AINTENANCE
L
OGS

When reporters asked Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Skiffington, a lead investigator in the Piatt Street crash, about the malfunctioning autopilot and rudder displacement theory, he replied, “Well, it is a case that gets real hard to prove, but you are right…we had a very strong suspicion that we had autopilot problems and the autopilot was the thing that put it into a yawed condition.”
³²⁷
A survey regarding prior incidents of power rudder malfunctions on KC-135s, conducted by the air force from February 1963 to October 1964, revealed thirty-four write-ups, each one unique in terms of severity. And while minor maintenance issues are no doubt expected, some of the malfunctions—as indicated in the following tail number write-ups—were truly disturbing:

Adding to suspicion, five months before the crash, there were fifteen occasions in which the crews flying Raggy 42 wrote in the maintenance logs that the autopilot had malfunctioned.
³²⁹

The most telling and possibly most disturbing evidence for these malfunctions is an excerpt from the radio traffic between Raggy 42 and a Boeing crew flying a B-52 (airplane 632) recorded on January 12, 1965. It provides a chilling premonition for what would soon lead to the demise of Capt. Szmuc and his crew just five days later: