Clawed by the Hook in the Sky

It was like flying into a tornado.

Hailstones the size of baseballs smashed into the Southern Airways DC-9 so hard that they cracked the pilot's 1 1/2-in.-thick windshield. Turbulence tossed the jet wildly, and the rain was so heavy that it was later described as "a wall of water." First the left engine failed, then the right. Fighting for control, Pilot William McKenzie, 54, tried to glide the 25-ton plane to a safe landing.

He nearly made it. McKenzie managed to put his crippled jet down on Georgia's Route 92, near New Hope, 35 miles northwest of Atlanta. But the careening airliner slammed into a grocery store and there was a flash of flame. Says Marie Clayton, wife of New Hope's fire chief: "We actually saw bodies going through the air." Of the 85 passengers and crew members aboard the flight, 62 died, including McKenzie. Eight people on the ground were also killed.

The crash was mystifying because modern commercial aviation had apparently solved the problems that brought the DC-9 hurtling out of the sky at 150 m.p.h. The engine was one of the most reliable ever made: Pratt & Whitney's JT8D7, now used by some 2,800 aircraft all over the world. Never in 112 million hours of flying time had rain or hail caused one of these engines--let alone two--to "flame out" (quit). Federal air-safety experts discovered that the engines had ingested a great deal of water and overheated, but they were not sure of the exact reason for the flameouts.

Even more puzzling, perhaps, was how Pilot McKenzie found himself in the midst of a storm so filled with hail that the radar of a trailing jetliner detected what appeared to be a solid form in the black clouds--a great, ominous "hook" in the sky. Since the early 1920s, when mail pilots held up a wet finger to see which way the wind was blowing, U.S. aviation has been trying with increasing success to spot weather hazards and route pilots around them. Today's commercial airlines get a steady stream of up-to-the-minute weather reports, including data gleaned by satellites that scan the earth. Indeed, the combination of advanced meteorological techniques and the toughness of the modern jet airliner has largely eliminated the danger that planes will be caught in the kind of massive storms that have been called the "anvil of the gods." "Wind shear," created by colliding air masses, was listed as the probable cause of an Eastern 727's crash while landing at Kennedy International Airport in 1975; 114 people were killed. But aviation experts believe that until last week, no American jetliner had ever been knocked out of the skies by bad weather.

Metal Fatigue. At week's end investigators were also trying to solve the mystery of how Pilot McKenzie--who had been warned about the danger in his flight path--had run into the exact kind of storm that pilots are trained to avoid.

Despite the vast improvement in flight safety during recent years (TIME, April 11), neither man nor machine has been made foolproof. In clear skies last week, after an American 707 took off from St. Louis, one of its four engines fell off. The pilot easily landed, and a team of experts began looking into the possibility that metal fatigue may have caused the pylon bearing the engine to break away from the wing.

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