Departing JFK only four minutes behind schedule, the non-stop to LAX sailed high over northern Pennsylvania, Cleveland, the southern curve of Lake Erie, and southern Michigan. Routed south of Chicago, it crossed the Mississippi River from Illinois to Iowa at the city of Davenport. In Nebraska, passing the Lincoln navigational beacon, Flight 353 adjusted course southwest toward the next major forward beacon at Goodland in the northwest corner of Kansas.
The battered flight-data recorder, salvaged from the wreckage, eventually revealed that the pilot made the proper course correction from Goodland toward the next major forward beacon at Blue Mesa, Colorado. But about a hundred and ten miles past Goodland, something went wrong. Although it experienced no loss of altitude or airspeed, the 747 began to veer off its assigned flight path, now travelling west-southwest at a seven-degree deviation from Jet Route 146.
For two minutes, nothing more happened—and then the aircraft made a sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, as if the pilot had begun to recognize that he was off course. But just three seconds later, this was followed by an equally sudden four-degree heading change, nose left.
Analysis of all thirty parameters covered by this particular flight-data recorder seemed to confirm that the heading changes were either yawing of the craft or resulted in yawing. First the tail section had swung to the left—or port—while the nose had gone right—starboard—and then the tail had swung to the right and the nose to the left, skidding in midair almost as a car might fishtail on an icy highway.
Post-crash data analysis also gave rise to the suspicion that the pilot might have used the rudder to execute these abrupt changes of heading—which made no sense. Virtually all yaws result from movements of the rudder, the vertical panel in the tail, but pilots of commercial jets eschew use of the rudder out of consideration for their passengers. A severe yaw creates lateral acceleration, which can throw standing passengers to the floor, spill food and drinks, and induce a general state of alarm.
Captain Delroy Blane and his copilot, Victor Santorelli, were veterans with forty-two years of commercial piloting between them. For all heading changes, they would have used the ailerons—hinged panels on the trailing edge of each wing—which facilitate gentle banking turns. They would have resorted to the rudder only in the event of engine failure on takeoff or when landing in a strong crosswind.
The flight-data recorder had shown that eight seconds after the first yawing incident, Flight 353’s heading again abruptly changed three degrees, nose left, followed two seconds later by a second and even more severe shift of seven degrees to the left. Both engines were at full performance and bore no responsibility for the heading change or the subsequent disaster.
As the front of the plane swung sharply to port, the starboard wing would have been moving faster through the air, rapidly gaining lift. When the starboard wing lifted, it forced the port wing down. During the next fateful twenty-two seconds, the banking angle grew to one hundred forty-six degrees, while the nose-down pitch reached eighty-four degrees.
In that incredibly short span of time, the 747 went from earth-parallel flight to a deadly roll while virtually standing on end.
Pilots with the experience of Blane and Santorelli should have been able to correct the yaw quickly, before it became a roll. Even then, they should have been able to pull the aircraft out of the roll before it became an inevitable plunge. Under any scenario that the human-performance experts could conceive, the captain would have turned the control wheel hard to the right and would have used the ailerons to bring the 747 back to level flight.
Instead, perhaps because of a singular hydraulic-systems failure that defeated the pilots’ efforts, Nationwide Flight 353 rolled into a steep dive. With both jet engines still firing, it rocketed into this meadow, splashing millenniums of accumulated soil as if it were water, boring to the bedrock with an impact powerful enough to crack the steel blades of the Pratt and Whitney powerplants as though they were made of balsa wood, sufficiently loud to shake all the winged residents out of the trees halfway up the slopes of distant Pike’s Peak.