| USAir Flight 427 was preparing to land in Pittsburgh when the first officer got on the P.A. system to thank the passengers for flying and to announce that they’d be on the ground in ten minutes. It was a peaceful evening in September, 1994, with only light winds and hardly any clouds. All but two of the seats were occupied. The aircraft, a Boeing 737, never made it. As the plane approached the airport, the cockpit crew bantered casually before a sudden emergency sent the plane slamming into the ground. No one survived. Untangling the mystery of what happened would soon become the responsibility of the National Transportation Safety Board, a government agency that had found “probable cause” in almost ninety-nine per cent of the major commercial-airline accidents it had previously examined. But the challenges this time were immense. Although the flight-data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered, they provided only faint hints about what might have initiated the plane’s nearly vertical descent. Much of the other physical evidence was smashed or burned almost beyond recognition. Theories swirled, including the possibility that geese or a bomb were to blame; a rumor also circulated about a passenger allegedly in the witness-protection program. There were strange thumps and clicks on the recorders—and, hovering in the background, concerns about reassuring an entire nation of travellers. “Commercial-airline disasters exert a unique fascination on the human mind, perhaps because they often involve large numbers of fatalities,” the writer Jonathan Harr observed. “But also because flying, although statistically one of the safest means of modern transport, remains for many people a fundamentally unnatural act.” | 
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