Cipher

About 8 miles south of downtown Colorado Springs stands the suburban subdivision of Security-Widefield. The suburb is unremarkable in every way, except, perhaps, for its name—and for one strange day in its otherwise uneventful history. 

About 30,000 people live in Security-Widefield, mostly in cookie-cutter houses with wide lawns. There is a mall, a recreation center, and half a dozen elementary schools. The main drag, Fontaine Boulevard, divides the town into two principal neighborhoods: Security and Widefield. Along Fontaine Boulevard is Widefield Park, a charmingly average suburban greenspace with a playground, disc golf course, tennis courts, and a lot of poorly manicured grass. A lethargic stream runs through the middle of the park on its way to Monument Creek, passing through a grove of ash trees within sight of several two-story brick apartment buildings. It was here, where a paved footpath crosses over the stream, that a Boeing 737 crashed on the morning of March 3, 1991. 

 Earlier that morning, a Boeing 737—registration N999UA, operating that day as United flight 585—began boarding in Peoria, Illinois. The plane was nine years old and in fair condition; United Airlines had purchased it secondhand in 1986. The plane had seats for 136 passengers, but United used it to serve smaller cities, so it often operated at less than half capacity. 

At the controls that day were Captain Harold Green and First Officer Patricia Eidson. Three flight attendants rounded out the crew. Captain Green, 52 years old and a highly experienced pilot, was known for being a stickler for the rules. March 3 was to be his last day of flying before a two-week vacation, and he was looking forward to going home to see his wife and young daughter.

First Officer Eidson, 42 years old, was also no rookie. She had been among United’s first female pilots, and had made impressive headway in a male-dominated industry. She had not been scheduled to fly flight 585, but a vacancy opened up, so she volunteered. Eidson found herself unexpectedly paired with Green, who she had flown with for three days back in February. They had apparently gotten along well.

Eidson and Green flew the plane together, switching who was at the controls for each segment: first to Moline, Illinois, then on to Stapleton International Airport in Denver. (Stapleton was decommissioned and turned into a suburban neighborhood after Denver International Airport was built in 1995.) At Stapleton, the plane boarded just 20 passengers, leaving over 100 seats empty on the final leg of its journey to Colorado Springs. The passengers included a U.S. Olympic cycling coach, as well as two employees of the U.S. Olympic Committee. One of the flight attendants was a model and aspiring actress who had recently appeared in a hip-hop music video. Most of the passengers were from Colorado Springs, but a few were from other parts of the U.S. There was also one passenger from Canada, one from Ireland, one from Poland, and one from Japan. Also on board was a corpse on its way to Colorado Springs for burial. In total, 25 people (and one dead body) were on the plane when it took off from Denver at 9:23 a.m.

The flight was scheduled to take just 23 minutes, after which it would turn around and go back to Denver. Captain Green joked to a customer service agent that they would “be back in a few minutes.” Shortly thereafter, flight 585 took to the air. 

The plane flew for 14 minutes before First Officer Eidson opened communications with an air traffic controller at Colorado Springs Airport. At 9:37 a.m., the controller cleared flight 585 to approach runway 35 from the south, directing the pilots to make a wide loop past the airport and over Security-Widefield. The published transcript of the cockpit voice recording begins somewhere around this time. A bout of light turbulence jostled the plane, prompting Captain Green to remark, “I’ve never driven to Colorado Springs and not gotten sick!” 

The pilots had already put the plane into its landing configuration when the controller informed them to wait on the runway after landing to make way for another plane that would taxi across their path. First Officer Eidson noted that the taxiing aircraft would cross the far end of the runway, assuring that it was nothing to worry about. About a minute later, Eidson noted a change in the plane’s speed, presumably connected to swirling winds that they had expected to encounter near the airport. After another 30 seconds, Eidson commented on another change in speed, accompanied by a barely audible “Wow.” “We’re at a thousand feet,” she added. The plane would be on the runway in two minutes and 30 seconds.

Four seconds after her mysterious “Wow,” the plane rolled hard to the right. First Officer Eidson yelled, and Captain Green called for “flaps fifteen,” referring to the angle of the adjustable wing flaps. Both pilots hammered on the rudder pedals, trying to steer the aircraft back to level flight, but their efforts seemed to have no effect. The plane kept rolling to the right until it was upside-down, at which point it entered a dive straight toward the ground. Captain Green uttered an expletive while one of them tried to move the position of the flaps. The plane began to pull up out of the dive, but there wasn’t enough height left. It continued to roll inexplicably to the right. The pilots’ grunts of exertion turned into screams of panic. Green yelled “No!” even as he continued his futile attempts to adjust the flaps against the right roll. 

“Oh my God!” Eidson shouted. “Oh my God!”

The last sound on the cockpit voice recorder is Eidson’s final ear-splitting scream. Just nine seconds had elapsed from the beginning of the roll until the moment of impact.

—

Flight 585 plunged almost straight down toward Widefield Park at 245 mph. According to news reports, nearby residents watched in horror as the plane narrowly missed the Widefield Apartments, passing so close that one witness claimed to see terrified passengers clawing at the windows. Another swore the plane clipped her roof (it didn’t). A split second later, flight 585 slammed into the ground, obliterating a grove of trees. An explosion engulfed the park, shattering windows in the nearby apartment complex. The force and angle of the impact were so great that most of the wreckage crumpled like an accordion into a 10-foot deep crater, while tiny burning pieces rained down on the surrounding area. Residents hurried to the crash site, hoping to find survivors, but the destruction was so complete that they could hardly even find the plane. 

“I saw this huge ball of black smoke and flame, so I ran as fast as I could to help,” said Robert Allen, who worked at the Air Force Academy and lived in Widefield at the time. “But when I got there, I could see that I wasn’t going to be of any help. It was all over.”

“It was obvious that the airplane was a total loss, and that there were no survivors,” Louis Matthews, a firefighter who arrived at the scene, recalled 20 years later. “But people held out hope in spite of what they were witnessing.”

Those hopes would be in vain. Within minutes, first responders confirmed that none of the 25 passengers or crew had survived. On the ground, only one person sustained an injury—an 8-year-old girl who was knocked down a flight of stairs by the blast wave. Other than her, the ambulances went home empty.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and reporters alike arrived several hours after the crash. On March 4, the New York Times published a haunting description of the scene: “Firefighters and volunteers surveyed the eerie, incongruous site. The wreckage, like so many shreds of blackened paper, was strewn about singed grass near bare oak and elm trees, in the jagged shadow of the snow-topped Rocky Mountains. Purses and suitcases that looked as if they had hardly been touched mingled with airplane parts burned almost beyond recognition.”

A crew of volunteers was sent to walk a grid pattern to search for any human remains. They found little more than tiny pieces of bone scattered by the explosion. Investigators, meanwhile, set about digging the wreckage out of the ground with manpower and heavy machinery, searching for the black box flight recorders that would have recorded data about the plane’s performance as well as cockpit conversations. Both were found the following day and sent to a lab for analysis.

The investigators expected that finding out what happened would be a challenge. “My first sense that it was going to take some time to investigate the accident was the damage we saw on the parts,” said investigator Greg Phillips. “When they’re burned and broken, the process always takes longer.” None of them, however, expected the investigation into the crash of United flight 585 to drag on until 2001, making it the longest crash investigation in U.S. history.

The first suspected cause of the crash was wind. Colorado Springs Airport was notorious for a wind phenomenon known as a “rotor,” in which air rushing down off the mountains loops back on itself and creates powerful vortices like sideways tornadoes. Sudden changes in wind direction had been reported in the area around the time of the crash. Some witnesses also said they encountered freak gusts of wind up to 90 mph. But the NTSB’s analysis of the plane’s flight path, pressure data from the black box, and cross-examination of the witness accounts revealed that the plane could not have encountered a rotor vortex. 

Pilot error also seemed unlikely. Both pilots were highly experienced with good safety records, and the black boxes showed no indication that they had failed to properly perform landing preparations or other in-flight tasks. Lacking any clear evidence of pilot error, investigators’ suspicions increasingly turned to some kind of mechanical failure. 

The NTSB eventually narrowed in on the plane’s rudder. If the rudder had suddenly deflected all the way to one side, it could explain why the plane rolled so sharply to the right. The primary suspect became the Power Control Unit, a complex piece of machinery that translates pilot inputs into actual movement of the rudder. Unfortunately for the NTSB, the Power Control Unit was completely destroyed in the crash, leaving them unable to determine if it had malfunctioned.

Three years after United flight 585 slammed into Widefield Park, the NTSB was still unable to explain how the Power Control Unit might have failed. They made the unusual move of publishing an accident report that did not establish a cause. The case was closed, but it remained unsolved.

Then, on September 8, 1994, USAir flight 427, another Boeing 737, was approaching Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when it suddenly rolled hard to the left and plunged straight into the ground. All 132 passengers and crew were killed in the crash, which was remarkably similar to that of United flight 585. Investigators immediately wondered if the mysterious culprit of the smaller crash in Colorado Springs had struck again. Experts began to worry that the Boeing 737, the world’s most popular passenger jet, had a hidden fatal flaw.

Miraculously, the Power Control Unit was among the few parts that remained intact after the crash of USAir flight 427. The unit was taken to a lab for testing, and the NTSB began an analysis of a critical valve that they believed may have played a role in both crashes. To their surprise, the valve showed no physical signs of having jammed or otherwise failed. Determined to prove their theory, however, investigators began trying to replicate what might have happened to the valve while the plane was in the air. They put the valve through a thermal shock test, in which it was supercooled and then commanded to pump hot hydraulic fluid. Sure enough, the valve jammed—and the process left no trace. But the jam lasted for only one second. The rudder wouldn’t have deflected for long enough to cause a crash unless the pilots made some kind of error. Suspicion again turned to the pilots, but just like in the case of flight 585, the investigators could find nothing to indicate that either of them had made a mistake.

Whatever it was that killed a combined 157 people in two separate crashes continued to pose a threat. On June 9, 1996, Eastwind Airlines flight 517—another Boeing 737—was on final approach into Richmond, Virginia, when it suddenly rolled to the right. The pilots reacted quickly, holding the plane in a precarious 90-degree bank for 30 seconds. Then, the terrifying sideways flight ended as mysteriously as it had begun, and the plane made an emergency landing minutes later. One flight attendant was injured, but everyone survived. Now, with a living pilot to give testimony and a perfectly intact aircraft, the NTSB was finally able to draw substantial conclusions.  

It turned out there was an entirely unexpected side effect of a jam in this particular valve. It would not only push the rudder all the way to one side, but also cause “rudder reversal,” an almost unheard-of phenomenon in which the pilots’ steering inputs have the opposite of their intended effect. The reversal caught the pilots of flight 585 and flight 427 completely off guard, so they never had time to figure out what was wrong. Desperate to level their respective planes, they tried to steer against the roll, but they had no way of knowing they were actually steering their aircraft straight into the ground. Flight 517 only survived because the failure occurred at a higher altitude where the plane was moving faster and there was more room for recovery, allowing the jam to clear before the pilots lost control.

On March 27, 2001, the National Transportation Safety Board issued its final revised report on what had happened in the skies over Colorado Springs 10 years earlier. But even after the final report, questions remained. The NTSB was never able to demonstrate how the jam could occur under normal flight conditions. They couldn’t explain how the Power Control Unit could have become cold enough, nor the hydraulic fluid hot enough, to cause a jam. Nevertheless, because the jam would explain all three incidents, the report concluded that a jam was the most probable cause. The NTSB ordered Boeing to redesign the valve, which it did, and the new valves were installed on all 737s. But Boeing continued to dispute the official findings, claiming that the failure was impossible. It blamed the crash of USAir flight 427 on a pilot having a panic attack, and pinned responsibility for United flight 585 on wind. 

Even stranger theories circled during the intervening years. One particularly salacious rumor insinuated that Captain Green and First Officer Eidson had been engaged in an adulterous relationship. According to the rumor, during the approach to Colorado Springs, Eidson demanded that the relationship end. Green, distraught, then split her head open with a fire axe and deliberately crashed the plane. Needless to say, the rumor had no basis in reality, and not even the seediest tabloids took the story seriously. Gail Dunham, the widow of Captain Green, believes that Boeing was responsible for the allegations. “They don’t want to say they were wrong,” she told Westword in 1999. “They want to push it off on someone else. They don’t want to be responsible.”

 Regardless of whether a jammed valve actually caused the crashes, there has not been another similar incident on a Boeing 737 since the valve was redesigned.

—

Following the long trail of fallout from flight 585 across 10 years and several states inevitably leads back to Colorado Springs on March 3, 1991. But strangely enough, the crash was not the only major tragedy in Colorado Springs on that day. That very same day, a fire broke out at a nursing home in the Hillside neighborhood, killing nine senior citizens. As a result, the city made major changes to Colorado Springs’ firefighting procedures and building codes. In contrast, the crash of flight 585 in Colorado Springs did not produce changes quickly enough to save the 132 passengers and crew of flight 427 in Pittsburgh. But perhaps the twin accidents can serve as a reminder of why it is so important to uncover the cause of every disaster, no matter the cost.

Today, Widefield Park once again looks like any other suburban park in America. Over time, collective memory of the crash has faded as people move in and out of Colorado Springs, and new generations grow up and old generations die. But in Widefield Park, amid a grove of 26 ash trees (one for each victim, plus the dead body in the hold), a gazebo shelters two plaques. One reads, “This memorial grove and sitting shelter is dedicated in fond memory of the passengers and air crew of United Airlines #585 which crashed on this site, March 3rd, 1991.” The logo of El Paso County Parks runs along the bottom. The other plaque contains the names of the 25 people who perished in the crash:

Bonnie Bachman, AZ

Dan Birkholz, CO

Andy Bodnar, Toronto, Canada;

Mildred Brown, TX

Dr. Bill Crabb, CO

Clay Crawford, CO

Jo Crawford, CO

Robert Geissbuhler, CO

Pam Gerdts, CO

Fred Hoffman, CO

Herald Holding, CO

Maurice Jenks, CO

Michael Kavanagh, Barna, Ireland;

Kevin Kodalen, CO

Dr. Andrzej Komor, Warsaw, Poland;

Paula McGilvar, CO

Vincent Riga, CO

Lester Ross, GA

Dr. Peter Van Handel, CO

Takashi Yoshida, Fukushima, Japan; 

Flight Attendant Anita Lucero, CA

Flight Attendant Lisa Church, NY

Flight Attendant Monica Smiley, NY

Captain Harold “Hal” Green, CA;

First Officer Patricia “Trish” Eidson, CA

—

Though Colorado Springs is forgetting about flight 585, people still occasionally come by to leave flowers at the memorial, and relatives of the victims meet on important anniversaries at the gazebo in Widefield Park. On the twentieth anniversary of the crash, a dozen family members, as well as two first responders, came back to the site and exchanged stories about the friends and relatives they lost. They read letters to the deceased and thanked the firefighters for their service. Perhaps the most striking feature of the somber meeting was a letter placed in the gazebo by one of the volunteers who scoured the site in the aftermath of the crash. “I was one of the young searchers helping collect the remains of your loved ones,” the letter said. “Please find solace in the fact that your loved ones’ remains were treated with respect while we collected them. They will never be forgotten.” 

But most of the time, the gazebo is empty. It sits there through the passing years, seldom visited, commemorating a loss that most people don’t remember. The neighborhood moves on, the grass grows again over what once was blackened earth, and the ash trees stand watch over the spot where 25 lives were so suddenly lost.

—

All details and information regarding the crashes were found on news reports, NTSB Accident Reports, published cockpit recordings, and documentaries. 

National Transportation Safety Board. “National Transportation Safety Board Aircraft Accident Report: Uncontrolled Descent and Collision with Terrain, United Airlines Flight 585, Boeing 737-200, N999UA, 4 Miles South of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport, Colorado Springs, Colorado, March 3rd, 1991.” 27 March, 2001. https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR0101.pdf

Wikipedia. “United Airlines Flight 585.” Last updated 22 April 2018, Accessed 18 April 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_585

Air Crash Investigation, Season 4 episode 5, “Hidden Danger,” Cineflix, aired 13 May 2007, on National Geographic.

“United 585 CVR Transcript,” Cockpit Voice Recorder Database, Tailstrike, Accessed 18 April 2018, https://www.tailstrike.com/030391.htm

KOAA News First 5, “United Flight 585 - 20 Years Later,” 4 March 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIB0x6FbC7w

Berton, Justin, “Flight Diversions,” Westword, 1 April, 1999. http://www.westword.com/news/flight-diversions-5059718

Leicht, Jessica, “25th Anniversary Of United Flight 585 Crash That Killed 25, Neighbors Remember Day Vividly,” KKTV 11 News, 3 March 2016, http://www.kktv.com/home/headlines/25th-Anniversary-of-United-Flight-585-Crash-That-Killed-25-Neighbors-Remember-Day-Vividly-371000511.html

Benzel, Lance, and Steiner, Matt, “20 years ago: El Paso County had its 24 hours of hell,” Colorado Springs Gazette, 26 February 2011, http://gazette.com/20-years-ago-el-paso-county-had-its-24-hours-of-hell/article/113601

Johnson, Dirk, “Jetliner Crash in Colorado Kills All 25 Aboard,” The New York Times, 3 March 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/04/us/jetliner-crash-in-colorado-kills-all-25-people-aboard.html

“List of Victims of Airliner Crash,” The Los Angeles Times, 5 March 1991, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-03-05/news/mn-253_1_colorado-springs