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OUTSIDE PROBE Specialist panel convenes, begins search for cause
By David Arnold, Globe Staff, 2/4/2003
The panel, chaired by a retired Navy admiral, Harold W. Gehman Jr., who led the investigation into the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, includes four military crash experts and two civilian specialists. One of the civilians is Cambridge-based Dr. James N. Hallock, who analyzes aircraft safety at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center. While NASA conducts its internal investigation, the space agency charged Gehman's panel with developing an independent review of the shuttle's failure. ''They'll have access to all the same science and all the same agencies as NASA. You could consider it a parallel investigation,'' said NASA spokesman Robert Mirelson. ''We wanted it to be, for the sake of credibility, totally independent.'' A crucial part of its mission will be the painstaking assembly of thousands of pieces of the shuttle, which disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere early Saturday.
Yesterday NASA reported approximately 2,000 debris sites had been located. The recovery effort is complicated by the size and scope of the debris field, which stretches 380 miles east from Eastland, Texas, to Alexandria, La., and 230 miles south from Sulphur Springs, Texas, to Houston. Pieces of Columbia found thus far have ranged from the size of playing cards to the size of a pickup truck. The rubble is being taken to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where the Gehman panel gathered yesterday, and to the former Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, which became a collection center yesterday. ''We are confident that the missing link that can solve this puzzle is out there on the ground somewhere. We are confident that we can find it,'' Ron Dittemore, the shuttle program director, said last night. Members of the board were unavailable for comment yesterday. But one veteran air disaster analyst described in detail the problems presented in simply collecting all the shuttle pieces. A flying machine breaking up while going 18,000 miles per hour more than 200,000 feet high has two major challenges for searchers, said Michael Barr, who directs the Aviation Safety Program at the University of Southern California. Many of the flight surfaces are airfoils, and when they break off, they glide on their own and stray far from the intended flight path. The extreme speed of the orbiter would have launched debris on many different trajectories, he said, with the heaviest objects flying the farthest from the point of disintigration. Barr, who has been teaching investigators how to analyze crashes since 1952, described the seven members of the Gehman board as ''the best of the best'' -- and said he was optimistic about what they would find. ''I have little doubt about it, the answers will come,'' Barr said. He pointed out that TWA Flight 800, the 747 that crashed in Long Island Sound on July 17, 1996, was almost entirely reconstructed in a Long Island hangar to reveal a fuel tank had exploded and brought the airplane down. The source of the spark that caused the explosion in the Paris-bound airplane has never been determined. ''Those pieces came up from the bottom of the ocean. For the shuttle, it's an issue of combing dry land. And if you finish the first sweep and discover you are missing something critical, you can take 200 people and focus the search,'' he said. ''I'm not saying it will be easy, but it will surprise the public how much ultimately can be put back together.'' Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
This story ran on page A12 of the Boston Globe on 2/4/2003.
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© Copyright 2003 New York Times Company |
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blue-ribbon panel of flight safety experts convened yesterday in Louisiana to begin the daunting task of piecing together the remnants of the space shuttle Columbia and sifting through records to determine what went wrong on its final flight.
