Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 14

14A DETROIT FREE PRESSWEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1987 of 3325,000 Northwest agrees to pay fine with Minneapolis-based Republic Airlines in August 1986 and didn't get refund operations to run smoothly until early this year. He described the delays as excessive and said they involved at least several thousand tickets. Federal regulations require airlines to provide refunds in seven days for tickets purchased with credit cards and in 20 days for tickets purchased with cash. Northwest now meets that requirement, Tyler said. crowded flights weren't always informed of their rights.

The airline did not always inform customers that some of its flights are operated by smaller regional airlines using propeller-driven aircraft instead of jets. Northwest operates almost 70 percent of the flights at Metro Airport, which is one of its hub airports. Tyler said Northwest encountered refund delays shortly after merging In a statement Monday, Northwest said it "did not admit to violating DOT guidelines, but agreed to settle the matter to avert costly litigation that would result if it challenged the DOT penalty." The Transportation Department cited three problems at Northwest: Refunds on unused tickets were not paid promptly. Passengers bumped from over- EAGAN, Minn. (AP) Northwest Airlines has agreed to pay a $325,000 fine to the U.S.

Department of Transportation to settle DOT charges that the airline has violated federal consumer protection rules. "None of these problems will ever occur again," Northwest spokesman Redmond Tyler said Monday. "It's just good business to get this matter resolved and go on with the business of running our company." to resolve the regional airline problem, -he said. Federal rules require airlines to; tell customers whenever a flight or a segment of a flight will be on a smaller regional airline. Tyler said customers buying tickets from Northwest for such flights al- ways were told that service was pro-': vided by another airline, but who simply asked about schedule in-" formation and didn't buy tickets werer not, a DOT rule violation.

Reason tot survived is disputed By BRIAN FLANIGAN and JOHN CASTINE Free Press Staff Writers A fire fighter who helped rescue Faulty breaker could cut warning I 1 I i i 2 I 'l 1 I i -Hi j. I He said the government's complaints about bumping and regional airlines resulted from differing interpretations of federal rules and have been remedied by increased training. In the case of overcrowded flights, Tyler said, ticket agents did not always fully inform all passengers of their rights when they were denied boarding, and the problem was resolved with improved training. Northwest also improved training HUGH GRANNUMDetrolt Free Press we were in those shoes. You can't have somebody come up to you and ask how do you feel, because they just can't understand.

"Once, God willing, we get this (group) off the ground, we'd like to do a living memorial because we don't want them forgotten. We want something to help the people that are alive," she said. The women said this Friday will be an especially tough day for each of them. On that day, Polec and her husband had planned to fly to Phoenix to spend Thanksgiving with Lisa and her husband; Gleason and her husband had planned a wedding anniversary trip to Hawaii. "They say time heals, but it hasn't started with me," Polec said.

Gleason said she and her husband, who had been married almost 27 years, "were at that point in our lives when the kids were raised. This is what we'd been working for. "This was going to be our time. I feel very cheated." Kay Gleason, whose husband. Patrick, was killed in the crash of Flight 255: "I just want to know what happened." Families want answers at hearing By JOHN LEAR and TOM HUNDLEY Free Press Staff Writers The crew of an MD80 jet would get no signal that a circuit breaker had failed on the aircraft's system to warn the crew if flaps were not set for takeoff, a Douglas Aircraft official testified Tuesday.

Jack McDonnell, the aircraft company's director of flight guidance and control, said the company had issued an incorrect analysis showing that a warning light would go on if the circuit breaker failed. McDonnell's testimony came on the second day of the NTSB hearing into the Aug. 16 crash of Northwest Flight 255 that killed 156 people at Metro. The Northwest jet was an MD80, built by McDonnell Douglas. The hearing is expected to last until Friday at the Ramada Inn near the airport in Romulus.

Also Tuesday, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) said wing slats retracted spontaneously on an MD80 jet over California last month, but the pilot was able to fly out of trouble. And an NTSB expert said the agency is satisfied that it made a complete transcript of the tape recording from the Flight 255 cockpit, despite an enhanced version done for Northwest that the airline says has the sound of a flap control being set for takeoff. But most of Tuesday's hearing focused on circuit breakers little switches designed to interrupt electrical current to prevent a short circuit specifically those in the cockpit's Central Aural Warning System (CAWS). NTSB EVIDENCE shows that the Flight 255 crew never got a computer-generated voice warning that the ai-craft's flaps and slats had not been extended to provide lift for takeoff. But investigators have not been able to explain why the warning system failed to sound once the pilots increased the throttle on the runway.

Speculation has center on the CAWS circuit breakers, including a key one that was damaged in the crash. McDonnell acknowledged that 'a "failure mode and effect analysis" submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration as part of the process of certifying the MD80 jets for use stated that a loss of power to the CAWS would cause a warning light to go on in the cockpit. But he said the analysis was "clearly in error," and speculated that the person who wrote that part of it did not understand the system. McDonnell said he did not know why simulators used to train pilots for the MD80 are wired so the "CAWS fail" light comes on if there is a loss of power to the takeoff warning system. Rod Peters, manager of avionics for Northwest, said that after the crash, Northwest recalled and replaced the CAWS circuit breakers throughout its MD80 fleet.

The airline also tested the recalled circuit breakers and found three of them were defective, he said. Peters also said 69 of 71 circuit breakers recovered from the wreckage of Flight 255 were manufactured during a period when McDonnell Douglas was reporting problems with them. An MD80 has more than 200 circuit breakers. MCDONNELL TESTIFIED that the dompany sent three letters to airlines between 1981 and 1983 about reports of problems with Klixon one-amp to 10-amp circuit breakers made by Texas Instruments from January 1979 to November 1980. The letters were in response to problems reported in DC8s, DC9s, DC 1 Os and MD80s by some users of the planes, he said.

The users "told us they thought they "1 Cecelia Cichan has labeled "all. wrong" specula-! tion by a federal investigator that the child survived the crash of Flight 255 because she-; was not wearing a seat belt. "When I read Cecelia that, I about threw my Cheerios across the John Thiede, 22, said Tuesday. Thiede, a Romulus volunteer fire fighter, was among spectators at the second day of the National Transportation Safety Board hearing on the Aug. 16 crash.

An unnamed NTSB investigator was quoted in a report Tuesday in the Detroit News as saying Cecelia, 4, the only survivor of the crash that killed 1 56 people, may have lived because she was suspended in air as the plane crashed onto Middlebelt Road. Thiede said Cecelia "was in her seat and her seat belt was on." "I don't know how these guys came up with that, but I couldn't believe it," he said. Fire fighters and other rescue workers at the crash scene have said that a woman was found in a seat atop Cecelia, but it was not her mother. The mother's body was found belted in a seat some distance away, according to investigators. Thiede said he and fire fighter Dan Kish were going through the wreckage when they heard moans and thought they were coming from the woman in the seat on top of Cecelia.

"We started checking the woman, but she was wasn't alive and we still heard the moans and realized the chair with Cecelia in it was moving a bit," he said. Thiede said he called over fire fighter and emergency medical technician Roy Brindamour, who unbuckled Cecelia from the charred seat. Cecelia, whose parents and brother died in the crash, spent eight weeks recovering from burns, fractures and other injuries at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann bor. She now lives with relatives in Alabama. SEW-N-SAVE 19451 LIVERNOIS DET.

345-4SEW HOURS: 10-6 FRI. 10-8, SAT. 10-5 ALL SEW EASY 1479 Fort Street Wyandotte Hours: 10-5; Thurs. Sat, 10-2 285-4280 AND PRESSES, CRAFTED IN SWITZERLAND to 60 'A i hafl an excess number of circuit-break er failures," McDonnell testified. But he added that tests by McDonnell Douglas, parent company of Douglas Aircraft, did not show a problem with the circuit breakers.

Nine failed in a test of 3 1 5 of them, McDonnell said in a 1983 letter to airlines. McDonnell said that in August 1 983, Douglas Aircraft offered an alternative circuit breaker to users who were experiencing problems. "In about 1983, the problem seemed to be going away," he added. He said he did not know if the circuit breakers in Flight 255 were in the problem batches from Texas Instruments. NORTHWEST'S Peters said a damaged CAWS circuit breaker recovered from Flight 255, a P40 type, appeared to be from those batches.

But Jack Drake, chief investigator for the NTSB crash probe, testified Monday that the board has not "identified any defect in the P40 circuit breaker from the airplane." An NTSB document states that "due to the nature and severity of impact sequence, nearly every circuit breaker was open or destroyed, with little reliable pre-impact information." Meanwhile, ALPA, the pilots' union, released a report Tuesday on a Northwest MD80 that had trouble similar to Flight 255 on take-off Oct. 22 from John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, Calif. PETERS SAID that when the circuit breaker on the Santa Ana MD80 was tested, it failed to pop out of its panel as it should. Peters said the apparently faulty breaker has been submitted to the NTSB for exmaination. Ben Lightfoot, Northwest vice-president for technical services, discounted the significance of the Santa Ana incident.

He said that although a light came on indicating the slats did not agree with the pilot's direction, there was no evidence of actual slat movement. But ALPA's McClure said that in light of Flight 255, "we may be seeing the first of a series of problems (with MD80s) that is just starting to happen." ALPA investigators said thay had uncovered another incident of uncom-manded slat retraction on an Air Canada DC9, the predecessor of the MD80, during a takeoff from Montreal in August. The pilot in that incident dumped fuel and made an emergency landing, they saifl. JAMES CASH, the NTSB's expert on reading tapes from cockpit voice recorders, testified Tuesday that voice prints from Flight 255's recorder showed only one of two stall warning systems sounded as the plane went into a stall just before it crashed. Pilots association officials say the secondary stall warning that did not sound likely was connected to the same circuit breaker as the flaps warning that also did not sound on Flight 255.

The pilots association quizzed Cash Tuesday about an enhancement of the cockpit voice recorder tape which Northwest Airlines commissioned, and which the airline says includes the sound of the co-pilot making a verbal flaps check and setting the flaps lever. Pilots association hearing representative Capt. Dan Donovan asked Cash whether it was possible that, if two people were speaking simultaneously, the tape would record "one voice overriding the other." Cash said that was possible, but usually the tape still could be filtered so both voices were distinguishable. Cash said the NTSB "was very happy with the quality of the recording. We worked very hard to get every word out of there." "The baby was born at 8 a.m.

at Children's Hospital in Buffalo," Dowd beamed. "He weighed seven pounds, eight ounces. I would assume, and I'm only assuming now, that they'll name him Tom Jr. She's very relieved it's over with." The baby boy born to Jacqueline Spark is Tom Spark's second joining two-year-old sister Jourdan, Dowd said. The crash "has had a real impact against all of us, my wife, our daughter.

And there's a certain loss for the player who now plays professionally in Spain, got home two days after his sister was buried. "Larry and his new bride," married eight days before the crash, "talked my husband and me into going to the theater," Polec said. "Exactly 15 minutes into the show, the tears started coming. It was a Gene Hackman movie, and I love Gene Hackman, but the title was 'No Way I left the show and came home. I just felt like I wasn't supposed to have fun any more." IN BASIC WAYS, the crash of Flight 255 "has disrupted our family," Polec said.

"We still love each other. We're very close. But we don't know what to say to each other. That's why Kay and I want to get in a support group. We really need the help." And the two women, after searching for help from outsiders, have decided to turn instead to other people who suffered losses in the crash.

"I've tried a widows' club, parents without partners, everything, Gleason said. "There's nothing there for me. You run out of people you can talk about this with. We make people very uncomfortable." Polec said: "The main object is we understand how each of us feel because GAMBLER'S SPREE AS LOW AS $209oo RlVIERAffa I HOTEL CASINO 'JEuSL DEC. 10-13 JAN.

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Clemens, said she felt "a knife in my heart" Monday when a pilot testified that he believed the MD80 jet could have flown if it had not hit a light pole after takeoff. "That hurt me so bad, that they came within inches of saving 156 lives," Polec said. "But even if they pinpoint the cause, it doesn't matter," she said. "I really wish it were an act of God, that it was wind shear or lightning, because it would almost be more acceptable. You can't control those things.

But with human error, pilot error, they're human beings. You can control them." While saying she was there "to find out the facts," Polec asked in almost the same breath: "But does it really make a difference? Death is so final and you feel so helpless." Thatsense of helplessness was clear in their voices and their mannerisms as the two women chain smoked and talked about a husband, a daughter and a son-in-law. GLEASON'S VOICE wavered a bit when she discussed Patrick, 49, a General Motors Corp. engineer who was going to Phoenix to road test some automotive air conditioning units. "He was a very giving person, she said softly.

"In fact, I never realized until he died how many people's lives he touched. To me, he came home every night at six o'clock. I knew what kind of guy he was. But I didn't realize so many other people did, too." Polec said the deaths of her daughter, Lisa Klaft, 21, who was pregnant, and her husband, Donald Klaft, 23, have created "a nightmare for my family. My three sons are devastated.

My husband can't talk about it. I think it about it 28 hours a day." The night of Aug. 16, Polec said she spent about 90 minutes with her daughter at the airport. "She and Don were flying standby," Polec said. "I just wished Don hadn't gone up to the counter.

They told him there were two seats left in Row 13. 1 said, 'Let's not get on that It was just a zoo. It was so crowded that night." Her son, Larry Polec, a former Michigan State University basketball two-year-old," Dowd said. "She doesn't realize it yet." Spark, 32, was a product engineer for General Motors Corp. and had flown from Buffalo to Detroit on Aug.

16, then caught Flight 255 to Phoenix for a business trip, Dowd said. The Rev. Lowell Lawson, a police chaplain who helped counsel grieving relatives of the victims of Flight 255, said: "We had been hoping and praying it would be a little boy, an incarnation of his father. "This is just delightful." WHITTIER SEWING LANDMARK PLAZA 31374 HARPER -ST. CLAIR SHORES 293-2380 HOURS: WARREN SEWING 25922 VAN DYKE BET.

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