The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 11

  In his book, George Jehn has a lot of questions for Guarachi. “Was he paid? If so, who paid him?” he writes. “What was his specific mission? What did he discover? Did he take pictures? Did he see or recover the recorders? Why didn’t the NTSB demand answers to these important questions?”

  Oddly, though, Jehn never actually attempted to find Guarachi, even though he’s a fairly prominent climbing guide in Bolivia and is open to being interviewed when I contact him.

  Born in Bolivia but raised in Chile, Guarachi returned to La Paz to look for work when he was nineteen. After being taken in by a more experienced guide in Bolivia, he went to Germany for formal training as a mountaineer and came home looking to make his name. He introduced himself at various organizations and said he was available if they ever needed help in the mountains.

  He tells me that a man named Royce Fichte from the U.S. embassy contacted him after a Bolivian plane spotted the wreckage of Flight 980 the day after the crash. They met at the airport on short notice—Guarachi didn’t even have time to grab a camera—and took a helicopter toward the mountain. By the time they arrived at Puente Roto, a base camp on the west side, there were already teams assembling from the Red Cross and the Bolivian military.

  The team stayed there that night, and the next day Guarachi and two assistants climbed to the crash site while Fichte stayed behind. Partway up, someone on the radio told them to turn around—he wasn’t sure who it was—but Guarachi insisted and finally got permission to keep going. After climbing to the saddle beyond the summit, he could tell they were getting close from the overpowering smell of jet fuel, but he couldn’t see the plane. It was only during a tiny break in the weather that he caught a glimpse and hiked over.

  There was wreckage scattered everywhere. The team found open suitcases, papers from the cockpit, crocodile skins, and shoes. Fichte had described where the flight recorders should be, but everything was a mess.

  “When you went to the crash site, did you see body parts?” I ask him.

  “No bodies,” he says. “Not even a finger. But there was blood. The plane hit the mountain dead-on. Everything disintegrated.”

  They slept at the crash site and the next day got word that they would be resupplied from the air and possibly joined by another investigator, who would drop out of a high-altitude helicopter on skis—probably Bud Leppard. But during test runs, the maneuvers were deemed too dangerous, and the supplies never came. Guarachi and his team had to descend.

  On the way back down, they saw footprints at their previous camp. They had been followed, but whoever it was didn’t continue to the crash site. They just stopped at the camp and left.

  “I don’t think their intention was to rescue us or see what happened to the plane,” Guarachi says. “They were monitoring us.”

  At base camp, Guarachi’s team was detained by the Bolivian military, separated, and taken to three different tents.

  “They searched us all,” Guarachi says. “My backpack, even our clothing. They got us naked.”

  He told them that all he’d found were plane parts and snakeskins. They were taken by helicopter to the airport and interrogated again. The official Bolivian crash report states that there were no bodies or blood, but Guarachi says that’s because he was too scared to talk about what he saw.

  “One of the men threatened me,” Guarachi says. “He said, ‘Careful telling anyone about this. I will ruin you.’”

  We start higher on the search field the next day, marching with purpose toward the glacier. Yesterday it felt like the plane parts were in better shape the higher we climbed, so we start by searching the melting ice itself. Soon we’re finding wheels, pistons, switches, hydraulics, another engine, life jackets, an oxygen tank, cables, alligator skins, and tangled clusters of wires.

  Dan and Robert find a piece of metal lodged in ice, chip it out, and then decide not to do that again—there’s not enough oxygen up here to swing a pickax around. By midmorning we’re all thoroughly exhausted, and the novelty of new plane parts has worn off. Back at camp, it felt sort of miraculous to discover wreckage on a mountain, like each piece deserved our attention. But here, in the newly melted ice, there’s an almost comical number of parts.

  “I think something happened here,” Isaac deadpans.

  “Maybe a plane crash of some kind?” Dan responds.

  You can hardly sit and rest without finding something aviation-related in the rocks at your feet. Jose and Robert find a pilot’s jacket half buried in the glacier and start digging it out. Twenty minutes later, I find the cabin’s altimeter.

  On the way back to our packs for lunch, Isaac spots a lump of green cloth tied off with thick white yarn and begins to unwrap it.

  “I hope it’s not a body part,” Isaac says, embracing the gallows humor that has become a mainstay of the trip. “No body, no body, no body . . .”

  I point out that it’s more likely to be cocaine.

  “Cocaine!” Isaac says, comically hopeful. “Cocaine, cocaine, cocaine!”

  It isn’t cocaine. It’s a brick of papers in a ziplock bag. And a 1985 Baltimore Orioles schedule. And a plastic toy. And some crayons. And pages from a diary?

  Oh. No way. This belongs to Judith Kelly.

  In July 1985, Judith Kelly made the second private expedition to the crash site. Her husband, William Kelly, had been director of the Peace Corps in Paraguay and was on Flight 980, headed back to the U.S. When the NTSB’s immediate response was stymied by weather and logistics, Kelly began preparing for her own trip.

  She devoted three months to getting in shape, took a mountaineering course in Alaska, and then went to Bolivia. Kelly declined to be interviewed for this article, but she told her story to George Jehn. In his book, Jehn describes how she met with NTSB investigator Jack Young, who died in 2005. Young reportedly told her to move on and put the loss behind her.

  “Perhaps you could say that to someone with a broken arm or leg,” she told Jehn. “But not a broken heart.”

  Kelly took a few weeks to acclimatize in Bolivia before hiring Bernardo Guarachi to take her up the mountain. They arrived at the wreckage on July 5, and Kelly spent a day reading letters she had written to her husband since the crash. She had also collected letters from the family of other victims. When she was done, she wrapped the package and buried it in the snow, where it began the same slow descent as the plane parts.

  Back home, Kelly lobbied Eastern to conduct a more thorough investigation. She’d reached the crash site without any problems, she argued, so there was no reason not to send another team. When that failed, she appeared on the Today show and said the same thing.

  A few days later, the NTSB announced an expedition, which embarked in October 1985, after the Bolivian winter, with logistical support from the Bolivian Red Cross. According to a report by lead investigator Gregory Feith, the mission was nearly its own disaster. It describes how, on the first night, porters delivered their supplies to the wrong base camp. When the two parties did connect, they found that the porters had brought tents for only four of the seven people and no stoves or fuel.

  “We were able to melt enough snow to make one pot of cold noodle soup that allowed each of us one cup,” Feith wrote.

  One investigator developed signs of pulmonary edema—a life-threatening accumulation of fluid in the lungs—and had to descend the next morning; another developed altitude sickness at the crash site. Feith’s team spent a day digging through deep snow around the plane and located the portion of the tail where the flight recorders should have been but weren’t.

  It would be decades before anyone went looking for them again.

  After finding so much—wreckage, body parts, Judith Kelly’s memorial—Isaac starts to think that the flight recorders have to be here somewhere.

  “A couple days ago, I would have told you—I think I did tell you—that I don’t really care about finding the black box,” he says. “But I find myself becoming more and more obsessed.”

  The ne
xt day, Dan is low-energy, but Isaac’s on fire, scrambling around the debris field trying to cover it all. We crawl through glacier ice melted into curious spires. We hop over crevasses and peer into glacial caves, because we’ve exhausted all the safest places to search.

  “Have you found it yet?” Dan and Isaac ask each other every few minutes.

  “No, but I’m about to,” the other invariably responds.

  At one point, Dan finds a human neck with what looks like a dog tag embedded in the flesh. But when he digs the metal out, it turns out to be just another piece of aluminum. “I was hoping I could get an ID,” Dan says. “But this unlucky guy just took some plane metal straight to the neck.”

  By midday we’re beat. Isaac walks 150 yards to his gear and barely makes it back to the group; Dan sits down next to an engine. I can’t stand without feeling like I’ve stepped onto a merry-go-round. We give up. Jose and Robert head back to camp to start dinner; Dan and Isaac say they just want to search a little longer.

  But instead of searching, they start digging up a metal beam angled out of the ground. When I ask them why, Isaac says, “I don’t know, I just started digging.”

  Just as we’re beginning to accept that we’ve failed, that we still don’t know whether the flight recorders were stolen or destroyed or maybe still covered in ice, that we’ve given up and will have nothing to tell Stacey Greer and George Jehn and all the other people who are still following the crash . . . Just as we’re coming to terms with all that, something amazing happens: Isaac finds the cockpit voice recorder.

  It’s on the ground, ten steps from where we ate lunch, a chunk of smashed metal sitting orange side down in the rocks. Isaac picks it up. Dan comes over to examine it.

  There’s a wiring harness on one end, with a group of cables leading inside, labeled CKPT VO RCDR. It’s bright orange, crushed almost beyond recognition. Like many recorders manufactured before the mid-eighties, its outer shell is made of aluminum.

  “This is it, this is the black box,” Isaac says.

  We’ve been finding pieces of it—of both flight recorders—the entire time.

  When we get back to La Paz, Dan and Isaac call Stacey Greer. “Why didn’t anyone find it before?” she says. “It just feels like there are so many unanswered questions.”

  Indeed. Why didn’t anyone find the flight recorders on the first, second, or third expeditions? Who threatened Bernardo Guarachi and why? Who was smuggling reptile skins to Miami? What brought the plane down in the first place?

  Flying home, we thought we still might have a shot at answering the last one. We had that roll of magnetic tape Dan found on the first day of searching. And based on nothing more than photos we could find online, it looked pretty similar to what would have been inside a flight recorder.

  Before we found anything, the plan had been to turn all notable materials over to the U.S. embassy in La Paz. But with orange metal in hand, giving them to a bureaucrat seemed like a good way to get them locked away forever.

  When Dan and Isaac got home, they told a friend who had worked at the FAA about what they’d found, and he said, “I just hope you didn’t bring it home.”

  By taking the flight recorders and tape back to the U.S., they discovered, they had violated Annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, a document that lays out the rules for international air travel. It says that wherever a plane crashes, that country is in charge of the investigation. Moving evidence to a different nation could be seen as undermining that authority.

  The NTSB told Dan and Isaac that the Bolivian government would have to request the agency’s assistance before it could get involved, and it’s the only agency with equipment to analyze the tape.

  Unfortunately, relations between Bolivia and the U.S. are pretty frosty. In 2008, Bolivian president Evo Morales accused both the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and the Drug Enforcement Administration of plotting a coup and expelled them from the country. Then, in 2013, Morales’s personal plane was forced to land in Austria because of a rumor that Edward Snowden was on board. Morales was so mad he threatened to close the U.S. embassy.

  I tried reaching out to retired crash investigators at Boeing and to various aviation museums, hoping that someone might help us figure out whether the tape was from the black box, but no one would touch it until the legal situation was resolved. Meanwhile, we couldn’t get any answers out of La Paz or the Bolivian embassy in Washington. From June to September of 2016, we made phone calls that weren’t returned, sent emails that weren’t acknowledged, and mailed certified letters that went unanswered.

  “This surprises me not one iota,” George Jehn wrote in an email when I sent him an update. “It’s like that crash is toxic. Nobody wants to go near it.”

  Conspiracies breed in the spaces between solid facts, and unless the NTSB decides to further strain diplomatic ties with Bolivia or gets permission to look at the tape and finds usable information—and both scenarios seem pretty unlikely—there will always be gaps in the story of Flight 980. But when you’re solving mysteries, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. After we got back from Bolivia, we knew that Guarachi didn’t steal the flight recorders and that a bomb didn’t suck all the bodies from the plane before it hit the mountain. As we reevaluated the facts about the flight, a plausible story began to emerge.

  The descent into La Paz, for example, was even more difficult than we first realized. In addition to the lack of radar at the airport, language problems sometimes plagued communication between flight crews and controllers on the ground. When Eastern purchased the routes to South America, it issued a memo warning pilots to exercise a “dose of pilot type skepticism” when in contact with the tower. There was little training on how to do this, however. Before going into La Paz, the captain was required only to watch a video about the landing. Then, on his first trip, a check pilot—someone who had flown the route before—would ride in the cockpit.

  Flight 980 crashed on what would have been pilot Larry Campbell’s second landing in La Paz. Check captain Joseph Loseth was aboard but had been seated in first class.

  What’s more, the navigation technology at Campbell’s disposal was rudimentary. Nine months after the crash, Don McClure, the chairman of the ALPA’s accident-investigation board, was part of a separate inquiry into the overall safety of flying in South America. His report details a number of shortcomings, particularly with an onboard navigation system called Omega. He noted that on flights between Paraguay and Bolivia, the system steered aircraft four miles off course in the direction of Mount Illimani—though this alone wouldn’t have caused Flight 980’s impact.

  Meanwhile, the aircraft’s other navigation system, called VOR for very high frequency omnidirectional range, relied on localized radio transmitters that told pilots only where the beacons were, not where the plane was.

  “All the navigation facilities on this route are so weak and unreliable that there is no good way to cross-check the Omega,” McClure wrote. Even if the pilots suspected that they were off course, it would have been impossible to verify.

  Maybe none of this would have mattered if there wasn’t also a storm southeast of the airport. Maybe a more experienced crew would have gone south around that storm instead of north, toward Illimani. (Or maybe not—other airlines had maps of the valley with terrain hazards labeled prominently, but Eastern didn’t.) We can speculate that the storm, combined with lackluster navigation equipment, inexperience, and bad luck, led Flight 980 straight into the side of Illimani, but it’s still conjecture. Instead of case closed, it’s case slightly less open.

  Or maybe that’s missing the real point. In July, Stacey Greer was in Boston for a week of classes and met up with Dan to talk about the expedition and look at pictures of the debris field. He also brought a couple of small plane parts and gave them to her.

  “This is my dad, right here,” Stacey said as Dan clunked the pieces down on the table. “This is the closest thing I have to the last time I saw
him.”

  When her young kids called at bedtime, she had them talk with “the man who found Grandpa’s plane.” Then she and Dan called her mom, Mark Bird’s widow.

  “Do you have any idea what happened?” she asked.

  “We have lots of ideas,” Dan said. “The problem is we’re no better than anyone else at picking the right one.”

  But now that there’s evidence of the bodies and flight recorders, and any notions of mysterious journeys to the summit have been dispelled, the questions we’re left with seem much less nefarious.

  Did a storm push the flight off course, or was it a problem with the navigation systems? Did the cockpit crew spot the mountain and try to make a frantic emergency turn? Or were they calmly pulling on the oxygen masks that they would have worn all the way to the gate? Were they sitting in nervous silence as lightning flashed around them and weather beat at the cockpit? Or was Mark Bird wishing everyone a happy new year and telling a joke? If his voice is on the magnetic tape sitting in Dan and Isaac’s kitchen, will anyone ever hear it?

  JACKIE HEDEMAN

  The Ones Who Left

  FROM The Offing

  Dad and I climb off the tram and land in a puddle. I am hunched under a creaking, insubstantial umbrella. Dad keeps the hood of his raincoat up. It is an hour before we are due at dinner and we are wandering through a quiet Amsterdam neighborhood looking for Hans Hedeman-Kalker’s house.

  I am there to hold the umbrella while my dad stands on the sidewalk and consults damp Google Maps printouts, old school. He planned our days in the Netherlands around nine such printouts. He did his research back in Kansas, ordering the chaos of barely familiar names.

  By the time we find the house, the rain has subsided and a hush has fallen over this corner of the city. Amsterdam, under rain and far from tourist coffee shops, is as sweet-smelling as a city can be. Jacob Obrecht Straat is a brick-lined street with brick houses and dripping shade trees. The buildings are all Art Deco right angles, pristine facades with white trim. Number 53, when we approach it, is just like the rest.