As the loved ones of Flight 427’s victims arrived at Greater Pittsburgh International Airport, a hastily assembled team of guides met them at the gateways.
Those specially trained guides, along with other USAir staffers working behind the scenes, were there to help relatives on a bewildering journey, searching for answers about what happened to the Boeing 737 and dealing with the grief of sudden tragedy.
That help, company officials said, can be so extensive that members of one family may have as many as four airline employees assigned to them personally throughout the process.
The aid provided comes loaded with fancy names-for example, there’s a “situation room,” where employees work phone banks, and “critical incident stress debriefings,” in which families are encouraged to say what they’re feeling. But what it amounts to is having at least one guide available for each family, 24 hours a day.
Other airlines scramble similar teams to provide help for the families of victims of air disasters. The methods they use-and the counseling that’s provided by non-airline employees-has been refined through the years, as airlines and mental-health professionals learn from each new tragedy, according to experts.
In Pittsburgh, more than two dozen mental-health counselors were available to help family members, who have been sequestered in the airline’s club rooms at the airport and at area hotels. The counselors had been drawn from the Allegheny County Mental Health Department and from Allegheny General Hospital.
Dr. Anthony Mannarino, director of the hospital’s Center for Traumatic Stress and Children, said there even may be too many counselors.
“At a time like this, families need space to deal with this when they’re ready,” said Mannarino, who met Friday with four Chicago-area families of victims. “And the time may not be today or tomorrow, but a few weeks from now.”
Whenever they need assistance, the airline plans to help them find it. The airlines don’t provide counseling-they’re not equipped to, officials said. But they try to provide everything else, from food to funeral arrangements, said Patricia Goldman, a USAir spokeswoman.
The airline’s efforts started immediately after the crash, when a team of USAir employees set up a phone bank at the company’s headquarters in Arlington, Va., she said.
Workers waited for calls from relatives and provided what information they could. They also made calls on their own to families, trying to confirm identities of the plane’s passengers.
Once telephone contact was established, USAir assigned two employees-called “family coordinators”-to each family. If relatives wanted to fly to Pittsburgh, the coordinators made the travel arrangements, set up hotel accommodations and even escorted the family’s members, if the family wished.
“They are not ever presented with a bill for anything,” Goldman said. “Everything is complimentary for them.”
Other USAir employees work with the coroner’s office, helping with the identification of the dead passengers. Later, the company will assign yet another person to keep the family informed of developments in weeks and months to come, including details on the crash’s investigation.
Wayman and Winnie Hancock, parents of jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, discovered how much help an airline can provide in such disasters when their daughter, Jean, died in the 1985 crash of Delta Flight 191 in Dallas.
Delta flew Wayman Hancock to California so he could tell another relative of the death personally. The airline offered to fly the family to Texas. And, finally, the airline paid for relatives to travel to Hawaii so they could scatter Jean Hancock’s ashes in a bay that she loved.
“They took care of everything,” said Wayman Hancock, who lives with his wife in Chicago.
Winnie Hancock said she also received counseling that helped her through the crisis.
But one man at the Pittsburgh airport said his family isn’t interested.
Harry Bernard’s 49-year-old nephew, a U.S. Steel purchasing agent who has the same name as his uncle, died in the crash while returning from a steel industry meeting in Gary. The victim’s wife doesn’t want to be counseled about her loss, he said.
“She doesn’t even want to watch TV,” the uncle said. “TV here is showing some awful things. People were cut to bits, and my nephew was one of them.”
But other families have talked with counselors.
“There’s a whole range of reactions, from intense emotional upset to people just trying to get through the next couple of days,” Mannarino said.
Mental-health experts say that’s to be expected. People deal with grief in different ways. Most go through the usual stages-shock, anger, denial, acceptance-but the order can differ, as can the stages’ duration.
By Friday afternoon, the families of 27 victims had arrived at the airport.
One of the USAir staffers there to meet them was John Tingle, an airline district manager from Charlotte, N.C.
He had learned about the crash at a managers’ conference intended to lift morale in the financially struggling company, which has suffered a string of crashes in the past five years. It was an upbeat meeting to discuss new products, but Tingle had been telling associates about his counseling of the family of a young man who had died in a USAir crash in July in Charlotte.
