Retired police chief remembers Beaver County plane crash 30 years later
Like all of the first responders from Sept. 11, 2001, Terry Seilhamer cannot forget what he saw on that awful day. He was dispatched to assist in securing the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 after it crashed in Somerset County, Pa., killing all 44 on board, including the four hijackers.
However, Flight 93 wasn’t the only air disaster he was called out to during his more than 50-year policing career, and it wasn’t even the deadliest.
That happened exactly seven years and three days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in a crash that was not the result of a deliberate act of terror, but an unfortunate accident.
On Sept. 8, 1994, a calm, still night in Hopewell Township, Beaver County, was shattered when USAir Flight 427, a Boeing 737 bound for Pittsburgh International Airport, crashed into a wooded area and killed all 132 people on board, including the five crew members.
At the time, Seilhamer was serving as commanding officer of the Pennsylvania State Police Troop D, which oversees Butler, Armstrong, Beaver, Lawrence, and Mercer counties. On the day of the crash, he was over 200 miles away in Hershey, attending a conference.
“I got a call about this plane crash, and initially I was told it was at the Allegheny County Airport,” Seilhamer said.
That location would have prompted the response nearby Troop B, but later, he received another call informing him of the real location of the crash.
“I thought, ‘Oh, God, it’s mine,’” Seilhamer remembered.
He promptly checked out of his hotel — one day earlier than scheduled — and made the two-hour trip to the Green Garden Plaza in Aliquippa, where the state police set up a command post. It was the start of a response that would last 10 days and involve agencies at the local, state and federal level.
Seilhamer recalled the immediate aftermath as one of mass confusion.
“Nobody knew what to do, basically, because we didn't have a precedent,” he said. “We were flying by the seat of our pants and basing our actions on other major incidents that we had handled.”
The perimeter kept inching further and further back as police found remnants of the crash, including luggage and pieces of the aircraft.
“We had to keep moving our perimeter back until we could get it established that there was nothing beyond us,” he said.
Above all else, what Seilhamer recalls most about working the crash scene was the smell.
“Most guys who were working there will tell you about the smell of all that burning aviation fuel,” he said. “It just lingered for days.”
It wasn’t until 7:30 p.m. the day after the crash that Seilhamer could return to his home in Butler Township for some shut-eye. By then, he’d been awake for 36 hours.
“I was wasted,” Seilhamer said.
In the later stages of the state police’s response, their focus shifted to securing the scene for the National Transportation Safety Board, whose job it was to investigate the accident. Allegheny County maintenance staff cleared a path through the wooded area to the crash site for the benefit of the investigators.
“We had to arrange a lot of logistical stuff … making sure the guys were fed, a lot of mundane things. Just doing whatever we were asked to do by federal authorities,” Seilhamer said. “They were taking parts of the plane to a hangar over at Pittsburgh Airport and trying to assemble it, trying to figure out what exactly went wrong.”
After an investigation that lasted over four years, the NTSB later determined that the accident was caused by an issue involving the Boeing 737’s rudder, a component that was found to have caused two other crashes.
Seven years after Flight 427, it was Seilhamer’s experience with the USAir disaster that put him at the Flight 93 crash site in Somerset County on 9/11, where he assisted the state police task force commander in securing the scene.
“There was a little bit of anger when we went to 93, because we knew that was a deliberate act,” Seilhamer said. “And you just don't understand how people can … hijack an airplane and turn it into a flying bomb.”
Although he says he felt a sense of déjà vu working two airline disasters in Western Pennsylvania in less than a decade, Seilhamer says the two situations were very different.
“The plane crash in Beaver County … was scattered over a pretty good sized area,” he said.
He remembers it was heavily wooded, but there was no wildlife around.
“You didn't see or hear any wildlife. That was kind of creepy,” Seilhamer said.
The debris from the latter crash didn’t span the same distance.
“When you went to Flight 93 … that plane went basically straight down into the ground. You could see the indentation. It basically nosed straight into the ground, so the debris field was not quite as extensive.”
Seilhamer recently retired from police work, having last served as a police chief with the Jackson Township Police Department.
Unlike with Flight 93, which has a publicly-accessible national memorial in Somerset County, Flight 427’s crash site is on private property overseen by the Pine Creek Land Conservation Trust. Pieces of the plane are still visible on the original site to this day.
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