LITTLE ROCK — The entertainment console in Lisa Rowe's Cabot living room features Barbies in mint condition, Beanie Babies of all types and Wheaties boxes celebrating the cereal as "breakfast of champions."
When she was flying home from Colorado Springs, Colo., in June 1999, a Wheaties box featuring Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway was tucked under her seat, 14A, aboard American Airlines Flight 1420.
Later, investigators found the crushed and waterlogged box in the plane's wreckage. Flight 1420 crashed while landing at Little Rock National Airport, Adams Field, during a midnight thunderstorm, then burned on the bank of the Arkansas River. Eleven of the 145 on board died.
Rowe found a replacement for her Wheaties box easily enough. But now she is on a hunt to collect something else: a piece of the crashed airplane, specifically, her seat.
Rowe asked American for it, offered to buy it. But it's not for sale. The wrecks of most commercial airline crashes are scrapped, melted down for their aluminum. Anyone with a collection of Hot Wheels toy cars may have a piece of history imbedded in the aluminum-zinc alloy.
What is left of Flight 1420 is stored in a Central Flying Service hangar at Adams Field.
The National Transportation Safety Board says it has released the wreckage to American. But American says the wreckage isn't its to give, and even if it were, nothing can be done with the plane until all of the attendant litigation is finished.
"Some issue might arise, and we'd want to have access to all of the parts. So we will maintain it, completely secured, until all of the litigation is over. After then, we'll see where we are," says Al Becker, a company spokesman.
Rowe knows there is no guarantee she will ever get a piece of the plane, but says, "I'm not going away. I'm not giving up." Friday, she mailed a letter to American's top executive, Don Carty.
Rowe settled her lawsuit against the airline in March, but says that did not give her closure.
"I want something tangible, something that was there with me that night, that was part of that plane, that is part of what I went through," she says.
At least five other passengers, all of whom still have lawsuits pending, also want a piece of the wreckage.
Paul McIntosh of Phoenix, seat 10A, has a keepsake -- a golden seat-belt buckle given him by an Arizona company that makes airplane seat belts. It is a tribute for helping passengers evacuate the broken and burning plane.
But McIntosh would like a piece of the wreckage. "Maybe something small, to remember it was real, not just a nightmare," he says.
Becker says no one has made this sort of request before.
RECYCLED INTO HOT WHEELS
United Airlines Flight 585, a Boeing 737, crashed on approach to Colorado Springs in 1991. The rudder failed 1,000 feet above the ground, and the plane hit nose down, killing all 25 on board. According to company spokesman Joe Hopkins, only a few very small pieces of the airplane were salvageable.
There was plenty of scrap metal left in a Sioux City, Iowa, cornfield after United Airline's Flight 232 crashed in 1989, killing 111, but Hopkins says none of the 185 survivors asked for a piece of the wreckage. He's not sure what happened to the plane after that.
"Airplane accidents are so rare, that there's not really an industry set up to handle" the wreckage, Hopkins said. "Airplane graveyards are not what you think they are. They're full of out-of-service or retired planes in the desert in Las Vegas or Arizona, but not wrecked ones. There just aren't that many."
Paul Stark, who runs Aircraft Disassembly Specialists in Tucson, agrees with that.
"My job is to take apart planes that are wrecked or obsolete, but I get many more obsolete ones than anything else," he says. "When I sell them for scrap, I go to a junkyard and sell the aluminum. ... The scrap yards don't much care if the material came from an airplane or an old car."
Stark says it's been years since he's been called to pick up scrap from a wrecked plane, so long he can't recall the particulars.
"We can take apart the rotors, landing gear, navigation equipment, some of the stuff that can go back into other planes, but there is a limited aftermarket," Stark says. "The rest of it, we hang onto it until the scrap prices go up."
Since the aluminum in an airplane is commingled with silicone, copper and zinc, it's in limited demand. "It's not like you'll see parts of an airplane recycled into a beer can," Stark says.
But there are uses.
"Look around your house," he says. "Any sort of cast figurine with aluminum in it probably has some old airplane metal in it."
The best customers for his aluminum are in Asia, die-cast manufacturers, including Mattel Inc., which says it sells more than 150,000 Hot Wheels a day. The average collector, the company says, has 1,500 cars.
'GHOULISH' TEACHING TOOL
Vapors in the center fuel tank of TWA Flight 800 exploded on July 17, 1996. The plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island, killing all 230 aboard.
During its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board reconstructed the Boeing 747 in a hangar in Calverton, N.Y. Now, the plane's skeletal remains may become a teaching tool.
In January, on his last day as chairman of the safety board, Jim Hall shoveled dirt at a groundbreaking for a new training center in Ashburn, Va. When complete, the 73,000-square-foot building will have classrooms and a learning bay, where the TWA wreckage will again be reassembled.
None of the victims' families asked for a piece of the plane. In fact, says TWA spokesman Mark Abels, some of the passengers' personal effects were never claimed and are now boxed up and in storage.
Even if someone had asked for a memento, Abels says, "We would tend to agree that airplane parts after an accident should not be distributed."
Indeed, TWA would like to see the wreckage destroyed. Displaying it, as the safety board intends, is "grotesque, bizarre and ghoulish," Abels says.
"It should be disposed of in a respectable manner. Putting it on display is no different than showing a mangled car, a car where someone you loved died. We're against it."
But the safety board contends the airline has no claim on the wreckage.
A year after the crash, Hall asked TWA to pay $5 million toward the cost of recovering the plane and the bodies. TWA refused, saying that such a payment would taint the investigation.
Two years later, attorney Bob Craft of New York, who now represents American in Flight 1420, sent the safety board a letter on behalf of TWA confirming that neither the company nor the insurance company made any claim on the wreckage or the personal effects of the passengers.
That letter, says safety board spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz, leaves TWA with no say in what happens to the wreckage.
"We own it. We can do with it whatever we want, and we think that it will be a good learning device."
American Airlines now owns TWA, but has no ties to Flight 800 or the continuing litigation.
'A PART OF ME'
When it comes to crash wreckage, American has no established policy.
Of the 164 aboard the 757 that crashed in the Andes Mountains near Cali, Colombia, in 1995, there were four human survivors and one dog.
The dog is now cared for by an American employee. But of the plane, the company recovered little more than the flight- and data-recorder boxes.
The remote mountaintop where the plane crashed was so dense and overgrown that natives reached the site days before salvage crews could.
"If one were to hike up into the villages dotted up in that mountain, you could peek into huts and see overhead compartments and seats," says American spokesman John Hotard. "It's not like we could go hut to hut in a foreign country and dig all of the pieces out."
The wreckage of Flight 1420 will be easier to deal with, but it may be years before the trials and appeals end.
Lisa Rowe insists she's got the patience to wait it out.
"That plane is a part of me. I just want to have it, I don't even know what I'm going to do with it," she says. "I'd even buy my seat if they'd let me, and one of the attorneys told me I could, but I can't get anywhere with them.
"I guess, if worse comes to worse, I'll have to start collecting Hot Wheels cars just to get a piece of Flight 1420."
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