“That’s where our luck ran out. We just ran out of altitude, trying to correct it,” Haynes told a NASA conference on risk in 1991. “That close to the ground, we didn’t have time.” The right wing and tail section broke off, a fire erupted, and the body of the airplane bounced along the runway and broke apart. Most of the fatalities were in the back of the plane and in the first-class cabin behind the cockpit, which broke away during impact.
The most bizarre postscript came in the final moments of the Air Canada flight that came to be known as the Gimli Glider. The nose gear collapsed as the plane touched down, and the front end of the plane hit the ground with “a hell of a thump,” as Pearson recalled it. The dragging of the metal across the pavement acted to brake the plane, which was a blessing. For, unseen by either of the pilots as they approached what they thought to be an abandoned airfield, the former air base had been converted into a motorsports track. On that day, it was being used by the Winnipeg Sports Car Club and was crowded with spectators enjoying the summer afternoon. Miraculously, no one on the ground was injured.
After wrestling with perplexing calamities in the air, not getting a break in the final seconds just seems wrong, but hurdles right up to the end do not surprise retired airline pilot and air safety specialist John Cox. “Air accidents are complex,” Cox explained. “In some cases, factors outside the original problem can come into play, and in others, there is so much going on that it is not possible to anticipate all the possibilities.”
The Opposite of Despair
Norhisham Kassim praised God after his harrowing brush with disaster, and Al Haynes chimed in with his belief that “something guides us in all we do,” adding that strength can be found by looking inward, a philosophy shared by Pearson and Burkill. This last component of resiliency is what James Reason calls “realistic optimism,” the opposite of despair, a stubborn belief that things will be all right in the end.
“You have to believe in yourself. Every time you go to work you’re doing something that not everyone on the street can do,” Burkill told me. In managing emergencies, confidence is necessary, “for sure,” he said. Pearson chimed in with the circular argument that experience makes a pilot confident, and confidence can lead to positive outcomes.
“Pilots should feel they can handle anything,” Haynes told me. “If you don’t have that feeling, you shouldn’t be flying.”
These nerve-racking flights are rare. The general public will never know just how often pilots avert disaster much earlier in the chain, but several airline executives say that safety threats are interrupted all the time.
Despite the ambiguities in how the increasingly complex airliner affects the pilots’ ability to interact with it, one thing is clear: the amount of data available from new-generation airplanes is a remarkable tool. Hundreds of details on every routine flight are collected and analyzed as airlines try to determine how often their operations veer outside the safety envelope. Voice and data recorders offer an after-the-fact view, but information collected during normal trips can be downloaded, combined with others, and analyzed in order to discover hidden weaknesses in maintenance, training, or operational procedures.
“Even with a good outcome, every part of the story isn’t perfect,” said Billy Nolen, a former captain with American Airlines and now senior vice president of safety for the U.S. airline trade association Airlines for America. Reviewing large numbers of flights allows a carrier to understand how close to the edge uneventful flights get. “What is our data showing? What is our story?”
It’s not exactly studying the silver linings instead of the clouds. Much more can be done to get there, according to Captain Fantastic (a.k.a. de Crespigny), who has taken on the study of human achievement with the same energy he has devoted to flying. “Many things improve when we mine the big data for successes,” he said. From the few hero pilots who have accomplished dramatic saves to the many who overcome hurdles and safely bring their passengers to their destinations—these examples should be examined for the lessons they hold. “We’ll be able to change our definition of safety from avoiding what goes wrong to ensuring things go right,” de Crespigny said.
On a summer morning in 2006, Capt. Cort Tangeman and First Officer Laura Strand were approaching Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. They’d taken an MD-80 airliner on the overnight flight from Los Angeles. Strand was flying the leg, and she called for Tangeman to lower the landing gear as they neared the airport, but Tangeman found that the nose gear doors would not open.
“At that point we had been up all night, and it’s kind of like shock and awe,” Tangeman said. “You’re not sure what you’re seeing, and you know it is not going to be solved between now and the time you land.” The crew took the plane down to about five hundred feet, making an unusual flyby right down the runway of one of the world’s busiest airports. From there, a tower controller eyeballed the plane using binoculars. This confirmed that while the main gear was down, the wheels under the plane’s nose were not.
The crew was given an area off of the approach path to fly while they planned for landing. They were not immediately concerned about fuel, but soon they would be.
“I was alarmed at how much fuel we were burning, because flaps were down in early-approach mode setting, and the gear was down and we were low. Airplanes burn a lot of fuel at low altitude,” Tangeman said. He had taken over the flying duties from Strand, who was now working the radios. “When that fuel light went on, that added another level to that event.”
The pilots had talked to maintenance and tried to extend the gear manually, without success. Tangeman remembers the tension and finality that came with the realization that the emergency was real and that all their skills would be required to avert disaster.
“This is not a simulator, we can’t step back and do it again; we’re fuel low,” he said he thought at the time. “We’re not getting out of this.”
As the plane touched down, Tangeman decided to stay on the main gear as long as possible without operating the thrust reversers. “When the aluminum skin of the MD-80 finally hit the tarmac, the sound was like running a Skil saw on a garbage can, and we stopped really fast at the seventy-five-hundred-foot mark, fully loaded, with no reversers.” It was a landing so flawless that none of the 136 people aboard was injured, and damage to the plane was minimal.
A television news helicopter equipped with a camera had recorded the last thirty seconds of the landing, providing a riveting element to an already compelling story. Maybe this is the reason Tangeman’s and Strand’s performances that day became the subject of human factors training at American for the next eighteen months.
Tangeman was encouraged to share his story with his fellow pilots, and the subject to which he kept returning was the value of the lessons he’d learned from others. “There are no top guns” in the airline cockpit, he said. Senior pilots who share their expertise enable an atmosphere where pilots routinely save the day.
“The most influential thing in my life has been working with other great captains,” Tangeman told me. “Nothing replaces great mentoring.”
At a time, and in an industry, in which automation is preferable to the human touch, humanity’s marvelous flip side is often overlooked and underappreciated, except in cases of hero pilots such as those you’ve read about here. Their stories are uplifting, but they are certainly not the only people contributing to the complex system that keeps flying safe. Aircraft and engine designers, airline workers and maintenance engineers, air traffic controllers and regulators—they all play a role; as do passengers when they note the closest emergency exit to their seat and keep their belts fastened throughout the flight.
When things go wrong, as they inevitably do, the crash detectives find the lessons in catastrophe. Our uniquely human ability to learn from mistakes, to think, create, and innovate, works better than we will ever know.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is an exercise in patience—not for me, but for everyone whose
path has crossed mine over the past two years. I pestered them all. People I knew and people I didn’t. An astonishing number of them provided assistance.
Some are quoted or profiled in this book. Others gave background help, research, guidance, fact checking, and provocation, all of which crystallized my thoughts. Without all these people, this book would be incomplete.
I am deeply grateful for the knowledgeable people mentioned here and also for those who, fearing negative consequences, asked that I not thank them by name. Their contributions infuse every page.
In the digital age, a librarian’s job is constantly evolving. I had the opportunity to work with two stellar examples of this still-vital profession, Yvette Yurubi, who presides over nearly seven decades of Pan American Airways history at the University of Miami, and Nick Nagurney, from the Perrot Memorial Library in my hometown of Old Greenwich, Connecticut, who cheerfully searched the world for some very obscure titles. To the authors of the books and reports in my bibliography, thanks for making complicated subjects comprehensible.
Sometimes the written word isn’t enough, so I relied on Bob Benzon, James Blaszczak, Mike Bowers, Barbara Burian, John Cox, Key Dismukes, Olivier Ferrante, Peter Fiegehen, Pete Frey, John Gadzinski, Darren Gaines, Mitch Garber, Keith Hagy, Tom Haueter, Guy Hirst, Kevin Humphreys, Judy Jeevarajan, Jim Karsh, Rory Kay, Lewis Larsen, John Lauber, Robert MacIntosh, John Nance, Michael O’Rourke, Kazunori Ozawa, David Paqua, Mike Poole, Helena Reidemar, Eduard M. Ricaurte, Donald Sadoway, Steve Saint Amour, Gary Santos, Ron Schleede, Patrick Smith, and Robert Swaim.
Working in an unfamiliar culture is always challenging. Providing assistance in Malaysia in too many ways to count were Maureen Jeyasooriar, Riza Johari, and Anita Woo. Although, like all Malaysians, they were dazed by the disappearance of Malaysia 370, these women worked with energy and dedication.
In Japan, Takeo Aizawa started off as my legman, became my translator, moved into the position of researcher, and then adviser, and will always be a dear friend.
For digging up old records and sharing stories of events from long ago, special thanks to Ed Dover of Albuquerque, and the late Nick Tramontano. Others deserving of a special shout-out are Stuart Macfarlane and Anne Cassin in New Zealand, Mick Quinn and Ben Sandilands in Australia, Samir Kohli in India, George Jehn in New York, Les Filotas in Ottawa, Guy Noffsinger in Washington, DC, Jeff Kriendler in Miami, and Graham Simons and Susan Williams in England.
Officials with the following organizations went out of their way to accommodate me in one way or another: Daniel Baker, CEO at FlightAware; Perry Flint of the International Air Transport Association; and Markus Ruediger of Star Alliance. From Lufthansa, Matthias Kippenberg, Nils Haupt, and Martin Riecken (the latter two employed elsewhere now). Also thanks to Corey Caldwell of the Air Line Pilots Association; Martin Dolan, now retired from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau; Robert Garner of the High Altitude Chamber Lab at Arizona State University, Mesa; Mary Anne Greczyn at Airbus; Peter Knudson of the National Transportation Safety Board; James Stabile and James Stabile Jr. of Aeronautical Data Systems; and Mamoru Takahashi of the Japan Transport Safety Board.
Special thanks to ABC News for bringing me in to help with the network’s coverage when air disasters happen. While I was in Malaysia, it was a gift to work with Mike Gudgell, Matt Hosford, David Kerley, David Reiter, Gloria Rivera, Brian Ross, Rhonda Schwartz, Ben Sherwood, Jon Williams, and Bob Woodruff.
Exercising patience is one thing, but there’s little time for real exercise when writing a book. Thanks to Joanna Stark at Rebel Desk for enabling me to write on my feet; Steven Fiorenza of Advanced Physical Therapy of Stamford for stretching out my kinks; and M. J. Kim of Kida NYC for helping me feel pretty.
The two best critics in the world love me, if not everything I write. My sister Andrea Lee Negroni is a lawyer, but she slices sentences with such precision she could have been a surgeon. My husband, New York Times editor Jim Schembari, is an accomplished word polisher, but he had his work cut out for him in tackling mine.
I hope their efforts made my copy a little easier to handle for my editors, Shannon Kelly and Meg Leder, and the very clever Emily Murdock Baker, formerly of Penguin and now the head of EMB Editorial. Special thanks to them and to publicist Christopher Smith and to my agent, Anna Sproul-Latimer of Ross Yoon, who is prone to saying, “What can I do to help?” just when I need it most. Anna and I might never have met if not for the situational awareness of the beautiful and talented Dara Kaye, also of Ross Yoon. Thanks to my research assistant Chrissi Culver, whose tracking-down and following-up skills will surely be applied to the benefit of the flying public in her new position as an air traffic controller.
Women are a small part of the aviation geek community, but our numbers are growing. I’m so thankful that Chrissi, Emily, and Anna are among them.
Unending appreciation and love to my family: my husband, Jim, and my children, Antonio, Sam, Joseph, Marian, and her husband, Elliot Speed, for all their support. My undying gratitude to God for saving grace.
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