In 1964, when Juan Trippe decided to elevate his own rank to that of chairman of the board and chief executive officer, he named Harold Gray as president. Among the old hands from the boat days, Gray commanded intense loyalty. He was seen as a decent man, perhaps one level removed from the deviousness that characterized Pan American’s top management.
A streak of Boy Scout ran through Harold Gray. Throughout his career he held to the belief that the pure, unvarnished numbers—speed, capacity, profit, loss—would speak for themselves. Gray despised the political games Pan Am played in Washington—the incessant lobbying, the mansion Pan Am kept in the capital just for entertaining, the stroking of pet politicians like Senator Owen Brewster of Maine and Congresswoman Claire Booth Luce, wife of Trippe’s fellow Yaleman Henry Luce. Such things shouldn’t be necessary, Gray thought. If the airline was run efficiently and safely enough, everyone would know. The world, of its own accord, would beat a path to Pan Am’s door.
Which was why, of course, a man like Harold Gray had no use for a man like Najeeb Halaby. Halaby was not one of the old boat hands. Halaby hadn’t worked his way up in the airline business as Gray had. He was a Washington glamour boy whose only role was to do what Gray most despised—to lobby.
To Juan Trippe, such naiveté was worrisome. Many thought that it explained his choice of Najeeb Halaby as Gray’s backup man. It would be a typical Trippe solution—combining Gray’s clear-headed operational sense with Halaby’s political savvy. It ought to be the perfect match.
Not all the board members were as sanguine about Trippe’s choice. Some of the directors, privately, had raised objections. Halaby?
“What does he know about running an airline?”
“Jeeb? Well, now, Jeeb’s a nice fellow and all that, but. . .”
“I love Jeeb Halaby. Terrific guy. But he’s hardly qualified to. . . ”
They knew better than to bring it up with Trippe. One of them went to Gray with his concerns. Gray had never concealed his own misgivings about Halaby.
But now Gray just shrugged. “What difference does it make? There isn’t anybody else.”
And in a sense, there wasn’t. Trippe had approached the matter of succession as he had done everything else at Pan Am—with a calculated vagueness. Those few executives he had recruited with the apparent intent of grooming them for the succession inevitably gained the impression that the old man would never retire. And even if he did, he would somehow continue to rule. Pan Am would always be Trippe’s airline.
For years it looked like John Leslie, a brilliant young engineer who had joined Pan Am in the thirties, would be Trippe’s heir. Trippe had made Leslie a vice president and, in 1950, a director. But then Leslie had been crippled with polio. After a long absence he managed to come back to work, but for the rest of his life he was bound to a wheelchair.
Another candidate was Roger Lewis, who had come on board in 1955 from his job as assistant secretary of the Air Force. Lewis had distinguished himself as a talented manager and seemed to be the heir apparent. But like the others, he had doubts about Trippe’s ever turning over command of his empire. And along the way, Lewis had acquired doubts about Pan Am’s long-term chances. He worried that Pan Am’s constant political maneuvering in Washington had poisoned its chances for further route awards. He saw the domestic airlines eventually overrunning Pan Am’s position as the premier international carrier. When the offer came to assume the top post at General Dynamics, an aircraft manufacturing conglomerate, Roger Lewis jumped ship.
There had been no one else, no one but the old Master of Ocean Flying Boats, Harold Gray. Onto his shoulders, almost by default, would slip the mantle of Supreme Skygod. And after him, Najeeb Halaby.
They took the official photograph of the three of them. In the picture, they were all smiling. It was a portrait of unity, the torch passing from Trippe’s strong hand to the firm grips of his successors. Gray, the faithful lieutenant, sat at his customary place on Trippe’s right. Halaby, the novitiate, was on the left. The polished table and the mahogany paneling in the backdrop reinforced the image of stability and permanence. There was a model of the mighty new 747 nearby.
For those who expressed nervousness about Najeeb Halaby, the company line now was that Halaby was there to learn. He had plenty of time. “Don’t worry about Jeeb,” the insiders were saying. “Harold is only sixty-two. He’ll be the chairman for at least five years before Jeeb takes over.”
Five years. That was the envelope. It allowed everyone to feel less worried about the succession. A lot could happen in five years.
But there was more in the photograph they took that day. When examined up close, the picture revealed dark shadows ringing Harold Gray’s eyes. Beneath the affable smile and outward show of exuberance, Gray was concealing a deadly secret. He had been diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer. He was undergoing cobalt treatments and was frequently in severe pain. The fate of Pan American World Airways was in the hands of a dying man.
Juan Trippe walked down the hallway with his old colleague. Trippe ushered Gray into the big office at the southwest corner. He told Gray to take over the office, desk and all. Don’t bother moving new stuff in. In any case, Trippe said, he would be moving into a smaller office down the hall. He would be in next morning.
Trippe said goodbye to Kathleen Clair, his secretary of the past eighteen years. She had tears in her eyes. As he shuffled down the hall he acknowledged with a nod and a smile the well-wishing staffers standing outside their offices.
His driver was waiting at the street below. Spring sunshine slanted down the walled avenues. It was May 7, 1968. The long death of Pan American World Airways had begun.
Part II
Descent
Chapter Eleven
Crash
Every night for a month after the accident, Jim Wood dreamed about Lou Cogliani. It was a recurring dream, and it was very real.
You’re too low, said Jim Wood. You’ve descended too soon.
Captain Cogliani didn’t hear. He continued descending.
Lou Cogliani didn’t like crewmembers riding in the jump seat behind him. He always said that he didn’t want people looking over his shoulder. But in his dream, Wood rode the jump seat of the Boeing 707 freighter, Clipper Rising Sun, directly behind the captain. He watched the approach into Manila, and he was powerless to interfere.
They were making a VOR/DME nonprecision approach to the Manila airport. The thirty-mile descent path to the runway was divided into segments, like stair steps. Each segment was flown at a prescribed altitude that allowed the airplane to clear the mountainous terrain beneath. The descent from one stair step to the next was determined by the DME—the distance-measuring equipment—which told the crew exactly how many miles they were from the airport.
It was a dark, moonless night. Squalls from an offshore typhoon buffeted the jet, and intermittent rain hammered on the aluminum skin. The 707 passed through three thousand feet. Outside the cockpit windows, there was only darkness.
You’re supposed to be at thirty-one hundred feet, Lou. No lower.
Cogliani was at twenty-nine hundred feet. He continued descending. Twenty-eight hundred feet. Twenty-seven . . .
In the right seat, the first officer, Tom Rehman, was busy. He had his head down, studying the approach plate, trying to read the tiny print that identified the distance and altitude for each segment of the approach. At the same time, he was answering questions from Manila Control. He seemed confused. “You’re supposed to be at. . . uh, let’s see. . . 2,500 feet at twenty-three miles out.” And then he returned to his radio conversation with Manila Control.
They were still thirty miles out. And they were too low.
Lou Cogliani’s attention was riveted on his instruments. Occasionally he sneaked hurried glances at the approach plate near his elbow. Wood could see that Cogliani was looking at the wrong segment for the altitude he was flying. The descending 707 was one stair step lower than it was supposed to be.
<
br /> Jim Wood watched helplessly. There’s a mountain out there, Lou. It’s not on the approach plate. You can’t see it in the darkness.
Cogliani descended to 2,500 hundred feet.
Pull up, Lou.
Rehman’s head was still down. He was trying to determine the DME mileage for the next step-down altitude in the approach. Manila Control called on the radio, asking for the airplane’s position.
The mountain loomed out of the darkness like an expanding shadow. A sudden blackness filled the windscreen, and for an instant both pilots glanced up.
What’s that. . . ?
Clipper Rising Sun slammed into the sloping crest of the mountain. Her 130 tons of aluminum and steel alloy tore a mile-long swath through a forest of mahogany trees.
The debris littered the forest, where it burned for over six hours. There were no survivors.
The preliminary accident investigation had already determined the probable cause of the accident, and Jim Wood was not satisfied. It was one thing to attribute the accident to a mistaken altitude, or a procedural error. What bothered Wood was that it seemed so inevitable.
One night over beers in Sausalito, he told Rob Martinside about the dream. “Why didn’t somebody—the first officer, the engineer—tell him he was at the wrong altitude?”
“Because he was a Skygod,” said Martinside. “You don’t tell Skygods they’re wrong.”
“I do.”
“Yeah, I remember. You almost got fired.”
“But I was right.
“So what?”
“So it will happen again.”
And so it did.
Papeete, Tahiti, July 22, 1973. A moonless South Pacific night. The heavily laden Pan Am 707 lumbered toward the runway for takeoff. In addition to her sixty-nine passengers and ten crew members, she carried the great store of jet fuel needed for the flight back to Honolulu. The rotating beacon on the belly of the jet cast a red hue on the tropical grass by the taxiway.
The usual crowd—relatives, fellow tourists, airline employees—waited in the open lounge, watching the jetliner depart. The Papeete airport had an informal, open-air ambiance, like something from a Somerset Maugham tale. Travelers hated leaving Tahiti. In a short time the place grew on them, and they wanted to stay.
In the cockpit of the 707, Captain Bob Evarts responded to the checklist. Evarts was a senior captain, now in his last year of a career that had begun in the flying boat days. His first officer, Clyde Havens, was the same age—fifty-nine. His career had been nearly as long as Evarts’s, but Havens had never been a captain. Years ago he had failed the upgrade training for the left seat and was relegated to the status of permanent copilot. “Clyde’s okay,” captains said about Havens. “He’s just a little slow.”
Following the instructions from the tower, they taxied onto the active runway. Beyond the twin rows of white runway lights that stretched for nearly two miles in front of them was the end of the runway. Then an inky blackness. There was no horizon. The sea and the sky melded together in a featureless black void.
“Clipper eight-oh-two,” said the Papeete control tower operator, “the wind is two-four-zero at eight knots. You’re cleared for takeoff.”
Havens acknowledged the clearance. The jet began its takeoff roll.
From the airport terminal they watched the 707 trundle down the runway. The noise of the four fan-jets swelled in a crescendo. The jetliner gathered speed, rushing to the distant end of the runway. It lifted and climbed into the blackness beyond the shore. From the terminal there was no way to tell if the jet was climbing, descending, or turning. The lights of the departing 707 twinkled in the black void beyond the shore.
And then, an orange flash.
Seconds later, nothing. The lights were gone. Clipper 802 had vanished from sight.
In the terminal, disbelief.
“What happened?”
“Where did it go?”
“Do you think. . . ?”
Airmen hate mysteries. For every accident, they want to know the probable cause.
No probable cause was determined for the loss of Flight 802. Most of the wreckage of the Boeing 707, including the vital flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder—crashproof “black boxes” that capsulized the moments of the jet’s last flight—sank to the floor of the Pacific. They were never recovered.
Investigators combed the scant evidence, looking for clues. In the maintenance history of the airplane was a recent wing flap discrepancy. Had the flaps retracted asymmetrically? If so, might it have caused an uncontrollable roll, making the jet plummet downward to the ocean? Another discrepancy involved the windshield heat. Could a windshield have shattered, distracting or blinding or incapacitating the pilots?
Maybe. Or was it something else? Something nonmechanical? One inescapable statistic about aviation accidents was that most were caused by human factors. Since the first flight of the Wright brothers, aviation was a plethora of mistakes waiting to be made—landing short of the runway, forgetting to lower the landing gear or the wing flaps, running out of fuel, misjudging things like altitude, airspeed, distance. Such lapses were always branded with the most searing of aviation indictments: pilot error.
By an extrapolation of logic, investigators could conclude that every accident was somehow the result of human error. Someone should have caught the discrepancy, the circumstances, the procedural omission that permitted an accident to occur. In the final analysis of aviation mishaps, it always came down to the pilots. Pilots were almost always in the loop of blame, because they had the last vote in every impending calamity.
But that view was simplistic. In the accident equation, it still missed the all-important Why?
A more significant fact was that most fatal airline accidents—more than two-thirds—happened during the takeoff or landing phase. And a disturbingly high proportion of those accidents occurred at night, or in low visibility, and at airports that lacked an ILS—an instrument landing system, an electronic approach path transmitter that guided airplanes precisely down a glide path to the touchdown point on the runway.
Which described the world of Pan American.
Pan Am’s planet-wide route system covered the typhoon-scoured atolls of the Pacific, the equatorial republics of South America, the backwaters of Central Africa. Pan Am had the highest exposure to primitive airports of any major airline in the western world. Unlike the domestic carriers that operated exclusively in the comfortable, radar-controlled airway system of the United States, Pan Am’s jets made daily—and nightly—transits of the world’s most backward facilities.
So what happened in Tahiti? No one would ever know for sure. Rob Martinside blamed the “black hole” syndrome. Since aviators first flew at night, there had been a problem with spatial disorientation in the blackness. For the first few seconds after liftoff, as pilots made the transition from gazing outside at runway lights to looking inside at their instruments, they didn’t always believe what they saw. It was particularly difficult over an empty, horizonless ocean. A common accident off aircraft carriers was the phenomenon of airmen launching into the black night off the bow of the ship, then inexplicably flying into the water. The cause was visual disorientation—the pilot’s flawed senses overruling what he read on his instruments.
But such speculation was blasphemy in Skygod country, particularly when spoken by new-hire know-nothings. You didn’t second-guess the actions of a lost crew, particularly when there was no hard evidence in the form of a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder. Every trace of evidence from Flight 802, black boxes included, lay 18,000 feet beneath the waves.
The older Pan Am pilots closed ranks around their peers. Give the deceased the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was a split flap, or a windshield problem. Better to accept such an explanation than to impugn the reputation of a Pan Am captain.
“Bullshit,” said Jim Wood, who saw no reason to be charitable. He had seen the Skygods in action. It angered him that no one wanted to c
onfront the real problem. “How many airliners have had accidents because of a split flap— day or night? Virtually none. Or a shattered windshield?”
None.
Wood had his own theory: “It was dark. They took off in a 707 that was heavily loaded and didn’t climb fast. They got disoriented and let it fly into the water.”
It was a private theory. He had the good sense to keep it to himself.
Pago Pago, Samoa, July 22, 1973
Another Pacific island. Another dark night, with rain and gusty winds, and yet another instrument approach to a runway without an electronic glide slope. A Pan Am 707 plowed through the jungle short of the runway, then burned. Ninety-one people perished.
By now it was clear to everyone, even the Skygods. The crash of Flight 806 on the island of Pago Pago brought to ten the number of Pan American 707s destroyed. Pan Am was littering the islands of the Pacific with the hulks of Boeing jetliners. The chairman of the board ordered a special task force to be put together, called the Operations Review croup. The group was to study the reasons for Pan Am’s recent abysmal safety record and to recommend methods to prevent another crash.
The group’s sixty-nine-page report was completed on April 23, 1974. It was too late.
Tokyo, April 22, 1974
Captain Al Neubaur yawned. In nearly thirty years of international flying, he had never adjusted to the nine-hour time change between the Far East and California. Back in Palo Alto it was nearly dinner time. Here in Tokyo it was morning, and Neubaur wished he were going to bed, not departing on a flight.
Neubaur glanced at the wall clock in the lobby of the Keio Plaza Hotel. Ten to six. Ten more minutes before he and the rest of the crew would be picked up for the long drive out to Haneda Airport. The flight to Guam departed at nine in the morning. Outside, a damp winter grayness lay over Tokyo. Neubaur would be glad to leave. He had been away from home for four days, and he had four to go. At least in Guam the sun would be out.
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 11
