Five of his six flight attendants were already downstairs, chatting in the lobby. The first officer and the flight engineer, in their gold-striped uniforms, sat in the lounge reading newspapers.
“Telephone for Captain Neubaur,” said the uniformed pageboy.
Damn, thought the captain. A schedule change, probably. Another night in Tokyo.
It was the Pan Am station manager at Haneda Airport. Neubaur’s face hardened as he listened. “You want me to tell them?”
Neubaur hung up and motioned for his crew to follow him to an empty corner of the lobby. He repeated what the station manager had told him.
There was a stunned silence.
Then a stewardess, a pretty, blond woman in her early thirties, went crazy. “You’re killing us!” she shrieked. She flailed at the captain with her fists. “You goddamn pilots!”
Neubaur tried to hold her arms. Astonished hotel guests stared at the bizarre scene. The hysterical woman was beating at the captain’s chest.
The other crewmembers managed to calm the stewardess. She collapsed into a lounge chair, sobbing.
One of the flight attendants, a steward, glowered at Neubaur. “Those were her roommates on that flight.”
Incredibly, another Pan Am 707 was down. The circumstances were depressingly familiar. Another moonless night. Another Pacific island. A nonprecision approach to yet another primitive airport.
Again, no survivors.
This time it was on the island of Bali, in the Indonesian archipelago. The wreckage was strewn over a remote mountainside twenty-five miles north of the airport.
Flight 812, inbound from Hong Kong, had begun its approach in darkness toward the Bali airport using the NDB—the nondirectional radio beacon. Like most Pacific Island airports, Bali lacked an instrument landing system.
An NDB approach was a primitive procedure by jet age standards, more suitable for bush pilots and gun runners than for commercial airliners. Nonetheless, in the developing countries of the world—Pan Am’s working world—NDBs were still in wide use. Instead of making a straight-in approach on an electronic glide path, as they would do at most United States airports, pilots at Bali had to fly over the archaic NDB radio beacon, fly out over the blackened ocean for several miles while they descended, then turn back and fly to the airport.
Pilots tracked their course by watching a quivering pointer needle on the radio compass. The trick was to fly directly over the station, which the pilot recognized by a “swing” of the needle, from the top to the bottom of the compass. Then he turned to fly outbound before turning back to the airport.
They called it a teardrop procedure, because the pattern—the outbound leg, a reversal of course, then inbound to the same place— had a teardrop shape. Pilots hated the procedure because it was difficult and imprecise and things could go wrong.
On the night of April 22, something went wrong. Flight 812 went down somewhere on the island of Bali.
The investigating team spent two sweaty, insect-swatting weeks in the mountainous jungle. When at last the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorders were uncovered, one vital clue emerged.
The pilots had not flown over the station before beginning the outbound turn for the teardrop approach. They had turned too soon.
Again, the agonizing question: why?
Snippets of crew conversation from the recovered cockpit voice recorder provided clues. While still inbound to the station, the pilots mentioned that they observed the needle of number one radio swinging. The 707 was equipped with two direction-finding radios, and the number two needle remained steady, still pointing straight ahead. This was confusing, one radio indicating they had passed the station, the other indicating they had not.
The crew made a fateful decision. They concluded that the swinging needle was the correct one and that they had passed over the station.
In their next radio communication, they reported to Bali Control that they were turning outbound on a 263-degree track and descending to a lower altitude. Bali Control, which had no radar and no way of knowing where Clipper 812 actually was, acknowledged the report.
Flight 812 was still thirty miles to the north of the airport, descending in darkness toward the crest of a 7,500-foot mountain.
When Bali Tower had heard nothing from the Pan Am jet for several minutes, the tower controller radioed: “Clipper eight-one-two, Bali Tower.”
No answer.
“Clipper eight-one-two, Bali Tower, how do you read?”
Clipper 812 did not respond. What had once been a gleaming aluminum jetliner was now a litter of pulverized and burning wreckage scattered a hundred meters below the summit of the mountain.
The Bali calamity brought Pan Am’s 707 losses to eleven. Pan Am had crashed more Boeing jets than any other carrier in the world. And not just 707s. A three-engine 727 was lost during a night approach to Berlin. One of the new 747s struck the approach lights and incurred heavy damage during a miscalculated takeoff in San Francisco. Another 747 was lost to a new and still unrecognized threat. Terrorists hijacked the jumbo jet in Amsterdam, then had it flown to Cairo where they blew it up.
Something had to be done. Before the smoke subsided from the burning wreckage on Mount Patas in Bali, the probe of Pan American’s flight operations had begun.
Inspectors from the Federal Aviation Administration climbed aboard Pan Am Clippers all over the world. FAA men rode in cockpits, pored through maintenance records, asked questions, observed check rides and training flights.
The inspection went on for six weeks. The FAA’s findings confirmed the dismal facts that the internal Operations Review Group had already determined: Pan Am was crashing airplanes at three times the average rate of the United States airlines. Worse, Pan Am’s accident rate was on the rise, a reverse of the steadily decreasing industry-wide accident experience with jet airliners.
The report was scathing. Pan Am’s accidents in the Pacific, declared the FAA, involved “substandard airmen.” Training was inadequate, and there was a lack of standardization among crews. The FAA’s list went on to cover a host of operational items, matters of training manuals, route qualification, radio communications, and availability of spare parts.
But at the heart of Pan Am’s troubles, according to the FAA, were human factors. That was the trendy new term psychologists were using in accident reports. It meant people who screwed up. When applied to airline cockpits, it had the same taint as pilot error.
With the exception of a crash caused by a cargo fire, and excluding the unknown circumstances of the Tahiti crash, every recent Pan Am accident could be attributed to some form of pilot error.
The indictment landed in Skygod country like a canister of tear gas.
Substandard airmen? Wait a minute, you bureaucratic piss ants. . . this is Pan American, the world’s most experienced airline. . . we were the first to fly jets, the first to . . .
That was then, said the Feds. This is now. Clean up your act, or you will be the world’s most grounded airline.
Heads, of course, would have to roll. And so they did, particularly in the San Francisco base, where the Skygod umbrella had long ago been raised over the heads of the venerable Masters of Ocean Flying Boats.
The vice president of flight operations and the airline’s de facto chief pilot, Don Kinkel, was replaced. Before his rise to senior management, Kinkel had been the chief pilot of the Pacific operation. His lieutenant, Ira Anderson, the San Francisco chief pilot and former head of training in the Pacific, received his walking papers directly behind Kinkel. Down through each level of management, in quick succession, the airmen in charge of training, checking, and administration were dismissed.
Jim Waugh, a 747 captain with an unblemished record in the training department, was made a vice president and placed in charge of Pan Am flight operations. Walt Mullikin, a bright and tough-minded manager, became the new chief pilot of the Pacific operation. Ned Brown, a Miami captain with a reputation for hard-nosed efficiency,
took over the Atlantic. A separate department was established to oversee all matters of flight safety, headed by Fran Wallace, a highly regarded senior captain from the flying boat era.
Pilots’ training and performance histories were reviewed. A list of over a hundred senior pilots with spotty records was compiled. Quietly, with much dignity, the old pelicans received a gentle but emphatic shove into retirement.
But the most profound change was still coming. It was an invisible transformation and it had more to do with philosophy than with procedure. Pan Am was forced to peer into its own soul and answer previously unasked questions. Instead of What’s wrong with the way we fly airplanes? the question became What’s wrong with the way we manage our cockpits?
A new term was coming into play: crew concept. The idea was that crews were supposed to function as management teams, not autocracies with a supreme captain and two or three minions. It meant the captain was still the captain, but he no longer had the divine license to crash his airplane without the consent of his crew. Copilots and flight engineers—lowly new hires—were now empowered to speak up. Their opinions actually counted for something.
Disagree? With the captain? In the sanctums of the Skygods, it amounted to anarchy. Hadn’t the Masters of Ocean Flying Boats labored for thirty years to preserve the cult of the Skygod? The barbarians were storming the gates.
But history was running against the ancient Skygods. Though Pan American technology had led the world into the jet age, Pan Am’s cockpits had not emerged from the flying boat days. A new era, like it or not, was upon them. The Skygods were about to become as extinct as pterodactyls.
It was painful at first, but time was already solving part of the problem. Most of the senior Skygods—vestiges of the boat days— were at retirement age. Many had already been swept out in the purge by the Operations Review Group. Their younger counterparts, the more recently promoted captains, were quicker to embrace the new crew concept because they had endured the tyranny of the Masters of Ocean Flying Boats for their entire copiloting careers.
The cockpit transformation came down to two separate problems. The first was to de-autocratize the cockpit—to dismantle the Skygod ethic. Pan Am captains must master the subtle distinction between commanding and managing. Junior pilots must learn to participate in the decision-making process.
This was revolutionary. Pan Am copilots actually having an opinion . . .
The other problem was standardization. There wasn’t any. Pilots from the unregulated, make-the-rules-as-you-go-along flying boat days were inherently nonstandard. They were, by God, supposed to be different. Flying was a game for individuals—chest-thumping, throttle-pushing, flint-eyed Masters of-Ocean-Flying Boats—not compliant drones.
The newer breed of airmen had come from a different environment. High-tech airplanes demanded a collaborative effort from their crews. Uniqueness in a pilot was okay, but it ought to be manifested by excellence, by a mastery of technical skill, rather than by eccentricity .
The Pacific Division, home of the Skygods, had the most idiosyncratic captains. Each had a personal fetish.
“Forget that damn checklist, son,” a captain once told Rob Martinside. “You’re not flying for Pan American today. You’re flying for me.”
One of Lou Cogliani’s idiosyncrasies had been that he wanted his airplane flown everywhere, over the ocean or on airways, one hundred feet off the assigned altitude. “It’s smoother,” he explained. “No one else is flying at that altitude, stirring up the air.”
Crewmembers would nod at each other and wink. Stirring up the air? That would be like throwing a pebble in San Francisco Bay and making waves in Honolulu. But they knew better than to get into an argument about applied physics with Cogliani. “Sure, Captain, that’s a great idea. . .”
Hud Gibson, a portly and mean-spirited captain, was conservation-minded. He ordered his crews to turn off every nonessential radio, light, instrument, and navigation device. “It saves electricity,” he said, sitting in his blacked-out and nearly radioless cockpit.
Some captains scheduled themselves exclusively on the round-the-world route, a week-long journey that took them completely around the planet. But they would do it in only one direction—east-bound—because in the northern hemisphere the annoying rays of the sun always beat on the right side of the cockpit, the first officer’s side.
Other captains didn’t bother with such complications. They taped navigation charts over the windscreen and all the windows on their side. They flew around the earth in sublime, shady comfort with the sun—and everything else—blocked from view.
The magic word standardization brought eventual relief. It meant that everybody operated the airplane the same way. Total strangers—captains, first officers, flight engineers—could check in for a flight, enter the cockpit, and work in total harmony. They could fly the airplane around the world—and each would know what the other would do. Gone were the surprises.
It would take time to change an ethic so deeply embedded in the airline’s skin, but there was no choice. It had to work.
And it did. The nightmare was over. From 1974, following the Bali crash, not another Pan Am 707 was lost in a crash.
The 747, which was emerging as the new flagship, established itself as the safest airliner ever operated by Pan Am. Not a single life would ever be lost in a flying accident with a Pan Am 747*.
Pan American went on to establish a safety record that was the envy of the industry.
* In neither of two fatal 747 disasters—the bombing of PA 103 in 1988 and the runway collision with a KLM 747 at Tenerife in 1977—was the 747 or the Pan Am crew held to blame.
Chapter Twelve
Vietnam
Ton Son Nhut Air Base, Saigon
May 1968
What the hell are we doing here?
That was what Rob Martinside wondered, standing beneath the broad wing of the jetliner. He squinted in the bright sun. Across the sprawling ramp he could count six more tall tails bearing the blue Pan Am emblem. There were others—World Airways, TWA, Flying Tigers—but most of the commercial aircraft hauling troops and materiel into Vietnam belonged to Pan American World Airways.
The troops went to war in the upholstered comfort of a Pan Am jetliner. Even as they stepped out into the searing heat of Saigon, they could hear the din of war—artillery firing over on the Mekong shore, the afterburners of the F-4s thundering down the same runway Pan Am had just landed on, the load masters yelling at the grunts who were sliding cargo pallets out the cargo door of the 707.
So far no Pan Am airplane had been hit by ground fire in Vietnam. But on the home front, Pan Am was taking heavy flak. The airline’s role in the Vietnam airlift was attracting the wrath of the war-haters, who considered Pan Am to be as criminally culpable as the Dow Chemical Company, LBJ, Robert McNamara, and the CIA. Rocks smashed through the windows of Pan Am ticket offices in sporadic demonstrations around the country.
The war had become an awkward subject with the Pan Am new hires. None thought of himself as a military service evader. Most had already been in the service, and some had even served in Vietnam in the pre-buildup days. When Martinside and his classmates joined Pan Am, Vietnam had not yet escalated to a full-fledged war. But that was before the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964, followed by a steady increase in American troop presence and an intense bombing campaign in North Vietnam. Martinside and his classmates still had friends flying missions in Southeast Asia.
Now, a strange irony. Intentionally or not, they had been spared from the war. But here they were anyway.
Pan Am jets hauled toilet paper and canned food and ammunition and spare tires and clothing. They hauled troops in, and they hauled them out. At the far end of the ramp in Ton Son Nhut, a load of soldiers was waiting to be hauled out. They were in no hurry. They lay in aluminum coffins, sixteen to a pallet, waiting to be loaded into cargo bays of a jet—the same jets that hauled in the foodstuffs and toilet paper and ammunition and spare tires. A fo
rklift could slide an entire pallet of coffins into the cargo bay of a 707 freighter.
Martinside tried not to think of the coffins as he performed his checks for the flight back to Guam. There another crew would continue the flight to Honolulu. Their passengers were soldiers—live ones—bound for a week of R&R, rest and recreation, in Honolulu.
They took off for Guam. After a layover Martinside and his crew continued on to Honolulu where they would pick up a new load for the flight back to Vietnam.
That was the part Martinside hated.
Pan Am had a contract to fly the R&R flights, airlifting GIs out of the battlefield for a week’s leave in Hong Kong, Taipei, Sydney, Tokyo, or Honolulu. Married soldiers usually chose Honolulu, because their wives could fly on discounted tickets to join them.
What troubled Martinside wasn’t the coffins. The war was over for them. What he didn’t like was the endless stream of live bodies being hauled back into the maw of Vietnam.
He was doing the hauling.
The soldiers were mostly kids from down-home America—the farms, the dusty little towns, the urban barrios. He saw them strolling the sidewalks of Waikiki, hand in hand with their sunburned, teen-aged, usually pregnant, scared-to-death wives, trying to condense a lifetime into seven days.
The hard part—the time that Martinside came to hate—was the departure. It was early, just before sunrise. The wives came to the airport to say goodbye to their soldier husbands. Their lifetime-in-a-week was over.
The front of the 707, the cockpit, pointed directly into the departure lounge. Martinside hated it. As they sat there performing their preflight, waiting to be pushed back from the gate, the pilots looked through the window of the lounge, directly into the tear-streaked, swollen faces of the young wives. The women stared back at them.
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 12
