Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

by Gandt, Robert

  The Titanic was again looking for a captain. The search was led by the same trio of powerful directors who, seven years earlier, had engineered the replacement of General Seawell: Jack Parker, former vice chairman of GE; Donald Kendall, former chairman of PepsiCo; and William Coleman, a former Transportation Department secretary.

  To replace Shugrue as chief operating officer, heading the airline’s day-to-day operations, the board settled on Hans Mirka, fifty-one, a fast-rising star in the business who had come to Pan Am four years before from American Airlines and who was currently a senior vice president of field sales and services.

  Finding a new CEO—the next in the lineage of Imperial Skygods—was not so easy. The leading candidate for a while was the ex-chief of Piedmont Airlines, William R. Howard. But Howard was bound to a contract with the pilots of United Airlines, whom he was representing in their bid to take over United. There was brief talk of drafting Paul Sheeline, a longtime director who had formerly headed the Intercontinental Hotel subsidiary. Neither Howard nor Sheeline was inclined to accept.

  After the internecine warring of the Acker years, what the Imperial Airline needed, everyone agreed, was someone with the persuasive clout to bring them all—unions, managers, executives—together. Someone dynamic enough to rebuild what had been lost. Someone with the same vision and guts Juan Trippe had possessed when he built the airline.

  Pan American needed a Skygod.

  On January 20, 1988, the board announced that it had found its man. And when it revealed his name, a single collective question reverherated around the offices and crew rooms and work shops of Pan American.

  Who?

  “He’s a nice guy.”

  That’s what you heard when people talked about Tom Plaskett. A nice guy.

  How strange it sounded, referring as they were to the chairman of the board of Pan American. Pan Am! Over the decades, Pan Am’s CEOs had been called many things, but never nice guy.

  In the past, throughout Pan Am’s years of decline, it had been easy, fashionable even, for the pilots to hate the chief executive, especially someone like General Bill Seawell. And the Cold War gladiator with the ice-blue eyes had returned their contempt in full measure. Seawell always maintained that level of arrogance that made him so satisfyingly hateable.

  And then it became just as easy for them to hate Ed Acker, because the Texas huckster had promised them things, and then instead of delivering, had dismembered their airline. And Ed Acker, in his high-rolling style, was also arrogant. And such arrogance! The Skygodly loftiness—the champagne, the tantrums, the much-loved rumors of looting and plunder. Both Seawell and Acker had reigned over the Imperial Airline like potentates of a medium-sized monarchy—and the grunts loved it because they could hate them for it.

  Now they had Mister Nice Guy. No icy-blue-eyed tantrums, no hucksterism, no arrogance. Here was a bland-faced little guy who was telling them to their face that things weren’t looking so good at Financially Troubled Pan Am, that he was going to do his best, whatever that was, to turn it around. But he wouldn’t promise them the moon. The moon days were over.

  He was a little guy, diminutive both in stature and in manner. Standing in a room full of six-footers, Tom Plaskett looked like a kewpie doll in a business suit. Roundish of face, bland of expression, he stood there and recited his numbers, dismal as they were, and took hits from the audience, who had just agreed to pay $180 million to get rid of Ed Acker.

  “Mr. Plaskett, tell us why you and the other top executives aren’t taking pay cuts just as we are.”

  He didn’t even blink. “Because Pan Am needs the best talent it can recruit right now,” he said. “We can’t recruit good managers unless we offer attractive salaries.”

  Whaaaat? That answer made no one particularly happy. But how could they argue with it? At least the man wasn’t dodging and weaving.

  Plaskett brought with him decent, if not impressive, credentials. He had a Harvard M.B.A. and had begun his career as an engineer at GM. He had served a term at American Airlines, where he earned recognition for creating the first frequent-flier program. He played classical piano. He was a self-avowed computer freak who carried a laptop with him wherever he traveled. He disdained strong drink and language. When Tom Plaskett became irate, truly seething, he would let fly a salty epithet like “Oh, poop.”

  With his engineer’s roots, Plaskett was known as a detail-oriented manager, methodical perhaps to a fault, disinclined to shoot from the hip. And that, of course, suited the Pan Am staffers just fine, because for the past seven years they had worked for the king of the hip shots, Ed Acker.

  Plaskett’s sole experience as an airline chief executive was at Continental Airlines. Frank Lorenzo had hired him for the top job, then decided that Plaskett was too plodding, too unflamboyant for his taste, and summarily fired him. But no one was holding that against Plaskett. In the stormy world of deregulation, being fired by Frank Lorenzo was like winning a public service medal.

  Chairman Plaskett put together a fresh management team. To the post of senior vice president, operations, he named Bob Gould, the pilot who had first represented the labor coalition on the board of directors, and who had been drafted by Marty Shugrue as a vice president for planning.

  Gould was a young man in a hurry. Seven years ago he had been a junior Pan Am first officer. Now he was in charge of all Pan Am operations—flight ops, maintenance, in-flight service, dispatch—everything that had to do with how Pan Am moved airplanes.

  One of Gould’s first acts was to shake the whole foundation of the flight operations department. He fired the vice president of flight operations—the airline’s chief pilot—an avuncular, highly experienced manager named Jim Duncan. And he replaced him with a bellicose union officer named Dan Affourtit.

  The pilots were furious. Duncan fired? Duncan was one of the few managerial pilots the line pilots trusted. Duncan was one of them, everyone said. Duncan would stick up for his troops.

  Now he had been replaced by a union table thumper.

  Until then the pilots had believed that Bob Gould, one of their own, was endowed with a Skygodlike judgment. No more. Gould’s brain had apparently turned to toast.

  Gould had a specific purpose in mind. He had witnessed previous “concessionary” contracts. The pilots would agree to change the scheduling and duty limit rules in their contract so that the company would gain a specified dollar savings. It never worked. Somehow all the little “productivity” changes were never fully implemented. Too much slipped through the cracks. A $50 million contract concession never yielded half that much.

  Which was why Gould hired Dan Affourtit. It amounted to hiring your adversary to tell you what you were doing wrong. As a union representative who had negotiated contract givebacks, Affourtit understood the nuances of the new contract better than anyone. Gould gave Affourtit his orders: Get our money’s worth out of this contract. Squeeze the pilots’ agreement like a wet chamois.

  Gould figured they had a year. Two at the most. Pan Am had to extract full value from the employee contract concessions quickly, or the game was up. Tango Uniform.

  More heads rolled. Most of them were experienced managers who had been around flight operations for years. They were mostly replaced with former union officials.

  And that troubled the line pilots, both pro-and anti-union. Despite its financial troubles, Pan Am had earned one of the most enviable operational records in the business. The old appellation “the world’s most experienced airline” meant something, because over the years Pan Am’s checklists, procedures, manuals, and flight-training curriculum had set the industry standard. And the standard had been maintained by a succession of professional managers like Duncan and his lieutenants.

  Now what? There were predictions of calamity. What did union hacks know about running flight operations? To those with clear recollections of the Great Strike, it seemed a variation on an old theme: the monkeys were running the zoo. This time the monkeys were from the u
nion. The same ones who had strived to bring the company to its knees during the labor war were now striving to resuscitate it.

  It did seem peculiar, but after a while people stopped thinking about it. Pan Am wasn’t flying airplanes into the ground. There were no headline-making breaches of safety. Nothing changed.

  As the Financially Troubled Pan Am lurched through 1988, good news came in strange forms.

  The Wall Street Journal confidently reported that the airline would have “a much narrower loss in 1988 than in 1987,” which provoked minor celebrations at Pan Am. Hell, what else did they have to celebrate? Sure, they were still losing money by the shipload, but—hallelujah!—not as many shiploads as before.

  And then Chairman Plaskett told the business press he expected the airline “to have a modest operating profit this year.”

  Which triggered serious celebration. Profit? Could it be? It was almost more than the dispirited, pay-reduced grunts dared let themselves imagine.

  Much of the previous two years’ monumental losses had been attributed to terrorism—the negative traffic effects of a TWA hijacking in the Mediterranean and a terrorist takeover of a Pan Am 747 in Karachi, which was climaxed by a bloody shootout. Overseas passengers stayed away from Pan Am in droves.

  Now they were coming back. The threat of terrorism was fading from the public consciousness. The number of summer travelers to Europe had risen by 30 percent. Pan Am’s share of the North Atlantic market was actually growing—from 13.5 percent in 1986 to a current 16.7 percent. The airline was embarked on a refurbishing program for its flagships, the 747s. Plans were announced to hire an additional eleven hundred flight attendants.

  Small gains, maybe. But in them were the minuscule seeds of a recovery. It was beginning to look as though the old Imperial Airline was turning itself around. Pan Am just might make it into the next century after all. . . unless, of course, something unforeseen, something unthinkable, happened.

  And then four days before Christmas, 1988, something did happen. Something unthinkable.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A Village in Scotland

  It was the day the heart of Pan American died.

  —A PAN AM PILOT

  Some things never change. Captain Jim MacQuarrie was exasperated. Here they were, ready to push back from the gate at six o’clock in the evening—exactly on time—but still they were going to be late. Out there on the blue-lighted taxiways, MacQuarrie could see the airplanes with the anticollision beacons winking, backed up like cattle in a chute. It was a classic Heathrow winter evening. Too many departures in too short a time.

  In his mid-fifties now, MacQuarrie was becoming something of a curmudgeon. He liked to bitch about things—the delays and the beat up airplanes and the mush-witted executives that he thought were running the airline into the toilet. But for MacQuarrie the bitching was mostly a reflexive activity. Hell, it was his duty to bitch. Somebody had to keep the jerks on the forty-sixth floor honest, and it might as well be him. For nearly a decade MacQuarrie had been a mover in the Air Line Pilots Association. It was MacQuarrie who, as chairman of the union, had led the pilots into the Great Strike of 1985.

  All that was behind him now. All except the bitching. He was out of union work, content to enjoy his job as a 747 captain. MacQuarrie was senior enough to fly to the destinations of his choice, which, for him, meant London. He didn’t care about Rio or Delhi or Moscow. London was civilized. In London they spoke English, served decent beer, and didn’t honk their horns in traffic. He liked that.

  And as a senior captain, MacQuarrie could pick his time off. After this trip he would be home in New Hampshire spending the Christmas holidays with his family.

  People liked Jim MacQuarrie. Once you knew him, you could see behind the curmudgeonly bitching and tough-guy role-playing. MacQuarrie had a twinkle in his eye.

  The truth was, he enjoyed the union-versus-management scrapping. It was good fun. It was a game where you got into the ring with the other guy, slapped each other around awhile, then you shook hands and repaired down the street to knock back a few.

  And MacQuarrie’s bitching also concealed his true feeling about Pan Am. As much as anyone, he wanted the old Imperial Airline to make it. He liked to say, not too discreetly, that if the morons in management would just get their shit together, the airline could be great again. Like all the old new hires of the sixties, MacQuarrie remembered the lofty talk. . . Congratulations, gentlemen, you’re going to be SST captains. . . the rich legacy of the Clippers . . the reservation list for Pan Am’s first commercial moon fligh.

  Well, maybe it hadn’t worked out. But there was a new generation. MacQuarrie had a son, Mike, who had been a naval aviator and was now a Pan Am pilot himself—one of the new lineage of new hires. Maybe, just perhaps, he would be flying an SST.

  Clipper Maid of the Seas was working its way in the queue toward runway 27R. When they were third in line for departure, MacQuarrie leaned back and told the flight engineer, Jerry Avritt, he could start the two inboard engines, which had been shut down to conserve fuel.

  It had taken nearly half an hour to get there. Finally they were number one. “Clipper one-oh-three cleared for takeoff on two-seven-right,” said the tower controller.

  MacQuarrie reached up and snapped on the landing lights, illuminating the concrete a hundred yards ahead. He eased the four throttles forward.

  Weighing over 700,000 pounds—nearly her maximum weight—the great ship lumbered down the darkened runway. Vortices of mist spiraled from her wingtips as Clipper Maid of the Seas lifted from the concrete and climbed into the sodden English sky. In less than a minute she was enveloped in the slate-gray murk.

  It was the busiest time of a flight, the first half hour. Air traffic control kept them down at six thousand, under the inbound arrivals. After Burnham VOR, they were steered north. “Clipper one-oh-three, fly heading three-five-zero and climb to flight level one-two-zero.”

  That was better. They were on their way northward, toward Scotland, and climbing. A few minutes later they were cleared all the way up to 31,000 feet.

  MacQuarrie handled all these chores just as he had hundreds of times before. The jet leveled at its initial cruising altitude of 31,000. Avritt, the flight engineer, was busy at his panel managing the fuel supply to the four thirsty Pratt & Whitney engines.

  They checked in with the air traffic controller in Prestwick. “Good evening, Scottish. Clipper one-oh-three, level at three-one-zero.”

  “Good evening, Clipper one-oh-three,” responded the controller. “Squawk zero-three-five-seven. Ident, please.”

  MacQuarrie inserted the transponder code—0357—and pushed the tiny “Ident” button on the control head. This would produce an image on the controller’s radar screen identifying the Pan Am flight by its number and confirming its altitude of 31,000 feet.

  Six miles below, invisible under the dank layer of cloud, lay Scotland. Through the undercast MacQuarrie could pick out the soft glow of the cities. They shimmered through the cloud like lamps under a blanket.

  The clearance was to an airways position called Margo, in Scotland, then oceanward, directly toward 59 degrees north by 10 degrees west. They were bucking a headwind, a jet stream of over a hundred knots that howled down out of the Arctic, nearly on their nose.

  Despite the torrent of high-altitude wind, the ride was smooth. Clipper Maid of the Seas was cruising the night sky as serenely as an ocean liner.

  Jim MacQuarrie tilted back in his seat. His feet found their usual perch on the two rests at the bottom of the instrument panel. The busiest part of the flight—the hectic climb-out and post-departure activity—was behind them. All the pilots had to do now was obtain their oceanic clearance and check it against their printed flight plan. Then they could relax and work on something important. Like dinner.

  In the first-class cabin the flight attendants were already into the cocktail service. The first round of appetizers was on the way. That’s what MacQuarrie li
ked about Flight 103. You left London at dinner time, and it was still early evening when you landed at Kennedy. A very civilized schedule.

  “Oceanic clearance, Jim.”

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  On the second VHF radio, Shanwick Control was delivering Clipper 103’s oceanic track across the North Atlantic. To preclude a misread clearance, both pilots monitored oceanic clearances.

  The time was 7:03 P.M. The pilots were still copying the clearance when the unthinkable happened.

  A loud whump—from somewhere below and behind the cockpit. A lurch. The sucking, ear-popping whoosh of an explosive decompression .

  The hull of the pressurized jetliner split like a burst balloon. A maelstrom of fog and cushions and paper and luggage and bodies swept through the fuselage. As the cabin lights extinguished, there was a bewildering roar.

  It took less than three seconds. Clipper Maid of the Seas was transformed from a colossus of the skies to a plummeting aggregation of scrap metal and human life.

  A few lucky ones died in the violence of the airframe disintegration. Most did not. They spent the last forty-six seconds of their lives trapped in the belly of a raging beast. . . whirling, twisting, plunging in darkness toward the earth. . . their screams lost in the vastness of the night sky.

  It was a vision of hell.

  Nothing in Bob Gould’s years as a Marine Corps officer or as a Pan American pilot had prepared him for this. The stench of kerosene assailed his nostrils. A pall of smoke still rose from the torn hunks of metal that littered the landscape. As Gould slogged through the wet grass, the mud sucked at his shoes like soft cement.

  The ghastliness was almost too surreal to register on the senses. Bodies lay in gardens, by the roadside, on rooftops. They hung in trees, their clothing fluttering in the dismal wind. They lay in the fields, half buried in the mud. Some were horribly dismembered. Some appeared to be unmarked, as if in a deep sleep.