Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

by Gandt, Robert

  In the center of the town was a crater thirty feet across. Gould walked to the edge of the great hole and peered inside. It was still smoldering, filled with fragments of the doomed jetliner. Nearby were three of the engines, planted vertically in the concrete.

  The still-smoking crater was on the site of what had once been a house. It was the home of a family named Flannigan. Now the house was gone, and so were the Flannigans, every trace of them. They had been literally vaporized in the thirty-foot bubbling hellhole.

  The village of Lockerbie had been visited by horror. One Scottish family rose that morning to find a handsome young man with blond curls lying in their front yard. There was no visible sign of injury, but the body was lifeless.

  On the golf course north of town, the greenskeeper discovered corpses scattered fifty to a hundred yards apart on the fairways. They had tumbled from the sky like bales of laundry.

  Outside the village, a farmer found his flock of sheep spooked and stampeded into a fenced corner of the field. One of his ewes, he discovered, had been killed by the falling body of a young woman.

  Gould looked at a large section of the fuselage that was still intact. It was filled with debris and oddments of passenger’s belongings—Christmas gifts, eyeglasses, shaving kits, driver’s licenses, shoes, dolls. And corpses. The cabin looked to Gould as though it had been whirled in a devil’s caldron.

  When the bulletin came in on the night of December 21, 1988 that Pan Am’s Flight 103 had inexplicably fallen from the sky, Gould assembled his team of maintenance and operations people and boarded Pan Am Flight 2 for London. From London they took a chartered light airplane to Scotland.

  On the way, Gould had time to think. He already knew the names of the crew. There wasn’t anyone in Pan American he knew better than Jim MacQuarrie. When Gould was the chairman of the pilot’s union, his vice-chairman was MacQuarrie. And when he had vaulted the fence over into management, it was MacQuarrie who had succeeded him in the union job.

  Gould and MacQuarrie. Their styles were as different as velvet and sandpaper. Gould, the Yale graduate, liked to keep union affairs on a businesslike, genteel level. MacQuarrie, more the street fighter, was apt to aim for the solar plexus. Together they made a formidable team. Even after they took opposite sides at the negotiating table, they remained fast friends.

  It was raining in Lockerbie. The muck and mire of the soggy ground made it difficult to inspect the extensive crash site. There were six separate impact areas, including the one in the center of the village where eleven residents had been killed by the falling mass of metal.

  Soldiers and constables and policemen were formed into search teams to comb the hills and forests and fields for articles from the wreck of Flight 103. The total search area amounted to 845 square miles of soggy, wooded hilly Scottish terrain. In the jet stream at 31,000 feet, fragments from the disintegrated jetliner had scattered like chaff in a hurricane. Debris from the jetliner was turning up as far away as eighty miles from Lockerbie.

  In an open meadow, looking like a piece of abstract sculpture, lay the nose section and cockpit of Clipper Maid of the Seas. The smoothly contoured bow of the jetliner had been neatly severed from the rest of the fuselage. At a glance it appeared to be an intact airframe component waiting to be joined to the fuselage.

  Gould didn’t want to see what was inside. He had to, he told himself. It was his job. So he took a deep breath and looked.

  The interior was a jumble of debris. The throttles were jammed full forward. Trailing from them, fifty or more feet from the cockpit, were the cables that had once connected the throttles to the mighty Pratt & Whitney engines. Two crew members were inside. Gould could tell by the uniforms and insignia that both were pilots, the first officer and the flight engineer.

  They walked on. Bodies lay in clusters across the open meadow. A few had been covered with tarpaulins. Most were not.

  As Gould and one of his team, John Pagnotta, were walking along the impact path of the doomed jetliner, tracing the sequence of its collision with the Scottish countryside, Gould spotted what he had been dreading—and expecting—to find.

  The body was partially covered by a tarpaulin. Someone had marked it “Captain.” Partly visible beneath the tarp was the white uniform shirt with the four-striped insignia.

  Gould stood there for a moment gazing down at the shape on the ground. He stooped to pull back the tarpaulin.

  Pagnotta caught his arm. “Jesus, Bob, I wouldn’t do that.”

  Gould drew another deep breath. He pulled back the tarp. For a long while he stood there, looking down at the lifeless body of his old friend Jim MacQuarrie.

  Late that night, Gould latched the door in his hotel room. Except for a nap on the flight across the Atlantic, he had not slept for over twenty-four hours. He was bone-weary, chilled by the dismal wind, numbed by the daylong exposure to unbelievable horrors. He sat on the bed and stared at his mud-encrusted shoes. The leather soles were already rotting.

  It would be the hardest thing he’d done all day. He picked up the telephone and called New Hampshire. Gould delivered the news that Jim MacQuarrie’s wife had been waiting for. “I found him,” Gould told her. “I found my friend.”

  How could this happen?

  One of the tenets of accident investigation was that you didn’t leap to conclusions. You methodically collected all the facts, without bias. Then you studied them. It was a very analytical process.

  The press wasn’t waiting for analyses. Already the media were offering speculation that Clipper Maid of the Seas had experienced an in-flight structural failure. Weren’t Pan Am’s 747s the oldest in the industry? CNN reported that of the 710 Boeing 747s constructed, Clipper Maid of the Seas was number fifteen. Her maintenance records contained a history of cracks, corrosion, one on-board fire, and an incident of smoke in the cabin.

  Clipper Maid of the Seas had a phenomenal history: 72,000 service hours. That placed her in a twilight zone far beyond what anyone knew about airframe flexing limits and metal fatigue. It amounted to fifteen hundred circumnavigations of the planet. Television news programs hosted experts who explained how such an old bird could literally come apart at the seams after so many years of service.

  Such speculation was making the Pan Am team furious. For one thing, Clipper Maid of the Seas had just been through a hugely expensive six-month-long structural retrofit to qualify it for the CRAF, the Air Force’s Civil Reserve Air Fleet. This particular 747, old as she was, possessed the strength of the Brooklyn Bridge. Gould and all his staff knew there was no way this airplane would have experienced a structural failure.

  But here it was, smashed over the earth like a dropped watermelon. If not a structural failure, then what?

  By the end of the first day, they suspected. By the end of the second day, they knew. The wreckage was yielding tiny, telltale clues. Bud Perry and Walt Winkler, Pan Am maintenance executives, identified certain fragments of the fuselage that were charred—but not in the manner of an after-impact kerosene fire. They bore the residue of something that burned much faster than jet fuel. Shards of aluminum were ripped in a rose-petaled pattern that could only have come from a violent explosion.

  It was a bomb.

  But the Scots, who were officially in charge of the investigation, weren’t yet ready to confirm such a conclusion. They wanted to be absolutely certain.

  For four more days they delayed making a public announcement. Meanwhile each news program began with the same shot of the nose section of Clipper Maid of the Seas lying on its side in a Scottish meadow. CNN continued interviewing aviation experts. The experts pointed to schematics and cutaway drawings of the 747. They explained how the tired old bird had probably popped apart like a worn out watch.

  Not until the day after Christmas, nearly five days after the fall of Flight 103, did the truth come out. Flight 103 had not crashed because of a failure of her airframe. Clipper Maid of the Seas was destroyed by an explosive device stored in the forward cargo
compartment. The 259 passengers and crew and the eleven people on the ground had been murdered.

  The accident inquiry was now, additionally, a homicide investigation. No more airframe experts appeared on the news programs. They were replaced by experts on terrorism.

  They had a memorial service for Jim MacQuarrie there in Lockerbie. According to his family’s wishes, his remains were cremated.

  The next day, Bob Gould checked in for his flight back to the United States. Under his arm he carried the box containing Jim MacQuarrie’s ashes.

  But he hadn’t reckoned on British bureaucracy. As he stood red-eyed and drained at the departure counter at Heathrow Airport, clutching his box, he was confronted by a thin-haired, bespectacled customs agent. The agent raised both eyebrows. “See here,” he said, “what do you think you’re doing? You don’t have permission to carry human remains out of the United Kingdom. You have to have authorization for that.”

  Gould stared at him. He couldn’t believe this. After the spirit-numbing experience of Lockerbie, he was faced with a cement-headed obstructionist. Gould told them who he was and where he had been. He explained that he was carrying the ashes of the captain of Pan Am Flight 103 home to his family. He said that he had no intention, under any circumstances, of relinquishing custody of this box under his arm. It looked like a standoff that would quickly slip into a shouting match.

  And then Gould witnessed a miracle.

  The agent nodded curtly, and his bureaucratic eyebrows lowered. He conferred briefly with a colleague. And then, in one stroke, the agent sliced through half a millennium of Her Majesty’s Royal Red Tape.

  “Yes, sir,” announced the agent. “Please accept our apologies. We wish you Godspeed and a swift journey.”

  Gould was on his way, box under his arm. Ten hours later, shivering in the New Hampshire night, he rang the doorbell of the MacQuarrie household.

  In the shock and anger of Lockerbie, it was not surprising that nerves would be taut. A tabloid reporter was foolish enough to keep badgering one of the Pan Am team, a grizzled flight engineer. “Listen, sport, would you mind commenting on how this accident could have—”

  A limit had been exceeded. The red-faced engineer whirled on the reporter. “Listen, asshole, quit calling this an accident. This was premeditated fucking murder. Do you understand?”

  The reporter, suddenly possessed of a clearer understanding, nodded agreeably. “Ah, yes, yes, I do. I think I get your meaning. . .”

  Now that they knew what had caused the fall of Flight 103, it was imperative to know precisely how such a heinous act had been committed. And by whom.

  The investigators had delayed announcing the bomb determination because they hoped to buy time. The saboteurs might make a mistake. They might leave a clue as to their identity if they thought the world didn’t know it was a terrorist bombing.

  It was a reasonable hope, but futile. The terrorists, whoever they were, had covered their tracks.

  There was no shortage of suspects. Even before the bomb finding was announced, Scotland Yard’s phones were ringing with calls from an assortment of loonies and extremist groups, all claiming credit for the fall of Flight 103. Psychics were phoning in to offer solutions to the crime.

  It didn’t take long, even before the forensic experts applied tests to the shredded metal, to figure out where the bomb had detonated. One fifty-foot section of the forward fuselage was missing from the assembled wreckage. A careful look at the severed nose and cockpit section showed that the nose and forward cabin had been neatly blown off the fuselage. The explosion had occurred in the forward baggage compartment, just behind the bulkhead connecting the nose section to the main cabin.

  And that explained why no signal, not one sign of distress, had flashed down from Flight 103. The bomb exploded next to the ship’s main electronics bay, known as Station 41, the nerve center for the ships electrical, communications, and navigational equipment. In an instant, Flight 103’s radios and radar transponder were snuffed out. Down below, in the air traffic control center, the identifying blip on the radar screen had simply gone out like a failed bulb.

  Forensic testing proved that the residue on certain shreds of metal came from a Czech-made explosive substance called Semtex. The bomb had been contained in a Toshiba radio-cassette player, model RTF53D, which investigators determined had been transported in a Samsonite hard-sided suitcase. The weapon had been armed and detonated by a two-stop timer-barometer device that required both a specific cabin altitude and a certain elapsed time to blow up.

  Which meant that the bombers hadn’t intended to leave any evidence. Had Flight 103 not been delayed by the congested departure traffic at Heathrow Airport, the explosion would have occurred not over Scotland but farther along on the flight plan, over the North Atlantic. The true cause of the downing of Flight 103 might never have been learned.

  The image was incessant: night after night on the evening news, the cockpit of Clipper Maid of the Seas, lying on its side in a Scottish meadow. Television viewers stared at the blue-and-white death capsule while the subliminal message etched itself into their consciousness: Pan Am airplanes explode and crash. . . The Doomsday Airline. . . Fly Pan Am and you could end up as a bloated corpse in some foreign meadow. . .

  Travelers stayed away in droves. Logic and loyalty and good sense had nothing to do with it. It was a gut reaction, an abhorrence of the televised images they had absorbed from Lockerbie. If you had to fly overseas, you’d best do it on KLM, or Lufthansa, or Swissair. Anyone. Any airline that didn’t tempt terrorists.

  Thus came the new year, 1989. The operating plan that Bob Gould had constructed was in place and working. The only trouble was, there were no passengers.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Coyote’s Last Leg

  Did you hear about the new Tom Plaskett doll? You wind it up and it does nothing for a year.

  —Joke reported in the Wall Street Journal, June 5, 1989

  You could stand in the back of a Pan Am jumbo jet, looking forward, and see not a living, paying passenger. The cavernous passenger compartments of the 747s looked like abandoned warehouses.

  The ghosts of Flight 103 were stalking the ticket counters. The passenger loads that had begun, ever so haltingly, to pick up in 1988 vanished like the radar blip of Clipper Maid of the Seas.

  Historically Pan Am faced a cash crunch every winter during the slack America-to-Europe tourist season. This year’s shortfall amounted to more than a crunch. Only by transferring its slots on previously ordered Airbus A-320s to Jay Pritzker’s Braniff II was Pan Am able to generate the cash—$l24 million—to meet its payroll at the beginning of 1989.

  Worried employees were asking, “Why doesn’t he do something?”

  By “he” they meant, of course, the chairman. Granted, no one had any particularly good ideas about what Tom Plaskett ought to be doing about Pan Am’s condition. But they wanted something done. Anything.

  “I gave up a third of my wages and benefits,” said an operations staffer, “for this? All we’re doing is covering Plaskett’s losses.”

  “Pan Am doesn’t need a guy like Plaskett,” declared a vice president from the Acker era. “What Pan Am needs now is a real fire-in-the-belly ass-kicker. And that ain’t Tom Plaskett.”

  And that much seemed to be true: Tom Plaskett didn’t have a fire in his belly. He was a corporate incarnation of Jimmy Carter. It was coming back to everyone now why he had been fired at Continental: Plaskett was too slow-moving for Frank Lorenzo’s taste.

  Then in June of 1989, plodding Tom Plaskett gave them all a huge surprise. He did something so uncharacteristic that people wondered if Mister Nice Guy might, in fact, have metamorphosed into a Skygod. It was a move so audacious even Juan Trippe would have been impressed.

  Buy another airline?

  When the news appeared in the business press that morning, Wall Street regarded it as a jolly good joke. The Financially Troubled Pan American? Here was an outfit out of money, bur
dened with debt, so strapped that it couldn’t afford to buy a single new airplane, bidding to take over mighty Northwest Airlines.

  Tom Plaskett formally presented Northwest with a takeover bid of $2.7 billion, which amounted to $110 per share of stock. And it was real money. Since April, Plaskett had been in marathon sessions with bankers and takeover strategists. Standing behind his bid were the likes of Bankers Trust, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Citicorp, and Prudential-Bache.

  Wall Street stopped chuckling. Hey, wait a minute. . . this looks real. The caper was perhaps not so wacky after all. These were the eighties, the decade of the LBO and the corporate buccaneer. No one had ever accused Tom Plaskett of being a buccaneer, but here he was, throwing his weight around like a fire-breathing robber baron.

  The reason the deal made sense—and the reason why the banks were willing to lend Plaskett the money—wasn’t Pan Am’s financial strength, which was appallingly nonexistent. Northwest itself was flush with cash and assets. A computer analysis done by the banks showed that a merger of the two airlines would be a marriage made in heaven. According to the analysis, the merger would produce a total savings of more than $240 million annually, more than enough to make up for Pan Am’s own shortfalls.

  The trouble was, Pan Am wasn’t the only player in the game. Northwest was a vulnerable takeover target, and other raiders were appearing on the horizon. And any such buyout would have to be approved by Northwest’s board of directors, none of whom were jubilant about Pan Am’s $883 million of debt and decrepit fleet of airplanes, including the oldest jumbos in the world.

  But there was something appealing, if a bit quixotic, about the Pan Am bid. When overlaid with Pan Am’s current structure, the Northwest system, particularly its Far East routes, presented a tantalizing facsimile of the old Imperial Airline. Even the cynical grunts in the Pan Am cockpits found themselves ruminating about the glory days they thought were behind them. By now, of course, they had been through too many such flights of fancy—white knights, would-be mergers—to get their hopes too high over this deal.