Read Cockpit Confidential Online
Authors: Patrick Smith
Cockpit Confidential (35 page)
To me, had the airplanes crashed, blown up, and reduced the upper halves of those buildings to burned-out hulks, the whole event would nonetheless have clung to the realm of believability. Had the towers not actually fallen, I suspect our September 11 hangover, which rages to this day, might not have been so prolonged. It was
the collapse
âthe groaning implosions and the pyroclastic tornadoes whipping through the canyons of lower Manhattanâthat catapulted the event from ordinary disaster to historical infamy. As I stand awestruck in this shithole airport restaurant in South Carolina, the television shows the towers of the World Trade Center. They are not just afire, not just shedding debris and pouring out oil-black smoke. They are
falling down
. The sight of those ugly, magnificent towers collapsing onto themselves is the most sublimely terrifying thing I have ever seen.
And pilots, like fire fighters, police officers, and everyone else whose professions had been implicated, had no choice but to take things, well, personally. Four on-duty crews were victims. They were disrespected in the worst way, killed after their beloved machines were stolen from under them and driven into buildings. John Ogonowski comes to mind, the good-guy captain of American 11. Of the thousands of people victimized that day, Captain Ogonowski was figuratively, if not literally, the first of them. He lived in my home state; his funeral made the front pages, where he was eulogized for his philanthropic work with local Cambodian immigrants. Maybe it's melodramatic to say I felt a direct bond or kinship with these eight men, but I did feel an underlying and wrenching empathy.
In the ten-second bursts it took them to fall, I knew
something
about the business of flying planes would be different. It's hyperbole to speak of the world, or for that matter flying, having been “changed forever,” but yes, for sure, things are different nowâalbeit for reasons we don't always own up to. More than any clash of civilizations, the real and lasting legacy of Mohammed Atta is something more mundane: tedium. Think about it. The long lines, searches, and pat-downs; the color-coded alerts, the litany of inconvenient rules and protocols we're now forced to followâall this meaningless pomp in the name of security. Of all of modern life's rituals, few are marinated in boredom as much as air travel. “Flying” is what we call it. How misleading. We don't fly so much as we sit and stand around for interminable amounts of time. And most distressing of all, we seem to be okay with this. The terrorists have won, goes the refrain, and perhaps that's true. It isn't quite what they hoped to win, but they've won it nevertheless.
First, you can't simply cut a hole into the side of a plane and add an extra door. Doing so would require a large-scale and extremely expensive structural redesign. And you'd presumably need to add a lavatory to the cockpit. And what about rest facilities? Long-haul flights carry augmented crews working in shifts (
see crew rest
), and the off-duty pilots require a suitable place to relax. You'd be doubling or tripling the size of the average cockpit, which in turn would take up space already used for galleys, storage, and passenger seats. In addition, there are times when it's beneficial for pilots to have direct access to the cabinâfor checking out certain mechanical problems, helping flight attendants deal with passenger issues, and so on.
Even if this were an easy or affordable thing to do, which it's not, would it really be worth the trouble? Strategically, the September 11 suicide takeover scheme was a one-shot, one-time formula. Hijacking protocols are different today (
see security essay
), and the awareness of passengers and crew, together with armored cockpit doors, does about as good a job as is necessary, in my opinion. Long and short: having the crew barricaded up front is going to cause more problems than it solves.
The hazard of portable rocketsâthey are often referred to as MANPADS, a horrible acronym formed out of the words Man-Portable Air-Defense Systemsâhas become a hot topic, provoked by media stories about possible, even imminent, attacks using these weapons, which are small and easily concealed. An estimated half a million such rockets exist worldwide, with more than thirty terrorist organizations and other rogue groups possessing them. Some experts have opined that all U.S. airliners should be installed with electronic antimissile devices, as are some military and VIP planes. Systems are available for about $1 million per unit, and the U.S. government has pressed ahead with a feasibility study.
What hasn't been widely reported, for one, are the weapons' technical shortcomings. They are difficult to use, and when fired at short range are unlikely to score anything other than a close miss. Two Soviet-made Strela-2M missiles were fired from a truck at an Israeli charter plane taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002. Both missed. Even a direct hit would not necessarily destroy a plane, as proven by a DHL Airbus struck over Baghdad in 2003, and a DC-10 that survived a shot in 1984. Granted, we shouldn't disregard this or any other threat because it
probably
won't result in a disaster. Trouble is, we're again chasing the chimera of absolute security, price tag be damned. Of all the air safety ventures on which we could spend tens of billions of dollars, I don't think this is the right one in terms of cost-effectiveness and the number of lives it might save.
“Soft walls,” this idea is called, and it's one of those things that keeps the writers at
Popular Science
busy. More power to them, but it's on par with the idea of establishing colonies on Mars: within our engineering abilities, extremely expensive, and then only vaguely useful. Reading comments from people at work on these ideas, one is struck by how consumed and infatuated they are not with the promises of safety or practicality, but with technology alone. That's not a bad thing by itself, and it's a fine testament to anyone's devotion as a scientist or engineer, but the application of these concepts is limited. It's sci-fi show-and-tell. In another way, it gets back to our greater national fetishizing of safety. Believing we can protect ourselves from every last direction of attack, we now wish to string coils of virtual barbed wire among the clouds. To me, there's a beautiful and poetic futility to the idea of securing the very air above our heads.
Where to start? Conspirobabble stretches back to the death of Dag Hammarskjöld and the heyday of the Bermuda Triangle. The modern era got going with the 1983 shoot-down of Korean Air Lines flight 007 by a Soviet fighter. Since then, the Internet has become a potent incubator of myth and misinformation, spreading pseudo-truths with the lackadaisical tap of a Send button. Five minutes with a keyboard and mouse, and you're privy to more feverish speculation than the old Grassy Knollers ever could have dreamed of.
Prior to 2001, the 1996 TWA tragedy was probably the most mulled-over disaster in the minds of the intellectually eccentric. Flight 800 blew up like a giant roman candle in the July twilight off Long Island, the result of a short circuit igniting vapors in an unused fuel tank. What came next was a sideshow of at least four books and enough web chatter to power a 747 through the sound barrier. Even mainstream commentators registered intense skepticism that flight 800 could've crashed the way it did. After all, fuel tanks don't simply explode.
Except, under very unusual circumstances, they do. It's not likely, but it's neither impossible nor unprecedented. There have been fuel tank explosions on at least thirteen commercial planes, including a Thai Airways 737 that burst into flames while parked at the gate in Bangkok, killing a flight attendant. TWA 800, an older 747-100 destined for Paris, had been baking on a hot tarmac up until departure, superheating the vapors in its empty center fuel cell (a 747 does not need full tanks to cross the Atlantic). Later, an electrical short deep in the jet's mid-fuselage bowels provided the ignition. Per FAA behest, airlines have begun phasing in a system that uses nitrogen as an inert filler in vacant tanks.
We heard more whispering after American 587 went down in New York City less than two months after the 2001 terror attacks. Officially, the crash was caused by crew error, compounded by a design quirk in the A300's rudder system, but the mongers had another idea: a bomb destroyed the plane, and the government, along with the airlines, fearing paralysis of the economy, decided to pass off the crash as an accident.
Then we have September 11 itself. If you haven't been paying attention, cyberspace is awash with claims that the attacks were an inside job. The specific assertions are too numerous and complicated to list here exhaustively. They vary website to website, overlapping, underscoring, complementing, and contradicting one another to the point of madness. The Pentagon was struck with a missile, not a 757; the planes that hit the World Trade Center were remotely controlled military craft; the real flights 11, 175, 77, and 93 never existed or were diverted to secret bases; controlled demolitions felled the Twin Towers. And so on.
The same technological magic that makes the spread of wild conjecture so effortless should, you would think, make countering and dismissing it no less easy. Strictly speaking, indeed it does. But it depends who's paying attention, and the human proclivity for
believing
in conspiracies is a lot stronger these days than our proclivity for analyzing and debating them. Maybe that's human nature, or maybe it's some perverse/inverse fallout of technology. Either way, there are lots more people around hungry to make us believe something than make us
not
believe something. A pro-conspiracy website is certainly a lot more exciting and will garner a lot more hits than an
anti
-conspiracy website. Both kinds are out there, but it's the conspiracy traffickers, regardless of their credibility, who believe more passionately in their cause and consequently garner more attention.
It's not beyond reason that
some
aspects of the 2001 attacks deserve more scrutiny than the 9/11 Commission granted them. But those who most urgently wish us to believe so have done themselves no favors by expanding the breadth of their contentions beyond all plausibility: particulars of the conspiracy theories fall anywhere from compelling to lunatic. I'm genuinely curious about why surveillance video from the Sheraton hotel near the Pentagon was confiscated and never made publicâif, in fact, that's true. On the other hand, I'm told that the aircraft that struck the World Trade Center were artificial images projected by laser and that the real flights never existed. There's so much flak out there, it's difficult to tell what's genuinely mysterious and worthy of a closer look and what's nonsense. (I haven't the room for it here, but on my website, I tackle several of the airplane-related 9/11 myths, point by point.) I propose a conspiracy theory that the conspiracy theories are themselves part of a conspiracy, intended to discredit the idea of there being a conspiracyâand to divide and conquer those who might sleuth out certain facts.
I don't deny that, at times, important truths have been concealed from public view. But we also need to remember Carl Sagan's famous quip about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof. It's distressing that so many people become married to a preposterous idea based on little more than erroneous interpretations of some pictures and selective, manipulative use of evidence. We see this with September 11, with the “chemtrails” theory (don't get me started on that one), and still others. And I've learned to be wary when attempting to reason with such people. Ultimately, it's like arguing religion. Evidence, or a lack of it, has little to do with what motivates many believers, and contradictory facts are simply not accepted. At the heart of their convictions is something only partially subject to reason. It's faith.
: The Horror and Asburdity of History's Worst Plane Crash
Most people have never heard of Tenerife, a pan-shaped speck in the Atlantic. It's one of the Canary Islands, a volcanic chain governed by the Spanish, clustered a few hundred miles off the coast of Morocco. The big town on Tenerife is Santa Cruz, and its airport, beneath a set of cascading hillsides, is called Los Rodeos. There, on March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747sâone belonging to KLM, the other to Pan Amâcollided on a foggy runway. Five hundred and eighty-three people were killed in what remains the biggest air disaster in history.
The magnitude of the accident speaks for itself, but what makes it particularly unforgettable is the startling set of ironies and coincidences that preceded it. Indeed, most airplane crashes result not from a single error or failure, but from a chain of improbable errors and failures, together with a stroke or two of really bad luck. Never was this illustrated more calamitouslyâalmost to the point of absurdityâthan on that Sunday afternoon almost forty years ago.
In 1977, in only its eighth year of service, the Boeing 747 was already the biggest, the most influential, and possibly the most glamorous commercial jetliner ever built. For just those reasons, it was hard not to imagine what a story it would beâand how much carnage might resultâshould two of these behemoths ever hit each other. Really, though, what were the chances of
that
âa Hollywood script if ever there was one.
Imagine we're there:
Both of the 747s at Tenerife are charters. Pan Am has come from Los Angeles, after a stopover in New York, KLM from its home base in Amsterdam. As it happens, neither plane is supposed to be on Tenerife. They were scheduled to land at Las Palmas, on the nearby island of Grand Canary, where many of the passengers were on their way to meet cruise ships. After a bomb planted by Canary Island separatists exploded in the Las Palmas airport flower shop, they diverted to Los Rodeos, along with several other flights, arriving around 2:00 p.m.
The Pan Am aircraft, registered N736PA, is no stranger to notoriety. In January 1970, this very same plane completed the inaugural commercial voyage of a 747, between New York's Kennedy airport and London-Heathrow. Somewhere on its nose is the dent from a champagne bottle. White with a blue window stripe, it wears the name
Clipper Victor
along the forward fuselage. The KLM 747, also blue and white, is named the
Rhine
.
Let's not forget the airlines themselves: Pan Am, the most storied franchise in the history of aviation, requires little introduction. KLM, for its part, is the oldest continuously operating airline in the world, founded in 1919 and highly regarded for its safety and punctuality.
The KLM captain, Jacob Van Zanten, whose errant takeoff roll will soon kill nearly six hundred people, including himself, is the airline's top 747 instructor pilot and a KLM celebrity. If passengers recognize him, it's because his confident, square-jawed visage stares out from KLM's magazine ads. Later, when KLM executives first get word of the crash, they will attempt to contact Van Zanten in hopes of sending him to Tenerife to aid the investigation team.
The normally lazy Los Rodeos is packed with diverted flights. The
Rhine
and
Clipper Victor
sit adjacent to each other at the southeast corner of the apron, their wingtips almost touching. Finally at around four o'clock, las Palmas begins accepting traffic again. Pan Am is quickly ready for departure, but the lack of room and the angle at which the jets face each other requires that KLM begin to taxi first.
The weather is fine until just before the accident, and if not for KLM requesting extra fuel at the last minute, both would be on their way sooner. During the delay, a heavy blanket of fog swoops down from the hills and envelopes the airport. That fuel also means extra weight, affecting how quickly the 747 is able to become airborne. For reasons you'll see in a moment, that will be critical.
Because of the tarmac congestion, the normal route to runway 30 is blocked. Departing planes will need to taxi down on the runway itself. Reaching the end, they'll make a 180-degree turn before taking off in the opposite direction. This procedure, rare at commercial airports, is called a “back-taxi.” At Tenerife in '77, it will put two 747s on the same runway at the same time, invisible not only to each other, but also to the control tower. The airport has no ground tracking radar.
KLM taxis ahead and onto the runway, with the Pan Am Clipper ambling several hundred yards behind. Captain Van Zanten will steer to the end, turn around, then hold in position until authorized for takeoff. Pan Am's instructions are to turn clear along a left-side taxiway to allow the other plane's departure. Once safely off the runway, Pan Am will report so to the tower.
Unable to differentiate the taxiways in the low visibility, the Pan Am pilots miss their assigned turnoff. Continuing to the next one is no big problem, but now they're on the runway for several additional seconds.
At the same time, having wheeled into position at the end, Van Zanten comes to a stop. His first officer, Klaas Meurs, takes the radio and receives the ATC route clearance. This is not a
takeoff
clearance, but rather a procedure outlining turns, altitudes, and frequencies for use once airborne. Normally it is received well prior to an aircraft taking the runway, but the pilots have been too busy with checklists and taxi instructions until now. They are tired, annoyed, and anxious to get going. The irritability in the pilots' voices, Van Zanten's in particular, has been duly noted by the control tower and other pilots.
There are still a couple dominos yet to fall, but now the final act is in motionâliterally. Because the route clearance comes where and when it does, it is mistaken for a takeoff clearance as well. First officer Meurs, sitting to Van Zanten's right, acknowledges the altitudes, headings, and fixes, then finishes off with an unusual, somewhat hesitant phrase, back-dropped by the sound of accelerating engines. “We are now, uh, at takeoff.”
Van Zanten releases the brakes. “
We gaan
,” he is heard saying on the cockpit voice recorder. “Let's go.” And with that, his mammoth machine begins barreling down the fog-shrouded runway, completely without permission.
“At takeoff” is not standard phraseology among pilots. But it's explicit enough to grab the attention of the Pan Am crew
and
the control tower. It's hard for either party to believe KLM is actually moving, but both reach for their microphones to make sure.
“And we're still taxiing down the runway,” relays Bob Bragg, the Pan Am first officer.
At the same instant, the tower radios a message to KLM. “Okay,” says the controller. “Stand by for takeoff. I will call you.”
There is no reply. This silence is taken as a tacit, if not exactly proper, acknowledgment.
Either of these transmissions would be, should be, enough to stop Van Zanten cold in his tracks. He still has time to discontinue the roll. The problem is, because they occur simultaneously, they overlap.
Pilots and controllers communicate via two-way VHF radios. The process is similar to speaking over a walkietalkie: a person activates a microphone, speaks, then releases the button and waits for an acknowledgment. It differs from using a telephone, for example, as only one party can speak at a time, and has no idea what his message actually sounds like over the air. If two or more microphones are clicked at the same instant, the transmissions cancel each other out, delivering a noisy occlusion of static or a high-pitched squeal called a heterodyne. Rarely are heterodynes dangerous. But at Tenerife this is the last straw.
Van Zanten hears only the word “okay,” followed by a five-second squeal. He keeps going.
Ten seconds later there is one final exchange, clearly and maddeningly audible on the post-crash tapes. “Report when runway clear,” the tower says to Pan Am.
“We'll report when we're clear,” acknowledges Bob Bragg.
Focused on the takeoff, Van Zanten and his first officer apparently miss this. But the second officer, sitting behind them, does not. Alarmed, with their plane now racing forward at a hundred knots, he leans forward. “Is he not clear?” he asks. “That Pan American?”
“Oh, yes,” Van Zanten answers emphatically.
In the Pan Am cockpit, nose-to-nose with the still unseen, rapidly approaching interloper, there's a growing sense that something isn't right. “Let's get the fuck out of here,” Captain Victor Grubbs says nervously.
A few moments later, the lights of the KLM 747 emerge out of the grayness, dead ahead, 2,000 feet away and closing fast.
“There he is!” cries Grubbs, shoving the thrust levers to full power. “Look at him! Goddamn, that son of a bitch is coming!” He yanks the plane's steering tiller, turning left as hard as he can, toward the grass at the edge of the runway.
“Get off! Get off! Get off!” shouts Bob Bragg.
Van Zanten sees them, but it's too late. Attempting to leapfrog, he pulls back on the elevators, dragging his tail along the pavement for 70 feet in a hail of sparks. He almost makes it, but just as his plane breaks ground, its undercarriage and engines slice into the ceiling of the
Victor
, instantly demolishing its midsection and setting off a series of explosions.
Badly damaged, the
Rhine
settles back to the runway, skids hard on its belly for another thousand feet, and is consumed by fire before a single one of its 248 occupants can escape. Remarkably, of 396 passengers and crew aboard the Pan Am jumbo, 61 of them survived, including all five people in the cockpitâthe three-man crew and two off-duty employees riding in the jumpseats.
Over the past few years, I've been fortunate enough to meet two of those Pan Am survivors and hear their stories firsthand. I say that nonchalantly, but this is probably the closest I've ever come to meeting, for lack of a better term, a hero. Romanticizing the fiery deaths of 583 people is akin to romanticizing war, but there's a certain mystique to the Tenerife disaster, a gravity so strong that shaking these survivors' hands produced a feeling akin to that of a little kid meeting his favorite baseball player. These men were
there
, emerging from the wreckage of what, for some of us, stands as an event of mythic proportions.
One of those survivors was Bob Bragg, the Pan Am first officer. I met him in Los Angeles, on the set of a documentary being made for the thirtieth anniversary of the accident.
It was Bragg who had uttered, “And we're still taxiing down the runway”âseven easy words that should have saved the day, but instead were lost forever in the shriek and crackle of a blocked transmission. Just thinking about it gives me the chills.
But there's nothing dark about Bob Braggânothing that, on the surface, feels moored to the nightmare of '77. He's one of the most easygoing people you'll ever meet. Gray-haired, bespectacled, and articulate, he looks and sounds like what he is: a retired airline pilot.
God knows how many times he's recounted the collision to others. He speaks about the accident with a practiced ease, in a voice of modest detachment, as if he'd been a spectator watching from afar. You can read all the transcripts, pore over the findings, watch the documentaries a hundred times over. Not until you sit with Bob Bragg and hear the unedited account, with all of the strange and astounding details that are normally missing, do you get a full sense of what happened. The basic story is well known; it's the ancillaries that make it movingâand surreal:
Bragg describes the initial impact as little more than “a bump and some shaking.” All five men in the cockpit, located at the forward end of the 747's distinctive upper-deck hump, saw the KLM jet coming and had ducked. Knowing they'd been hit, Bragg instinctively reached upward in an effort to pull the “fire handles”âa set of four overhead-mounted levers that cut off the supply of fuel, air, electricity, and hydraulics running to and from the engines. His arm groped helplessly. When he looked up, the roof was gone.
Turning around, he realized that the entire upper deck had been sheared off at a point just aft of his chair. He could see all the way aft to the tail, 200 feet behind him. The fuselage was shattered and burning. He and Captain Grubbs were alone in their seats, on a small, fully exposed perch 35 feet above the ground. Everything around them had been lifted away like a hat. The second officer and jumpseat stations, their occupants still strapped in, were hanging upsidedown through what seconds earlier was the ceiling of the first class cabin.
There was no option other than to jump. Bragg stood up and hurled himself over the side. He landed in the grass three stories below, feet-first, and miraculously suffered little more than an injured ankle. Grubbs followed, and he too was mostly unharmed. The others from the cockpit would unfasten their belts and shimmy down the sidewalls to the main cabin floor before similarly leaping to safety.
