Down Around Midnight (6 page)

Certainly, I wouldn't be able to work right away, but I wasn't going to quit my job. Though my reputation had been established as an author and though, along with some occasional film work, I would continue to support myself writing books, like most nonfiction writers, for better or worse, I was by occupation a reporter, and it was freelance magazine journalism that provided much of my income over the time it took to complete them. Writing was only half the work. Reporting the story came first. And showing up where it was happening was only one of the more obvious requirements. I would lose some momentum after the crash, and not only in the pursuit of assignments. Writing almost anything would be hard for a while, for as difficult as it was to travel, the toughest thing to do with the injuries I had was to sit for any period of time.

Not until nine months after the crash, in March of the following year, did I resume writing magazine features.
Rolling Stone
flew me to Aspen, and for a couple of weeks around Easter, with soft powder deepening with every snowfall, I investigated a bureaucratic war being waged in the Rockies between the Drug Enforcement Administration and the local sheriff's department and didn't ski.

But my first time back on an airplane was that August flight to Boston. I don't remember it in any detail. I guess if there was anything special about it, it was my pretending that it wasn't special, pretending for the first time that there was nothing special about flying.

P
ilot error is the single most common cause of fatal accidents on scheduled air transport. It accounts for over half of fatal air crashes with a known cause, and over a third of fatal crashes in total. When stipulated as the cause of a crash, pilot error falls into one of three categories: related to weather, related to mechanical failure, or related to neither. There is a high correlation between pilot error and bad weather. Such error is four times more likely when visibility is poor and a pilot is relying on instruments than in conditions where a pilot can see clearly.

The federal agency tasked with investigating U.S. air crashes is the National Transportation Safety Board. In its report, issued six months after the crash, in language immediately decipherable to aviators and bureaucrats and few others, the NTSB determined:

“The probable cause of the accident was the failure of the flight crew to recognize and react in a timely manner to the gross deviation from acceptable approach parameters, resulting in a continuation of the descent well below decision height during a precision approach without visual contact with the runway environment.”

Pilot error.

“Although the Board was unable to determine conclusively the reason for the failure . . . it is believed that the degraded physiological condition of the captain seriously impaired his performance. Also, the lack of adequate crew coordination practices and procedures contributed to the first officer's failure to detect and react to the situation in a timely manner.”

Pilot error waiting to happen.

To understand where things went wrong, some rudimentary information about an instrument landing system (ILS) will be helpful:

Imagine a right triangle. At its apex is the airplane. Its vertical leg (side A) represents the distance between the airplane and the ground. The ground is the base of the triangle, the horizontal leg (side B). A and B meet, by definition, at an angle of ninety degrees. Opposite that is the triangle's hypotenuse (side C), which is the distance between the airplane and the edge of the runway. Descending from the apex, the hypotenuse meets the base of the triangle—the airplane meets the runway—at a narrow angle of three degrees.

This is the three-degree glide path the pilot follows on final approach (when the plane ceases its level flight and begins its descent to the airport), riding it right to the runway threshold. There are numerous electronic components to an instrument landing system that make it possible for the pilot to do this when visibility is poor. One of them is known as a glide slope, a radio beam transmitted along the glide path from the start of the runway to the plane. Another is a series of radio beacons, also transmitted from the ground, known as the outer, middle, and inner markers, over which the airplane crosses, giving the pilot, among other things, his (horizontal) distance from the airport. To be properly fixed on the ILS, the aircraft must be at a specified altitude when it crosses a given marker.

There is an altitude restriction placed on the pilot after he crosses the outer marker, where he picks up his final approach fix and is cleared to initiate his descent. That minimum is called the decision height. When the aircraft descends to that altitude, the pilot must have the runway or its approach lights in sight—“visual contact with the runway”—to continue the approach. If not, the approach must be aborted:
No contact. Go around.

According to the NTSB report, the plane was “405 ft below the normal glide slope altitude and 153 ft below the decision height of 293 ft when it struck the trees.” A gratuitous piece of information—we can assume the aircraft would have been better off
above
the trees—if you don't understand that the plane didn't just end up there. Its altitude and descent, the safety board concluded, “were controlled in an imprecise and careless manner.” So steep was its angle of descent that little could be done to save the aircraft once the problem had become clear to the copilot, the one person in a position to save it. The flight descended from decision height to impact in about six seconds, making it “extremely difficult if not impossible,” in the words of the NTSB, “for the first officer to detect a deteriorating situation and react once he called decision height and verified that no approach lights were visible.”

The imprecision of the approach was due in large part to pilot fatigue caused by “multiple stresses,” states the report, which “in concert with [the pilot's] personal flying habits . . . and his age contributed greatly to a marked human performance degradation.” Among the multiple stresses on the pilot, who was understandably exhausted, were underlying “aeromedical factors.” These are itemized in the report and are crucial to an understanding of what happened. I'll get to them, and to things like “crew coordination,” later.

The term “precision approach” is not a poetic construct. It speaks to the level of refinement with which an instrument landing must be performed if it is to be executed successfully. The margins are narrow and the tolerances low. The standards are sufficiently exacting that ILS instruments do not even register certain deviations beyond a selected point. The aircraft is moving fast, so small corrections must be made rapidly, but at the same time they must be—there's no better word for it—precise. Allowances for what you might call oversteering are not generous. Minor errors have a domino effect. I say minor errors because with minor adjustments they are easily correctable—easily correctable during visual flight, when a pilot can see where he's going. On instruments, he is flying blind, and minor errors don't remain minor for long.

The destiny of Flight 248 began taking shape when the plane was a few miles out, about two minutes north-northeast of the airport and a minute or so before impact, when the captain approached the outer marker three hundred feet high. Crossing the marker ten seconds later, he was two hundred and twenty feet high. He had to nose down to pick up the three-degree glide slope that would bring him into Hyannis on runway 24. Leveling off after he intersected the glide slope, he overcorrected, however. Imagine the plane bouncing off the hypotenuse. So he nosed down again.

It was now thirty seconds before impact. And he was coming in at too steep an angle. The seven degrees at which he was pitched in his attempt to pick up the beam took him below it at too high a speed. And he never knew how far below it he was. His position relative to the glide path would have appeared on the cockpit instrument panel as a full-scale deflection—the needle on his glide-slope indicator reaching the farthest point on the meter—nothing more specific than that. When the needle hit two and a half degrees, the glide-slope indicator quit measuring. Reading no deviations beyond that point is the technology's way of accepting the inevitable. Low on a precision approach by more than two and a half dots, you're no longer flying the airplane—nor even aiming it—you're just holding on.

He was angling in at seven degrees. Moving at a ground speed of 123 knots, he was shedding altitude at almost 1,500 feet per minute. As stated in the report, he intersected the glide slope in a descent “that he was unable to arrest” before hitting the canopy.

After that it was all thunderous noise and kinetic energy.

Thus ended the life of a pilot by the name of George Parmenter and the youthful innocence of several American air passengers who had invested their faith in the statistics governing such travel.

 

 

Evaluating George Parmenter's performance in the last minute of his life, a minute in which he made a tragic mistake, one runs the risk of forgetting the more than twenty-five thousand hours of flight time—more than thirty-five hundred on instruments—and forty years of aviation in which he didn't.

At eight A.M. on the morning of the crash, Doris Parmenter answered the phone at her Centerville home and handed the receiver to her husband, who just twenty hours earlier had returned from Waterville, Maine, where mechanical trouble, after a day of flying, had grounded him overnight.

As she told the editor of the
Cape Cod Times,
“I heard him say, ‘OK, I'll be there. When do you need me?' I said to him, ‘You're not! Let them get somebody else this time.' ”

George Parmenter, almost sixty-one, a vice president and cofounder of Air New England, who flew only occasionally for the airline, only as a replacement pilot, was being called in on short notice again, summoned at the last minute to fill in for a line pilot who had phoned in sick.

In the interview she granted the editor of the
Times,
Doris Parmenter continued:

“He said a lot of people were depending on the airline to get them somewhere. And I said they never get someone else—they always call Old Faithful. And that was about the last conversation I had with him. I followed him outside and said, ‘Have you got your flight bag? Have you got your notebook?' He needed his notebook because he had been working on gasoline allocations the night before—this was the time of the fuel shortage. I handed him his notebook and he got into his truck and that was the end of that.”

Parmenter reported to work forty-five minutes later, scheduled for twelve and a half hours of duty. Late that same day, on the ground in Hyannis, anticipating the end of the shift, he was visibly upset, witnesses said, when informed that additional flights had been scheduled and his workday had been extended. To his original flight schedule, which called for twelve trips among four destinations, two more flights of two legs each had been added.

Parmenter and the plane's first officer put in fourteen hours of duty that day, including nine hours and sixteen minutes of flying. Parmenter's only intake of food during that time, according to the NTSB, was a Danish pastry with his coffee in the late afternoon. After fifteen takeoffs and fourteen landings, they were executing their fifteenth approach for landing when Parmenter crashed the plane.

“A prominent figure in New England aviation,” in the words of the
Boston Globe,
Parmenter was a legend among local flyers, a pioneer of commercial air service on Cape Cod. Having settled on the Cape after the Second World War, during which he had flown for the Marine Corps, he and Doris, a Dennis native, founded the Cape & Islands Flight Service, which they operated for some twenty years, until the merger in 1970 that gave birth to Air New England.

“George Parmenter, throughout his airline and military career, was a hard worker,” said his friend John Van Arsdale Sr., founder and president of Provincetown-Boston Airlines, who gave the eulogy at Parmenter's memorial Mass four days after the crash. “This was most clearly demonstrated this past Sunday. That day George knew there was a job to be done and he was personally ready and willing to assume more than one man's fair share.”

In his eulogy, which was quoted in the
Cape Cod Times,
Van Arsdale was echoing a sentiment shared by all of Parmenter's friends, when he said, “Flying was his life.”

One of Parmenter's closest friends was Delta Airlines pilot Angus Perry, a Centerville native, who died in 2003. Recently, I talked to Perry's daughter Wendy, who attended the service for Parmenter at which Van Arsdale spoke.

Wendy Boepple, now in her midfifties, is a registered nurse and mother of four. She lives with her husband, a physician, outside Boston. Wendy remembers Parmenter as “a typical Marine,” and her affection for him is palpable. Beneath a gruff exterior, she says, was a man of tremendous warmth. She grew up knowing him as Uncle George, nurtured on the adventure stories that he and her father would tell.

Back in the fifties, she told me, on days when the ceiling was low, her father and Parmenter, with two planeloads of newspapers to deliver and only one plane rigged with the proper equipment, would “fly wingtip to wingtip” through the fog between Cape Cod and Nantucket. The stories the two men told, like all proper tales of derring-do, were invariably fraught with bravado:
We made it
. . . .
Yeah. That was easy
. . . .
Yeah, now all we have to figure out is how we're gonna make it back.

Flying for the Perrys was a family affair. Many were the times in Wendy's childhood, she said, that a clear day would find her and her sisters and brother heading with their dad to the airport, where “he would borrow one of George's planes and take us up.”