Hard Landing (35 page)

The copilot prepared to take the controls. “Slushy runway,” he said to the captain. “Do you want me to do anything special for this or just go for it?”

No, Wheaton said, “unless you got anything special you’d like to do.”

The FAA control tower, meanwhile, was bubbling like a coffeepot in an old Maxwell House commercial. It had been only five months since President Reagan had fired the striking controllers, and the tower was severely understaffed. The airport having been closed for part of the day, the controllers had to cram as many planes down as possible, while also relieving the backlog of tardy departures. At the moment an Eastern flight, barely two miles away, was being directed to a landing on the same runway. The controllers were cutting it close.

“Palm 90,” crackled the control tower. (Air Florida flights were addressed as Palm, New York Air as Apple.) “Palm 90, taxi into position and hold. Be ready for an immediate.” That meant taking off as quickly as possible to clear the runway. “No delay on departure, if you will,” the controller emphasized.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have just been cleared on the runway for takeoff,” the cockpit announced. “Flight attendants, please be seated.”

The captain released the cockpit controls to his copilot. “Your throttles,” he said.

“Okay.”

With no time to lose, the copilot throttled the engines even before he had completed his hard turn into the runway. Flight 90 rolled down the runway … and rolled, and rolled. It was having trouble getting speed. The 737 seemed sluggish, heavy.

The engine settings were at the highest level deemed prudent, yet still the plane was rolling listlessly. Neither pilot was aware that ice had formed in the engine sensors.

Pettit noticed that the gauges on the cockpit control panel were suddenly haywire. “God, look at that thing!” he cried. “That don’t seem right, does it?” The airplane continued lumbering beneath him, like wounded game trying to make a break.

“That’s not right!” the copilot again said.

It was up to Captain Wheaton to decide to abort the takeoff. There was still time. But he sat silently as the copilot prepared to pull back on the stick to get the 737 off the runway. Aborting the takeoff in this kind of slush would be risky, particularly with airplanes coming in behind them to land. Indeed, as Wheaton and Pettit tried to make sense of their senseless gauges and their stubbornly slow speed, they heard the Eastern flight behind them acknowledging that it was “over the lights.”

At that moment, perilously close to the end of the runway, Air Florida Flight 90 reached the intended takeoff speed of 138 knots. But the speed had been calculated on the presumption that the engines would be performing properly; the engines in reality were severely underperforming, even though the cockpit controls showed them to be at full power.

As Flight 90 lifted laboriously from the runway, the nose pitched up. Had the engines been cranked high enough, it probably wouldn’t
have mattered, since safety, after all, lay in speed. By the same token, had the wings been free of ice, the improper engine settings wouldn’t have been such a problem.

Flight 90 was doomed.

The stall warning sounded. Below lay the ice-covered Potomac, ahead the 14th Street Bridge, clogged with commuters bound for the suburbs of Virginia.

“Larry!” the copilot cried. “We’re going down, Larry!”

“I know it.”

Twenty-four seconds after leaving the runway, Flight 90 slammed into the bridge. All but five aboard died, most from fractured heads, necks, and chests.

The icy rescue effort, in which one heroic bystander dove into the chilled waters to attempt a rescue, created some of the most dramatic footage seen in the history of prime-time news. The country was left with an unshakable image of a tail fin emblazoned
AIR FLORIDA
poking through the icy surface of the Potomac.

In the days ahead an estimated 100,000
reservations evaporated.

A few months later the company’s chairman suffered a stroke. Donald Lloyd-Jones, who had been nosed out by Bob Crandall in the horse race for the presidency of American two years earlier, was brought in to try to save the company. It was too late. Debt levels were too high for Air Florida to tolerate such a decline in patronage on top of all the damage inflicted by Pan Am. In droves, passengers that Acker had once coaxed from Pan Am to Air Florida were now being coaxed back to Pan Am. In a matter of several weeks some $14 million in
revenue vanished from Air Florida, and now there was no stock or futures-trading profit to cushion the blow. Lenders moved to seize the company’s assets. The IRS slapped on a tax lien. Air Florida, the Cinderella story of airline deregulation, filed for bankruptcy.

Filling the service void, once again, was Eddie Acker.

Acker had settled quickly into the corner office on the 46th floor of the Pan Am building, the same suite where once, as a Braniff executive, he had negotiated the purchase of the Latin American routes from Juan Trippe. The 46th floor was an extraordinary place, not only for its great, gold-lined route map but for its burled walnut furniture
and the commanding southerly view of Manhattan, with the Empire State Building in the foreground and the Hudson River cutting a ribbon in the distance. The various chairmen of Pan Am—not just Trippe and Acker, but also the four hapless chief executives who had served in between—sat so high over New York City that not a single distraction from outside could be heard, other than the occasional roar of a jet airplane.

Though Pan Am was losing $1 million a day, Acker
saw no merit in continuing the flight cutbacks that the preceding management had instituted. The alternative was for Pan Am to grow its way out of its problems, which among other advantages was fun. In addition to restoring the East Coast service that helped push Air Florida over the edge, Acker soon added more cities to the route map. Still waving his copy of the
OAG
, he added one after another—Warsaw, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and others. Before long he was flying a new Pan Am
flight to his home in Bermuda. Newly remarried, Acker was urged by his wife to launch service to the French Riviera; when he encountered some internal opposition to the idea, she was incredulous. “Why don’t you
just
tell
them to do it?” she demanded. (Service to Nice was launched.) Pan Am swarmed into the Caribbean, putting Frank Borman and Eastern on the defensive.

To pay for all this new service, including the new airplanes, Acker simply heaped on additional financial obligations. Acker could always get a plane deal financed. Thus to the liabilities and fixed costs Pan Am had already accumulated—in buying the 747s, then in buying National Airlines, and then in covering the losses generated by both moves—Acker heaved on still more.

For all his impulsiveness—even if he managed Pan Am as a kind of multibillion-dollar amusement—Acker had a guileless and unpretentious quality that made him extremely popular. He would stoop over to pick up
cigarette butts on the concourse of Pan Am’s Worldport terminal at JFK. He
counted his chauffeur among his closest confidants on corporate matters. If he mistrusted the data he was getting from the revenue department, Acker would call his limousine and head off to the administrative offices in suburban New Jersey to flip through
hundreds of ticket stubs, returning to Manhattan with his fingertips reddened from the carbon-copied tickets. Moving to improve on-time performance following the purchase of
National Airlines, Acker demanded that airplanes push
away from the gate even when passengers were still standing in the aisles. When his critics at one point attacked him for managing by intuition, Acker refused to deny it.

“Intuition is a
powerful force,” he responded.

Among the surprises greeting Acker when he arrived at Pan Am was the dearth of experienced executives. Years of purges had driven away dozens of top officials. Many of these executives had received absurdly generous severance packages in which they retained not only their salaries but their membership in the Sky Club, high atop the Pan Am building. Luncheons and happy hours at the Sky Club looked like reunions of the departed.

As part of his effort to rebuild management, Acker hired Stephen Wolf, who had spent 15 years at American. Wolf, age 40, had been through the star chamber of Bob Crandall’s budget reviews and had seen American brought back from the edge of financial collapse on the strength of relentless cost cutting. Literally within hours of joining Pan Am as a senior vice president, Wolf began boring into budgets and personnel records, looking for ways to stem the red ink.

A few days after Wolf’s arrival, Acker was leading him around the Sky Club, making introductions.

“Ed,
does he work for us?” Wolf asked after one such introduction.

“No,” Acker replied matter-of-factly. “He’s gone.”

He’s gone?

“Ed,” Wolf whispered. “I think he’s still on the payroll.”

But that was Pan Am, a company practically frozen by the inertia of grandeur and tradition, as was evident to another of Acker’s recruits, 37-year-old Gerry Gitner, who became a top officer of Pan Am after resigning as the president of People Express. Gitner walked into the Pan Am boardroom to meet the vice presidents reporting to him and was so startled to see them rise from their chairs that he
turned around to see who was walking in behind him. After eliminating every cargo airplane in Pan Am’s fleet in order to get more passenger planes, Gitner was puzzled to see a few pieces of cargo-handling equipment still remaining at Pan Am’s operation in Frankfurt, Germany. “
What’s that doing here?” Gitner asked. The local
manager explained that the equipment was being maintained so it would be ready whenever Pan Am brought back the cargo planes.

Wisely Acker did not rely on outsiders alone to bolster the ranks of senior management. He also promoted Martin R. Shugrue, Jr., a 41-year-old Pan Am lifer, into his inner circle. Shugrue, a former navy fighter pilot, had coincidentally flown the
search plane that located the bobbing Gemini 8 capsule with Frank Borman aboard in 1965. A short time later Shugrue became a 707 flight engineer for Pan Am, a position from which he climbed into top management.

Under Acker the three of them—Wolf, Gitner, and Shugrue—worked mightily to restore even a modicum of profitability to Pan Am’s operations. When the paperwork crossed Wolf’s desk for his own company-sponsored membership in the Sky Club, Wolf refused it; Pan Am veterans were offended by
Wolf’s display of sanctimony. Gitner, having spent much of his career at Texas International, knew well the value of free advertising; he ordered a new paint job for the fleet, replacing the delicate Bodoni lettering that said “Pan American” with a giant “PAN AM” that stretched the entire height of the fuselage. Shugrue, who had once worked as a hat salesman, became famous for taking key customers out for raucous nights on the town.

But none of Acker’s turnaround moves drew more attention than his prices.

Acker began walking into offices literally issuing orders to cut prices, the same way he added new cities to the route map. At one point he walked into a meeting of executives agonizing over whether to match a price cut that Eastern had just instituted and was stunned that they would belabor the issue. “You have
no choice!” Acker snapped. Failing to meet a price cut meant losing business, even if only a few passengers. Acker wanted to fly full airplanes even if the flights lost money; he wanted momentum. He wanted people talking about Pan Am’s comeback. He wanted to steal back every single bit of business that the previous management had given up, in the United States and overseas.

Even better than matching a price cut was initiating one, offering the customer, as he once told a management group, “the most
terrific travel bargain that he has ever probably seen in his life.”

Acker also declared a new policy toward Freddie Laker, a cut-rate British charter operator expanding into the scheduled airline business
over the North Atlantic. Laker, declaring it his mission to provide low-fare international service for “the forgotten man,” spent five years trying to get approval to conduct low-fare flights to the United States, and finally in 1977 had won the U.S. government’s approval, thanks to the burst of consumerism sweeping Washington. Before Acker arrived in 1981, Pan Am had arrogantly turned up its nose at Laker, uninterested in trying to capture the backpacking bargain customer. Acker, however, harbored no such contempt. Didn’t it make sense, he asked, for Pan Am to go for some of that business? One of Pan Am’s top analysts threw himself into the issue and quickly concluded that Pan Am could indeed benefit. The analyst handed over a 16-page report to Acker, who
flipped the pages for a few seconds and promptly ordered prices to London slashed by nearly 60 percent.

In short order
Laker’s operation was dead. “I didn’t do it to put him out of business,” Ed Acker would later say, “although
I didn’t mind if it had that effect.”

And then, most outrageous of all, was the “ninety-niner,” as Acker called it—a $99 fare to anywhere in the United States, offered in the winter of 1982–83. No Saturday stay, no advance purchase restriction—just walk up to the ticket counter and go. Even a coast-to-coast flight plunged to $99, for the first time on any airline in years. Every other airline, unwilling to lose a single passenger to Pan Am, matched the ninety-niner, and although prices climbed back a few weeks later, profits had been devastated across the industry. In the first quarter of 1983 the U.S. airline industry racked up the deepest quarterly deficit in its history, $640 million.

To an extent Acker’s sell-at-any-price philosophy was accomplishing its intended effect, pumping blood into Pan Am’s sclerotic arteries and infecting the organization with the spirit of rebuilding. Lapel buttons popped out saying,
I’M AN
ACKER BACKER
. Acker began holding massive meetings of managers and eventually companywide meetings, using high-technology satellite linkups that were still rare for the time. Although no one would ever confuse Acker, a man of no small elegance and savoir faire, with the abrasive Bob Crandall, Acker took to giving the same kind of locker-room pep talks. After Frank Borman of Eastern had snatched Braniff’s Latin American routes-a prize Acker made no secret of coveting for himself—Acker
wrote a letter to Pan Am employees declaring, “We should all
dedicate ourselves to making sure that Eastern regrets that they ever obtained those routes.” Speaking to a management group in Miami he vowed, “We are going to be leaders in the future. We are not going to take a back seat to anybody because of their pricing! We are not going to let Eastern Air Lines run us out of any more markets. We are going to start running
them
out of markets!… We will survive and Pan American will become the finest, most respected airline in the world today, just as it was 15 or 20 years ago when it introduced 747s.”