Flying The Line 1: CHAPTER 23

Chapter 23
Jets and Thin Ice

Rites of passage are never easy. Ask the old helmet-and-goggle airmail types what it was like to go from open cockpits to Ford Trimotors and instrument flight. Then ask their successors, the second generation of professional airline pilots, what it was like to go from the DC-3 to the Super Constellation. By the late 1950s, airline pilots were about to undergo another baptism of fire under new technology—the jets were coming.

For 20 years the jets gestated in the world’s military services. Their coming to commercial aviation was inevitable, part of a long trend stretching back to the Wright brothers and their bitter competition with Glenn Curtiss. Always pushing each other, the pioneers extended the frontiers of aviation until development became an all-consuming passion, a kind of religion that saw men sacrifice their lives and fortunes to fly faster and higher. No man could restrain this rush to progress.

After World War II, sleek military jets were at the cutting edge of aviation development, but commercial exploitation of the jet’s potential would have to wait until the needs of national defense abated. This was a far cry from the 1930s, when the “Douglas Commercial” series, the planes that made the first real profits, were at the peak of existing technology and were totally a product of the private sector. The military aspect of jet aviation was troubling to many airline pilots, largely because of an “image” problem. The popular media depicted jet pilots as hard-living, bushy-haired, physically flawless specimens of young manhood (rather like airline pilots had been depicted in the 1930s). Magazines, movies, and television saturated the 1950s with sensational accounts of the physical ordeal that high-altitude jet flight put these young military pilots through, endlessly making the point that flying these hot new aircraft was a “young man’s game.”

No small wonder, then, that staid, middle-aged airline pilots should feel apprehensive about their futures once the new jets came on the line.

In fact, the transition to jets was something most pilots would take in stride. A big airplane was, after all, just a big airplane, and the pilot who had mastered Douglas DC-7s or Boeing Stratocruisers was usually sure enough of his own abilities to handle new power plants and increased speed. But there were exceptions, and everybody who lived through the jet transition knew of a pilot whose career had been short-circuited, usually by that deadly handmaiden of insecurity, alcoholism. There were even a few cases where a suicide might have been the result of the feelings of inadequacy that the giant new jets could instill in an older pilot.

Consider the massive changes that the new jets brought to air transportation. Big and swept-winged, operating smack up against the sound barrier and on the threshold of the stratosphere, the new jets were able to shrink continents and oceans like no passenger plane had ever done before. By the mid-1950s, the old prop planes had already extended their technological parameters as far as possible, and the traveling public was growing weary of their time envelopes. Coast to coast, the props still ate up 10 hours between boarding and deplaning for the ordinary passenger. But the jets could cut that time down to less than a working day, about five hours of air time, and maybe an hour on each end to get to and from the airport (provided that the antiquated ground transport systems weren’t too crowded). For international travelers, the differences were even more astounding. London was only 7 hours away from New York for a jet setter, but for a prop passenger it was 12 hours distant.

For the engineers, the new jets were technological marvels, collections of scientific advances in dozens of fields from avionics to metallurgy to aerodynamics. For airline management, the new jets were at once a risk and an opportunity. History had shown that the airline boss who jumped in too fast, who committed to a new airplane before all the glitches were out, was taking a chance. If the jets proved unreliable, his competitors would sell more of that most perishable of commodities, passenger seats, by plugging along in their safe and sure old props. On the other hand, if the jets proved successful, and if an airline manager waited too long to place his name on the order list at the factory, he stood to lose out to the canny guy with jets who would lay first claim to passenger loyalties.

But the risks for pilots were greatest of all. Working pilots, ordinary guys who had somehow made airline piloting their calling, would ultimately have to break these new turbojet monsters to the commercial harness and would have to learn their jets’ eccentricities daily out on the line, in fair weather and foul. Long after the engineers had put away their sensitive instrumentation and the test pilots had gone on to the next frontier of aviation, ordinary line pilots would still be exercising their stewardship over the new jets, learning about them much as the pilots who had come before them had unraveled the mysteries of the Ford Trimotor after the engineers thought there were none. And, as inevitably happened, some pilots would pay with their lives to advance the curve of learning. ALPA had no official role in aircraft certification.

The enormous changes wrought by the coming of jets meant new problems for ALPA, but also new opportunities. Because the new jets represented a quantum jump in pilot productivity, most ALPA members insisted that they should be paid more—a lot more. For the average pilot, the greatest impact of jets was that pay scales took off. This dramatic jump in salaries didn’t happen by accident or at the largess of the companies. ALPA’s hard spadework prepared the ground for higher pay scales, and most pilots fully appreciated the work done by the committee on jet pay, which provided the rationale and justification for new contracts on each airline.

But another aspect of ALPA’s role in the coming of jets was never far from the mind of the typical pilot. “What will ALPA do for me if I can’t cut it?” was the haunting question many pilots secretly harbored. The local council chairman at each airline domicile usually bore the brunt of this apprehension, for he was the first to know when things went sour for a pilot moving to jets.

The experience of each pilot group under jet transition was different, yet somehow the same. For example, let us consider the situation on United Airlines (UAL). William J. Moore, who had gone to work for UAL in 1946 after learning his trade in combat during World War II, served as chairman of Chicago’s UAL Council 12 during 1963–64 and 1973–74. Moore’s first term as local council chairman placed him squarely in the middle of the transition to jets. Now retired, Moore sums up the problem generally:

From my experience, the jet transition was the most troubling period in the professional lives of the people I dealt with. For many pilots, the training school at Denver was stressful, although to a certain extent the stress was self-inflicted. For years I worked with people who had these problems, you know, the fear. There were several people who just dropped out, who couldn’t take the stress, who would go up to a certain point in training, nothing wrong with their flying, and then just couldn’t push beyond. There was an agreement between the companies and ALPA on the disposition of these cases, and generally if a man couldn’t pass muster at the Denver school, he could bid down to the equipment he had been flying previously. It was common rumor that if a man went through the Denver training center and he didn’t make it, practically any other line would take him. It was a tough school, certainly in the beginning.

The transition to jets was particularly troublesome on UAL owing to the merger with Capital in 1961. Capital (née Pennsylvania-Central) was the odd man out among large trunk carriers. Unlike its “Big Four” competitors, UAL, Trans World Airlines (TWA), American Airlines (AAL), and Eastern Air Lines (EAL), Capital was burdened with mostly short-haul routes, which meant that although it ranked fifth in almost every category, its profitability was vastly inferior. Given the tightly regulated structure of the airline industry in the 1950s, Capital’s only chance of improving its profitability over what was essentially a local service route structure lay in acquiring new aircraft that were so efficient and so superior that new passengers would come in droves. Traditionally, the Big Four had led the industry in technological innovation, largely because they had financial resources that airlines like Capital lacked.

In one of the great gambles in the history of commercial aviation, Capital’s president, J. H. Carmichael, ordered a fleet of British-built Vickers Viscount turboprops in 1956. Carmichael was aware that the pure jets were coming, and that neither his route structure nor his financial situation warranted their acquisition. The great advantage of jets was speed, but owing to the time eaten up by approach, landing, and ground turnaround, this advantage melted away on short-haul routes. The marriage of turbine power and propellers, however, meant that some of the pleasing characteristics of jets (quiet ride, lowered fares, better schedules) could be adapted to routes that were the natural habitat of aircraft with slower but more economical reciprocating engines. Carmichael and Capital would ultimately lose their gamble. The economic climate of 1956 dealt Capital the most telling blow. With a business recession in progress, it was a poor time to introduce the expanded service that Viscounts made possible. Also there were crashes that dampened passenger enthusiasm for the Viscount. Eventually the Viscounts performed well enough, but Capital’s route structure itself was impossible. Finally, the only way out for Capital was a merger. UAL picked up the pieces in 1961.

Under auspices of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), the merger of Capital and UAL brought salvation to the pilots of Capital, but they donned UAL uniforms as distinctly second-class citizens. The Capital pilots had always lived under a rather informal system that lacked the rigor UAL pilots had known. Consequently, the UAL training school, the “Denver aggravation,” hit the Capital pilots hard. Ironically, the Capital pilots, who had been flying turbine equipment before the UAL group, now faced pressure to relinquish their bidding rights to the jets that UAL had placed in service in 1960.

One cause of ALPA’s financial malaise of the early 1960s was the bitter seniority fight arising from the UAL-Capital merger. Eventually things worked out, and the two pilot groups blended harmoniously, thanks to the careful procedures that ALPA had so painstakingly developed for settling disputes. But what was a rough period for most airline pilots was doubly so for the Capital pilots, who came to regard the Denver training school with a phobia bordering on paranoia. In short, the Capital pilots, who called their training jaunts “You Bet Your License” (after the popular TV quiz show), worried that UAL might be using the rigorous training system to get rid of them.

Dick Becker, a Capital pilot who served out his career with UAL before retiring, describes the informal Capital training system as “two hours of flying, takeoffs, and landings; they showed us where the radios were, and you learned the rest on the line.” A vastly different system awaited the Capital pilots merging with UAL. “For one short period, they failed one out of three,” says Jess Bradford, another ex-Capital pilot. “It was quite an expense for the company, and eventually we got one instructor fired because he was creating a stress situation.”

“It got so bad some guys took up religion,” adds Carl Peterson, another ex-Capital pilot who endured the rigors of the Denver school. “They had this oral examination with 120 questions, and sometimes they would flunk you in the 727 course for missing one question.”

“You had to get up at 4:30 in the morning,” recalls Jess Bradford, “and they rarely had an airplane ready to go before 9:00, see? And some of these standards guys thought they taught the Wright brothers how to fly, and by the time you get through it’s 2:00 p.m. and you do a bad job, you know, because you’re tired. I was in the air 4 hours and 50 minutes during one check, and I never got out of the seat.”

The rigor of the UAL training system foreshadowed a general toughening of school requirements throughout the industry. Partly the new stress on comprehensive ground training came from the campaign of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) head Elwood “Pete” Quesada, the ex–Air Force general who seemed to bear a grudge against airline pilots—or so many ALPA members thought. Operating under the rubric that low pilot proficiency caused most of the safety problems accompanying the introduction of jets, Quesada insisted that FAA inspectors join regular crew members at random in the cockpit to conduct the aeronautical equivalent of pop quizzes.

Quesada’s approach to improving pilot proficiency caused the only wildcat strike in ALPA’s history. It began with Quesada’s insistence that his inspectors be allowed to ride in the third pilot’s seat during regular flights. When this controversy developed in June 1960, most airlines operating jet equipment carried a crew of four, three pilots and a flight engineer. The third pilot occupied a seat immediately behind and to the right of the captain. Quesada insisted that the inspector occupy the jumpseat opposite the flight engineer’s station. It was a clear case of conflict over command authority, since the pilots insisted that the third pilot had duties to perform, whereas Quesada argued that his inspector’s function took precedence over the crew function and that in any case the FAA personnel were fully qualified to perform the third pilot’s duties.

Over this conflict, the pilots of EAL, Pan American, TWA, and AAL began guerrilla actions against the FAA. During June 1960, several pilots on these airlines refused to fly—when the FAA man entered the cockpit and insisted upon taking the third pilot’s seat, they simply canceled the flight. Quesada again threatened dire consequences for pilots refusing to fly with his inspectors. With the problem of Electra structural failures still bubbling and the safety record deteriorating despite his crackdown on pilots, Quesada found the pilots’ guerrilla rebellion against his inspectors a convenient diversion. In a spate of news releases and interviews, notably with U.S. News & World Report, Quesada flatly declared that “pilot error” was still the largest single cause of fatal accidents, and he threatened to lift the license of the next pilot who refused to fly with an inspector in the third seat.

Quesada’s hard-nosed attitude provoked the wildcat strike at EAL. The EAL pilots who operated DC-8B equipment approached ALPA about authorizing a strike, but Clancy Sayen, after soliciting legal opinions from outside experts, concluded that there was no contractually acceptable way to strike under ALPA auspices.

The EAL pilots began walking out on June 12, 1960. EAL was forced to cancel 104 flights the first day of the wildcat strike; by the second day, over 50 percent of EAL flights were scrubbed. Despite an emergency court injunction against the walkout on June 14, EAL’s scheduled flights dropped to only 30 percent of the prestrike total, as court officers had trouble finding pilots to subpoena.

ALPA had to walk a fine line during this affair, owing to the legal complexities of the contract. Clancy Sayen had to make perfectly clear that this action was the product of extra-contractual problems with the federal government, for which ALPA was in no way responsible. Many EAL pilots, and others on AAL and TWA, as well, faulted Sayen for not supporting the wildcat strike more forthrightly. Years later, during Operation USA (Unity for Safe Air Travel), ALPA President J.J. O’Donnell, an EAL pilot during the wildcat strike, would apply some of the lessons learned in 1960. By defining Operation USA as an “exercise in free speech” to protest government policies, the nationwide shutdown ALPA threatened in 1981 would ultimately rest on the notion of “petitioning the government for redress of grievances” and would not technically be a strike against the airlines in question. This reasoning never occurred to Sayen in 1960. The trouble developed so quickly on EAL that ALPA was really more of an observer than an active participant.

Despite the injunction against the pilots’ wildcat strike, the trouble spread to Pan Am on June 20, as 102 pilots in sympathy with the EAL pilots refused to fly. James Landis, who was at the time challenging Sayen for the ALPA presidency (as we saw in Chapter 19), injected the wildcat strike into ALPA politics by promising fully to support the wildcat strike if he succeeded in ousting Sayen.

By June 25, under threat of contempt of court citations and with Clancy Sayen reluctantly calling for the pilots to return to work, operations at EAL were back to normal. Nevertheless, EAL filed suit against ALPA, its officers, and the striking EAL pilots individually for $11,400,000 in damages. This harassing legal action eventually came to nothing, and it probably reflected the new EAL management’s (Rickenbacker had just retired) frustration over losing money for the first time since 1934. As part of the welter of lawsuits emerging from the 1960 wildcat strike at EAL, ALPA filed suit against FAA, seeking to void the Quesada approach to in-flight checks. This suit, too, came to naught, and eventually ALPA would have to bargain directly with FAA over cockpit check procedures.

During the early jet era, ALPA fought FAA Administrator Quesada over many things, particularly his methods, but never his emphasis on safety. Everybody wanted safety, but Quesada’s approach, in the opinion of airline pilots who lived through that era, was entirely punitive, focusing too much on the alleged inadequacies of individual pilots and not nearly enough on the shortcomings of “the system.” For the pilots who ran ALPA during this period, two problems with “the system” were significant—inadequacy of training and inherent flaws in air traffic control (ATC), which the new jets aggravated.

To take the first of the systemic problems, one should be aware that airline training had historically been weak. In the early days, if a man had by hook or crook gotten a license, airline managers generally agreed that he was “trained.” Even airlines like TWA, which had more rigorous recurrent training programs than others, lagged behind the military in introducing modern training programs and devices. So once again, as had happened so often in the history of commercial aviation, ALPA took the lead that management should have taken and insisted that if pilots were to be vulnerable during recurrent FAA line checks, then they should at least have adequate training to prepare them.

Capt. Ed Watson of EAL headed the first ALPA Training Plans Committee. With the assistance of committee members Steve Gondek of Mohawk (MOH) and Don Leonard of Northwest Airlines, Watson patiently put together the technical assistance to enable the individual training committees of each airline to build adequate training programs for their own pilots.

ALPA’s position throughout the jet transition was that proper training alone would not solve the safety problem and that pilots themselves were less responsible for jet crashes than were defects in the ATC system. Quesada dismissed ALPA’s complaints. Quesada’s whole program rested on the assumption that pilots were at fault, not the system itself. Quesada, like most Eisenhower appointees, enjoyed a very favorable press with the influential Luce publications Time, Life, and Fortune. Time, for example, praised Quesada because he “cracked down mercilessly on slipshod flying procedures that have bedeviled the airlines for years.” Quesada trained a corps of FAA inspectors, mostly military retirees, and then sent them out to prove, in his words, that “they can fly better than the men they’re checking out.” One out of four airline pilots failed the checks administered by Quesada’s inspectors, who insisted, among other things, that airline pilots begin demonstrating their basic airmanship by doing approaches to stalls in routine checks. It all looked pretty good to the man in the street, and the administration was willing to give Quesada’s methods a chance. There was only one problem—despite Quesada’s crackdown on pilots, the safety record deteriorated in the late 1950s.

Naturally, professional airline pilots resented Quesada’s attack, but until he lost support by refusing to ground the Lockheed Electra during the airliner’s time of trouble, it was dangerous for ALPA to attack him. Quesada had public opinion on his side, and owing to the troubles over crew complement, the public was beginning to regard professional airline pilots as an exotic species of union featherbedder. Quesada insisted that his vaunted revamping of the airways system under the 1958 law, coupled with his campaign to bring commercial aviation “up to military standards,” as Time described it approvingly, would eventually solve all problems.

A number of ALPA activists publicly opposed Quesada. Bobby Rohan of National Airlines (NAL) attacked the requirement that FAA checks include approaches to stalls. After the crash of an NAL DC-7 over the Gulf of Mexico in November 1959, Rohan publicly warned that the probable cause of the crash was structural failure induced by Quesada’s required stall maneuvers. Rohan denounced approaches to stalls as “not necessary and deleterious to the airframe” and warned that NAL pilots would no longer perform them.

Quesada threatened to end the flying career of any NAL pilot who refused to go through the full check, and he had the power to make it stick. NAL Vice-President L. W. Dymond (whom we met in the chapter on Ed McDonald’s ordeal) sided with Quesada. Dymond’s credentials as an airline pilot were, of course, laughable, but the public had no way of knowing that.

Then, one of those spectacular crashes that illuminates a safety problem happened. Aviation historians know it as the Brooklyn–Staten Island crash, because one plane plummeted into Brooklyn, the other into Staten Island. For the first time, two aircraft under positive radar control in full instrument conditions collided in midair. The tragedy proved that “the system” could as easily cause death as a “slipshod” pilot.

The Brooklyn–Staten Island crash was reminiscent, in some ways, of the celebrated Grand Canyon crash on June 30, 1956. The cause of the Grand Canyon crash was the old “VFR [visual flight rules] on top” flying that ALPA had been complaining about for years. The TWA Super Constellation and UAL DC-7 collision, then the worst airline tragedy in U.S. history, cost 128 lives. Like the crash that killed Sen. Bronson Cutting in 1935, the Grand Canyon crash also led to sweeping changes in the federal government’s supervision of commercial aviation. The Cutting crash had led to the passage of the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, and the Grand Canyon crash led directly to the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.

Ironically, the Brooklyn–Staten Island crash of Dec. 16, 1960, again involved TWA and UAL. This time, a UAL DC-8 collided with another TWA Super Connie. Both planes were under full radar control from the ground. The dead totaled 139: everybody aboard both planes, including a small boy who survived the crash only to die later in the hospital. The UAL DC-8 had entered holding at normal cruising speed, overshot the prescribed racetrack pattern, and collided with the TWA aircraft. Federal regulations did not require a reduction in speed before entering holding, even though it was aerodynamically impossible for a DC-8 to stay within the limits of the holding pattern without so doing. The UAL captain was following “the book,” but obviously there was a flaw in its pages. By now, it was Quesada’s “system.”

Quesada had championed radar ground control as a cure-all for the system. ALPA had always distrusted absolute ground control because it robbed the pilot of authority. The Brooklyn–Staten Island crash offered ALPA an opportunity to attack Quesada’s policies without seeming self-interested and vindictive.

The man who knows more about the Brooklyn–Staten Island crash than anybody else alive is J. D. Smith of UAL. Now an executive with the line, in 1961 Smith was ALPA’s safety chairman for the northeast region, which included the site of the crash. During the 1950s, Smith participated in more accident investigations than any other pilot, since the most heavily traveled sector of the country lay in his region. As the spokesman for safety in the urban areas of the northeast, Smith found himself under considerable pressure:

We had airplanes landing in the streets at Newark, and 8 million people were scared airplanes were going to start falling on their heads like raindrops. I was at home when I saw on television that some kind of plane was down in Staten Island. I got in my car and went to the site, and I spent that whole day and most of the next there. I had to do a lot of coordinating so that there would be no finger-pointing by one pilot group at the other.

Any spectacular accident will cause a gusher of sensational news stories. Often, as in the case of the crash of the AAL DC-10 in Chicago in 1979, most of the early releases will be misleading, and federal officials, hectored by reporters and feeling public pressure, will sometimes make statements that add to the confusion. FAA Administrator Quesada made just such a statement to the press. Within a few days, Quesada announced on television that the UAL plane was at fault for overshooting its holding pattern. Immediately, “Pat” Patterson of UAL blasted Quesada for being “premature.”

Sensing a major controversy, the news media homed in on J. D. Smith, who was ALPA’s designated spokesman, for comment on the dispute between Quesada and Patterson. “I let Quesada and Patterson fight in public with no help from me,” says Smith. “The aviation reporters, the good ones, realized that speculation was premature at that point. They were a knowledgeable bunch.”

While Quesada and Pat Patterson engaged in verbal battle via the headlines, the FAA investigating team, along with J. D. Smith’s ALPA accident study group, patiently sought the “probable cause” of the Brooklyn–Staten Island crash. Quesada undoubtedly was seeking to regain some of the prestige he had lost recently by allowing the Lockheed Electra to keep flying despite fatal crashes involving structural failure. Quesada’s position was that the Electra was safe at reduced speeds, since the harmonic vibrations from the engines that had caused metal fatigue in the aircraft’s wings did not begin until maximum cruising speeds were approached. The public, needless to say, was so leery of the Electra that the plane’s full commercial potential was never realized, and Quesada suffered because the public saw him as sacrificing safety to the economic interests of the airlines and aircraft manufacturers.

Attempting to recoup his lost public standing, Quesada used the Brooklyn–Staten Island crash as a further argument in favor of stricter age limitations on airline pilots, particularly those operating jets. After all, military pilots seldom flew actively once they were in their 50s, so why should airline pilots? Since the allegedly slow reaction time of the UAL captain caused him to overshoot the holding pattern, Quesada suggested once more that jet captains retire at age 55. Quesada also made much of some recent crashes where pilot incapacitation played a role, particularly an October 1959 crash involving a pilot who was taking tranquilizers and undergoing mental treatment. Since the pilot had concealed his psychiatric problems from the FAA, Quesada suggested that mental incapacitation might have played a role in the accident. ALPA objected strenuously to Quesada’s airing of this opinion, largely because there was no direct evidence suggesting that the pilot’s mental state caused the crash. Similarly, in another crash of a nonscheduled airline’s military charter, the pilot in question had concealed a heart condition from FAA medical examiners. When he died suddenly in the cockpit, his copilot proved incapable of landing the airplane safely. ALPA pointed out that any regulatory setup that would permit an airline to employ an incompetent copilot, particularly a company holding a Pentagon contract, showed, again, that there was more wrong with “the system” than with the pilots.

Against this contentious background, the final act of the Brooklyn–Staten Island affair was played out. Initially, Quesada’s position, as usual, was that pilot error had caused the crash, whereas ALPA argued that the system was at fault. Quesada seized upon the lack of redundancy in radio equipment in the UAL plane (one VOR receiver was down), citing continued flight into the New York terminal area without fully functioning avionics as a prime factor in the accident. The UAL DC-8 crew, according to Quesada’s reconstruction, was unable to locate the radial designating the limits of the holding pattern quickly enough because they had to reset the single functioning VOR receiver.

The investigation later proved conclusively that any time lost tuning radios by the crew of the ill-fated DC-8 was inconsequential. The UAL aircraft was slowing from cruise after entering the terminal area; although its speed had dropped only some 50 knots, it was still screaming along at over 300 knots when the collision occurred. Quesada obviously knew this speed was too fast to allow the DC-8 to remain within the racetrack pattern, so simultaneously with his denunciation of UAL, FAA promulgated new maximum airspeeds in terminal areas. The new limit was 250 knots. Had the UAL aircraft been flying at that speed or below, the crew probably would not have overshot the racetrack holding pattern.

As the man who nursed the investigation along to its conclusion for ALPA, J. D. Smith sees the Brooklyn–Staten Island crash as a turning point:

The basic cause of the crash was that there were no specific requirements as to speed limits in the holding pattern, other than those required by the aircraft itself. The accident investigation generated greatly reduced speeds in holding and upon entering terminal areas. In a legal sense, there was no requirement for these maximum endurance-type speeds before Brooklyn–Staten Island. There were a lot of lessons learned out of that accident. It highlighted the need to develop wholly new ATC procedures.

One such procedure called for reporting the loss of avionics to ATC. The DC-8 was lacking one VOR receiver, and had there been a requirement for this to be reported to ATC, possibly the radar controller would have been paying closer attention to the plane. As it was, the radar controller simply sat and watched the DC-8 barrel past the limits of its holding pattern until it disappeared into the blip of the TWA aircraft. Naturally, this made Quesada’s reliance on ground radar control suspect. While conducting his publicity campaign, Quesada quietly ordered mandatory reports from all aircraft losing radio navigation equipment, thus indicating that he knew the DC-8 crew was not wholly at fault. But publicly, Quesada continued forever after to bemoan “dangerous flight practices” on the part of civilian airline crews and to imply that they were misbehaving in the cockpit.

Bit by bit, the jet transition progressed, with episodes like the Brooklyn–Staten Island lesson adding to overall knowledge. There would be others in the future, often illustrating, as did the TWA 727 crash into Mount Weather on the approach to Dulles Airport in December 1974, that even ATC procedures that seem time tested and foolproof can have fatal consequences. But the Mount Weather crash was far in the future, and ALPA greeted the election of John Kennedy with a sigh of relief and the hope of a better working climate. The change of administrations in Washington promised an early departure for Quesada. Few in ALPA would miss him—the “war with the general” had been one of the most trying aspects of the transition to jets.

Now a new trial awaited professional airline pilots in their taming of the big jets. These magnificent flying machines attracted a new mass clientele to the airlines. Any cross-section of Americans will always contain a few who are insane, deluded, or sociopathic, many of them subject to strange fantasies of power and omnipotence that the continent-shrinking jets seemed to encourage. How easy it would be, some of these aberrant individuals must have thought, simply to produce a pistol, take command, and rule the lives of crew and passengers, godlike, in the heavens.

The era of skyjacking was upon ALPA. It would test mightily two ALPA presidents, Charley Ruby and his successor, J.J. O’Donnell. Before the epidemic of skyjacking was over, professional airline pilots would pay with their lives.

To Chapter 24

Back to Contents